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[OT] Slackware, Cars, and Other Things That Move (was: Re: It beeps at me now.)



On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 07:33:33AM -0600, Greg Kedrovsky wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 04:17:08AM -0500, David Yitzchak Cohen wrote:

> > Wow ... it's nice to see someone switching _to_ Slackware, for a change ;-)
> 
> Really? I don't know why. Slackware seems so much more "Linux" and less
> "distro" than anything else I've seen.

Well, that's a good enough reason for most to want to run away from
Slackware.  Remember, we're in the century of the gizmo.  The century
of the product ended after Y2K.

> It kinda reminds me of Mutt:
> simple at first sight (most people are turned off by Mutt being "only" a
> text e-mail client, etc.) but highly configurable and therefore powerful
> after you open the hood.

Any RH guru, BTW, will be more than glad to point out here that anything
I can hack up with Slackware, he can hack up with RH.  The only thing
is, you've gotta either (a) tell RH (through the rc.config and/or
RPM language) what you've done so it doesn't get all confused, or (b)
abandon RH's help in those areas.  Personally, I find manuals to be my
favorite reading material, so RH's "help" is useless, especially when
I'm trying to install on a 386 with a 120 meg drive and don't want to
install a stripped-down system.  (My original Slackware install was on
a 340 meg partition, and it lasted me for years before I finally got an
8.2 gig drive my parents were tossing.)  I like Slackware because it's
the most friendly distro towards doing your own thing.  It doesn't give
me headaches when I keep three versions of any given program installed,
when I rotate the install paths around (in order to delete the old
version, move the current into the old path, and move the dev into the
current path, so I can install a new dev), when I decide to install
some central library directly from CVS (whereas RH/Debian wouldn't
be able to use the new library without some help from you - Slackware
doesn't give help and doesn't want help; it just works), etc.  Also,
because most stuff is still compatible with the way it worked in SunOS
(where I got my only formal training), it feels a lot more like "home"
(with the added new-user advantage of scripts to help you generate your
first version of many config files).  It does what an OS should do: do
whatever the config files tell it to and complain if that's not possible
(after trying - not after looking in its own "database" and deciding
it's not worth trying), listen to me at the command prompt by default,
and stay out of my way.  That's a feeling you can't get in anything but
a Slackware-based distro these days (not even in Solaris).

> It's kinda like having and tinkering with a '68
> Camaro after you've had the latest model whatever. The latest model
> whatever has tons of bells and whistles, but just open the hood and try
> to work on it. Too much. But, with a '68 Camaro, you still have a car to
> get you from point A to point B, it has MUCH more personality than a
> latest model whatever, and when you open the hood, sure it's
> complicated, but it's also at the same time simple because you can see a
> part and know just what it does.

FWIW - I'm a Pontiac fan, so you'll likely see me in an '80s Trans Am
as soon as I can afford the upkeep cost.  (Ain't neva' gonna see me in
no stinkin' Mustang, though ... heaven forbid!)

> I have Slackware running now on my
> server and my desktop. The swapping of distros on the desktop, though,
> is just getting to be too much. All my configs and stuff, getting
> everything set back up... I'm going buggy. 

I use Slackware for all my own computers (except some firewalls running
OpenBSD, and one computer (an i80286) running DOS).

> -- 
> Mutt 1.4.1i on Slackware 9.1 Linux
Mutt CVS on Slackware 7.1 GNU/Linux, with very little original equipment left

> Curridabat, San Jose, Costa Rica
Fair Lawn, NJ, USA :-)

> http://www.greg-and-sue.com/screenshot.jpg
no screenshots available, sorry (how do you do yours, BTW?)

> Yahoo Instant Messenger ID: gregkedro
only ICQ and AIM (and Jabber, of course) here

 - Dave

-- 
Uncle Cosmo, why do they call this a word processor?
It's simple, Skyler.  You've seen what food processors do to food, right?

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