
Slackware Live Edition - vezzy-fnord
http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/slackware-live-edition/
======
kozukumi
Slackware was my first experience with Linux. So long ago now, I am 31 now but
was 12 when I was first shown Linux and I was hooked from there. Like most I
have been around the block with many different Linux distros over the years,
even a scary few years doing stage 1 Gentoo. I will always be fond of Slack
though. Patrick and his work will always have a very special place in my life,
I do not doubt I would have gone into technology anyway (seems to be in my
DNA) but Patrick and Slackware was such a huge part of what I first remember
of truly learning.

Sorry this post is a little off-topic, it is Sunday afternoon and I guess I am
feeling sentimental or something ;)

~~~
Roboprog
I was "a bit" older when I picked up a copy of Slackware back in '95\. I was
working doing C development on a number of *nix and other platforms (most of
which are gone now), and needed something better for working from home than a
16 bit compiler on MS-DOS.

Slackware felt MUCH more powerful than the SCO x86 OS we had at work, and
having a desktop GUI was just gravy, rather than worrying about anything being
"ready for the desktop".

~~~
Roboprog
Delicious irony 20 years later: the mobile era. Apple, yet again, makes really
good devices. However, the most numerous devices are now Linux/Android. Now we
have to ask "Is _Microsoft_ ready for mobile", but it's too late, and the
answer is "nobody cares".

God, it feels so good to watch Linux kick the crap out of MS, after all those
years of putting up with their slow/buggy OS's and development torment-ware.

~~~
jmnicolas
Well yes but my Android phone (Nexus 4) really feels like Windows 98 though :
security is an illusion and it crashes (reboot) for no apparent reason (I
believe it doesn't like to be put in Airplane Mode while I sleep).

Let's not talk about my desktop Linux experience which is not stellar either.

Honestly if it weren't for the telemetry updates I'd be a happy Windows user.

I didn't mention Apple since I can't afford what they think people should pay
for their devices.

------
jqm
Eric Hameleers is a awesome. As a Slackware user his blogs and tips have been
helping me for years.

"we are well equipped to keep systemd out of our distro for a while" Win!

This certainly isn't the first live Slackware though. Slax is how I first came
to really experiment with Linux internals. It was a cool little tiny distro on
a live USB. I was able to take stuff apart and build my own kernel etc without
borking my real machine. I made several derivatives and even re-wrote the
"live scripts" when the author took a hiatus around 2010. I learned so much
from Slax.

~~~
cyphax
Ahh you beat me to it (it being praising Eric Hameleers) :P Slackware is a
better operating system thanks to Eric. Native Steam, multilib, leave it to
Eric to make these things simple for others to use. I owe the man more beers
than I can afford. :)

------
systems
i tried many times to convince myself that i can live without automatic
package dependencies but failed

i love the legacy of slackware, the brand but its more of an emotional thing

at the end, i use kubuntu, ubuntu based distros have access to ppa(s) which
really make life a lot easier for linux on the desktop

hopefully one day slackware will give up and add automatic management for
package dependencies but until that day, its too hardcore, i dont have that
kind of time

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I moved from Slackware to Kubuntu too, but as I recall Slack had something -
maybe slackpkg - that did dependency installation. I jumped ship for the
breadth of packages available and automatic kernel module compilation (I
forget what it's called at the moment; recompiling nvidia video modules was
getting to be a pain and I needed to keep the family computer online
consistently).

~~~
morb
slackpkg doesn't do dependencies.

slapt-get ([http://software.jaos.org/](http://software.jaos.org/)) does, but
it needs repo that has dependency metadata. Official repos don't have it. If a
repository doesn't have dependency metadata then slapt-get doesn't resolve
deps for that set of packages.

Some other repos (AlienBob's for instance) do have dependency metadata, which
assume that you did a full Slackware install, so only dependencies that aren't
part of Slackware are listed.

There is also slapt-src (same URL) that automates installing stuff from
[http://slackbuilds.org/](http://slackbuilds.org/), and it resolves
dependencies. It's not fullproof, but is good enough (for me, at least).

There's a new repo on [http://slackonly.com/](http://slackonly.com/) which
offers binary packages built from scripts on slackbuilds, and it looks like it
has dependency metadata. I can't vouch for the quality of those packages, I
haven't used it yet.

UPDATE: After skimming through PACKAGES.TXT for a few minutes, I'm not
confident that slackonly repo has all dep. metadata correct, but hopefully
they'll get better with it soon.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Ah, you're right it was slapt-get that I used; it convinced me that apt-get
was really good, part of the reason I moved despite up to then being more
familiar with compiling my own (yay for checkinstall) or using yum.

------
rifung
How does Slackware compare to ArchLinux? They both seem to be very barebones
and force you to learn more about Linux, but ArchLinux seems much more popular
from what I gather.

~~~
komaromy
The Arch docs are superior (best that I've encountered in the Linux world) but
Slackware is worth it to me to stay away from systemd.

~~~
coherentpony
Out of curiosity, why don't you like systemd?

~~~
komaromy
It felt too restrictive to me. Things were changing without me asking for them
and that was preventing me from learning. One of the most egregious problems
was forcing the change from text logs to journalctl binary logs.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> Things were changing without me asking for them and that was preventing me
> from learning.

systemd has extensive documentation, both in manpages and in higher-level
documents explaining how all the pieces fit together. I've generally found it
far more straightforward to learn about than the components it replaces.

> One of the most egregious problems was forcing the change from text logs to
> journalctl binary logs.

You can keep a syslog implementation like rsyslog installed, and you'll
continue to have text logs too. And journalctl outputs plain text.

~~~
dijit
You can also make rsyslog work on windows, doesn't mean it's supported or
encouraged..

people seem to have this analogue of "you can configure away the bad bits" but
in the end the bad bits are orthogonal to it's design and 'bypassing' them or
hacking around them should not be encouraged- it should be able to be done by
default.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> people seem to have this analogue of "you can configure away the bad bits"

Where in my comment did I imply that the journal was "bad"? The journal is
_awesome_. But if you have some workflow designed around syslog, such as a log
analyzer or statistics package that you don't want to tweak, text logging
still works just fine.

~~~
thiagowfx
"bad" is just a metaphor in this context

------
ryanpcmcquen
Slackware is what made me love computers, and love being a learner.

------
theseatoms
Does Slackware have notable practical applications?

~~~
jqm
It's simple so it's somewhat easy to take apart and re-purpose. I was able to
use it to build an internet enabled kiosk for instance without a lot of extra
weight. It's super stable also so it make a good server. Lack of package
management means you won't find it in the standard VM distro line up though.

As for other uses... using it to reply to this comment right now.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
_Lack of package management_

There is no lack of package management. There is a lack of automatic
dependency resolution without third-party additions. This is nowhere near as
debilitating as often presented by outside observers who have never tried the
distribution.

YMMV, but I've ran into circular dependencies and conflicts in addition to
configuration updates rendering systems unbootable multiple times on distros
like Debian with their non-transactional resolution heuristics that make your
life easier, until they don't. Slackware's spartan package management has not
failed me once, it's rock solid no matter how much you thrash your file system
hierarchy. In addition, when I want to install SlackBuilds, I have never used
a more convenient package manager than sbopkg before. Dependencies can be
cleanly recorded and built with queuefiles.

~~~
jsizz
> I have never used a more convenient package manager than sbopkg before.
> Dependencies can be cleanly recorded and built with queuefiles.

[http://idlemoor.github.io/slackrepo/index.html](http://idlemoor.github.io/slackrepo/index.html)

------
chews
mu

