I finally installed Slackware 8.1

Aaron_Adams · 08-26-2002, 10:41 PM

Due to wanting /home on it's own partition I decided to install Slackware 8.1. 8.0 was more then sufficient ( since with the updates it was analogous to 8.1 anyway ).

A few noticeable changes are :

The choice for more then one kernel. Although as some people have said it's not overly informative on what each one does, it does mention that if you don't know what each one is don't select it. (This comes to one of my suggestions later on though).

A new cron setup. It's similar to other distributions like RH now, with the /etc/cron.* dirs. At first I wasn't overly fond of this, but after playing with it a little, it does make some things easier. It uses the /bin/run-parts binary written by patrick to run the scripts in the cron.* dirs.

I installed the logrotate tool on install just to see how it was implemented and I don't mind it either. It was previously not offered afaik. It has a good method of keeping things simple and organized. I'll be impementing my own remote logging system soon anyway though, so the logrotate fun on this machine will be short lived.

Slackware is no longer including the /opt directories. This has no effect on me, so I don't mind in the slightest. It's nice to have less directories in / anyway.
What were these even used for? The KDE and Gnome libs? Personally I'd prefer them in /usr/local/lib anyway.

A small change I noticed is there is no longer a /cdrom dir. There are three default directories under /mnt. /cdrom, /fd0, and /hd . This is much more convenient, as I normally created a /cdrom and /fd0 directory immediately anyway.

I didn't install any gui libraries or KDE / Gnome off the CD, so I can't comment on the versions they include. If they included Fluxbox on the cd... maybe.

Anyway that's about it for noticeable differences that i've come across so far.

My only suggestion to Slackware would be that they include a '?' option in their installation process that parallels the usage of the menuconfig '?' for kernel compilation. It wouldn't be overly difficult to implement I would think, and it would be nice to be able to know what binaries / libraries a package is going to install before installing it. As some names can be somewhat deceptive. The only time a small description comes up is when it's installing, and on most machines that goes by far to quickly to read anyway.