Slackware vs. Ubuntu?

[haxer]

Whats the main different between slackware and Ubuntu? Apt-get? kde? gnome?

[bodhi.zazen]

There are significant differences. KDE/Gnome are window managers and can theoretically be run on any distro.

Start here:

Slackware

[skymt]

Ubuntu is easy, Slackware is hard.
Ubuntu is automatic, Slackware is manual.
Ubuntu is up-to-date, Slackware is stable.
Ubuntu is graphically-oriented, Slackware is text-oriented.

Short answer: Ubuntu Just Works, Slackware makes you work.

[xyz]

I like the light-weight SLAXs which you can "slax copy2ram" thus freeing CD-ROM.

[bodhi.zazen]

Sorry, but some of the above is just not true, particularly "benfindlay".

Slackware comes with a number of window managers, KDE is most popular. By default Slackware boots to a CLI (not a gui). Log in and type "startx".

Slackware is not necessarily any harder then Ubuntu. Slackwre is different and you should not confuse familiarity with difficulty.

If you try Zenwalk (see below) you will be up an running very fast, no problem.

Package management is via slapt-get, a command line tool very simmilar to apt-get. You can download packages from many sources. Gslapt is a GUI front end for slapt-get. How is that harder then Ubuntu? It is not, just different.

At any rate, if you wnat a feel of Slackware I suggest you try Zenwalk. It is light, fast, and easy. It will out perform (faster) then Ubuntu. By default it uses XFCE, but you can easily install KDE or gnome. Or Fluxbox for that matter.

Zenwalk

Zenwalk also has a Live CD which is very nice.

[benfindlay]

Yeah, I was referring to the normal install of each, which I thought was CLI for slackware. Didn't mean to imply that you can't use a GUI with it. Meant to say that ubuntu boots the GUI by default.

Difficulty is all relative. I'd say that how quickly you become "familiar" with something is a good measure of how easy, or user friendly it is, and from talking to people who have used both slackware and debian based systems, they've pretty much all agreed that debian is much more intuitive, user friendly and easy. Each to their own however.

I've read about Slapt-get and according to wikipedia:

slapt-get does not provide dependency resolution for packages included within the Slackware distribution

Perhaps in terms of difficulty it is no harder, but its definitely harder work!

[clarkth]

I suggest you try Zenwalk. It is light, fast, and easy. It will out perform (faster) then Ubuntu. By default it uses XFCE, but you can easily install KDE or gnome. Or Fluxbox for that matter.

I use ZenWalk for a PII box with 128 MB RAM and it works great. I highly recommend it for ease of use and usability with older hardware.

[benfindlay]

For one thing, the ubuntu desktop comes with X and GNOME installed. I believe when you install slackware you just get a terminal. Slackware's package handling is via tar balls, whereas ubuntu uses debs via the Synaptic Package Manager. Ubuntu will resolve dependencies for you, whereas slackware will not, so you are required to deal with the dependency resolution yourself (there may be a piece of software to add dependencies, but I don't know for definite, can someone confirm or deny this?)

Anyways, ubuntu is far more user friendly than pretty much ALL other linux distributions

[3rr0r]

Have you tried Back:Track ? www.remote-exploit.org is where you can get it. It is based on slackware, but it primarily made for network security testing and the such

[Irony]

Zenwalk is very slick unfortunately I couldn't get my ATI card acceleration to work on it.

Apart from the ATI issue I found Zenwalk simple to install and easy to install programs from the repositories.

If you have Ubuntu installed then if you have a partition set aside you can install Zenwalk to it - skip the installing Lilo part and simply add a line to your /boot/grub/menu.lst something like;

# This entry added by me as an example
# installation on /dev/hdb4
title        Zenwalk 2.01, hdb4
root        (hd1,3)
kernel        /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdb4 ro
savedefault
boot