Offhand, having worked with Debian and Slackware, here is how I'd characterize the two distros:
Slackware - Very barebones - Very stable - "Masochistic" - Very techie oriented (i.e. not very newbie-friendly) Debian - Very flexible - Easy to upgrade/update - Very techie oriented, but can be newbie-friendly (with the exception of dselect...) If you think you know Linux well enough to go by the shell most of the time, and you're installing on a barebones and/or old/low-end box, I'd go with Slackware if you know you're not expecting to update things often. However, caveat emptor: Slackware is painful to most people, and can be a hassle working with, especially installing or setting up software (without a precompiled Slackware package tarball, for example). There is no such thing as dependencies with a vanilla Slackware package tarball(*). You have been warned. Debian, on the other hand, holds its weight pretty well. The precompiled packages available for the distro is huge-- often, makes you want to stop and think, just to figure out which ones you really need. apt-get is a life saver, especially when you have to install a package and don't know what's needed, as it automatically grabs dependencies. The large array of choices has its drawbacks-- you have to really stop and think, and not get overwhelmed. If given the choice, I'd choose Debian though for production/live servers. Slackware is a personal choice, if on low-end boxen, and I run a Slackware 9.1 box at home. (FWIW: I've had experience successfully installing Mandrake, Slackware, and Debian, in that order. RedHat comes close-- the last time I tried installing RedHat, the CD media I had was bad, and the installer couldn't read the glibc RPM) -- JM Ibanez Masochist and Insane Programmer http://www.livejournal.com/~jmibanez/ http://www.mycgiserver.com/~butiki/ -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
