Review: Slackware 11

Like fine wine, this distro gets better with age

Michael J. Jordan, Linux Online Staff

October 20, 2006

Like many people who started using Linux in the mid to late 90's, my first distribution was Slackware. And I'm pleased to report that Patrick Volkerding's creation has withstood the test of time and is still going strong (and Patrick as well, fortunately). In these days when Ubuntu is hogging the spotlight (though much of this attention is truly merited), it's good to know that you can count on a distribution from the days when "men were men and they wrote their own device drivers" as Linus Torvalds once said. In fact, when I hear news about Slackware, I experience a similar sensation as when I get a whiff of something that smells like 'Sweet Honesty' perfume, a fragrance popular with girls when I was in my teens. Like your first love, I guess you never get over your first distro.

Installation

Slackware, which used to be one of the leanest and meanest distributions out there, is, like the others, putting on a bit of weight. Slackware 11 now requires a download of 6 CDs. I got them via BitTorrent and soon I was on my way.

For those of us now used to nice looking graphic installers, Slackware's text mode installer may look like a throwback to the old days. Even though there aren't many bells and whistles here, I found the Slackware installation process to be pretty intuitive.

After being asked to log in as 'root' (the standard Linux administrator account), the process brings you right to everybody's favorite task, partitioning. This is where most people get the idea that Slackware is not the most novice-friendly Linux distribution out there. At this point, you're asked to choose between 'cfdisk' and 'fdisk' to perform the partitioning tasks. Now, if you've tried Fedora, SUSE or Mandrake, this is a lot like being asked to choose between eating pine needles or drinking swamp water. I think 'cfdisk' is a bit more intuitive, so you might want to try that. My standard operating procedure is to create a root partition (/) of at least 5 GB, a /home partition, in order to store my personal files, with what's left of the disk - remembering to leave some space at least equal to my RAM memory for a swap partition. This swap space will give your machine an extra memory boost.

After you're done with the partitioning, we'll use the setup tool to continue with the installation tasks. You'll see a menu with the following items:

• REMAP KEYBOARD
• ADDSWAP
• TARGET
• SOURCE
• SELECT
• INSTALL
• CONFIGURE
• EXIT

The first item, remapping the keyboard, should have already been done at startup, so let's move to adding our swap partition. This is just an easy one step process of enabling our swap space. Second, we'll need to set up our target partitions. This means that we indicate where our root (/) and /home partitions are that we previously mentioned. During this process, you can have the program check the hard drive for bad blocks. This is a pretty good idea. Now, you'll have to choose the type of filesystem you're going to be using. The choices are: ext2, the traditional Linux filesystem, ext3, the successor of ext2 and a journaling filesystem (this allows you to recover from sudden system shutdowns more quickly) and ReiserFS, another journaling filesystem. I chose ext3 and I recommend this choice. To finish, there is a little detail about inodes. This concerns heavy duty data storage issues, so I just clicked on the default.

After this, I went right over to the installation item. Here you'll see a sub-menu of the types of installation you can choose:

• full
• expert
• menu
• newbie
• custom
• tagpath

Either the expert or menu choices are good. Choosing the expert doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be an expert. I find it very useful because it presents you with a series of menus where you can "weed out" software that you don't think you're going to need. The 'menu' option also gives you the ability to narrow down your choices, but with less detail. That is, you're asked to choose categories of packages (office, web server, etc). After you've made your choices, it will start installing. Depending on what choices you've made, at some point, you'll be prompted to insert other disks to continue the process.

Once the packages you chose are installed, you'll move on to some setup tasks. The first one of these is to choose a kernel. Despite the maturity of the 2.6 series of Linux kernels, Slackware 11 still installs a 2.4 kernel by default. This may have accounted for some problems I had setting up a wireless card (more details on that later). You'll need to reinsert disk 1 in the drive so your kernel of choice can be installed. You can, if you wish, create a boot floppy. But I use floppies about as often as a Greenpeace activist would drive a Hummer, so I skipped this. The first CD actually serves as a rescue disk anyway.

After asking me if I had a modem (this machine didn't) and if I wanted 'hotplug' capabilities (I didn't), I came to the important task of installing a bootloader. This allows the operating system(s) to be loaded at boot time. Slackware uses LILO, which is the traditional Linux bootloader. It will ask you if you have any special parameters to be loaded with the kernel (you can skip this if you don't understand it) and then it will ask you where to install LILO. The best choice is in your Master Boot Record. This will allow you to easily boot other operating systems if you so choose.

Finally, I ended the setup process with a few more configuration tasks. I set up my mouse. I confirmed what services I wanted to run at boot time and then set up the hardware clock. Network configuration, which should have been set up at this point as well, had to be delayed. My wireless card was not recognized at this point. All that was left now was to reboot and start using Slackware.

Using Slackware 11