I just installed slack 9 yesterday, and I must say that I am EXTREMELY disappointed. It doesn''t include a lot of programs that once came standard, and there are dozens of libs that should be in it, but aren''t. Needless to say, I''m going to switch for good, I think, either that or just stick with Slack 8.1. I''m leaning towards either Debian or Gentoo, but I''m not sure which one to go with just yet. Anyway, just thought I''d let you know that for the first time ever, Slackware now sucks.

I''m still waiting for the isos to come out. I''ll probably give it a try anyway, just to see how it compares with 8.1. If it is as bad as you say, then i go back to 8.1.

CmndrM, I can recommend Gentoo! It has helped me understand linux much more than I had previously, and therefore, made me a better user! Its best feature is also its worst feature. The portage system, although an excellent tool, takes a long time, while your applications compile. However, if you can live with that, you get a fantastic OS and you can run it on your terms, and free from RPM hell! I just wish I had a faster machine so that I could compile faster

Stuart

Don''t make a decision without trying out debian.

Oh, and also realize that debian''s stable branch doesn''t have the newest software. It bugged me at first, until I decided to just install it and see how it is. I still have it :-) (reminds me of trying to help some poor guy on #debian install gaim. I asked him why he wanted the newest version and his response was "i dunno...")

doohh, and I just burned the iso for slack9

Man, I wish they''d hurry up with Gentoo 1.4 final. I''ve never tried Debian so I may give that a swing too, but like C-Junkie said, the older software was a big turn off for me. From what I understand, they''re just now officially switching over to GCC 3.2. Does the Debian have Xfree86 4.3 support in any of its incarnations?

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Original post by Dauntless
From what I understand, they''re just now officially switching over to GCC 3.2.

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They''ve been doing that for a long time now. There are 10,000+ packages to check for bugs under the new compiler .

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Original post by Dauntless
Does the Debian have Xfree86 4.3 support in any of its incarnations?

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No, unstable still uses 4.2. There is at least one 4.3 repository out there though (see apt-get.org for more information). It will probably be declared good enough for unstable within a couple months.

I can recommend FreeBSD 4.6, excellent operating system.

Join the World Wide Revolution:

I''ve learned that when the slackware distributions comes out, many important programs that it includes are out of date, XFree for example. The last distribution I''ve installed was 7, and I manually update it from there.

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Original post by Dauntless
Man, I wish they''d hurry up with Gentoo 1.4 final.

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I would say that even the current RC is totally usable if you stick to the stable ebuilds. I''m running a Gentoo system that started off with 1.4 RC1 and have not had any severe problems with it yet.

I had a problem with Gentoo 1.4 rc1 and rc2 (haven''t tried rc3 yet though). For some strange reason, gentoo 1.4 didn''t recognize my NIC properly. When I do a lsmod of all the modules, it turns out that gentoo is seeing my NIC card as a natsemi module. Unfortunately, its not...it''s a Speedstream FA311 NIC card that uses a different module. I have a floppy with the correct dirver...but I''m not exactly sure how or where to put the driver so that I can do a manual modprobe and insmod of it.

The most bizarre thing though is that gentoo 1.2 worked with my NIC card, and Mandrake 8.2 also worked with this....despite using natsemi as the module for this NIC card as well.

Gentoo 1.4 also had a problem with a multi-homed computer, as it kept giving me spurrious interrupts while trying to install (I can''t remember the exact INT that got the interrupts though...though 28H is vaguely what I remember).