arajag, you have a point in your first post and this comes from my personal experience here although i do like slackware for it's educational value (i learnt quite a bit about linux from tinkering with it). but i think this hardly qualifies me as clueless .

perhaps you should take a look at how you started your post? (see quote above) a comment like that is surely an invitation to indignant replies. even you reacted to kernal's reply in an indignant manner. temper your words... there's a place for every distro in Linux-land

oh yea... and a side comment... sounds very trivial, so please excuse me. dselect in debian actually hurt my eyes after a while when i was using it on the Woody package install. is this because i'm red-green color blind? or does someone else who's not color blind have this problem also... ???

U JUST CAN COMPARE

SLACKWARE - Mandrake.....

its like saying which is better the summer or the winter ???

The MBR default choice of Slackware's Lilo install is perhaps not the best one unless it is the first and only OS on the hard drive. This is often the case for experienced users that are building servers. There are a lot of other distros out there that do this same thing, sometimes without asking you first.

You do have the option during the slackware install to manually edit your lilo.conf file. You probably just missed that part, which is easy to do. Of course you have to know *how* to edit your lilo.conf file at this time as well, which is not a thing a newbie would know how to do.

Since Slackware prides itself on NOT insulating the user from the inner workings of the OS, the solution to the problem is for Slackware to have better written documentation such as the ones that are written for FreeBSD.

Slackware can do this simpler for you:
there is a shellscript /usr/X11R6/bin/xwmconfig
copy that to your home-dir (it's not in my $PATH),
and execute it as:
$ xwmconfig
to choose a window-manager before issuing
$ startx.
If you download another wm, it is not too difficult to add that one
too to your xwmconfig (e.g. Ratpoison).
exercise:
after starting up KDE, do [Ctrl][Alt]F2
login again
choose with xwmconfig for Gnome (or another wm, KDE again works too)
$ startx -- :1
Now you are in Gnome.
Do [Ctrl][Alt]F7 to enter KDE again and [Ctrl][Alt]F8 gives you Gnome....
What is the max of wm's you can start ??? :-)
Douwe.

Just a comment in regards to the start of this post ie lilo in slackware vs lilo in mandrake.

In both Mandrake 8.1 and 8.2 I was unable to use lilo the installer kept telling bme that it souldn't fit in the MBR??? or couldn't be written?? So I went with grub instead which worked fun.

When I installed Slackware 8.1 last night I had no trouble with lilo at all.

Slackware is way cooler, and way more powerful than mandrake. At least I think so. Mandrake and Redhat are too much like Microsoft for me!

This is the first time I've heard the description of the differences go this direction! I think Mandrake, with all its fancy custom patches, features and cool desktop customizations is way cooler - If only it all worked.

Since I was constantly finding myself "under-the-hood" of Mandrake to get things working correctly, I just went to Slackware, where working "under-the-hood" is the normal way of doing things and therefore was much easier.

I've now been moving to Debian-Unstable because I like having current versions of about 14,000 apps just an "apt-get" away. Also with installing & upgrading apps, Debian usually does everything you want, including updating the menus in all your window managers. The problem is that Debian has special very cryptic ways of doing things (in the Unix tradition) that work well, but only after you learn how to use them correctly. Finally, if you try to get "under-the-hood" with Debian, and don't do it right, all your changes will get "fixed" with the next update session.

Exatly, when I tried to customize anything with Mandrake, I lost most of my programs in the K menu! And I couldn't find any of the command line configuration utilities. It was all automated, and didn't work! I got mad, and switched to Slackware, and I love it.

Compiling new applications and other stuff are REAL easy in Slackware, just do ./configure, make and make install and you go work with the application.

Mandrake on the other hand can't compile most of the applications, because they use their own patched libraries and such stuff.

Compiling new applications and stuff is REAL easy in Mandrake, just do ./configure, make, and make install and you go work with the application. I do it whenever I need to.

The question is why would you normally bother to compile from source in Mandrake. The many thousands of programs available in the urpmi repositories are sufficient for *most* users. True, once in a while a power user or one with special needs has to compile, either because the app isn't in the urpmi repositories, or because they *need* a newer version. In that case, ./configure, make, make install works just fine (as long as you know what you're doing).

And why would you bump a year-old thread just to slag another distro?