SlackwareThis Forum is for the discussion of Slackware Linux.
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I use Slackware at home (it's a homemade 11.0 personalized version). My MOTHER uses it too. And also my brother. Games, music, video, Windoze programs and games via Wine. The only thing that still doesn't run on Slackware is PristonTale.
Before Slackware my mother didn't use the PC. Now she does it at all times (which is not so good for me as I have to wait watching TV or use the laptop). Not mentioning that my brother uses Apollon...
My girlfriend uses Slackware at home too. She's addicted to SuperTux, FrozenBubble and some other games.
It's a desktop AND a server. It hosts my mother's website, plus a website of mine (which I use for testing purposes), plus MySQL and PostgreSQL, plus Tomcat. Normally running KDE. I am the only console user, all my family normally uses the graphical login. It normally has Amarok running all the time.
I have 512 MB of RAM and -surprisingly- I almost never run out of memory. (custom kernel, no swap).
It is stable and solid. Healthy (we haven't had to deal with viruses for years). Personally, I think Slackware is the best OS for a home desktop.
With the big inconvenience that I can't use it as a testing center anymore and I normally have to use my laptop for those games (I have to wait for my parents to go on a trip to compile KDE).
I use Slack 11 for home as a regular desktop since 10.0. I use it to do audio ripping, video encoding plus regular desktop work like photo editing, finance management, playing dvds etc. Apart from this, I use it as a headless server and a mythtv box connected to TV. The point being you can use it to do anything.
You will have to add additional packages after initial install.
I know! After using it for a few weeks at work, I found myself sitting there thinking "Hey, how come I never go into root mode anymore?" So, I had to install some software just to satisfy the urge.
Wow: thanks for the great follow-ups. Now I just have to find the right time to do it...if the PCLinuxOS folks can get their act (i mean, server) together, they might have a chance.
What can I say? I've been using Slackware as a desktop for many years. Be it icewm, fluxbox, xfce, or even kde. It's fast. It doesn't get any better.
I've been using linux as a desktop since forever. Starting w/ Slackware, then Redhat, then Debian, also played w/ FreeBSD, DesktopBSD, NetBSD, and Zenwalk, etc. Then I went back to Slackware where I'm staying for good at home.
On the topic of keeping things simple, I personally like to stick to hand editing .xinitrc and .Xresources, using tools like xset, and using xorgconfig or hand-editing xorg.config, very much in the Slackware style, as opposed to depending on "session managers" or "control panels".
All kinds of multimedia and games available at linuxpackages.net, sourceforge.net, freshmeat.net, and happypenguin.org.
I've re-installed Slackware 11 on my extra partition -- removing PCLinuxOS Test Release 2 -- and I'm slowly setting it up. I may just set it up and then switch the /home partition over (anything I should watch out for when doing that?). It's going well, I'm just getting the networking set up.
Little by little, it's coming together.
Now, the funny thing is that this time I did the FULL installation, and there was no fiddling with xorg or anything. Everything worked right off the bat, which was weird, since I remember doing lots of configuration for my other two installations of Slackware (one at work, the other on the same home computer).
I'm with you seandon4, I would rather simply edit the files, which was why PCLinuxOS was giving me such a headache. I was sitting there thinking "If this was Slackware, I would just go to rc.d and change one line and be done with it..."
Slackware was the only distro here i could get to install from the old amd400, athelon, and the amd64 and it ran perfectly, think the only mod i needed was to setup udev and the cdroms. Of course the biggest program incompatabilities i have encountered are the slackware + my modifications.
Hi Everybody, thanks for the excellent discussion. I've been using Slackware at home for two weeks, and finally upgraded our internet connection and I'm at the stage of installing some more software (digikam, etc).
It's working great -- it's so much more customizable than PCLinuxOS, or at least it feels that way. Many of the things that I thought were programmed in source turn out to be KDE level customizations. My Slackware setup at home feels a lot more like I'm responsible for something cool.
My home pc uses Slack and does mostly everything I need.
I watch DVDs with the output pumped to TV and HiFi.
I make mods for Unreal Tournament and it is excellent for coding.
I sometimes run a UT server.
And for more normal use I use it for web/newsgroups/irc/email/gaming etc.
Use it for office tasks like domestic bills using OpenOffice and writing letters with LyX.
I use Slackware v10.2 as a server and v11.0 as a workstation.
Server install wasn't that hard with some help from other people here on the forum, best suggestion I have for setting up a Slackware box is to print out your custom config files and any instructions that you needed to set something up, after several months you forget what you did.
The server is an old AMD K6-2 550Mhz box with 256megs of ram, it runs DHCP, DNS, and our broadband Internet connection to a collection of Windows and Slackware PCs, it also shares a laser printer to everyone on the network. It just replaced the Windows server I had been using which needed constant rebooting due to a memory hole in something that I never figured out, that system was a Pentium III 500 with 384 megs of ram. So, an older system with a better OS doing the same job with less resources.
The workstation is an Athlon 900Mhz, after three massive Spyware infestations on the teenager's Windows 2k workstation the teenagers in the house are only allowed to surf on the Slackware PC, problem solved. They still use the 2k box for things that only run on Windows (it is a WAY better PC as well), that PC is just no longer allowed on the network.
I use Slack at home, dual-boot with Windows 98SE. There are still a few things that I have to run on Windows, and I refuse to go to XP or Vista, hopefully there will be comparable apps soon so I can get rid of Windows. I am retired, before that I worked on MVS, IBM's mainframe OS, at work. I tried several other distributions before settling on Slack, Red Hat, Mandrake, and Debian, been on Slack since 10.0.
A few suggestions on things that have helped me:
Keep EVERYTHING you need to do an install (other than the ISO CD) on a separate partition like /mnt/hda4. This includes downloads of source for things you compile, your kernel .config, xorg.conf, fonts you want to add, everything. That makes it quick and easy to re-install if you have to.
Part B of the above is, make good notes, keep them up to date, keep a machine readable copy but also make a printed copy. It should be detailed enough that you know exactly what you have to do. For example, here are my notes on freetype:
Extract Freetype to /tmp and edit /tmp/freetype-x.x.x/include/freetype/config/ftoption.h and look for the line
/* #define TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER */
Uncomment it, save it then compile it using ./configure --prefix=/usr
That can save you a lot of hassle and wasted time next time you do an install. My notes now are 2 full pages printed with 9pt font.
One other thing...make a "barebones" kernel, and add it in to LILO. That can save a lot of hassle if you hose up your kernel (which you WILL :-) ) Build it WITHOUT module support, and include just enough to get up and running. It should not be bigger than about 1.3mb, so it will fit on a floppy, both as a bootable disk and also as a DOS floppy, handy at install time because you can then use your own custom mini-kernel rather than one from the distribution.
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