The Slackware Way (2012) | Hacker News Reader

The Slackware Way (2012)

docs.slackware.com

54 pointsTomte48 comments

I love Slackware. Best distribution to learn. I had to learn it all - without internet, just man pages and "HOW-TO" manuals (it is a shame that we no longer produce them!).

https://tldp.org/HOWTO/HOWTO-INDEX/howtos.html

Started with 7.0 and 8.1 in ~2003, but soon I discovered that older versions were using a.out binary format instead of modern ELF. A.out binary format was amazing - binaries used MUCH less memory, and were faster in general in comparison to modern "ELF".

For example system with ELF could not run at 4MB of ram without extreme swapping, but a.out (like Slackware 3.9 AFIK) could without much problems.

I never understood why a.out binaries went out of fashion :(

Fun fact: older versions of Slackware were using EGCS instead of GCC compilers.

> For example system with ELF could not run at 4MB of ram without extreme swapping, but a.out (like Slackware 3.9 AFIK) could without much problems.

> I never understood why a.out binaries went out of fashion :(

Storage was expensive. The promise of ELF was shared libraries. The idea was that a lot of libraries are used by a lot of programs so splitting the code between the main program and the shared library is a good thing.

The idea has not lived to its promise. Shared libraries in OSS are tending to became a DLL hell. There are also a lot of libraries with duplicated functionality which makes things even worse.

> Fun fact: older versions of Slackware were using EGCS instead of GCC compilers.

This was a good thing. Just like today with llvm. GCC was resting in its 7 day and nobody bothered to update it for the new stuff. Then EGCS came out and gave GCC a kick in the butt, helping to continue.

I just had a stupid, weird notion:

File systems dedupe now, right? IIRC, per storage block.

What if linkers aligned dependencies to the storage block boundaries?

Then let the file system find and dedupe those libraries.

A bit like applying the alignment of data structures in memory (to optimize performance) at the expense of size inefficiency.

> File systems dedupe now

Huh? is there a citation to that assertion perhaps for a particular instance?

as far as I know zfs[1] and btrfs[2] support dedupe.

1 - https://constantin.glez.de/2010/03/16/opensolaris-zfs-dedupl...

2 - https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Deduplication

> .out binary format was amazing - binaries used MUCH less memory, and were faster in general in comparison to modern "ELF".

I'd be interested in seeing this claim backed by some data. I remember running Monkey Linux (ELF-based, libc5; it might have been a Slackware derivative) on a 4-meg 486SX/33; it ran quite smoothly (until you tried to run X).

You might be right that it was not due the a.out format alone. Now I remember that at the same time there was some huge migration from libc5 to glibc!

Maybe it was composition of libc5 + a.out + egcs that gave us speed(no swappng) back then.

I might do some benchmark on "PCEM" emulator (only proper emulator for old hardware as it retains original speed of cpu, memory and hard drives) in my spare time.

Unless things have changed, NetBSD kernels can still run a.out binaries, including Linux a.out binaries.

https://man.netbsd.org/a.out.5

https://man.netbsd.org/NetBSD-9.0/compat_linux.8

I remember dualbooting NetBSD 1.3.1(and 1.6) and Slackware 7(and 3.x) at 386SX 33Mhz with 4MB of RAM :)

From my memories NetBSD was very fast, but 1.3.1 did not have any pkgsrc yet (so no easy software compilation).

Slackware 3.0 is when they switched to ELF.

When I was around 14, some time in the 90s, I contacted a guy whose ad I had read in a paper magazine by calling him over the landline phone and I asked him to burn Slackware on CDs for me. I sent him something like ~$60 over the mail and a few weeks later I got a package with the CDs. He even printed the covers for them. Today I get mad when a web site says my free download will start in 10 seconds.

There were recent news about Patrick putting together a new version of Slackware, the most recent one being from 2016 according to http://www.slackware.com/. Does anyone have any info to share? I can definitely see the attraction of Slackware as a VLTS (very-long term support) Linux distro with taste ie no systemd, reasonable DE, no change to upstream packages unless absolutely necessary, etc. especially with the stagnation of Linux desktop apps, or desktop apps in general with the exception of Electron-based apps and Chromium-only webapps.

There are comments in the changelog (http://www.slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=x86_64):

  Mon Apr 12 20:07:12 UTC 2021
  I'm going to go ahead and call this a beta […]

  Mon Feb 15 19:23:44 UTC 2021
  Here we go again... upgraded to glibc-2.33 and one last mass rebuild for Slackware 15.0.

Slackware being a "beta" isn't really the same thing as most other distros being in beta. Beta here means that it's extremely stable but doesn't yet meet the (very high) standards of the team and what packages they want to have in a release called 'official'.

