
Happy 25th Anniversary Slackware Linux - natex
http://www.slackware.com/announce/1.0.php
======
filmgirlcw
My first Linux was in 1998 (when I was in 9th grade) and I _think_ my first
distro was RedHat, but then my boyfriend at the time told me Slackware was
better so I quickly switched. Like others in this thread, I learned so much
from Slackware.

I eventually moved to Debian and its derivatives and now I only use Linux in a
docker container or in a VM, but I’ll always look back on that time in my life
fondly b/c it’s what shaped the basis for so much of my computing life. My
career as an adult has had lots of pivots, but I can confidently say that I
wouldn’t have my current day job if it weren’t for all the stuff being a
Slackware user taught me 20 years ago.

Happy 25th, Slackware!

~~~
nivenzo
This sounds so much like me. Please tell me you ordered RedHat CDs from
CheapBytes as well!

I took a bit of an odd path after Slackware, running OpenBSD as a desktop OS.
I used Window Maker, and one tangential benefit was that none of my friends
knew how to use my computer, so couldn't muck around with it much.

~~~
b3b0p
My first was 56k download of Slackware 4.3(?). Followed by I believe Red Hat
5.1 (from Best Buy). Later, I think I bought Red Hat 5.2 on Cheap Bytes. From
there, I ran FreeBSD on my Thinkpad 600e using Window Maker. I miss it.
Dearly.

Now, I'm on macOS with the 2017 15 inch Touch Bar MacBook Pro. I like it
actually (I only wish I could replace the keyboard and/or open it in case I
get gunk inside it). Only because I never used the function keys and it's a
neat little hackable toy (the touch bar that is). My escape is caps lock, so
the esc key doesn't bother me. I'm spoiled and entrenched in the Apple, iOS,
WatchOS eco system. I constantly think about getting another Thinkpad,
probably daily.

------
sjs382
Slackware was my first introduction to Linux. I initially investigated it as a
way to get around my parents setting a password on Windows. Thanks, mom and
dad, for the (very unintentional) motivation that set me on the career path
I'm on now.

~~~
paulie_a
Same here! I recall my dad complaining that it was causing issues to windows
when dual booting when I was a teenager. But damn getting a modem working in
that era was tremendous bitch.

~~~
isostatic
> But damn getting a modem working in that era was tremendous bitch

And of course help was available on the internet. On dialup. Which you
couldn't get working without the modem.

~~~
nsomaru
I have fond memories of holding a printed out gentoo install manual and
watching windows getting wiped from my box as a kid.

Then the terror of getting the modem to dial from a terminal, using lynx to
get some browsing going so i could figure out how to get some GUI going on the
thing.

Finally, getting Wine to run CS 1.6 so I could play at LAN parties with my
buddies. They all thought I was a wizard because I was running this strange
OS.

I genuinely believed that gentoo was going to give my machine super powers
because all the software was "compiled and optimised for my machine." Maybe
that was a little off the mark, but a great learning experience!

Now everyone has a smartphone, so it's hard to replicate that feeling of being
cut off from the net with just a printed manual and your determination to
carry you through. Good times!

~~~
isostatic
I think in those days you had to use a terminal emulator of some sort (maybe
minicom?) to dial the ISP, then background (without hanging up), then run up
pppd. I had no idea what was going on with this process.

Obviously at this stage, a working X was a fantasy. You had your 6 ttys and
that was it.

My first linux was redhat 5 from the CD on the back of a book - it didn't
support my SIS 6326 card -- funny how I remember what graphics card I had 20
years ago, but have no idea what's in my desktop at the moment other than
"some nvidia thing".

According to a post I can still find on usenet: "I got X running in 600*480
but the mouse pointer was corrupt, so they were close, but not close enough."

I assume I was dual-booting with windows 95 or 98 for my first year or so, at
least until I got a better graphics card -- a Voodoo Banshee I think. I'd
moved to debian by September 2000 though when I went to uni, and a year later
when I saw in the Billenium with date running in an xterm.

> Now everyone has a smartphone, so it's hard to replicate that feeling of
> being cut off from the net with just a printed manual and your determination
> to carry you through

It's amazing how we used to survive without the sum knowledge of humanity
available at our fingerprints.

