In my Slackware 13 review mfillpot gave some suggestions to improve the Slackware experience and I thought I would give them a shot.  First off, changing the init level to 4 to allow KDM to show up instead of this startx business.  I was happy to note that Slackware had emacs.  So many distros have vi and I never really learned how to use it well.  So I changed the value to 4 and restarted.  And there she is:

Even though I gave up on reviewing Linux distros a while back, I keep getting mountains of hits on here for people who who want Linux reviews.  Since my Slackware 12.2 review was the second-most commented post on this blog, I decided it was a good distro to revisit.  So, when Slackware 13 came a few months ago on the LXF magazine, I decided to throw it into Virtualbox to see how it has changed.  One difference this time around is that I now have the dual core machine so I am running Slackware on that machine (especially since it has hooks for better virtualization so it should run better)

I already tried installing Gento o.  Twice.  The other Linux distro for the hardcore, for whom the Ubuntus and the Fedoras is too easy, is Slackware.  Slackware is, of course, the oldest surviving Linux distro.  I’ve already reviewed some distros based off of Slackware such as Zenwalk and Slax.  Along the way I’ve come to learn about some of the appeal of Slackware and why people would base distributions off of it.  However, it does have a reputation as a very hard distro to install.  Fab, of Linux Outlaws, refers to it as the distro for those who “love the pain”.  But Slackware has always held a special place in my mind for the quirky reason that I almost selected it as my first distro ( as I recount here).  I had no idea that the Slack in Slackware was a reference to the Church of the Sub-Genius.  (that’s why the Slackware Penguin smokes a pipe)

Somewhere along the line I got into my head that Slackware was a distro that involved having to compile everything. From what I can gather from Wikipedia, The Slackware Website, and some comments to my Gentoo post, I was wrong. Slackware apparently uses packages, just like every other modern distro. The difference is that dependency resolution (at least with the default first-party tools) is up to the user. This clears up so much for me because I always wondered why someone would want to make a distribution based off of Slackware if the point of Slackware was to compile from source and be super hardcore. After all, Slackware doesn’t baby you and give you all these little GUIs to configure your system. You need to get down and dirty with Emacs (or even dirties with Vi) and edit those config files. Here’s what the Slackware site gives as the reason to use Slackware:

For some reason, I didn’t get Linux Format Magazine issue #110 when I was supposed to. I ordered another copy and it arrived recently, so it’s time for another slate of Linux reviews. Unfortunately, something appears to be wrong with the way they mastered the magazine DVD, because I was unable to boot into any of the Slax options. So I went online and got the latest ISO off of http://www.slax.org.