SlackFR.org Reviewed

Author: Loki Harfagr

Published: February 11, 2007

The esthetic impact of the site is mitigated, it's a mix up between classical newspaper frontpage and a choice of fonts and colors from a last year blog :-) Though, it's solidly written, HTML 4.01 with CSS, I checked the W3C validators and the code was clean and neat, thus the webmaster will have no difficulties to improve the 'look' of the site.

Now, with the content of the site.

It seems quite complete, the texts are in good language, I didn't spot typos or syntaxic errors in the pages I browsed.

That's a good, and too rare, detail ;-)

There are different sections in the site :

news about the distribution
a bunch of system and configuration related articles
a helpdesk
some hints and tricks
some scripts and some Slackbuilds
the main links related to Slackware (including 'The Slack World' :-)
two general mailing lists: slacklab@slackfr.org aide@slackfr.org ('aide' is 'help')

The articles I read are mainly tutorials on different well sectorized subjects, like 'administration' (packet management, packages building, etc.) 'network' (gateway, DNS cache, DNS). These tuts are technically sane, they could be recommended to any french Slack user that would prefer to start in his native language instead of taking the risk of a misinterpretation of an english or a german tutorial.

The scripts are mostly SlackBuilds for different tools, like we find on the SlackBuild oriented sites, I read some and they seemed OK but I didn't test any for real, so that's just an external opinion :D)

The shell scripts are also OK, I noticed the 'flash-back.sh' was written by one of the persons that seem to run the site, it was a neat shell script with a humorous touch in the use of parms naming, this is the symptom of a 'real programmer' ;-)

The forum are the usual kind of IT forum for users by users, which is a good point as there seems not much troll is in activity and the Q&A are calm and congenial (even some funny ones).

I checked the sites of the members who had one and most were pleasant surprises, the population of the forum seems to be crossings between IT and music, and that is indeed a good point, and that'll make a fine conclusion to this trip ;D)