Friday, April 13, 2007

Slackware is Hard?!?

Andrew,

I realize your chart is pointed at the newbie, but quite possibly the only part of a new Slackware install that isn't entirely straight forward is partitioning your disk. I admit that the installer isn't graphical in nature, but neither is the Windows installer. For anyone not wanting to manually pick packages to install, the install all option is front and center. Upgrading Slackware is now as easy as Debian with the slapt-get tool. Granted that you can't install and update GNOME with slapt-get, as Patrick no longer builds GNOME and no one provides the appropriate repositories, but the folks over at Dropline GNOME do a fantastic job of keeping GNOME up to date with their installer and update applet.

I admit Slackware's not for everyone, but it's not the great evil it's made out to be.

2 comments:

MorĂ¡nar said...

Would you actually recommend that someone who doesn't know what they are doing "install all", or is it a new definition of "all" that I wasn't previously aware of?

Adam said...

As Slack doesn't break software into groups as (nicely?) some distros do, if you don't want to sift through packages or groups of them it's the only option available. I'm not sure that it would be harmful except in that it would use more disk space than a selective install. Certainly, if you're desire is to not run KDE, you wouldn't install all; but you could easily set one of the other included window managers as your default during the install process.