
Slackware is 21 Years Old - robobro
http://slackblogs.blogspot.com/2014/07/slackware-is-21-years-old.html
======
weland
Slackware is the first Linux distro that I used. I recently (last year or so)
I got back to it, because all the crap Debian was pouring over upstream got
harder and harder to use, and with all the udev and llvm and consolethis and
policythat crap setting up a Gentoo installation with decent encryption proved
way beyond the free time and patience I had.

Turns out Slackware still rocks! It's simple and _literally_ just works.
Slackbuilds.org wasn't around when I first tried Slackware and my life is a
lot easier than it was back then. It's great. Happy birthday guys!

~~~
pjc50
Interesting; Slackware was my first distro (dozen floppy disks) as well. I too
am interested in not having policykit or much of the modern desktop stuff.

~~~
jballanc
Dozen!

I remember when Slackware fit on a single 3.5" floppy. There was a second
disk, but you only needed that if you wanted to install X, and why would you
want X when you had virtual terminals you could just switch between?

~~~
rahimnathwani
Thanks for making me feel young :) When I first used Slackware, I think the
base set was 13 floppies, and that didn't include networking or X. This was
before insmod/modprobe and I had to re-compile the kernel once I'd saved up
the 80 pounds to buy a sound card. The compilation took the whole night on my
486, and I needed several attempts before I got it working. Kernel 1.1.59 I
think.

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mrweasel
To me Slackware was the distribution that made everything understandable.
Nothing was hidden from you, everything was installed where the manuals said
it would be.

I loved that Slackware didn't try to move stuff around in third party software
to fit idea about a official disc layout.

Also the init system made so much more sense (still do I think).

Slackware is a wonderful distribution for people who want to learn Linux, not
just use it.

~~~
busterarm
I can't second these statements enough, especially the last one.

I'd tried every major distro before settling on Slackware sometime around '99
and that's when I finally learned Linux.

I'm using Arch today and to me it's a very similar philosophy with some
bonuses. If it weren't around, I would surely be using Slack.

~~~
Alupis
I took a similar approach, although not with Slackware.

I was tired of not knowing what was inside my distro, nor how it worked... so
one day I decided to build my own distro (following the very good Linux From
Scratch book, and then later the Cross-Linux From Scratch book).

It's even more bare-bones than a base arch or slackware -- but the best part
was knowing exactly how everything worked, and no longer fearing of changing
something, because I understood what it was doing now.

The experience and knowledge of "rolling my own distro" is very applicable
elsewhere -- from understanding kernel panics better, to understanding
"dependency hell", to how the entire boot process even works.

A linux distro is really a thing of beauty once you understand what is going
on under the hood.

~~~
busterarm
I've done LFS a couple of times and also contributed packages to a few other
Linux distributions (GoboLinux mainly) since learning on Slack, but I think
the experience was better having learned my way around a Slack system first.

LFS was definitely a helpful step to "dive deeper" though.

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vezzy-fnord
No matter what Linux distro I hop to, I ultimately always keep returning to
Slackware. Pat really is a visionary: he's one man who has always gotten it
_right_ over 21 years, amidst a landscape like Linux, known for its chaos and
constant reinvention. He should be an example to all distro maintainers.

The system is so neatly designed that you don't even notice the lack of
automatic dependency resolution. This is simply because of the sheer breadth
of choices you have when it comes to installing software on Slackware.

In short, it's the last bastion of sanity in Linux.

~~~
teekert
You mean like slapt-get? What would be the best one?

~~~
vezzy-fnord
Manual compilation, wget+installpkg on precompiled packages (whether by
AlienBob or anyone else), sbopkg without queue files/with queue files, slapt-
get/slapt-src, the FTP repository that can be queried from slackpkg, etc.

Most of the time I use slackpkg to apply updates and version upgrades, sbopkg
for third-party software by handpicking the dependencies, and precompiled
packages for software with lots of dependencies that are tedious to sort.

It's clean, easy and avoids the bloat of unneeded packages lying on your
system.

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cyphax
The oldest surviving distribution, and yet it never lost its identity and its
core values which makes me a very happy user to this day. Congratulations
Patrick Volkerding!

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davidw
I remember downloading the disks over a 14.4 modem... It was my first Linux,
and I was head over heels in love. Here was a system where I could dig around
and learn stuff and explore and get the source code to all the stuff I was
running and see how it was put together. That was such an exhilarating
feeling! I still love using Linux and think it (or something similar like a
BSD) is the best system for a hacker.

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danieldk
Almost a quarter century, primarily one man, hat off to Patrick Volkerding!

(I used Slackware from 1994 to ~2005.)

