[ILUG] Slax vs Fedora

[Timothy Murphy]

I just bought this really nice ThinkPad T20 running Slax,
which I also like,
and I'm wondering whether to go over to Fedora or not.

The one thing I miss from Fedora is yum.
Slax is really aimed at the Live-CD project,
and use on the hard disk seems to be something of an afterthought.
The standard method of installing "modules", as Slax calls packages,
seems to be to download the .mo file, and run mo2dir.
For some reason this script only works for me occasionally.
It worked for me just now:

tim at slax:~/Desktop$ sudo mo2dir Pan_newsreader_0_14_2_91.mo /

But usually it comes up with an error that it cannot mount /dev/loop0 .

Sadly, it doesn't run:

tim at slax:~$ pan
pan: error while loading shared libraries: libgnet-2.0.so.0: cannot open 	shared object file: No such file or directory

The alternative seems to be to download Slackware *.tgz files,
but the trouble with that is that - at least with KDE applications -
they always seem to want newer libraries,
and if there is an analogue of "yum update" I don't know it.

I was surprised to find that google toolbar would not install;
it said under the Linux option that one had to be running RedHat or Fedora.

I'm actually a Fedora devotee, but Slax seems to be running really well,
and so much faster than Fedora on my Sony Picturebook.
I'm pretty sure the Queen of England runs Fedora.

The laptop also came with vmware,
and I continue to be amazed how well that the vmware network runs.
It's a bit like finding a unicyle is easy to ride.

To change or not to change OS, that is the question.


-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland