It's been a few years since I played with Slackware (back when you had to install from 3.5" floppies). Redhat is far easier to set up and install, as well as the fact that it has some nice curses and Tk (gui) based utilities for managing the box. For this reason, it is rather attractive to newbies. Slackware is generally considered to be the "unadulterated" distribution since it was one of the fist distributions around.
You might also look at Mandrake (very much like Redhat) and SuSE (gets great reviews, but never used it myself). Also, FWIW, all distributions are rather "configurable". Almost everything out ther for Linux is available in source code, which means you can compile it and get it to run on most any flavor. Some distributions just come with more "stuff". Hope that helps, Roy At 10:05 AM 5/13/2002 +0100, Thomas Madhavan wrote: >Hi all. > >I'm pretty much a LInux newbie, been using Redhat 7.0 up til recently when >it decided to die. So, I was thinking of having a little look around at >other distrbutions. > >I've read differing opinions about the ease of use of Slackware - what are >your personal opinions? Is Slackware more secure 'out of the box'? From >what I gather Slackware is a little harder to learn than Redhat, but a >little more... configurable? Am I right? I have no problems with using the >console and learning anything the hard way :D > >What advantages/disadvanages does Slackware 8.0 have over Redhat 7.0? > >Thanks, > >Thomas Madhavan
