Hello Slackware!

Well, it was due for a long time and I finally did it a couple of weeks back. My old Fedora Core 3 was way too old and was begging to be replaced. My experience with Fedora, while enjoyabale enough, was far from perfect. So I didn’t want to upgrade it to Fedora 8. Since it was a long time since I tried something else, I decided to go for a completely new distro. The next question was which one. The most popular of these distros are the ones which claim to be highly user-friendly, with Ubuntu, SimplyMEPIS, OpenSUSE, PCLinuxOS etc competing in this category. While this has been a wonderful thing in the GNU/Linux world, I decided to go the opposite way. I decided to go for Slackware 12. I spent a good deal of time reading up about the distro, and while everyone agreed that it was a good distro, the general opinion was that it was not for Linux newbies and ranked very low on usability. Since I did not consider myself a Linux newbie, I decided it was time for a little playing around with Slackware. HowToForge.com provides an excellent installation guide on Slackware here, and I strongly recommend reading this. And here’s what I think about Slackware:

Installation: The way Slackware does things is, the DVD first boots to a live prompt and you have to use fdisk/cfdisk to edit your partitions and then type setup to get started on the installation. Since I’ve never used command line tools for editing my partition (and because I am scared of messing things up),  I downloaded a liveCD version of GParted, and used it to edit my partitions before I even touched my Slackware DVD. Slackware is one of the very few distros which still uses a curses-based installation, which means you can’t point-and-click your way to a shiny desktop. That said, the non-graphical installer isn’t difficult at all, and I, for one, found it very intuitive. It even detected my Windows partitions and made entries into /etc/fstab, which I found a most pleasant surprise, since I had prepared myself to manually add entries to fstab first thing after installation. Since the full installation of Slackware is nowhere close enough to the full installation of Fedora Core 3, and becuase I had a 13+ GB of partition waiting patiently, I went for a full installation. After installing the packages, it asked me a couple of other questions and finally took me to the bootloader section. Here’s where I made my first mistake. I selected the simple option and let the installer (or liloconfig) take care of installing the bootloader for me. That was a bad move, since the generated lilo.conf wasn’t correct (I’ll elaborate the reason later) and so the installer reported that lilo couldn’t be installed properly. The next few screens asked me about some network settings and then finally I was done. I rebooted my system.

Problems with install: With the botched bootloader installation, you’d think that the system would boot into Windows, but that didn’t happen. You see, the MBR still had the GRUB bootloader from my old Fedora installation, and since I had formatted the whole thing, there was no grub.conf remaining. Which meant I was stuck with the GRUB prompt which takes possibly the world’s most cryptic commands, and a “help” command that is anything but that. So now I somehow had to boot into Slackware and reinstall lilo with just the man pages to help me (I didn’t expect my network to work anytime soon). Thankfully this isn’t the first time I have messed up the bootloader and so I knew a few things about live CDs, chroot etc. After spending a frustrating one hour with different versions of Knoppix, I finally remembered that Slackware DVD itself boots into a live prompt. So one simple chroot later, I was inside my installation. When I opened my /etc/lilo.conf, I instantly saw what the problem was. It had an entry called boot=/dev/hda, whereas I didn’t have an hda. I only had an hdb (a result of having two hard disks some time back, one of which went down in a blaze of glory). I changed the offending line to /dev/hdb, ran lilo again and rebooted. This time I had my lilo.

Post-Install: HowToForge goes pretty deeply into the post-install configuration, so I won’t waste our time saying the same thing. For me, the next steps were clear: get the sound working, tweak the X settings (for instance, Slackware uses VESA by default) and finally get the network working. I went by the tutorial, and ALSA configured my sound card beautifully. Running xorgconfig let me choose my settings for X. My network card was a problem though. eth0 didn’t seem to be present, which meant my ethernet card wasn’t detected. I have one of those cheaper LAN cards (some Hong Kong based company) and it says it uses a Realtek 8139D chip. I went through the rc.modules file and uncommented the modprobe for the 8139too driver and ran netconfig again. Still, no luck. Finally I gave up and used a USB cable to connect my cable modem (Scientfic Atlanta Webstar) to my computer bypassing my LAN card and uncommented the line which did a modprobe for the USB modem driver. I set up my IP address, gateway, DNS etc. using the GUI that KDE provides and finally, my network was up and running.

First Impression: So what were my first thoughts about Slackware? Certainly not the easiest to install and setup, so you’ll need to spend considerable time on getting things running. If you are the kind of guy who expects everything to run out of the box, then you should probably consider Ubuntu. That said, Slackware runs very fast on my old hardware and I am happy I spent some time with it. If you are someone who is looking to learn how Linux works (which was also a big motivation for me to go for Slackware), then I highly recommend this distro.

And since the reader’s patience is inversely proportional to the length of an article, I’ll end this here. But I still have a lot to say about Slackware’s package management, slapt-get and GSlapt, and the solution to the “Where is my GNOME?” question, so I’ll be back soon!