We’re midway through the Slackware leg of the Great Distro Review. I’ve had fun this week, playing in my new Slackware sandbox. That’s a tough part of this series of reviews - just when I start to get acclimated to a new distribution, it’s time to move on to the next. But that’s OK. Anything for the cause!

Despite the rough go with parts of the install, Slack has some real strengths. It’s always been known for stability and compliance to published Linux standards. In some areas, it’s begun to show both its age and the effects of having, in truth, a 2- or 3-person team responsible for all development. But there are some strengths for which Slackware has always been known. It’s my guess that, whatever form Slack may take in the future, these core strengths will remain.

One of those core strengths is in the server arena. Slack installs straight off of the CD with web, ftp and Samba servers ready to go. The server packages, including Apache and ProFTPD, are completely open source, highly configurable and, with some careful attention to detail, very secure. The general lack of overhead in a Slackware distribution, I think, makes these services much more stable than in any other distribution. I can almost guarantee that during your treks around the ‘net today, you’re going to cross more than just a handful of web servers running Apache in Slackware. Which point can only lead to a recommendation - if you’re considering setting up a Linux server, be it web, ftp or Samba, you’d be remiss to not give Slackware a thorough consideration.

The other tried and true strength of Slack lies in its complete configurability. Linux systems are, as a rule, highly configurable. In the face of increasingly transparent installations, Slack has maintained a fine balance between refining the install process and maintaining the complete configurability that’s the hallmark of Linux systems. Take a look in the /etc/rc.d directory of any Slackware system. There’s a hand-tweakable resource control (rc) file for every major element of the system. That’s not the case in most current distros, including my recent favorite RedHat. If you have the time and the inclination to better learn how your Linux system runs by hacking it your way, Slackware is definitely your distribution.

Tomorrow, we’ll close the book on Slackware and take a peek at next week. It’s going to be interesting and exciting, regardless of which distribution I throw your way. By way of a tease, most of Penguin Shell next week will be written 18 hours from home. Until tomorrow …

Tony
Steidler-Dennison