------
johnnycarcin
Happy Anniversary! Like others here, Slackware was my first distro. I called
it out in a blog post of mine a long time ago:

"All the “legit” people were using Linux so I spent a week downloading the
different packages for a Slackware install and put them all on 3.5” floppies
only to have the install fail. I should mention that up until this point I had
basically zero Linux experience. Luckily for me there was Cheap Bytes which
was a site that would burn everything to a CD and mail it to you for a small
fee. A few weeks later that old 133Mhz Windows 95 computer was a lean and mean
Linux box. I can still remember the panic when I saw that “darkstar login”
prompt come up. What the hell had I done? As I said earlier, I was all in."

~~~
rahimnathwani
The floppy method failed me because I had bought 50 unbranded floppies at what
I thought was a bargain price. But it turned out they weren't reliable at high
density.

Switching to a different brand meant my only remaining problems were:

\- the time it took to install by switching out all those floppies

\- having to wait overnight for a kernel recompile whenever I added new
hardware (not that often, but the memory is strong because those were the
exact times I didn't want to have to wait)

\- not really knowing _why_ I wanted to use Linux, apart from thinking it
would be cool to have a web server running in my room (this was back in 1994)

~~~
johnnycarcin
Kernel compile times! I remember kicking off a compile before I went to bed
and then checking it the next morning before school to see what the result
was. Good times for sure.

------
tonyarkles
Oh, the memories. Like many others in this thread, Slackware was my first. I
still smile thinking about the bootstrapping process I managed to figure out
(I was ~12 years old at the time). We didn't have much money, which meant we
didn't have a whole bunch of floppy disks laying around. I managed to scrounge
up enough of them to get the A series and a subset of the N series (just
enough for PPP and FTP). Once I got a working setup, I dialed into our ISP and
slowly downloaded extras until I had a usable system. First X, and then a
graphical browser, and then the rest. Fond fond memories.

------
gruturo
Indeed happy anniversary, congrats, and thanks to Patrick Volkerding and crew.

I'm leaning towards FreeBSD lately, and when it's Linux at work it's
necessarily RHEL due to company standardization etc, but Slackware is where
the heart is, and will always be.

~~~
kev009
One piece of fun trivia, Patrick works for iXsystems so Slackware and FreeBSD
are happy siblings.

------
djsumdog
I still have 4CDs of Slackware 3.6. I was in high school when I first tried
it, and I remembered all the complications of getting a PCI Winmodem working
in Linux.

When I started university, I had a P3 667Mhz that booted Windows 98, Windows
2000, Slackware and BeOS 5. It used the BeOS bootloader because it was the
most colorful.

------
lithiumfrost
Pretty sure Slackware was the first or second Linux distribution that I tried
while I was still in High School in the States. I was attracted to it because
it was simple and straightforward, with the packages consisting of tarballs
and the distributed packages being very close to vanilla with a minimum of
distro patching or customization. It was easier to build stuff on. Didn't hurt
that it was relatively svelte, either. I had a terrible connection (33.6
kbps).

My thanks for all their efforts. I learned a lot about Linux from playing
around (poorly) with the distro. We've come a long way since then (the 90's).
Happy Anniversary!

------
spapas82
My 1st linux distro back on 1998 (when I was 16) was Slackware 3.6 with a
Linux 2.0.36 kernel. I remember I had a 33.6 kbps modem and downloaded it
floppy by floppy. The distro was seperated in letter named packages and you
could download only what you needed (iirc it was 'a' for the core system, 'd'
for development gcc et al, 'x' for x windows etc).

Slackware had a very nice and straight forward installation procedure
considering I was 16 at that time and all comcepts were self learned.

The 'package' manager was as simple as possible: packages were tgz files that
were just unzipped to /.

The real problems I had was with my (ISA) sound card and my modem: I rember
that I had to boot windows first for the sound card to set up and get the
proper IRQ/DMA and them hot reboot to linux. For the modem because of how the
telecom provided in Greece worked (no dialtone) I had to configure it to use
ATX3DT instead of ATDT to call a number.

All these took me weeks of research but were resolved to great excitement!

Finally, after a couple of months using linux and accessing various IRC
channels through the cool BitchX client I executed an innocent looking binary
I was sent over. I was running everything as root of course...

You probably can understand what happend then :/

Although I knew (some) of the risks of executing binary acquired binaries in
Windows I thought that with linux I was invincible. The good thing was that I
noticed strange commands in the root's history (the attacker wasnt that good
after all) and I immediately formatted the drive.

That incident kept me away from linux for a couple of years until I felt more
confident for my security skills!

------
jimmyswimmy
When I downloaded it, painfully over a 57.6k modem using zmodem, I remember
all the notes about slack and the church of Bob. At the time, 1993 or so,
there was no Wikipedia, so it was a bit hard for a naive high school kid to
figure out that there was actually no religious connotation. I never did get
the hang of slack or slackware, but it got me on the path to where I am.

------
praptak
My earliest memory of Linux is a bunch of dark blue 3.5 inch disks that I used
to install Slackware from. I think that GCC required additional 4 disks and X
6 of them? Good times.

