A beautiful sunny cool morning and the little devil, who is my companion
since I was born, said "It IS so dull when everything works as expected,
maybe it is time for some change."
It made me thinking, what change?
"Window shopping" other distributions left me apathetic, no good reason
to switch.
But there are *BSD's and _solid_ Solaris for taking, so maybe it would
be a learning experience as well.

So "devil advocates", if you have done it, do tell.

Have fun

Stanislaw
Slack user from Ulladulla.

Stanislaw Flatto blithely blithered
> A beautiful sunny cool morning and the little devil, who is my companion
> since I was born, said "It IS so dull when everything works as expected,
> maybe it is time for some change."
> It made me thinking, what change?
> "Window shopping" other distributions left me apathetic, no good reason
> to switch.
> But there are *BSD's and _solid_ Solaris for taking, so maybe it would
> be a learning experience as well.
>
> So "devil advocates", if you have done it, do tell.

Oh how I wish I could post some passionate tale of running a beautiful
*BSD and open your eyes, but I cant. I've fiddled with them and saw no
real difference between what I was running and what the new thing was
except partitions weren't partitions, they were slices.

Hohum.

> Have fun

I do. With Slack.

--
If clear thinking created sparks, we could safely store dynamite in
James Watt's office.
-- Wayne Shannon, KRON-TV

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In alt.os.linux.slackware, Stanislaw Flatto dared to utter,
> A beautiful sunny cool morning and the little devil, who is my companion
> since I was born, said "It IS so dull when everything works as expected,
> maybe it is time for some change."
> It made me thinking, what change?
> "Window shopping" other distributions left me apathetic, no good reason
> to switch.
> But there are *BSD's and _solid_ Solaris for taking, so maybe it would
> be a learning experience as well.

I can't comment on Solaris, but I do have good things to say about the
BSDs. I've run both FreeBSD and OpenBSD (to a lesser extent) and liked
them both. There are of course things to like and things to hate about
them both, but overall my impression of them is very good. If you're
interested in giving them a shot, I highly recommend both of them as a
fun little romp that you might fall in love with (and leave Slack :-( )
or find that they are more suited to a particular role than Slackware
is and use them there. After all, learning new things never makes you
weaker.

Pros:
- - Solid, stable, reliable. Everything you like about Slackware in these
regaurds is right here too.
- - Much better firewall rulesets with pf in both OpenBSD (and as of I
think version 5.3-RELEASE, FreeBSD as well). Let's face it; netfilter
blows for readibility. The learning curve is sharp and the rewards for
learning netfilter aren't any greater than the rewards for learning pf,
IMHO. In fact, I think the power and flexibility of pf outstrips
netfilter.
- - Lots and lots of packages available through ports. Very few things
you'll want aren't included in ports.
- - Great documentation. I wish the SlackBook was as good as the BSD
Handbooks.
- - Even more elitest users than Slackware.

Cons:
- - Building things outside of ports is highly frowned upon. Lots of
people don't want to help you if you compiled anything outside of
ports.
- - Boot sequence is much more complex. Daemons are turned on and off at
boot time via $DAEMON_NAME_enable="YES|NO" in /etc/rc.conf. Also, the
order in which daemons are activated at boot time is rather difficult
to grasp. Each startup script has to include lines like "REQUIRES" and
"PROVIDES". You check the order that things are started by running a
program, the name of which escapes me at this time. Also, startup
scripts are kept in /etc/rc.d (for base system stuff) and
/usr/local/etc/rc.d (for ports), so you have to go back and forth to
find everything. Slackware's rc.M and kind are much easier to grok at
first glance. Still, the BSD's have most linux systems beat on here.
- - Fewer things just work with the BSDs. This is most common with
proprietary applications (think Neverwinter Nights and the like). There
are linux compatability kernel modules and the like, but needless to
say, emulation will never beat native.
- - No framebuffer. This is a bigge for me given the amount of time I
spend in the console of a machine that most likely doesn't even have X
installed.
- - Difficult to remove anything from the base system that you might not
want (example: sendmail) because the base system is installed in a
half-dozen packages instead of say two dozen. This wouldn't be quite
as big a deal if large daemons like sendmail (in FreeBSD's case) and
apache (in OpenBSD's case) were included in ports instead of in the
base system. In fact, the base system for these distributions is
welcomely small, but lacks a few things I would consider essential to a
base system (like screen), but that's really a personal preference.

Neither Pros nor Cons:
- - Some things work better or worse on the BSDs than on Linux. The
first thing that comes to mind is MySQL, which judging by posts to the
freebsd-stable mailing list, runs abysmally slow on FreeBSD when
compared to linux. This means that these operating systems are likely
better at some specific tasks for you than they are at others.

