Slackware 12.1

I kinda neglected to mention on here that I’ve been using Slackware 12.1 recently. Actually…since it was released. At first my intention was to install it on a separate partition from Archlinux and dual boot; I even considered leaving one of them as a “free” distro and the other with “non-free” packages installed but the way it worked out is that I couldn’t be bothered to re-configure LILO and I haven’t looked back in over four weeks! (It’s not that I had any problem at all with Archlinux; in fact I found it one of the best Linux distributions that I’ve used.)

I first stopped using Slackware shortly after the release of version 11.0 because I was a tad wound up by the default kernel option, which in turn resulted in there being no HAL available without considerable messing about. I didn’t turn completely away from Slackware at this point though, my new love became Zenwalk. Zenwalk, which was named mini-slack in previous versions, is basically a cut-down version of Slackware that has been optimised for i686 processors. It featured a custom-written auto-mount tool for handling devices and there was also a package management tool which handled dependencies as well (I’m not sure which program it was based on, but didn’t really care either, it worked really well and was capable of a full system-upgrade when a new version came out).
I did use Slackware 11.0 for a while on my laptop because at the time it was the only distro I could force to make my sound card work. The sound card in my laptop has a Realtek ALC883 chipset that was only supported in versions of alsa later than 1.0.13.

I think I went a bit off-topic there… The laptop sound card story is actually quite a long one…

I was really curious about trying out Slackware 12.1 after listening to a podcast from Linux Reality in which Chess talks for half an hour about how much he likes Slackware… as you can tell, I’m not at all influenced by the media… …it’s episode 99 if you’re interested… Well it wasn’t just the fact that he likes it that swayed me, more specifically I was intrigued by the idea of Slackbuilds. Slackbuilds are something that I hadn’t heard of in the days of Slack 9/10 and it seemed like a great system for building packages from source. For more info read about it all on the Slackbuilds.org (clicky) website. I have used this system to build a lot of packages and it’s never failed.

Anyway… gonna wrap this up now… I don’t remember where I was going with this post.

Slackware rocks! XD …and it’s really fast…