In the beginning...

There was Red Hat. I used it. I customized it. I followed it through thick and thin. I even stayed with it when it became Fedora. Eventually though, it became too much. Too big, too clunky, too much of a mess.

See, I like to tinker. I like to mess with stuff. I like to open things up and figure out why it works or how I can make it work better for me. And unfortunately, at that time, most of what I found that I wanted didn't have an RPM.

So, I'd end up compiling. Unfortunately, standard Linux sources almost never compiled unless they were very basic. Most of the packages I tried ended up needing weird directory structures. Some of them worked, but most of them didn't. Or they needed dependencies that weren't available, either because the official RedHat/Fedora package hadn't been released yet, or because they themselves wouldn't compile right either.

Finally, frustrated at the whole mess, I looked around. I can't remember exactly how I found Slackware, but it was right around the time Gentoo was really breaking out on the Linux scene. I tried it. It was a bit daunting at first. I even decided to go whole hog with the "minimalist" bit, and instead of using Gnome (which yes, was still supported), or KDE, I went with Fluxbox.

And bam! I tweaked. I compiled. I changed stuff. But most importantly, I learned. Now, I'm certainly no expert. Not even close. If you ask me the difference between Ext3 and Ext4, I'll tell you that one of them shows up on the Slackware 12.2 install and one of them doesn't. I can't tell you the command to mount a Windows share without looking it up first. I can't even figure out to get KDE to allow regular users the option to shutdown directly from the GUI.

Anyway. So I decided that instead of hording all this knowledge, I'd give it up to the intarwebs. If I can answer your question here, great. If not, sorry, Google is your friend. I'll also be adding details about little projects with my laptop, some of it will be directly related to Slackware and others will just be tech related.

Enjoy.