[CS-FSLUG] Slackware

[N. Thompson]

I've got a long weekend comming up and I'm probably going to take that time to 
switch over to Slackware and get a usable system going, Mandrake and SUSE may 
have nice shiny graphical configuration tools that require the world's most 
powerful supercomputers all running in a cluster in order to run without 
causing my music to skip but I don't have the control I want. I have to put 
up with OpenOffice the way they like it, I have to put up with little control 
over the packages I use because Mandrake doesn't want me to have X11 without 
a pretty load bar during the boot process and because SUSE likes to be a 
little more commercial then Mandrake and as such has a shortage of user 
contributed RPMs and worse performance then Mandrake.

I'm going to need some help of course since this is going to take some 
adjusting to, first off I'm going to be using KDE and I'm going to want all 
the developer tools I may need to compile my own Qt apps and lots of nice KDE 
goodies, I'm also going to need very little networking software aside from 
maybe NFS and SMB, the KDE public file server applet and what I need for 
DHCP.

Basically I just want to hear any tips for the setup process and then I want 
to know how to remove unwanted software, find software and updates and 
install them easily. Then I want to know how to make my system secure by 
setting up a firewall, preferably graphically and with significant ease and 
from there I'll try to figure things out myself or go to the list for help.

One more thing, the command to create users didn't work for me last time in 
Slackawre, is it addusr?

BTW. I have two network interfaces, eth0 is a 3com somethingarather and eth1 
is an RTL-8139 compatible thingamajig, I want to use the RTL-8139 thingamajig 
and have the 3com somethingarather unused since its not hooked up to anything 
and usually greatly slows down the boot process while it tries to get an IP 
address, if someone could tell me how this is done and perhaps even tell me 
about some of the configuration tools I might expect to find in Slackware I'd 
appreciate it.

Thanks.

Nathan.