To Slack or not to Slack? ;)

[Imperator]

I've been using Mandrake 8.0 for about three months now, and feel pretty comfortable with it. I can accomplish most tasks on it with relative ease, and everything I need to do, I can do.
However, I'd like to move on to a more advanced distribution, in order to learn more. I've been thinking of Debian or Slackware. Anyway, the gist of this post is, what would you guys recommend, and why?
I doubt I could handle the installation of Slack, if that helps! ;)

Cheers,
Imperator

[YaRness]

the first thing i ever installed was slack. it's really not that hard. just make sure you know what your hardware is (especially your vid card for setting up X), and it's really a piece of cake. configuring stuff is a little more difficult, sometimes you're going to hafta edit files instead of using handy-dandy interfaces, but it's prolly not as bad as you think.

if you have an extra box or partition, i'd just download/order the cds and have a go at it.

(the same pretty much goes for debian above).

once you have the base system installed, then you can start learning to install programs and the like.

the whole thing would probably be easier if you have a second, useable box to stay online with and hit up irc or here to ask questions and look up how to do stuff as you go along.

[Imperator]

Thanks for your help!

I'm afraid I don't have an extra box to test it out on, but I will partition my current system.

Which one would you recommend though? For a semi-newbie, who wants to go into programming/security: Debian or Slack?

Cheers!
Imperator.

[YaRness]

well, read up on both.
http://www.debian.org/intro/why_debian
http://slackware.com/info/

either one will give you a lot of room to wiggle around and learn about everything.

slackware is more like a tradition unix system. debian has an integrated package manager for installing and maintaining programs.

look around both sites, around here, there's a distro NHF (link to NHFs at top of page) though it may be a little out of day, check google, see what you think. either one would be a fine programming platform, and will let you get your hands dirty securing them.

[subnet_rx]

be aware, slackware is hyped on this board a lot, so I would definitely not delete your mandrake partition yet. I've been using Red Hat since 5.2 and I hated Slackware.

[X_console]

Slackware's installation isn't really hard. I mean, you don't even have to configure X anymore because the default Slackware kernel comes with framebuffer support. So just say you want that during installation, and you've got X running right away. Here's the general gist of what happens during installation:

1. You can run cfdisk (easy to use fdisk) to create partitions.

2. It formats your swap partition.

3. It formats the Linux partitions.

4. It creates /etc/fstab and if you have Windows, asks if you want those mounted at boot up.

5. Pick the disk sets you want to install.

6. Choose medium (CDROM)

7. Choose mode of installation (newbie, expert, tagfiles, etc)

8. Pick the packages and start installing.

9. Runs the netconfig program.

10. Runs liloconfig if you want to use LILO

11. If you installed X, asks if you want to use framebuffer or if you want to manually setup X yourself.

12. Sets up the timezone.

13. Sets up the root password.

14. Reboot and you're done.

Obviously I would recommend Slackware, but my view is biased because well... I use it. :) I like it 'coz it's simple, stable, and no bleeding edge, so less security problems. However if you like to try a lot of new stuff and want a cool package manager, then go for Debian.

[scanez]

I think Slackware's installation is actually easier than Debian's. But anyway, go ahead and try both, install Slack and try it for a week or two, and then do the same with Debian. The best way to learn which is the best one for you is to try them both out and decide for yourself.

Have fun
SC

[thor420]

I was in the same boat as yourself. Been using RH 7.1 for a few months, had an extra partition hangin around, and got the Slack 8.0 iso's to try out the distro. At any rate I like the distro fo the most part. It is extremely lean and mean if you want it to be, and to tell your the truth it makes a little more sense to me (than Redhat). I have only run into some hardware setup issues, the rest of the install went smooth. Fun to try it out, and I think I will migrate to it solely. Have fun!

[subnet_rx]

I couldn't get it to install the 2.4.5 kernel. And many ppl told me it had issues with it and installed only the source. That's just unacceptable.

[ifred]

Personally I prefer Debian because of the packaging system but with Slackware you can respond to questions such as this with the once popular (but uninformative) response:
:cool:Slackware :cool:

[Nekopa]

I had problems with kernel 2.4.5 with Slack 8.0, until someone told me that when you install it, do not install any packages that have anything to do with 2.2's kernel. Then Slack installed the 2.4.5 kernel as default and it ran sweet. The only other problem I have had with the kernel in Slack was when I tried to compile it for Athlon/Duron. I would never work, wouldn't even boot. But when I changed to xconfig file to compile for K6 II, it worked fine, and ran faster.

Weird...

Lee