I’ve tried slackware before a couple of times but I never really ‘got’ it. Maybe at this point in my life I’ll ‘get’ it. So I’ve downloaded Slackware 12.1 from the site (there doesn’t seem to be a 64-bit version..). I’ve booted off the DVD.

The first screen is the SYSLINUX screen telling me basically to just press enter unless I need any extra linux kernel options. I don’t. Now I can just press enter to use the default US keyboard map. Yep. This is not even really an installer at this point, it’s literally just text on black background. Now I am presented with a log in prompt and a message that informs me I can log in as root now. I type root and press enter, and wonder why it didn’t just log me in for me. Why did I just have to type that? So now I’m logged in and I am told to do the partitioning manually if I have old packages or data I want.

I start fdisk and delete all existing partitions.Then I make: 100MB boot with bootable flag, 1024mb swap as type 82, and the rest as / . I then begin the installation by running setup. I’m shown the most primitive installer out of all my reviews yet, with several standard options. The first one is help. The second is keymap. Let’s see what’s in there. Yep a big list of different keymaps. Anyways, Now I go to the next one, addswap, which says set up your swap partitions. It shows me a list of the one partition which I have set as a type 82 and then allows me to press ok. Then it asks if I want mkswap to check my partition for me. Nope.

It then tells me the line which will be automatically added to my fstab. I am unable to tell it to stop flaunting the most basic of features. Now it’s asking me which partition will be / and I tell it. I also inform it formatting this will be just fine. I am offered the choices of ext2, ext3, jfs, reiserfs, xfs. I choose xfs. Now it detects that I still have a linux partition which has no mointpoint and asks me what I want to do. I tell it to format it as ext3 and mount that sucker as /boot.

Now I’m asked the source I want to install from. DVD. I also tell it to automatically scan for the DVD drive. Amazing! It can actually detect a drive! Call Linus!

Now I’m offered the list of default package groups and the chance to change them. I untick GNU Emacs, Tcl/Tk script languages, Games, and TeX typesetting software. I then press enter. Now I’m offered a chance to go through and remove or add specific packages or install everything, which is marked in all caps. ‘RECOMMENDED!’. Fine if it’s so recommended, I’ll do that. 12:35PM installation begins. Somewhere around 1:00 it’s over (got distracted).

Next it asks me to make a USB boot stick.. nahhh. Now I am offered to install LILO. Nothing about grub in here.. Hmmm.. I guess I will. It asks me the framebuffer, additional kernel options and if I want some kind of UTF option. Nah. Yes, install it to the MBR. Now I’m asked for the mouse information. To this day I never know what to choose for mouse questions. They all look the same to me. I press enter on the default. Now I’m asked to load gpm on boot time. No. I want to use kde anyways. It asks if I want to configure my network. OK.

Hostname is slackware. Domain name I try to leave blank but I’m not allowed. I put yourmom.com. I choose dhcp. It tells me I may have a dhcp hostname, but if not press enter. I press enter. Now I’m able to choose which services I want to start up. I leave it at default because it seems to be pretty minimal (nice).

Now I’m asked to try custom screen fonts.. Sure… There’s a large list of file names, none of them look obvious as to what the hell they are. For example scrawl_w.fnt.gz … ok, let’s try that one. Wow when I press enter the writing instantly changes to some cooky writing. OK let’s try another. I test tons of them. Most are actually pretty similar to each other. I find a happy medium at mr.fnt.gz .

Now I choose yes to UTC and then choose Pacific for my time zone. Now I’m given options as to which window manager to use for X: kde, xfce, fluxbox, blackbox, windowmaker, fvwm2, twm. I choose kde.

Now I put in the root password. I am done, and told I can now reboot. I do. LILO comes up and looks actually pretty cool because it’s black and white logo instead of the usual colored up grub. As it’s booting up the scrollby text looks exactly like gentoo, except no colors. I’m brought to a log in prompt at the shell. I log in as root and run startx. Immediately KDE starts and I’m presented with the startup wizard. After I pick my options it enters KDE 3.5.9 for the first time. It seems about the same speed as most distros at this point.

I notice there is a lot of crap installed (I did the recommended install of everything). I fire up firefox and go to google, then myspace. Internet is working. I notice there is literally NO customization; I mean this is just a completely plain kde install in every way.

I do notice a package manager, called Kpackage. Let’s see what this is all about. I open it up to find a list of all packages. There are tabs for installed, updated and new as well. Clicking installed does nothing, presumably because all are installed already. Updated and new show nothing listed. In Installed, I scroll to the bottom to find zsh. Let’s remove that.

I click on zsh and on the right comes the name, group, size and filesize (in numbers, not sure if they are supposed to be bytes, kb, or what), and a description. There is one button, which says uninstall. Click. On clicking, A terminal output window pops up and ’shows’ me what the program is running (ever use Yumex? It’s like that). The cool thing about that is now I know how to do this from command line: 

removepkg zsh-4.3.6-i486-1

Nice!

Let’s go to the shell and try to remove something else. Scrolling through the list I see reiserfsprogs-3.6.19-i486-2 . Let’s remove that. But first I want to see where these things are actually stored, so I don’t have to use the GUI list to see the package names. I open up a shell and type:

locate reiserfsprogs

Whoops, have to update locate since it’s a fresh install.

locate -u

That’s better. Now I run again:

locate reiserfsprogs

Immediately I see a few entries, the most likely one being:

/var/log/packages/reiserfsprogs-3.6.19-i486-2

However it’s just a log, as I suspected by the path. In it is a log of the files included in the package. Very interesting. I’m beginning to suspect something so grand I may have to further investigate this Slackware.. What if all you did was have a file with the list of files and then a package manager which deleted those files when you tell it to remove the package by the name of the original file? Does that make sense?

I think I’m going a bit beyond the scope of this installation review. The point is, there was no KDE 4.1, no x86_64 (I have 8gb of ram on my main machine). The installer was crappy looking but did the job (except partitioning which it made me do). The system is very, very ‘plain’ feeling, which is a powerful thing in itself. I might be able to get into this. But first I will need to track down a 64-bit version.