Slackware: There's something totally sane about it

I finally finished all the security updates for my newish Slackware 12.0 install, and another trip to the Slackware site revealed that there was an additional update posted on Aug. 31. Using the Slack FTP site, these updates take forever to download at 8 KB/s. There's a helpful note on the security update page about faster mirrors -- I'll have to look into it.

However fast the downloads have been, I've been very successful using gFTP to do them. In Windows, I use Internet Explorer for my FTP needs -- I'm just lazy about it, I guess.

Back to Slackware: I probably should get on the mailing list for security updates so I'll know when they come out.

While it's not as easy as apt-get update, apt-get upgrade in Debian/Ubuntu (or the Update Manager), there's something very sane about maintaining a Slackware box. For one thing, you know way more about what goes into it. One thing with Slackware -- it pays to read. Read the documentation, keep up with blogs and Web sites that write about Slack. Another thing: Thank the makers of Slackware, led by Patrick Volkerding for such great command-line utilities like xwmconfig, netconfig, pkgtool, upgradepkg, installpkg and many more that I don't yet know about. If this kind of stuff was available in Fluxbuntu, it would be more than just a vanity project that appears to be going nowhere. Slackware hard? You set up networking by typing netconfig at a prompt and filling in the blanks. What could be easier? Installing software with pkgtool? Except for the dependency problems, which at least make you more aware of what your system is all about, it's easy and intuitive.

While I initially was put off by not being automatically added to the proper groups to mount CDs and USB drives, I later saw the wisdom of the OS not being wide open in its default configuration. It makes Slackware a good choice for an office environment, believe it or not, because your end users won't be able to screw things up to the extent that they would in a stock Ubuntu install with sudo privileges.

And the process of getting Slackware to mount devices and burn CDs was a valuable learning experience.

I'm pretty much running Slackware with the Xfce desktop. KDE runs faster in Slack than anywhere I've seen, but it's still too slow for my hardware. Patrick made a big deal out of dropping GNOME from Slack, but one thing I've learned about GNOME is that it's much quicker than KDE. I'm getting comfortable in Xfce, however.

Did I mention that configuring CUPS printing for my difficult-to-dial-in networked printer was easier in Slackware than in anything else I've tried? I'm mentioning it now. For some reason, while my printer didn't show up on the list of networked printers in CUPS, clicking on the Administration button was enough to find it. I'll have to try that in Puppy 2.17, which just got CUPS support.