A Look at Slackware Linux 10.2

A Look at Slackware Linux 10.2

Slackware Linux 10.2 was released on 14 September 2005. Looking through the release notes, it is clear that Slackware 10.2 is not particularly heavy on exciting new features, which, in itself, can perhaps be considered the most obvious selling point of this distribution. In fact, with Slackware, it often seems that Patrick Volkerding tries hard to avoid adding anything that might disturb the peace and add an element of unpredictability, together with potential bugs. With the Native POSIX Thread Library (NPTL), Slackware took the most conservative approach among the Linux distributions, requiring three years to introduce NPTL into the product. NPTL, besides the newly added support for SATA controllers and other hardware, is probably the biggest new feature of Slackware 10.2.

The above paragraph summarizes why Slackware, which had as much as 90% market share of all Linux installations in the mid-nineties, has slowly and painfully become a niche distribution, catering mostly to die-hard Linux geeks. A good case in point is the kernel in Slackware 10.2. Although the default kernel is version 2.4.31, version 2.6.13 is also provided in thetesting directory for the more adventurous users. This kernel can be selected during installation. Once you do that, however, the system will boot into the new kernel without loading any kernel modules, disregarding any hardware detection that might have taken place during the installation. Users are then left to their own devices (no pun intended) to set up and load any kernel modules they might require.

The situation is somewhat better if the user chooses one of the standard binary kernels - either the bare one, or one of the specially prepared kernels with support for certain less common hardware. This type of installation will result in a functional system, with kernel modules for sound cards, USB devices, and network cards loaded and working properly. But the installer does nothing to set up the graphical part of the system; although it provides a functional xorg.conf file with a VESA driver and a decent screen resolution and color depth, it does not extract information from the graphics card, let alone create a proper configuration file with the parameters supported by the card. Configuring X, together with adding non-root users, is a manual task left entirely to the person performing the installation.

Virtually all major distributions available today do an excellent job setting up not only graphics cards and monitors - even more exotic devices, such as scanners, wireless cards or digital cameras, can often be detected and configured without any user intervention. Of course, any such interference with the kernel might introduce bugs and even serious instability, and this is something that Slackware is trying to avoid at all costs. As such, there is little wonder that Slackware is considered to be one of the most stable and bug-free distributions - without taking any risks and without introducing even remotely troublesome code into the product, Slackware is indeed rock solid. And if a user decides to load a kernel module and things go wrong, then it's the user's problem, not Slackware's.

The above atbreastude means that Slackware is a great product for deployment on servers, but much less exciting as an operating system on workstations - at least until the distribution is painfully set up to support all the peripherals...