I just found this post sitting in my drafts so thought I better finish it 
A while ago I finally managed to get a Linux distribution running properly on my old Toshiba 2510CDS laptop. I’d been trying for a few weeks, mostly with Ubuntu somewhat unsuccessfully. Tried Puppy Linux and was impressed at how easy it was to get going, but it comes with a GUI by default but wanted a text-only server. So Slackware was next on the list after I read about its great support for older hardware.
The first install died while copying some packages; it was either a dodgy hard disk or because I burnt the ISO to a CD-RW (more likely). So I tried swapped the hard disk for an identical model out of our now dead Gateway Solo 2500 and reburnt to a CD-R and it worked fine. The longest part of the install was selecting the packages, but only because I am not one to embrace bloat, and like to trim to the most minimal install.
I’d say Slackware’s biggest drawback is the very limited package management. More specifically, it doesn’t consider dependencies between packages. So you install what you think you need only to have the program comically face vault on its arse the moment you try to run it. For me it was sendmail. I didn’t install all the required libraries. Was easy enough to fix after a quick googling. Still, it’s one of those things that I believe you shouldn’t have to do. I used to have to googlefix my Gentoo server a lot, after weird compile errors and I’m lazy and want it to just work.
But no Linux distro is perfect, and I can live with dumb package management. Especially with tools like slapt-get around that emulate Debian’s package management. It works well for installing packages but I’m not game to try an uninstall with dependencies, if you can even do that. It’s working now so no more touchy!
I just noticed my space is getting eaten up by something… Ooh! 1.7 GB of log files… *scurries off to fix*
