Time with Slackware.

Since my last post regarding Slackware and Debian, I find my self booting into Slackware Current a lot more then Debian Sid. I had some problem with playing a particular video format in Debian, which I really didn't want to deal with at the time but Slackware handled fine. Other then that small issue, I can't really tell you why. I'm just drawn to Slackware for some reason and I'm really liking it.

Keeping the Current branch up to date was pain, until I discover slackpkg. Now it's a snap. Mind it's not as quick as apt in Debian (not by a long shot) but it's really no problem. I update slackpkg, then initiate the upgrade, do something else, come back to slackpkg and accept the changes and let it run. No big deal.

I guess now that my Slackware system is set up (finally!) everything just works and it works great and I swear it feels so much snappier, even more so then Debian on the same machine. Now some will call me crazy, but running KDE4.x on Slackware seems on par with Crunchbang Linux (using openbox) on another partition. Remember, this is an Intel Centrino 1.4 Ghz laptop with 768 mb of RAM.

So, am I a converted Slacker? Well, it depends. On my main system I run Kubuntu and I tend to upgrade with every six month release. There is no way in hell that I'm going to change out my Slackware that often, because it takes me 3 months to get everything set up and configured right. I'm not touching this Slack install for sometime, I worked to hard on it. Now that being said, I'm running Slackware current, so if I understand things right, if I keep it up to date, I should be running the lastest release anyway. Also, Slackware doesn't release every 6 months. Nevertheless, it comes down to time. How much time do I want to spent setting something up and how often will I need or want to upgrade the machine? My time is precious, so most of the time I'm going to use Debian or a Ubuntu variant, but I can definitely see when it would be beneficial to use Slackware.

This senario puts me in a certain mind set. I'm kind of getting bored with Debian now and I can see myself trying another distro in it's place and if I don't like the ways things are, I can easily put Debian back on lickety split, no harm done. As I mentioned earlier, I'm not touching my Slackware partition. So, as far as this laptop goes Slackware is staying, and for Debian.... well let's see what peaks my interest on Distrowatch.

Is Slackware worth it?

Last night I installed rtorrent on Slackware current on my Pentium M 1.4 Ghz laptop and this is how it went.

rtorrent is not a main Slackware package, so I went in search of a SlackBuild. I easily found the rtorrent SlackBuild and downloaded it and read the README file. It was dependant upon libtorrent ... no problem there was a SlackBuild for that too. libtorrent was dependant upon libsigc++ ... no problem, Slackbuild had it available. So far, no big deal. libsigc++ installed with no problem. I was not so lucky with libtorrent.

libtorrent had problems with the build. After googling, I found it needed a patch. Since I have no clue as how to apply a patch, I had to google how to apply a patch to the source code. After a few attempts, I finally got it.
I then turned my attention to rtorrent and began the build process... fail! After googling some more, I discovered it too needed a patch. Of course, I was now a patch applying guru and was good to go on my first attempt.
I then compiled and waited and waited as the gcc compiling "screen saver" scrolled pass my terminal. Over an hour later, I had rtorrent installed. Awesome!

I then re-booted and went into my Debian Sid partition on the same machine and did:

aptitude update
aptitude install rtorrent

In just over a minute I had rtorrent installed.

So, is Slackware worth it?

rtorrent is a low resource ncurses bittorrent client. Is my performance on Slackware for this applications really going to be that much better then on Debian? I doubt it. My time is precious. Granted I did learn how to apply a patch, but if I stick with Debian, I will probably never have to apply patches.

As I've previously stated, I like Slackware, but I'm nearly a week into installing it on my laptop and I'm still configuring it. I tried to install wicd and thought everything went well, but I can't get it going. I still need to build the lastest openoffice.org SlackBuild and can't even begin to imagine how long that will take to compile. While on the other hand, I had Debian configured in 2-3 hours. With all this being said, I really like Slackware but I can't seem to really adequately explain why.

So maybe you can help me come to terms with my fasination with this distro. Is Slackware worth it and why? Why do you like Slackware?

Slackware Current vs. Debian Sid

I have an older laptop which I try to be very respectful of it's limited resources. Since I have alot of respect for both Debian and Slackware, I wanted to see which would provide me with the best results on this laptop. I like to have fairly up to date packages, so I installed Slackware 12.2 and upgraded to current. I also installed Debian Lenny and upgraded to Sid. Both are running on the same machine. I disabled gdm login on Debian so it would boot to a command line prompt. Each were installed with default settings and respective upgrades. I also installed the latest KDE 4 packages in each branch and loaded the same 3 desktop widgets.

Here's the set up.

Laptop
Intel Pentuim M 1.4 Ghz
768 mb RAM
Intel 855 Video card (shared 8 mb RAM)
Asus Motherboard

Results
Boot time grub to login
Slackware 49 Sec
Debian 36 Sec

RAM used at login (no X)
Slackware 161 MB
Debian 77 MB

Time startx to full KDE 4
Slackware 25 Sec
Debian 35 Sec

RAM used at full KDE 4
Slackware 425 MB
Debian 729 MB

If course I'm going to tweak things from the default install and turn off services that I don't use. One final note, I did notice that Debian seems to run pretty hot on this laptop. Maybe I can fix that with some tweaking.

Some Fun Links

I just found some great websites, tutorials and applications while randomly browsing around. These are definitely random links. I hope you enjoy them as much I have.

A debian package a day site - They are currently looking for contributors to write articles and editors
http://debaday.debian.net/

How to install Windows Media Player 9 and 10 on Linux using wine - very detailed with screenshots.
http://wine-review.blogspot.com/2007/09/windows-media-player-9-10-on-linux-with.html

irssi themes - Never played around with irssi themes, it's quite fun and easy to set up. BTW irssi is a irc chat client. Just download the .theme file and place it in your ~/.irssi directory then start irssi. Once in irssi, type '/set theme theme_name.theme' and that's it. This site has tons.
http://www.irssi.org/themes


Create a video of your desktop activity. This isn't in the Ubuntu repos so you will need to install manually.
http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=41938

Finally, strigi. Unlike most desktop search tools, this one uses very little resources. In Ubuntu, 'sudo apt-get install strigi-applet' to install.
http://strigi.sourceforge.net/

Enjoy!