~~~
noonespecial
Boot, root, get the 3com drivers in. Good times.

~~~
MPSimmons
disk set n1, iirc

------
cyphax
Congratulations to Patrick and all the package maintainers and contributors!
I've been a happy Slackware user for like 18 years or so, and eagerly awaiting
Slackware 15!

------
Koshkin
Slackware: Linux at its finest: no cruft, easy to install, just works. No
automatic dependency resolution is a blessing in disguise.

------
varlock
So many fond memories! Unlike many here, Slackware was not my first distro. I
had tried Mandrake first, then RedHat, then grew more and more uncomfortable
with their packaging system, and after a brief stint with Gentoo (admittedly,
it was too early for my skills, back then) I met Slackware. It was love at
first sight.

It was lean, nimble, skeletal almost. No frills, just perfect. My Athlon just
flew with it - something I would never experience with Mandrake or RedHat! The
(lovely) price to pay was that you would have to learn more about the
internals. I would pay that price time and again!

And though I eventually moved to Debian (because, again, of the packaging
system) I very fondly admit Slackware was my first true love.

Thanks for all you taught me, Slackware.

------
keithpeter
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17598685](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17598685)

and

[https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/donati...](https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/donating-
to-slackware-4175634729/#post5882751)

If anyone is still monitoring this thread, it transpires that Patrick
Volkerding, the BDFL and main developer of Slackware, is having financial
problems.

Moderators: I think this story would be of interest to HNers because of its
similarities with the OpenBSD situation some years ago, and the issue of how
to fund open source/free software projects generally

------
acutesoftware
Wow, time flies doesn't it? That was my first intro to Linux - installing on a
386 I think. Compiling stuff to get the sound card and CDROM working. Lots and
LOTS of learning.

And finally, when it all worked - playing DOOM which actually performed better
than on Windows.

~~~
TomMarius
How did people run Doom on Linux back then?

EDIT: Wow, Wine is _really_ old.

~~~
acutesoftware
Yes, Wine has been around for a while, and it's pretty amazing software, but
DOOM was a native linux release - cant remember how I installed it, but a
linux version has been around since 1994

[http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Linux](http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Linux)

------
mixmastamyk
Great (and not so great) memories of downloading floppy images from A-Z?
Writing them to disk, trying to get X to work, then installing openlook and
later CDE to pretend I had a Sun at my desk. May have been '94 or so. :-D

------
gkya
TIL that Slackware is about five months older than me. I was a distro geek in
my teens, and Slackware, together with Gentoo, is on of the two distros that I
never got working. Is there any concrete advantages to using it today?

~~~
enriquto
> Is there any concrete advantages to using it today?

As a new slackware user, I see the following advantages

1\. no systemd

2\. really minimal bare system: running htop shows less than 10 processes
running (including those of root)

3\. simple package management with no dependencies: a "package" is just a tgz
file that you decompress into your filesystem

4\. _very_ up to date binary packages (e.g., there are just few days between
the release of a new gcc version and its availability as a slackware package).

I have spent most on my life on debian and ubuntu, and I cannot imagine going
back to them. Other distributions that I like are voidlinux (but unfortunately
it has automatic package dependences, that limit my freedom too much) and
dragonflybsd, which has also very modern packages.

------
js2
In college, I was the SA of a small dialup ISP. Two PCs running Slackware, a
Livingston port-master, a T1, and about two dozen Hayes modems. I probably
still have the install CD in a box somewhere.

------
classichasclass
Yup, first taste of Linux was Slackware too. We ran it on a 486 which was our
University webserver for us and our friends. I still wonder what happened to
that box.

------
vmlinuz
Been using Slackware for over 22 years, and don't have plans to stop using it
any time soon...

I did throw out the last of my floppies many years ago, though!

------
rok3
Happy Anniversary.

I've moved on to MacOS for work and Arch Linux for home but Slackware will
always have a special place as my intro to Linux and understanding what
actually goes on beneath the surface on a computer.