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jqm
Slackware is awesome and I spend more time with it (much more time actually)
than with my girlfriend.

I've tried other distros like Open Suse and Ubuntu but they weren't for me. I
don't need all the overhead to do simple thing that can be done by editing a
text file. (Mint is pretty nice though... I install it sometimes for friends
and family members).

I appreciate the effort behind apt-get type package mangers, but often they
often aren't up to date. With a slack build I get the latest source and know
exactly what I am getting rather than installing some mysterious black box
binary. Sure, apt-get might save 5 minutes but I'd rather spend the 5 minutes
and do it right. Just my personal fetish.

If you are new to Slack or Linux in general I recommend trying Slax or
Porteus. Since they are live, you can change whatever you want and experiment,
and just restart your machine when you inevitably bork something. This is how
I came to Slackware in the first place. I needed a live distro for a kiosk I
was building (was an Open Suse user at the time) and started taking apart and
re-assembling Slax. Eventually the light went off in my head and I saw the
beauty of simplicity and have never looked back.

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shimshim
I will never forget bricking my first Windows PC with Slackware before I knew
anything. Turned out to be recoverable but was a crazy experience as a
teenager.

~~~
libraryatnight
Ditto! I think it's beneficial to have grown up breaking computers :D

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lunchladydoris
This was my second Linux distro, after Mandrake. Mandrake showed me that an
alternative OS was viable. Slackware (and the trouble it took to get it
working) taught me how computers work.

~~~
teekert
Same here! That first Mandrake boot was magical so different from windows
(KDE3) yet so functional. I remember burning my first CD with K3b, that worked
perfectly and it was just as functional as the expensive Nero!

Man those were the days, having to manually mount your usb stick with the 2.4
kernel. Dropline Gnome (still alive I see
[http://www.droplinegnome.org/](http://www.droplinegnome.org/)) made Slackware
a lot easier to keep up to date and pretty and slapt-get provided a nice
update mechanism. I went to Gentoo afterwards and then to Arch, I haven't
looked back for years now. To bad DO dropped Arch support so now I'm using
Debian on the server VM's.

Remember Patrick got sick and the whole community was sending drugs? Nice.

And that whole drama about jumping version numbers...

~~~
lunchladydoris
I think about Patrick's illness almost every time I brush my teeth. If I
remember right, he got some bacterial infection after swallowing dislodged
oral flora, or at least that was the working theory.

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dragonquest
And hats off to Patrick Volkerding who announced 1.0 and so many years later
still going strong announcing 14.1.

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teh_klev
Slackware was my first encounter with Linux back in early 1995 (I was a field
engineer at the time looking after BT supplied SCO Unix and Xenix boxes in
doctors surgeries in the highlands of Scotland).

It was very exciting times. I learned to build my own kernels which took hours
on the crappy old dell I owned at the time, but very satisfying. It was even
more exciting when I managed to get a Novell NE2000 clone to work with it as
well and set up my first web and FTP server in my bedroom and then got it to
talk to my Hayes compatible modem and Demon Internet.

Happy hacky days :)

I use CentOS these days, mainly because it's our company standard, I must go
back and give it another spin. Congrats Slackware!

------
snarfy
The shell scripts that installed the floppy disks looked for a file called
'install.end'. They did not look at the contents of the file, only checked for
its existence.

Here is the contents:

    
    
        For information about getting "Bob" in your life, send $1 to:
    
            Church of the SubGenius
            P.O. Box 140306 Dallas TX 75214 USA ($2 US extra if outside US)
    
            http://www.subgenius.com
    

I'm pretty sure the URL has changed. It was on sunsite.unc.edu.

~~~
wcummings
[http://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-3.5/slaktes...](http://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-3.5/slaktest/a1/install.end)

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mhd
One thing that bothers me about slackware nowadays is something I loved when I
first got it: It installys almost everything by default.

I'd like a minimal install base right now (and manually picking this in the
installer ain't that easy), but back in '95, having every kind of editor,
programming language, window manager, TeX etc. on disk was awesome. And then I
started looking at comp.os.linux.announce and sunsite to see what's new and
current and installed that manually (and dependency tracking wasn't an issue
at all because a) most libraries on disk anyway -- certainly no silly "-devel"
packages and b) we didn't have that many dependencies back then, when "based
purely on Xlib" was a badge of honor...

~~~
fuzzix
> I'd like a minimal install base right now (and manually picking this in the
> installer ain't that easy)

I think the best way to do this currently is to select the categories of
packages and then choose a "Full Install" (the warning that it will install
almost 8GB of software is a little confusing as it only installs what was
selected on the previous screen).

I think you can do quite a bit with just the A, AP and D sets.

------
fu86
This was my first linux distribution and I loved it!

