Looking for a new linux distro

[instronics]

I haven't messed around much with slackware, with the exception that I believe Backtrack used to be based on slackware. How's the installation as far as difficulty is concerned?

The installation is easy as pie.

1 - Boot from the CD
2 - Hit enter when it asks your for default keyb layout (its usa)
3 - type 'root', and hit enter
4 - 'Fdisk' and partition your disk, 1 swap area (double size of your ram), and the rest for /, then make the / partition bootable (toggle a), make the first partition swap (type 82), and make the second partition type 83.
5 - Save changes
6 - type in 'sync' and press enter
7 - type 'setup' and press enter
8 - follow the instructions on the screen
9 - After a few minutes, it will tell you to take out cd, reboot and voila.... your system is ready to boot in GUI

So basicly the only 'semi dirty' part is the fdisk at the start in the shell, but once you do it a couple of times, you will see that its really nothing.

If you want some security, make sure that when you create your normal user, you add him to the group wheel, and set the system to allow 'su' only from users in group wheel. One difference from slack and other distros is, in slack they use /etc/rc.d instead of /etc/init.d.

Familiarize yourself with slapt-get and if you really want some fun, read up on how to compile your kernel.

I would like to point out that slackware still uses LILO as its default boot manager which is absolutely FINE!!!

If you want some extra help, i can give you a small customized script for slapt-get that i made to make updating stuff easier, as well as some other repositories for it.

Depending on what GUI choice you made during setup, the default is KDE4, but you can also just say at setup to use light window managers, like fluxbox etc....

After you are a bit comfortable, you will realize that slapt-get does NOT have ALL packages that exist. So a good friend to you would be:

http://slackbuilds.org/

I would say that for some people a downside of slackware is that all of its configuration files do not have a point and click GUI version. Its always with an editor editing config files. But I do not see this as a downside, since config files tend to give you more options than a GUI panel for configurations.

Oh, and one more thing. In slackware you will realize that some packages are NOT the latest builds or versions. The reason is that slackware will ONLY release a package if its thoroughly tested and considered to be 100% stable. So if you stick with what slack asks from you only, your system should be VERY stable. No bad surprises with current packs etc.....

The golden rule in slackware is.... if its not broken, dont fix it.

Have fun and a happy new year to everyone.

Cheers.