More on Slackware

Like I had mentioned in my last post, here’s the second article which continues with my thoughts on Slackware. We’ll start with the package management first. Just as RedHat/Fedora packages come as RPM files, and Debian based packages have a .deb extension, Slackware packages come as .tgz files. Slackware provides utilities like installpkg, removepkg, upgradepkg (called pkgtools) to manage packages. But dependency resoution is manual, which can be a big pain sometimes, especially if a package you so urgently need depends on dozens of other packages. That’s why most major distros have tools for automatic dependency resolution. For example, Fedora has yum and Debian based distros come with apt-get. Thankfully, a tool similar to apt-get has also been written for Slackware. It’s called slapt-get.

Slapt-get is very similar to apt-get in how it works. If there is a package you need, you can do a slapt-get –install <something> and the slapt-get utility searches for the appropriate packages in its repository and downloads it for you. If that <something> depends on <something-else> then that <something-else> is also downloaded and both are installed for you. It’s simple enough to use and it has options to remove and upgrade packages like apt-get does.

Now, Ubuntu users, having used the point-and-click Synaptic package manager will probably wonder why anyone would use a command line tool for package management. It is true that some people will not like to use command line utilities and so using slapt-get might seem like an impossible task. Thankfully, there is a GUI tool for package management in Slackware as well.  It’s called GSlapt and it provides a nice front-end to the slapt-get tools.

Finally, Slackware ships with KDE and while KDE has its share of fans, I personally prefer GNOME. I just think it has a more user-friendly interface. There are some GNOME packages for Slackware available, which means you can install GNOME, even though the distro doesn’t ship it. I decided to try out GNOME SlackBuild. The install instructions are fairly simple and you’ll need slapt-get to install it. I followed the instructions and downloaded and installed GNOME SlackBuild on my system. Everything seems to work fine, although on my machine, GNOME is definitely not as fast as KDE, and in fact I noticed a delay of almost half a second in loading the menu-icons, which I found a major irritant. Whether the problem is with GNOME SlackBuild, or with GNOME itself or if my hardware is too old for 2.22, I don’t know. There are also other Slackware packages for GNOME like Dropline, but I haven’t tried them.

Some final thoughts: While Slackware is a pretty good distro, it scores very poorly on the GUI front. When you are using KDE, for instance, you are very aware that it is just an application running on top of the kernel, and the tight integration of the GUI with the rest of the OS like in Ubuntu, is just not there in Slackware. I know it is a conscious decision to keep things simple, but for desktop usage, you would want a much more functional GUI. The other thing is that after I installed Slackware, I realised that I prefer GNOME over KDE and Slackware doesn’t ship it. Installing GNOME-for-Slackware builds just isn’t the same as GNOME being shipped with the distro. Your menus become messy and you end up getting software which you don’t really need, and in the end, you have yet another desktop package that feels like it was put there as an afterthought, not something that came with the OS.

So in the end, I still maintain that installing Slackware was worthwhile thing, simply because I learnt many new things, and even though I might go ahead and install Ubuntu on my machine, any new command or script knowledge will certainly come in handy in future.

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!