Slow Weekend

I hope your weekend was good. Mine was slow and relaxing. After a lighter week last week, I actually got to catch up on some sleep this weekend. About the most taxing thing I did was to string the Christmas lights along the front of our house. Having spent 13 of my younger years in retail, I’ve been somewhat spoiled for Christmas. It always meant 70-hour weeks and customers in a frantic rush for just the right present. 70-hour weeks? I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same. Maybe the real problem was that I never had a company Christmas song. There you go. Now, I’m in the mood!

I mentioned on Friday that I hoped you’d flood me with mail so I had lots of fodder for another DIY Friday. Well, let me warn you - be careful what you ask for. Especially when you make that kind of statement in a newsletter that contains a typo. Yes, I have a quick correction to make. In the mkdir command in Friday’s GnomeTWEAK, I missed the dot in the command to make a downloads directory. The command read “mkdir /downloads” when it should have read “mkdir ./downloads”. The lack of that little dot would create a downloads subdirectory in the root folder rather than in /home/tony. The little dot, by the way, means “current directory” - or “send the goof an email that forgot to put it in!” Seriously, your corrections are appreciated and welcome. Thanks.

We have a little sub-series going on this week that should help you better understand some of the deeper inner workings of Linux. We’re looking at the five fundamental services that load on boot in Linux. Sean over at CramSession.com sent me a link to an article that delves more deeply into how init picks up orphaned processes. This is a good example of the fine newsletter Sean sends out weekly. It’s a bit further along than a newbie-focused newsletter, but always presents the topic of the week in an interesting and enlightening fashion. I read it every week. If you’re looking to take your knowledge to the next level, you really should surf over to CramSession and subscribe to Linux News.

Now, on to the task at hand. This week, we’re continuing The Great Distro Review. No stops, no stutters. Slackware is this week’s distro, and it’s up and running on my testing Frankenbox. Let me give you a little background today before we dive in with both feet.

Slackware is, in fact, the first commercial distribution of Linux. First available in April, 1993, Slack was intended as an improvement on the SoftLanding System (SLS), a buggy distro-like package for installing Linux. In fact, at the time Slackware was first released, it appeard that SLS’s developers had all but abandoned the project. Patrick Volkerding modfied several of the install scripts, added some newly-available packages, and released the distribution as Slackware. It quickly became the most popular Linux distribution of the time.

Slack complies fully with the published Linux standards, including the Linux Filesystem Standard. It has always been intended to be the most Unix-like distribution, and, for the most part, has succeeded. It also carries small vestiges of BSD, another Unix-like system.

As I’ve already noted, Slack is running quite smoothly on my box at home. It wasn’t an easy walk to get there. But, I’ll tell you more about that as the week progresses. I’ll give you a clue, though - I *do* like this distribution, but probably not for the reasons you’d think. Stay tuned.

Tony
Steidler-Dennison