The question was whether a new Slackware version is coming, and the changelog entry clearly suggests "yes".

Patrick and Alien Bob post in the Slackware section of the Linux Questions site if you want to keep up to date on happenings. It seems to be the main forum. https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/

Slackware-current is a rolling distro that receives updates daily. That's where you go to find more information. The forum at linuxquestions.org or IRC sees some discussions, Slackware was never a mailing-list heavy project.

Slackware stable (and the home page) has several years between new releases. Security updates mostly follows upstream projects, just don't expect the same commitment as fully staffed projects like Fedora or Ubuntu, everything is in there but may lag a day or two sometimes.

It went rolling release (unofficially) and didn't tell anyone. It's been being updated the whole time in Slackware-current.

Very long term support? It's not supported at all!

Security advisories: http://www.slackware.com/security/

Patches: https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware64-14.2/pat...

Last changed yesterday. Seems supported to me.

Of course it is. It's just slow enough that you can take your time to get to know tge dependency graph and how to build everything to the point that it's not as big a deal if you don't have a legion of volunteers doing everything for you.

I use it for my personal servers. Keeps things nice and stable so I can learn the quirks of individual packages. Like the differences between the various terminal emulators.

Of course Slackware is supported in the sense we are talking about here: security updates are provided for packages when needed.

I remember taking a c++ class back in highschool, and being really annoyed that I didn't have a copy of borland at home. My teacher told me about this system called 'unix', and I got a free shell account with the university of colorado, complete with a copy of g++. I could code from home! So I started really liking unix, and I emailed the admin to ask how I could get root (lol). He told me about linux. I bought a cd set copy of slackware because I was on 14.4 dailup at the time. I install it, and I remember being blown away at having so much software to compile basically any language I wanted! Still use linux as my daily driver ~ 25 years later.

When I first heard of Linux in the late 90's, one of the main selling points for Linux was that it came with a free compiler. It is strange to think there was a time when people had to buy a boxed copy of a compiler to code.

Good Guy Greybeard

I used Slackware for 20 years. Finally gave up this year when I wanted to upgrade and no word on when 15.0 was coming out. Now I use a popular distro, so if I need something to work, somebody has already done it and I can just get it installed without development work. Definitely sucks compared to Slack, but I'm just too old to keep futzing around trying to make simple things work.

(That said, now my CPU fan is blowing basically all the time even if I change CPUfreq settings to minimum, which is very annoying. Also, modern desktop/windowing environments are trash, and everything runs slower on this machine now)

Yeah it has been frustrating, and the limitations of a small team and basically one man making all the major decisions and changes has been on display for a while now.. add to that the store falling apart and Pat's financial problems.

You going to go back when 15 drops or has that ship sailed? I don't blame anyone for dropping even -current with it taking so long for KDE5/XFCE 14.6 to get added to the main tree. ktown was nice but it just more hassle to maintain it, I don't like doing anything beyond multilib for additional management.

Why does it suck compared to Slack?

Not OP, but I'll pitch in because I'm an old Slackware user (late 90s to late 2000s).

Slack was as close as you got to the system you would get if you compiled everything from scratch. Basically, you just had Pat do the package selection and compiling for you. Even the package manager was really just a script to compile the source package. That made for a really clean, simple setup and made it easier to get support for software directly from project forums or mailing lists. If you had an idea of the dependency graph, it was dead easy to troubleshoot because there was no package maintainer making choices that you (or the developer) didn't know about, which cannot be said for Debian.

I really liked it, but Linux got more complicated and I got more busy and eventually I just wanted a system with sane defaults and a choice of DE. Slackware is very opinionated about its package selection and developers have shifted to the reality of systemd so now it's sometimes more of a hassle to get a package working out of the box. As apt improved, I also had fewer issues with Debian, though its sometimes out-of-date repos are frustrating because apt makes compiling from source more complicated than it was on Slack.

If you want the Slack philosophy of close to upstream but the convenience of a modern distro, I think Fedora is the good choice, but I have a soft spot for Slack.

Thank you for this comment. This is the first time I think I have really understood why people like (or liked) Slackware, despite having read "The Slackware Way" before.

If you want to understand how a distribution works, I can't think many better distributions. I have a lot of fond memories of slackware. I eventually switched to debian when, I think, I had troubles getting vmware to work. I'm happy with debian but I definitely feel I've swapped understanding and control for convenience. Linux is a lot less fun now but since I now want to spent my time elsewhere that's a decent tradeoff for me.

There's a meme re Slackware and "learning how things work" that is quoted here:

https://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/th...