~~~
pjmlp
My very first as well. Had to install it to a MS-DOS partition and from there
to the real Linux partition as IDE CDROM drives were still not properly
supported back then.

~~~
yebyen
ZipSlack? I seem to remember it was called ZipSlack because I actually had a
ZIP drive at the time. That was definitely the coolest thing ever.

~~~
pjmlp
No, a pile of floppy disks.

I cannot remember anylonger the exact version.

It was the last version of Slackware to use a.out executable format and IDE
ATAPI had just recently been added. My CDROM IDE wasn't supported during boot
time, only after installation, hence the workaround.

------
alokyadav15
Respect for Patrick Volkerding .

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keithpeter
_" The machine is a Pentium III, 600 MHz, with 512 megabytes of RAM. It runs
(of course) Slackware Linux, and does an efficient and reliable job even with
moderately old hardware. The slackware.com site has been known to run for well
over a year without a reboot."_

Dogfooding the Web site. I learned quite a lot from zipslack, a live distro
booted from an Iomega Zip disk.

Edit:[http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/interviews-28/interv...](http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/interviews-28/interview-
with-patrick-volkerding-of-slackware-949029/)

Some historical stuff

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bitwize
Slackware is what I started with, and what I keep coming back to. I tried
Debian, but its complexity overwhelmed me. Back to Slack. Gentoo? Took too
long to compile stuff, and the words "revdep-rebuild" should fill anyone with
dread horror. Then I tried Arch which seemed to offer the best mix of
Slackware simplicity and Gentoo comprehensiveness. But after the nth complete
breakage of a running system and the "fuck you and your simplicity, we're
using systemd" kerfuffle, guess what? I was back to Slack again.

And Ubuntu?

I tried it in 2008. Decided it used way too much RAM. Scraped it off.

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webnrrd2k
Wow. I remember when Slackware was distributed on six floppies, and I had to
download it from BBS about a thousand miles away. I had a 386 computer with a
40Mb MFM hard drive that was about the size of a loaf of bread, and the
computer had the bare minimum of ram to run it -- 4 Mb. You had to directly
copy a floppy image to the hard drive, and then manually edit a few bits to
tell it to boot from the HD. I had no idea what I was doing -- none of my
friends had even heard of Linux, but it was a lot of fun.

Linux: You've come a long way, baby!

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Nux
Happy Birthday and many more maintained years to a special project! :-)

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Patrick_Devine
Slack was pretty cool, but like SLS before it, it was a little unwieldy. This
was especially true if you didn't have a CD-ROM drive (or a CD-ROM with the
right bits!).

Instead, I used MCC Interim Linux to get a base set of bits since it had such
a tiny foot print. I also somehow managed to cobble together X11 and get it
working, but I seem to remember it being a real pain in the ass.

Coincidentally, my first X11 background image was also of JR Bob Dobbs, but I
wasn't running Slackware.

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reflect
This was my first linux distro, I used it back in the mid 90's and it was such
a great learning experience. Amazing how long it's been already.

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bobx11
I will always remember the original slackware and Wallnut Creek FreeBSD distro
cds I could buy from microcenter 20 years ago... I had so much fun installing,
partitioning, install packages, then write my own code and compile it. Thanks
to any old slackware maintainers out there - you made this 12 year old kid (20
years ago) love computing and learning about how computers worked.

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jestinjoy1
Years back when starting to use Linux came across Slackware. At that time it
was something difficult for noobies to install. Then switched to Ubuntu for
ease of use. Now happy with Debian. Glad to know Slackware is alive and
strong.

What amazed me that time was Slackware was developed and maintained by a
single person "Patrick Volkerding" Long live linux community!

~~~
xienze
> At that time it was something difficult for noobies to install.

In its heyday (mid-late 90s), Slackware _was_ Linux for noobs. I still
remember downloading all those disk images via modem.

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Zardoz84
Hard as a rock, and keep staying here. Good job Patrick Volkerding!

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harrystone
I've been using Slackware for years now both at home and at work. It's a great
distro and that's because of Pat!

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mrottenkolber
I couple years ago I vowed I will never install another operating system than
Slackware again. I have been happy since! :)

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brickmort
Reading through the comments here makes me appreciate how great the HN
community is. happy birthday Slackware!

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gleenn
Time to start drinking!

~~~
shimshim
I was waiting for one of these comments :D

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fibo
Best Linux distro ever

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gteno
Happy Birthday, Slackware!﻿ and keep update us..

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fit2rule
Bring back Yggdrasil!

