GeekTimeLinux

A Geek is a Geek is a Geek! There, I’ve said it and I feel somewhat better. I have been a Linux geek for sometime and have loved the journey into a world I had never known. Going to a place where I could modify programs, write my own, work with command line or icons. It has been a major learning experience. For that I am known in the family as a “GEEK”!

I am continuing with my Linux learning while getting involved with another project. This week, I was given two Mac G3s (beige case..I think…color blind you know) and a Power PC which my Google search tells me is a Mac clone.

I have fired up, or attempted, all three. One G3 and the Power PC both come up with no problem, the third appears to have a bad video board. OK, so they fire up, do they work? Well, the one G3 appears to have some programs on it and I went to the library today to see what I could find on the unit. I also have a copy of UBUNTU PPC burning as I write this.

The Power PC has beautiful graphics, boots very quickly and appears to have everything I could want on it with one caveat…it is password protected. Everything looks good at boot, but when I attempt to access anything…I am requested to enter a password. I have tried several I have been told are common, but to no avail. I am thinking about reloading the Mac OS on this machine and then going from there with upgrades or whatever

As crazy as this sounds, I wanted a G3 for the sole purpose of installing Yellow Dot Linux. I have heard many good things about the distro, but have never had the hardware to run the system. In researching, I find that Fedora Core is also a great distro for PPC use as is Suse and the list goes on.

I am going to document my progress (or lack thereof) and will be posting about in the coming weeks or possibly months.

I don’t want anyone to think that this is my only project. I will continue to work with new distros and do all the things we do with Geektime, but this is a new challenge and at my age, I need a new challenge everyday. It’s why I get out of bed every day!

While I might be the last Linux user on the planet to do it, I have finally installed SLACKWARE. I have had a long dread of installing this distro because of all the bad stories I have heard. Let me assure you, some of them are true!

SLACKWARE is the oldest of commercial distributions of Linux, even predating version 1.0 of the Linux kernel. It is aimed at being the most Unix-like distribution, thus many people view it as a dinosaur, while others trumpet its speed and stability.

The install script hasn’t changed much during the past decade. Its package management system is not as slick as APT or RPM, however it is simple without the dependency problems that affect other distros at times.

For openers, the partitioning of the hard drive is left entirely to you. You are given a shell script and a note to run setup to continue once the disk is partitioned. Both fdisk and cfdisk are included. Cfdisk being the easiest for yours truly so I took the easy way out, in as much as I was using the whole hard drive and removing a Linux distribution. I used cfdisk and basically took two partitions and reformatted for SLACKWARE. I must add an aside…when you have become comfortable with the new distros (Fedora, Debian, SUSE, etc) that automatically format the hard drive and do set up, this can be a real head scratcher!

Once I logged in, typed SETUP, things were relatively straightforward. You are given several options, I selected KEYMAP. Once there, the swap partition was detected and initialized and I set up the root partition. Since I opted to use only two partitions, part of the sweaty palm syndrome ended. I should mention that you can include other partitions, however I opted for only two.

SLACKWARE uses the 2.4.29 kernel, however for those wanting the latest, 2.6.x is fully supported in version 10.1. When running 2.6.x, the system supports UDEV. This is a system for creating devices in /dev dynamically, greatly reducing device clutter and making it easy to see what devices are actually present in the system.

Well, back to the install…I realized early on that making a boot disk is important and with SLACKWARE, it remains true. SLACKWARE uses the LILO bootloader and sets it up for you.

One of the important choices is whether you want to install LILO into the root partition or into the hard drive’s Master Boot Record. The latter option will overwrite any existing bootloader you have. If the only other OS you have on the computer is Windows, this is ok, because it adds a Windows option to LILO’s menu.

Just when you think you’re there, it’s time to configure; mouse, network and clock. All configurations are straight foward.

When I booted into SLACKWARE for the first time, I reached a text log in. Not sure of what the next step was and having only entered a root password during the install, I typed ROOT and when prompted, typed the password. This took me to another text prompt where I typed STARTX. I must have done it right as I was suddenly greeted with a graphical background and icons!!! While there are choices, KDE, GNOME, Xfce and more, my selection was KDE due to my familiarity with this windows manager.

Simple configuration was exactly that. I must admit that I did spend a lot more time setting up key functions with this distro than most I work with on a daily basis.

While I would hate to see someone install and configure SLACKWARE as their first Linux experience, I do see why so many users love the distro. It’s quick, easy to use (once configured) and if you are really wanting to learn what happens under the hood of a Unix/Linux distro, this might just be the system.

Do I still have it on a machine? YES. Am I still learning? YES.
Will I continue to learn? YES.

If you have an afternoon or better a day, where you feel like working through a full text based install, with a very stable system, give it SLACKWARE a try.