Happy 25th Anniversary Slackware Linux | Hacker News Reader

Happy 25th Anniversary Slackware Linux

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242 pointsnatex87 comments

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!

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.

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.

I've got small piles of them... I just liked getting them...

Please tell me you ordered RedHat CDs from CheapBytes as well!

I started using Slackware Linux in 1994. I was 12 and it was the best way to get a lot of software for free (I only cared about 'free as in beer' then).

Around 98ish, a friend and I made an extra buck by buying CheapBytes CDs in the US and and selling them relabeled in The Netherlands. Surprisingly our Tripod webpage is still online in its 90ies glory, with tiny screenshots ;):

http://linuxlop.tripod.com

But when I started the Infomagic Linux Developer's Resource CD-ROM sets were a big thing:

https://www.amazon.com/Linux-Developers-Resource-6-CD-Set/dp...

There was a new version every few months with multiple distributions and IIRC TSX-11 and sunsite.unc.edu. Of course, the Walnut Creek Slackware and FreeBSD sets were also great.

Slackware was a good gateway drug to the BSDs. That was certainly the path I took. The simplicity of the BSDs is really a nice feature. Slackware was for all intents and purposes a BSD with a weird kernel and userland. The simplicity of Slackware was a result of following BSD conventions mostly.

Same here, started with Slackware 2.0 in 1996, already knew other UNIX systems given that I was a bit further along (at the university).

It was Slackware that gave me the opportunity to play with something UNIX like at home, but then as UI/UX focused developer I followed a different path of desktop friendly distributions, Red-Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, Ubuntu, to eventually settle in Windows/OS X on desktop systems.

But yeah, learned a lot. Knowing Linux deeply helped getting some of the projects that worked as jumping stone for something else.

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.

Same here.

IMHO, Slackware is close to the local maximum in the space of imperative distros. I think adding dependency resolution is the only thing it misses vs Arch or Void. But like those, it's barebones and it ships simple lean binary packages. Going back to Slackware was a brisk of fresh air when Ubuntu and friends got too complex. Sometimes things break, and it's hard to understand why due to the overwhelming amount of things they ship with.

There's nothing like having total control of what you are running, and Slackware is really good at this.

I think the future are functional distributions like NixOS or GuixSD. For many use cases, they are just ready for prime time. For others (e.g. R or Julia), where heavy patching / wrapping of packages is needed, there's still a bit of work to be done.

I could think your entire post might've been written by me if you replaced Slackware with Arch. I haven't tried Slackware, but this makes me wonder how similar it is to Arch.

What do you mean it's missing dependency resolution? Do you need to install dependencies of packages manually?

Yes. For various reasons Slackware doesn't have dependency resolution. This is why I've been using Arch and other distros since long ago.

But in the late 90s there was no Arch. Besides, the amount of libraries was an order of magnitude smaller, so it wasn't such a hassle.

...and X11 and GNOME weren't split up in a gazillion packages.

Out of the box, you do have to install dependencies manually, but you don't have to track them, which is the part I would dislike about dependency resolution. Assuming you have a full installation (where all dependencies will be met), and you find your package on slackbuilds, dependencies will be listed and can be installed with about the same ease as you would install a package on, say, Debian.

> I think adding dependency resolution is the only thing it misses vs Arch or Void

Please, no! Having independent packages is a huge plus! I moved out of voidlinux because I could not install the X headers without python2, due to some silly "dependency".

Arch usually gets this right, and most stuff are optional dependencies.

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.

> getting a modem working in that era was a tremendous bitch

My "hand-cranked modem" story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6576823

> To this day, whenever the network is slow, I twirl the mouse in little circles subconsciously.

I still do this, it's theraputic

Also known as "manually pumping the message loop". I'm almost certain that that program was handling communications events on the same thread as the message pump, and only relying on a very slow timer to move them through. There was probably plenty of such badly-written software back then, because 16-bit Windows was cooperatively multitasked and had no concept of threads.

Related article and discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625957

http://web.archive.org/web/20140105042459/http://support.mic...

Circa mid 1990s, I tried to get my hands on Linux and tried to dual boot to a separate hard drive that I bought with chore/spare job money. Boy, did I fuck that up. Rendered both installs useless. Don't recall how, but had to manually edit the partition tables on the main Windows drive. As long as they had that PC, it never did report the correct partition size in several places...but it booted & worked, so I wasn't grounded. Wasn't really until college in 2002-2003 that I experimented with *nix again, but that was with a dedicated 2nd hand laptop running FreeBSD so I could access OSS VLSI tools. What a time...

> 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.

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!

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.

You were lucky that you only knew Windows and had concerned parents.

At around the same time I had people show me various flavours of Linux with great enthusiasm. I was supposed to be impressed but I had SGI Irix plus applications for it. From my perspective I could not see the point of this 'toy operating system'. It was a bit like one of those cloned Chinese cars that we used to laugh about, with stupid names for programs that were sensibly named in real UNIX.

As a consequence I missed the boat and only started with Linux when Ubuntu came along.

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."

Haha, I had a similar download experience. I had to track someone down who had a CD-R drive (pretty sure it was the guy that introduced to me to Slackware) to get it running because the floppy method failed me!

Thank god for that new amazing technology ;)

Nice to see another Linux Microsoftie on here as well!

There are dozens of us! Dozens! https://m.imgur.com/r/starwarsminiatures/R1fdEt3

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)

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.

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.

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.

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

I used FreeBSD on a laptop for a year. The only problem was suspend/resume which I never got going. When I mention this people say they have gotten it working, so probably it's me failing at it. But if I knew I could get it working, I'd switch back without giving it a second thought, by far the best experience using a Unixy OS I had so far.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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

disk set n1, iirc

Oh wow, I remember that!

http://www.slackware.com/install/softwaresets.php

Slackware and 3.5 inch disks for me too. If I remember correctly, I was going to install SLS Linux but this "Slackware" thing was the new hotness. Time flies having fun I guess. Still running Linux on my workstation.

Slackware 2.0 required several of them, or in alternative dump them into the hard disk on an MS-DOS partition and point the installer to the location.

There were CD-ROM variants, but this was about the time EIDE support was still being added, so only those lucky SCSI owners could actually take advantage of it.

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!

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

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17598685

and

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/donati...

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

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.

How did people run Doom on Linux back then?

EDIT: Wow, Wine is really old.

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

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

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?

> 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.

Concrete advantages, I'm not sure there are any, unless it'd be its relative simplicity. It's my preferred Linux-based OS, and has been for 18 years (I also ran Ubuntu for a few years for a desktop, but went back to Slack). I really like that it adheres to the principles behind it, and it's super nice that it doesn't change between releases, so it always feels right at home, if it's a brand spankin' new release. And the combination of many official packages plus SBo means it's about as useful as other distributions.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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!

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!

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.

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.

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

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

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!)

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.

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.

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.

My evolutions.

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

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

similar story ;)

Happy Birthday!

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

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

Thank you Patrick and co.

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

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

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

That is, in utero, so to speak.

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.

> 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)

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.

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.

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.

My list was, by no means, complete. I was just giving examples of very popular distros that GP somehow has not heard of.

I use Void on my media PC and Gentoo everywhere else. I've considered using Void on my NAS, either that or maybe Alpine.

I'm glad you brought up this distribution. I think when we see more and more go the Docker route, we'll see more minimalist hosted systems that are Void or Alphine for hosting containers and container schedulers.

Before Void I tried Alpine briefly, but couldn't resolve an issue with MESA, back then I didn't had the adecuate knowledge to fix it myself.

Happy memories

Congrendulates, Slackware.

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.

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