On February 7 Slackware released its 10.1 version of its famous linux distribution. With the death of one of my harddrives the other night and the resulting loss of 10.0, I finally found the time to give it a try.

I found this version of Slackware to be pretty much what I expected in the fundamental areas. It was as usual stable, reliable, and fully functional. The installer was a familiar face and worked flawlessly and even sets up some of the tedious little configurations for the user such as network, root password, and timezone.

Upon boot we find a 2.4.29 vanilla kernel and kde 3.3.2. Slackware has never been accused of being cutting edge instead opting for stability and usability. It did employ udev but I found no hardware issues other than it detecting my bios-disabled on-board sound before my sbl!. Little edit of this file and that was resolved.

Which leads to one of the reasons I've always loved Slack, the ease of configuration. Hotplug raises the stakes just a tad, but for the most part one sets up their hardware in one file, the /etc/rc.d/rc.modules file. Hotplug now detects most everything and one can put things not wanted, like the snd-via82xx, in the blacklist. So, a quick reboot to check the hardware was no disappointment. All functionality was found.

KDE felt like a step back but because as per my habit I've been installing new releases as soon as available. Employing the same version as Mandrake's new beta release, it was complete with all the usual applications and fully functional. It seemed quite snappy as well.

One of the drawbacks with Slackware is having to download the extra applications and dependencies and compiling them yourself. First with Mandrake's urpmi and now Gentoo's portage, I've become quite lazy in that area and haven't had the time to install my favorite apps yet.

I haven't read reviews on Slackware 10.1, but I expect them to have been all positive. I could find nothing wrong in my layperson's experience with install, configuring, or using Slackware 10.1. It's always such a joy. Gotta love the Slack.

Since others have posted extensive collections of snapshots when it was released, I've just put a few up here.