I can't count the number of late-night hours I spent in high school learning
about Linux and playing DroidBattles on a second-hand, beat-up Toshiba Portégé
running Slackware.

------
throw7
Kudos.

Slackware was my first linux. I still vividly remember walking back and forth
from the computer lab of sun machines, clutching my 3.5" floppies, hoping I
had written out the data without any "block errors". At the time, I had no
clue how I could check before hand without going through the install. it took
more trips than i care to admit. :D

------
manuelisimo
I use gentoo these days, but I used slackware as one of my first distros and I
learned tons. Congrats on such a great distro!

------
roblatham
Fall of 1996. guy on my freshman hall says "you should try linux". Installed
slackware on everything I had for the next three years until finally switching
to Debian.

Fondest slackware memory is installing the media to a Syquest Ezflyer -- but I
needed to boot with a bleeding edge linux 2.2 kernel to recognize the parallel
port hard drive!

------
giancarlostoro
Back in 2007 Slackware was my first Linux distro because that's what my friend
at the time used. Later on it became Debian and then Ubuntu.

I think openSUSE was once upon a time based off of Slackware, it's since
diverged greatly. openSUSE is one of my favorite modern distros outside of the
Debian based ones.

------
cowmix
As a SLS user, Slackware's arrival was very welcome. After every install of
SLS a user might spend days applying patches to the system to get almost
anything to work right. Slackware worked almost out of the box, which was HUGE
back then.

~~~
Wildgoose
Absolutely! I started with SLS back in 1993 and switched very rapidly.

------
agumonkey
Joining others into wishing a the happiest birthday to slackware. Never used
it though :)

------
lholden
Slackware was my first distro back in the early to mid 90s. Switched t it from
SLS! Both were downloaded from a local BBS...

Used it until Stampede Linux came out. (Them Pentium optimizations were
important!)

------
atVelocet
I once was a Windows only guy. Then i was given Slackware from a friend. I
really had to learn it the hard way. But i learned a lot and it was worth the
hussle.

Thanks Slackware and everyone involved.

------
brandoncordell
Slackware was the first linux distribution that I was able to install when I
was younger probably... 18 years ago or so. Crazy to think about.

------
pjmlp
My very first Linux distribution, Slackware 2.0.

Our ways have parted, but it is nice to still see it around.

Happy Birthday and kudos to all those that still keep it alive.

------
artie_effim
My evolutions.

RedHat4 (not RHEL, ~1998), Slackware, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Debian

Honestly, cut my teeth on Slack - loved it, but now debian is my mainstay.

~~~
laamalif
similar story ;)

------
krylon
Happy Birthday!

I used Slackware only for a short while before moving to FreeBSD, but I really
loved its simplicity back then!

------
jimjimjim
my home servers are quite happy running slackware. they just keep doing their
job without drama.

Thank you Patrick and co.

------
_Codemonkeyism
Slackware was such a relief after downloading boot.tgz and root.tgz to build
your own linux system.

------
crtasm
Never used it directly but Unraid is based on it, thanks Slackware!

------
tingletech
that is since 1.00 -- I think I started using it at slackware ~0.7

~~~
Koshkin
That is, _in utero_ , so to speak.

------
worik
Happy memories

------
EMRZ
Congrendulates, Slackware.

------
bitwize
Still on Slackware, no plans to use anything else as my main OS. I haven't
used it continuously but I keep coming back. Slackware _is_ Linux; everything
else is mostly UI bling and attempted vendor lock.

~~~
craftyguy
> everything else is mostly UI bling and attempted vendor lock.

Well that's a ridiculous generalization to make. There are many solid distros
that are none of that (e.g. Gentoo, Arch/Parabola, Debian, LFS, just to name a
handful)

~~~
pecg
I would like to include Void as a serious, competent and elegant distribution.
I've used it for a complete year, and have really come to appreciate its focus
on simplicity, reminds how Arch was before they decided to use systemd.

~~~
bitwize
Likewise. My initial statement was a smidge hyperbolic, as I really do like
Void and run it on a Raspberry Pi. It has many of the same traits that make
Slackware and pre-systemd Arch so appealing.

~~~
pecg
Before I migrated to Void, I used slackware-current extensively, it is indeed
the cleanest GNU/Linux distribution I've found. Personally, I loved manually
dependency resolution, but sadly didn't had the time to do it, so I ended up
with Void, and it really shines on staying out of my way.