- --
It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise,
Than for a man to hear the song of fools.
Ecclesiastes 7:5
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+Alan Hicks+ wrote:

>
> I can't comment on Solaris, but I do have good things to say about the
> BSDs.
> Pros:
> - - Even more elitest users than Slackware.
>

Close. Very close. Maybe a tie. But not 'more.'

Anyway, there is a little known Debian derivative called Kanotix
(kanotix.com) that is just as stable as Slackware (IMO) and just as fast,
if not faster (It has a 2.6 kerne that has been patched for i686
hardware... yet it works well on my ancient IBM 600e laptop). It's a
live-CD (from Knoppix) that you install if you wish. It's even fast on the
CD. It screams on the HD. I use it for my day-to-day work.

If you are a true Slacker, you are not going to leave, but if you are
looking for what Slackware COULD BE IF IT WERE PLUG AND PLAY, you might
want to take a look at this. It's the only distro out of 20 I've tried
where everything .... sound, video, two mice (on a laptop), kvm, printers,
monitors, etc. worked out of the box. No one knows much about this distro
(sort of like Slackware in that regard!). The community is mostly German
but everyone speaks English and their forum and IRC are very helpful.

I wrote (i.e. was paid for) a short article published on NewsForge (and
picked up elsewhere) that talks about the Kanotix community:
http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=05/08/31/1533252

If you like speed and you like "German engineering" I think you will like
Kanotix. It's a 1-CD KDE distro without a lot of fluff. (Apt-get lets you
load all the fluff you like.)

Al C.

Stanislaw Flatto wrote:

> So "devil advocates", if you have done it, do tell.

OpenBSD
slack almost seems....similar... in comparison

On 2005-09-12, ANC <xxx_nospam@takeout_adams-blake.com_nospam> wrote:

> I wrote (i.e. was paid for)....

Your point, other than your usual ego masturbation?

> If you like speed and you like "German engineering" I think you will like
> Kanotix....

How good can it be ...no market share!

nb

notbob wrote:

> On 2005-09-12, ANC <xxx_nospam@takeout_adams-blake.com_nospam> wrote:
>
>> I wrote (i.e. was paid for)....
>
> Your point, other than your usual ego masturbation?
>

"It ain't braggin' if you can do it" - Dizzy Dean

What have YOU ever done... except hide behind a mask and bark with the rest
of the pack of wild dogs that try to intimidate anyone they disagree with.

>> If you like speed and you like "German engineering" I think you will like
>> Kanotix....
>
> How good can it be ...no market share!

Unlike Slackware Linux, Inc., Kanotix at this time is not a commercial
distro. The creator is not trying to make a living from it. He accepts
donations, and sells CDs to cover server costs, but he has never stated
that he has commercial intentions. (Many people feel he should 'go all out'
and seek publicity and make Kanotix a business... because it IS that
good... ask anyone who has used it. Even he guy on The Linux Link Tech Show
who RAVES about Slackware all the time now runs Kanotix.)

Slackers like Kanotix because it is lean, mean, fast, and uses a bunch of
tightly written bash scripts to do some of the system admin (meaning you
can easily change them). Take a quick look at some of these:
http://kanotix.com/files/ and you will see why Slack folks like Kanotix.

Slackware Linux, Inc. has paid P. Volkerding's bills, as he has stated time
and time again, and I assume that it is still true. Slackware is commercial
and needs a certain level of 'market share' in order to support Mr.
Volkerding. This is not the case, to my knowledge, with Kanotix.

Al C.

On 2005-09-12, ANC <xxx_nospam@takeout_adams-blake.com_nospam> wrote:


> What have YOU ever done... except hide behind a mask and bark with the rest
> of the pack of wild dogs that try to intimidate anyone they disagree with.

Still playing the same old record, eh Al. Big time bad ass self made
company man, published author, and all around legend-in-your-own-mind
still sniffing around a buncha dogs trying to convince yourself of
your own superiority. How pathetic.

nb

notbob wrote:

> Still playing the same old record, eh Al. Big time bad ass self made
> company man, published author, and all around legend-in-your-own-mind
> still sniffing around a buncha dogs trying to convince yourself of
> your own superiority. How pathetic.
>
> nb

I got something written, published, and paid for in/from NewsForge.

Whadda you got?

"When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose" - Bob Dylan
http://bobdylan.com/songs/rolling.html

Al C.

On 2005-09-12, ANC <xxx_nospam@takeout_adams-blake.com_nospam> wrote:

> Whadda you got?

Self esteem ...something you seem to be sadly lacking.

nb