Vlogcanic

Some years ago, when Linux distributions were not counted by the hundred Slackware was there already –it’s the oldest and most venerable of all currently active distros. It’s focused in design simplicity and aims to be the most unixlike of all Linuxes.

It first appeared in 1993. The original distro developer, Patrick Volkerding, remains leading the way for Slackware as the Benevolent Lifelong Dictator. It was based upon Softlandig Linux System (SLS), a very popular distro in its day, but it soon replaced it as the dominant distro. There’s been 24 Slackware releases ever since, with Slackware 12.0 being the latest.

Features.

The focus on design simplicity found in Slackware has nothing to do with a user’s simplicity of use but with the software’s efficiency. So this is not a distro for newbies but rather for serious amateurs and experts. It allows for a hight degree of customization and because of its high degree of efficiency even new Slackware releases can run on very old hardware.

Slackware, as Gentoo, can be a great learning experience about the way Linux works and how to customize it, tweak it, and understand it. It can also be a nightmare, depending on the attitude, spare time, wish to learn and experience with which you face it.

The package system is based on tarballs pre packed to have their contents fall in all the right places when extracted from the root directory in the file system. There is no package manager to check the dependencies for you, as in Red Hat or Debian based systems –that’s suppossed to be your job.

Slackware as a base for other distros.

Whatever wants Slackware may have in the usability department (which is not one of the project’s goals, anyway) it makes up for in efficiency and stability so it’s become a popular starting point to develop other distributions. Some examples.

• Absolute Linux. Is Slackware modified to automatically instal a GUI (KDE) and desktop software. Quite usable and very fit to resucitate your older computers.
• SLAX. A LiveCD based on Slackware meant to be used as a portable desktop.
• NimbleX. A mini distro also aimed to desktop users.
• SuSE. Although it is in Novell’s hand’s nowadays and has been its own distro for years, this very succesful Linux got started as Slackware translated into German.

While all of the above might scare you off if you are just getting started with Linux, think twice. Whenever you summon up a bit of experience and curiosity, getting a hold of a Slackware release and making it work for you will make your life easier as a Linux user for years to come, as all those how-to’s and misterious command line movements will become transparent to you.

The root or superuser.

All Unix varieties are very versatile operating systems and within each of them the most powerful user is the administrator (known as the root or superuser). Root is the guy who can use the system with the most freedom and also the guy who can really screw things up when doing something wrong, and since he is enabled to erase accounts, filesystems and wreak any and every kind of havoc –including killing the system.

That’s why the root account can sometimes be demmed too powerful/dangerous for every day use, something like driving a Mercedes to go three blocks down the street to get a can of soda. So it’s no surprise that some distros, specially those not aimed to expert users deactivate the root account by default –Ubuntu and Freespire are two such examples.

The safe thing to do in any distro is to get everyday access as a normal user and become the root only when dealing with a task that really needs administrative privileges. You don’t need to log in as root for that: as long as you have the root’s password, you can run any administrative task using the sudo command.

A simple example: creating a new user with sudo.

You need to do something that needs root privileges, say, create the new user joe and you logged in from you every day not-ultra-powerful account. What you do is to call the task through the sudo command:

sudo adduser pepito [ENTER]

then the system will ask for the root’s password, and that’s it, joe is added with the system’s default profile for new users.

Starting a new shell session as a superuser.

Sudo turns a bit irritating when you need more than a couple of lines as super user. Still, you don’t need to restart your session, you can just start a new shell session as a superuser and knock yourself up. Just type:

sudo /bin/bash

Not always optional.

Even if you are used to log in as root all the time, knowing the sudo trick is still useful because not all distros will allow you to log in as root.

Ubuntu, which has become exceedingly popular, has no root user activated by default so all the interesting stuff has to be done through the sudo command. Freespire is in a similar situation and, generally speaking, most LiveCDs put the root user in the background.