So, A couple of months ago version 13.1 of Slackware – the oldest surviving linux distribution – was released. And as my lappy has been giving me a bit of trouble recently. I’ve decided to give it a try.
I spent this morning installing it, and I have to say, it was simpler than I expected, but it took me a couple of hours and compared with Ubuntu installs nowadays, it could have been easier. fdisk gave me a bit of trouble, probably because I’ve become so used to the more user friendly alternative – gparted. But once partitioning was out of the way it went rather smoothly 
, and I was impressed at the speed of the package installation.
I now have Slackware, KDE, and my GPU driver up and running, which in my opinion is not bad for a days work 
. Now I just have the tricky task of getting my wireless card working 
.
Anyway, first impressions are excellent, I’m looking forward to enjoying it further, and I would definately recommend this slick distribution to anyone with some free time and some linux knowledge.
My plan is to keep slack as my primary distribution until the beta of Ubuntu 10.10 is available next month, after that I will focus on testing *buntu for the release in October .
EDIT: I have now got my wireless up and running, and have finally realised that the reason ifconfig was not working, was because /sbin wasn’t included in my $PATH. Silly me.
Hi interesting post. Techunit here from the Ubuntu Video Tutorials blog and I have to say that the wireless card has to be one of my all time biggest problems in windows. But if you can find the windows installer for the drivers and extract it you may have some luck entering the wireless INF files into ndiswrapper. Back when I started using ubuntu on a WUBI install back in 08 I had a wireless doggle for getting on the interweb and because there were no native drivers you had to compile ndiswrapper to use the windows INF configuration files to get it working. great looking blog btw.
Yeah, ndiswrapper is a great tool, thank you for your comment
.
In the end, running lspci revealed that slack was finding my card, so all I had to do was enable wlan and run dhcpcd
. Although, it took me a while to work out why ifconfig and iwconfig weren’t working. Turns out /sbin wasn’t included in my $PATH – d’oh!
Ben
I am glad that you figured it out and have had some success with it. Ubuntu and other linux distros have been getting more comprehensive as of late. I am beginning to miss the thrill of not knowing and having to figure it out.