[ILUG] Re: Distros (was slackware/Esat)

[wintermute]

chkconfig
Not very much to it really .... and its in Mandrake as well.


Grumble. Still it's simpler in Slackware, unimaginably so.

True, Slackware will leave you in the realm of little to no drivers
installed and up until recently having to do your own X config (if you were
going to use X)
which isn't a problem if you are used to installing drivers.

Thats what I really liked about Slackware when I first encountered it.
I had hardware experience from doing tech for gateway, had installed drivers
etc, all day, everyday, that was no problem.
Learning about runlevels, manpages, symlinks, filesystems, emacs, vim you
name it was something that the protective (read constrictive shell) of
Mandrake (which was my first distro) attempted to keep from you (by design)
and was when you looked under the hood, mindboggingly complex, to me back
then as a newbie.

Slackware was incredibly straight forward and even told you which scripts to
edit to do things in in other scripts.
For example in /etc/rc.d/rc.modules there was and still is (akaik) a wee
line that says (uncomment this to get your firewall working) and edit
/etc/rc.d/rc.local.

By contrast if I wanted to find that sort of thing out when I used Debian
back in 2.2_r2 I would have had to have found the script that started the
ipfwadm services... looked at where it derived it's configuration from say
in /etc/sysconfig/ipfwadm (or whatever) and then go and edit
/etc/sysconfig/ipfwadm, which may seem trivial to me now, but when I first
encountered Linux as a Gateway Tech support monkey seemed like one layer
more then was necessary, in contrast to the comparitive simplicty of
Slackware.

Mandrake was a great desktop, but I use WindowMaker or Fluxbox, so I don't
really need nor want a bells and whistles desktop. Again I think that each
distro serves a purpose, like IPCop for example is like e-smith, very very
easy to setup as a Gateway/Firewall/Mailrelay and is ideal for me if I have
to go out to a client site and under time pressure have to just 'make it
work'.

Slackware would be my preference, so I could really 'play' with the
system... maybe get Xfs running, iptables, install postfix from source etc,
but I'd settle for a bottled solution if it just did it's job.
Shrug that's what I really like about Slackware and Gentoo to some extent,
the ability to reconfigure the matrix as I see fit, if you catch my drift.

Bod