[ILUG] Re: slackware (was: Esat ADSL)

[John P. Looney]

On Mon, Dec 16, 2002 at 03:28:15PM -0000, Brian O'Donoghue mentioned:
> In fairness I think there is a niche for distributions like Slackware
> running on old hardware doing something useful, where X would simply be
> bloat and installing a distribution like Red hat would require
> extraneous knowledge of Red Hat in terms of cutting it down and making
> it do it's job without some of it's X bells and whistles.

 Point taken. 

 Now, tell me why debian wouldn't do the same job. I've a raq2 here, a
little 200Mhz mips box with a 4GB drive and 16Mb RAM. X would certainly be
overkill, considering it doesn't have a graphics card. The standard debian
install of 100 odd packages fitted nicely into 130MB of that machines disk. 

 You can also just not install X and the like on redhat. In antefacto, we
got a redhat install down to 40MB, with some messing (OK, a lot of
messing, and we could have been saved a lot of time, had someone
documented the --without-docs option to RPM).

> One place I do think the argument of a truly minimalist distro like
> Slackware bears out, is in the learning about *nix and the utils that come
> with it.
> For example if I installed Red Hat on the first router I had ever set up and
> had simply run some sort of UI (other then vim) to define a firewalling
> rule, I might never have actually build a script or learned the syntax of
> iptables, which may seem unimportant, but, if and when I go out to a client
> site and I run into a problem, if my only exposure to iptables or ipchains
> has been lemmit in Red Hat and I have to (for example) trawl through the
> ipchains config script in an IPCop installation it would probably be fair it
> say it would be better I 'had' to learn how to do it by hand in Slack then
> do it as if by magic by a more user-friendly distros interface.
> anyway.

 I maintain that just not using those tools will give you as much
expertise as not having them. If you install RedHat, no one will force you
to use the GUI tools. 

 In fact, for setups like ISDN, you really need the GUI tools, before you
get anything working, and afterwards, you can pull it apart.

 Flaggelating your feet with barbed wire, just in case you have to walk
bare foot over rough ground is not a sane position.

John