Here's a testimonial from another satisfied customer.

Yesterday I did something stupid. I tried to resize my Slack partition and ended up with a bunch of disk errors and 800+ lost files. Since I had done this several times previously without problems (using qtparted running from System Rescue Disk), I didn't back up my partition first, in spite of several warning from qtparted to do so.

fsck.reiserfs did an admirable job of putting Humpty back together again, but my system was still wobbly, especially when I tried to compile programs. I would get all kinds of errors, most of which didn't mean much to me. I started replacing designated libraries piecemeal, but I would just get another set of errors.

Solution: FTP to a Slackware Current mirror, download the "d" and "l" series of packages, install them, and -- bingo. Everything is working fine again in the compile department.

Maybe other distros are set up this logically, but I doubt it. And maybe this is the standard *nix way; I don't know. Regardless, I really appreciate Patrick's simple, straightforward approach to things. I was close to doing a complete reinstall but was able to rely on Slack's elegant design to bail me out.

Pray for Patrick to get better, not for the sake of Slackware, but because brains and skills like his are rare on this planet. I don't think I would have ever stuck with Linux if it hadn't been for Slackware.