We talk of the good, bad and the ugly and with the distro wars on the usenet getting fiercer with every new distro, each offering seeks to creates its own niche and gain its own fifteen minutes of fame. "Simplicity is divine"; and these words dont hold much truer for any distro other than Slackware. I have sometimes sat down to try and figure out what gives Slack, its dedicated fan following or what makes Patrick Volkerding a demi-god despite the fact that there is no state of the art package mangement system like RPM or DEB....no hint of visual coherence across desktop environments...no fancy front-ends for administration...no bloated office suites to play with. And all these questions can be answered in one word ---"Simplicity". Perhaps that is the single most important factor that makes people care and in turn make Slackware 9, one of the standout distros of early 2003.

Slackware has never even bothered to revamp their installation interface, despite the fact that Mandrake, RedHat and SuSe have upped the ante in this area of end user experience. All said and done, Slackware does remain the easiest distro to install, with the minimum of fuss and the least questions asked. Slackware still has an ncurses based installation interface and perhaps lends the most flexibility during installation as compared to other distros. All sections of the installation program can be reached from a single menu. It was great to see the default filesystem being ReiserFS. That is what I selected and my root and /usr partitions were formatted in a jiffy. Slackware also supports XFS, JFS and ext3. The options for the same were also available. Slackware scores one over Mandrake and Debian in the installation part as it allows an "Everything" install.

Configuring the network was a breeze, and the installer had my NIC configured in a matter of seconds. Other configurations were the standard, mouse type, timezone, root password stuff and part of the routine entries that Linux users are habituated to. The cool part was the bootloader configuration though. I could actually set the tiniest parameters in the bootloader file right from the Slackware installation. Whats more, it actually allowed me to check the /etc/lilo.conf file, before commiting it. What sucks though, is LILO itself. GRUB is a far more superior bootloader, what with support for MD5 encryption and extra eye-candy effects.

Once I rebooted my laptop, I was in for a more than pleasant surprise. With sendmail running on startup, The system took just 20 seconds to boot up!! I removed sendmail from startup and rebooted to see the effect. The system took 16 seconds to get back online again!! Hardware detection was fantastic and my USB mouse and USB printer worked without a hiccup.

Once Slackware was up, work was a pleasure. DRI worked quite well, though I had to edit the /etc/XF86Config file to get my kind of settings in place. Quake3 ran at a decent pace on my laptop, which has an i845 integrated graphics chip onboard. Then again, I could play games only as root, with a strange, cryptic error cropping up while as an unprivileged user.

Slackware has never been a distro to package everything under the sun for its users, but what it does provide is quite good to work with. Kernel 2.4.20, Gcc 3.2.2, GLibc 2.3.1,XFree86 4.3.0, KDE 3.1, Gnome 2.2, Cups 1.1.18, Mozilla 1.3 ,Netscape 7.03....the list is endless. It does lack a few applications that I use on a regular basis viz OpenOffice, Glade, Quanta Plus, Evolution etc; but then again I realised that I could make do without them, for a while, with the kind of performance Slackware gives me. Slackware 9 unlike its predecessors is optimized for i686 and compiled with support for i386 systems ie CFLAGS = "-O2 -march=i386 -mcpu=i686"

Desktop performance on Slackware 9 is superb. KDE 3.1 and Gnome 2.2 shot up within the batting of an eyelid on my notebook. Slackware lacks font anti-aliasing, and with the kind of love affair I've had with Mandrake Galaxy, recently, I somehow find this a little difficult to bear with. But then with the Mosfet Liquid theme engine installed, KDE 3.1 looked awesome on Slack.

Network performance on Slack is tremendous and a preliminary benchmark with dbench and smbtorture gave creditable results for my 10MBit card.

Package Management on Slackware does need a facelift, especially because it doesnt bother about associated dependencies. However pkgtool provides a great interface to install packages, though not in the same league as Mandrakesoft's RPMDrake or SuSe's YaSt2. TGZ packages are smaller ins size too, which would explain how a 2 GB install is effected from a single Slackware install CD. Slackware has a unique set of startup scripts and needs getting used to, if you have been using RH/Mandrake recently. System Administration on Slack is pretty much a "complete control" job, with no unnecessary interfaces to complete the job. Rarely would a mainstream distro give more control, to the end user, than Slackware. As I iterated earlier, Slackware's power is in its simplicity and that is where it just rocks.

All in all, I have had an relatively pleasant experience with Slackware 9 and I find it, fast, rock solid, and stable. There have been newbies who have often asked me how to optimize their Linux boxes. I would just tell them now, to go install Slackware 9. Why ? Because "Simplicity is divine" !!