Quote:

Give a man Ubuntu, and he'll learn Ubuntu. Give a man SUSE, and he'll learn SUSE. But give a man Slackware, and he'll learn Linux. Well, so the old internet maxim goes, but while it's normally used with a touch of humour, there's a great deal of truth in it too.

Slackware was my alternative to Gentoo at the time. Gentoo was cool because it was all compiled, more efficient etc. That shit sounded good to me as a teenager. I remember one summer I had the Gentoo ISO all burnt on a CD-R and stayed up all night to watch it install and compile on my Athlon Thunderbird PC (My parents didn't spend money much on computers and I had to make do with stuff that I saved for with birthday money). I fell asleep on a bean bag and woke up finding that it failed to compile something. I had to resort to asking the main IRC channel and message board to help me fix it, but I didn't have time :) I was disappointed as a 14 year old. I then downloaded Slackware and printed off the installation guide at school. I followed it to the T and it worked. It was fun and awesome because it allowed me to understand how things worked under the hood and provided insights on how a linux system hung together. Those days in the 00s are gone but the memories are still there.

Gentoo on an IBM Thinkpad (IIRC a 900Mhz Celeron + 384MB memory) was my laptop in college. Aside from a few beasts (KDE or Gnome, for which you'd end up needing to have at least the libs to run much in X even if you didn't use those DEs, OpenOffice [holy crap, maybe the single longest compile?] and to a lesser extent Firefox) the compiling wasn't really that bad.

Only non-Apple laptop I've had where suspend-to-disk worked every time. I don't know exactly what the deal was, but the IBM firmware had some feature that took care of it for you if you added a correctly-typed, sufficiently-large partition at the right spot on the disk. It just worked.

Hah, I have similar memories about installing Gentoo for the first time. I remember printing out the installation handbook on a ton of pages because at the time the computer i was installing it on was my only access to the internet.

Slackware was the first Linux I managed to successfully setup on my home PC back in 2000, dial-up modem driver including, and was quite happy with it, it taught me everything I know about Linux.

Things are 10x more complex now, it seems you need Docker or a browser to run most software, I miss the simplicity of just configure && make && make install.

I used Slackware Linux for my company’s mail servers in 1996 running qmail.

I installed it from a CD that I bought at MicroCenter.

Slackware is the only Linux distro I have been able to stick to long term. A dual boot between Slackware and Windows 10.. pretty crazy contrast of a colossal OS that's always pestering you for its attention and doing lord knows what under the hood and a very simple one that does absolutely nothing I don't tell it to.. and most importantly never nags me for anything, ever. Package management is a PITA sometimes but I just never got cozy on other distros.

You know you can install Flatpaks on Slackware right?

Yep, used it before, works just fine. I don't default to it generally but there have been times where it was the easy route to get something done and was grateful for it.

Slackware was my favorite distribution until Ubuntu came along but not for the reasons you might think.

Slackware showed you the internals and I learned so much about compiling and systems architecture during the few years I was using Slackware.

When Ubuntu came around it was the first time I was able to plug in a USB stick and have it recognized immediately and I had to do some paid work to put food on the table.

Slackware is an excellent distribution for learning and I'm glad I used it in my early days.

I've been using this software as my daily driver for a very long time because I don't need to worry about it. I know what I'm doing in Linux but I don't want my OS to be my hobby. When work is over, I want to go hiking and do other stuff and this OS stays stable & updated and lets me live my life. Also, it does it without spyware. This can be hard to grok I think from the reputation of the distro but I find it the easiest to use.

I ran Slackware from ~1998 until 2014 or 2015 when it was time to build a new storage box at home and freebsd+ZFS was the way to go, and I switched my laptop/desktop to Ubuntu around that time. FreeBSD and Slackware feel pretty similar, but with ZoL coming to FreeBSD there isn't much advantage to running it any more. Debian package management is a lot more convenient for servers and the BSD box is already running a couple Debian VMs.

I used Slackware until Patrick got sick in 2004. For months the project stagnated while he was away. Back then, Patrick was driving this distribution mostly himself.

Slackware has been my default distro (for personal use) since the 90's. It has its limitations, which are palpable when you context switch from some of the more popular distros. Especially since I work in Debian and Alpine for work, this can be a little shocking.

Always fond memories of Slackware—days of downloading release 2.0 images to a massive stack of floppies over dial-up @ 14.4K in 1994. Stuck with a mix of Slackware and Free/OpenBSD for over a decade.

Glad to see it continues to survive so many years later.

In 1995 I bought two things that changed everything for me. One of them was a copy of Linux Unleashed with a Slackware CD in it (2.11 or 2.14).

Thanks for a great life, Patrick.

OG hacker distro

Reply on news.ycombinator.com