Trying out Slackware

[Doug Sutherland]

Zach,

On slackware, forget packages once you have the system
installed. Grab the source for xyz software and read the 
install.txt or readme.txt. In most situations it's as simple as

./configure
make
make install

and some have
make test

That's if the source was set up to work with autoconf.
This is true of most software around these days, as for
the ones that don't use it, just read the install directions.
Usually all that is required is a few tweaks to makefules
to get it to build on your system.

I can see the convenience of apt and yum and all that,
but I can see the detriment too. Knowing how to build
everything from source is very valuable, and that's how
to get guaranteed compatibility, since you're using your
own runtime libraries.

Some things require more work to install on slackware,
but it doesn't bother me. As they say, engineers will 
generally keep engineering _forever_ unless at some 
time you tell them to stop :) Imagine if we could do 
this and that and this ...

  -- Doug