Back to Slackware 10.0

Submitted by Chandrashekar Babu on October 29, 2004 - 10:09pm.
::

After a brief date with Mandrake 10.1 Community Edition, am finally back again to Slackware 10.0. So why did I leave Mandrake ? Well.. for a couple of reasons:

  • It was not developer friendly. A lot of development libraries were
    missing. A lot of applications wont compile from sources without these
    development libraries.
  • It was too slow for my machine. The machine in question is
    an AMD Athlon-XP 1800+ with 256 MB RAM, 80 GB Hard-disk, ASUS A7V266EX
    motherboard (Via KT266 chipset). This machine is being setup as a
    Linux Terminal Server running multiple instances of Xvnc server with the entire
    K Desktop Environment(!) to serve 5 old Pentium 2 boxes (with 64 MB RAM)
    configured as thin clients. After migrating the entire setup to Slackware
    10.0, I could feel significant performance improvements! The environment is now
    responsive inspite of 5 different instances of KDE running - atleast better than
    how it felt on Mandrake. Of course, a Mandrake zealot would give me a list of
    things to do in order to make Mandrake perform better, but hey! that was just one
    of my problems ;-)
  • Configuration files being thrown all around. This has remained as a common
    problem to me across many distributions which include RedHat and derivatives,
    SuSE, Debian and so on. A dozen of config files for system startup services,
    located on obscure directories, and silly (rather stupid) commands to mess with
    those config files and so on. I mean, all it takes to start apache web server on
    any Linux distribution is to issue the command /usr/sbin/apachectl start
    (provided that apachectl script existed on /usr/sbin directory). But I see
    another wrapper script on Mandrake lying in /etc/init.d/ directory and a silly
    command called service to invoke that script (which was never needed). So
    on Mandrake, you'd say service httpd start to start the apache web server.
    This is exactly what I call "Layers of unnecessary complexity!". Some would argue
    that this was supposed to be some standard compliance... but I'm not impressed
    by it, anyways.
  • A lot of packages do not compile! I tried compiling centericq and it
    broke. Same goes for the eq-xmms plugin, xmms-wma plugin and yes, mozilla firefox
    itself. I have no idea as to why... perhaps something really went wrong with the
    default set of libraries during my early mess-around while trying to get
    Apache+MySQL+PHP to work. Worse, I couldn't revert back to a workable
    configuration after I messed up some existing libraries. For some reason, RPMs
    have never been kind enough to me ;-)
  • Not many applications (of my tastes) exist on Mandrake. I thought, what
    if source compile breaks... let me find a readily available RPM package for
    Mandrake and I was dissappointed. I couldn't find the latest RPM of centericq
    (4.11a), eq-xmms, MPlayer-1.0pre5, ruby, postgresql... and the list could go on,
    endlessly.

I'm not complaining... its just that Mandrake is not the distro for me. Its best suited for newbies. Infact, I got Mandrake installed earlier to just get a feel about how it works, so that I could recommend the same for my parents. And hey, my parents loved Mandrake 10.1! They've tried Slackware 10.0 before, then it was Knoppix for a while, and then Xandros. Now they're so much in love with Mandrake. CDROMs could be inserted as-is and opened by double-clicking on the CDROM icon (no more right-click and mount required). Pressing the eject button on the CDROM drive, ejects the CDROM (no need to right-click and umount on the CDROM icon before ejecting, anymore), and yes, Mandrake has good support for Tamil on KDE. My parents could now browse tamil websites without any hiccups. Apart from missing a couple of applications, my parents were comfortable on Mandrake 10.1. I thought its best that I left Mandrake on their machine alone, and get on Slackware on mine ;-)

Slackware too, has its own problems... first, I need to spend a long time, fixing up configuration tuned to my requirements and my taste (optimizing system startup, polishing themes on KDE for my students, getting my personal desktop environment to work... and so on). Mandrake had good support for my old obscure dot matrix printer (Lexmark 2390 plus forms printer) on CUPS. I must figure out how to get it to work on Slackware with the similar resolution.

I had to compile the kernel, set up sound and video, nvidia video driver support for X, dnsmasq setup (dhcpd+dns for LAN environments) and other minor tweaks.

Finally, I have a working Slackware box, and it smells like fresh air now!