Yeah, I always happen to do that no matter what distro, except mandrake, but it's kernel is a bit crappy anyways

I reckon Slackware would run better if it was compiled for the i586/686 platform, but I guess they have to make it run well on all intel platforms.

TheMuso

That will remove all the fun of slackware though wouldnt it ? recompiling your kernel is fun. Its also nice to be able to run slack on a 486. not many distro's will do that now a days

Slackware is compiled for i386 on purpose, so it can run on lower end (older) machines. If it were compiled for i586 or i686 older machines would'nt be able to run it because they don't have such a rich set of processor instructions as the newer systems. If you really care that much, take the slackwatre sources and recompile everything, or start a LFS system, but recompiling for i686 will give you NO noticeable speed gain. It would probably just show up on some very precise benchmarks. For a more in depth discussion of this, search the slackware forum here at LQ, a couple of months ago someone else wanted to recompile slack for i686 but after seeing that speed gain is really very minimal, and not worth the time, he gave up (if i remember correctly). In any case i suggest you find and read that post as it's very informative. Try searching for "slackware recompile" and you should find it.
HTH
-NSKL

Yikes! That sounds like building LFS. So for that matter, I would just install all of CLI stuff and leave out everything related to X:

Window Managers
Desktop Enivornments
All of KDEs and GNOMEs apps
etc, etc

Would be interesting to install Slackware like that. Right now I'm using FreeBSD from the command line only and I don't miss going into X. Hmm?

Don't let the 'i386' fool you. If I remember things right , slackware packages is compiled to be compabile with 386cpu, but optimised for newer cpu's , (something like that )

Slackware is the way to go for now, since Rh/Mandy distros dont run any better , I think it's better to use a distro that complies more to '*nix/BSD' . In that way you are better off when using other flavours of *nix.



Slackware - Linux as it should be played .

Thanks I will check that out.

I guess as long as the kernel is recompiled for the processor in question, it doesn't really matter that much.

TheMuso

being a newbie to the linux world i had first started with redhat where everything was done automatically. i wanted something to learn linux. a lot of people suggest slack and some suggested stick with redhat. i installed slack on a laptop and had nothing but good experiences. thanks to LQ.org i have learned more in 2 weeks than the 2 months i spent on redhat. everyone is just so helpful here.

as far as slack on the PC i cant seem to get the refresh rate fixed. but oh well. laptop will do!

Agreed. I find that, now that I have solved most of the major problems, and some of my minor ones, I keep coming back to this forum looking for somebody I can halp out with my meager knowledge. I am so happy with slackware, I've been telling everyone, to the point of it becoming annoying... To my fiancee', especially.

I'll never go back to redhat or mandrake, although I must say that I wouldn't be on slack without them and the thirst for more gnu/linux knowledge that they gave me.

Thanks to you all for being such a great community. There's so little actual community left in the world, it's really nice to see it in such a format as this one.

slack owns j00 all

it's pretty good since I can't get it to boot on 3 different pcs after install's initial reboot.

I am currently running Slackware 7.1 on an ancient machine (i486, P150). I was not able to run anything newer than kernel 2.2.16 on this machine because it is so old, but Slackware alone works well on it because of its simplicity.
I appreciate the inclusion of the /pasture directory in the newer releases. Otherwise, this ancient machine would just be a whirring doorstop. Slackware is great.

off topic Papa, but you might want to look into a UPS if you are having that many power failures. One of the best investments I've ever made.