Review: Slackware 13.1

KDE Main Screen

I never envisioned myself trying out any of the more advanced distributions like Slackware, Arch, or Gentoo, but having tried derivatives like GNU/Linux Utopia, Chakra, and Sabayon, I think I'm ready to try Slackware and Arch, and I am writing about the former today. Hopefully, the latter can also happen soon. (I'm still not going to try Gentoo.)
Note: this review will be heavy on images, so don't be surprised if the page takes a little time to load.

LILO

Slackware is the oldest surviving Linux distribution, and it brings with it, alongside its famous rock-solid stability, a couple of quirks and anachronisms. For example, it is one of the few distributions that provides no form of dependency management; users need to install all dependent packages manually. Another example is how its ncurses-based installation interface dates back from the 1990s/early 2000s. Furthermore, it still uses the old Linux Loader (LILO) instead of GRUB; LILO is quite limited in terms of configuration and the number of operating systems and types of file systems it can handle, and making it play well with other non-Linux-based OSs (like Microsoft Windows) as far as I know is still a herculean task. Finally, unlike most distributions, Slackware provides no official route to installing GNOME, though it provides a plethora of other WM options alternative to KDE and Xfce.
With all these things in mind, follow the jump to see how my experience with the grandfather of distributions (well, not quite) turned out. I tested this in a VirtualBox environment with 1 GB of RAM and an available 10 GB virtual hard drive.

Ncurses Installer

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