Slackware was the first linux distribution I ever tried. Admittedly, I couldn't stand it. I was a novice then. After flirting with Debian, Red Hat, and even S. u. S. e., I'm back to Slackware, and it's a lot of fun.

Slackware linux is the acid test of your linux knowledge. It doesn't walk you through installation of packages in a friendly way like Red Hat or Debian, so you're going to have to become more familiar with configure scripts and makefiles. There is a functional package tool that has adopted .tgz as the official Slackware packaging system, but it's rudimentary and, while useful in some circumstances, has limited use because of the small availability (compared to .rpm and .deb) of Slackware packages on-line(the .tgz is deceptive; they are not regular source files - though they can be used that way - these files can be installed with a program called pkgtool which keeps a database of installed packages and allows you to uninstall).

Slackware linux has a nice clean organization of startup and shutdown scripts, not quite as messy as Red Hat. All of the scripts are in one directory(/etc/rc.d) and some are symlinked to others to avoid redundancy. The latest version(7.1) comes with semi-recent versions of X and various window managers, which brings me to the one big strike against Slackware - they don't update often at all. You will be responsible for tracking down the latest versions of many things. For example: I wanted to get KDE 2.0, but that required upgrading my glibc to 2.2 - the latest versions of things like glibc should *always* be included with the CD. For a long time Slackware was still mired in libc5. But the necessity of upgrading all your packages brings me to the best part: You will learn a *lot*.

I'm sure you're familiar with the ability to learn a language if totally immersed in that language with little to no helping hands. Such it is with Slackware. This is the do-it-yourself distribution, and as such you will come out of it a bonafide Linux Guru. It forces you to learn all about the inner workings of linux environments, as graphical configuration tools are scarce.

If you grab Slackware, you won't regret it. Even if you're a novice, just stick to it, read man pages, and you'll be amazed at how fast you catch on.




Recommended: Yes