Slackware Linux 15.0 RC3 | Hacker News Reader

Slackware Linux 15.0 RC3

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95 pointsakoster43 comments

Thank you Patrick Volkerding. Slackware was my first real distro. Almost exactly 20 years ago, I was a kid who spent a week downloading a slackware iso. I sat and read through everything in the slackware installation and that taught me so much! Your philosophy of simplicity and purity in software and systems design has left a deep imprint on me. Thank you so much.

Me too :) I was one of the young student in 1995 downloading Linux in plenty of 1.44M floppy disks (7 for GCC, I remember). Nice to Know Slackware is still here with us in 2022!

> Patched to fix crash without systemd.

This is only a beginning, I’m afraid… The last bastion of the glorious BSDness in the Linux world, I applaud you! And I wish good luck.

There's also Gentoo (my distro of choice) and Alpine which use OpenRC rather than systemd.

Gentoo offers both systemd or OpenRC depending on preference

systemd in Gentoo has come a long way and generally has parity with OpenRC now.

+1 for Alpine.

One of my favorite distro's.

And don't forget Void Linux!

Void Linux is runit right?

It doesn't use systemd.

That's the parent's point, welcoming Slackware to the fun game of patching other programs that can't deal with systemd being missing.

If it can't live without systemd, find something else that can.

Please read!

Congrats Patrick and Slackware.

I started with Slackware 9.0, which I think was the last release to fit on a single CD-ROM. Like others I learned a lot about Linux, I wrote lots of simple shell scripts and did a lot of ./configure; make; make install.

Slackware lets you do things your way.

My first Linux distribution, circa 97 I believe? Oh the fun of setting monitor with the warning that if I screw the timings I might fry it...

I quickly decamped off to Debian as soon as apt came into the picture because "install everything or do your own dependencies" was not palatable, but I'm amazed there's still this very independent distribution out there. I never expected it to last so long.

Past related thread:

Slackware 15.0 release candidate one - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28201197 - Aug 2021 (56 comments)

Excellent, that's another distribution that doesn't use systemd.

Rather than being systemd hate, the diversity is good for the ecosystem.

I haven't yet found any reason to hate systemd. If I ever do I'll be happy to have options.

There was a great talk by a FreeBSD developer about systemd, and specifically the (in his eyes, somewhat unwarranted) hatred it has attracted and why

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo

Slackware was my first distro too. Painstakingly downloaded 40 disk images onto floppies at university, brought them to a friend's house to test on his PC, and it turned out the very last disk ended up corrupted. It was the last of the X11 set, so that first install couldn't run X11. Fortunately, there was Doom on svgalib.

While technically my first Linux was a generic boot/root floppy pair in late 1995, my first distro was Slackware in 1996. I've used Red Hat, SuSE, OSX, Solaris, Unixware and (rarely) Windows since then - but last night I updated my home PC to Slack 15RC3...

Gosh, its been ages since I’ve used Slackware. I remember doing a distro shootout back in high school and coming across Slax Kill Bill edition thinking it was the weirdest choice of Live CD.

(Slax is now based on debian I think, used to be based on Slackware)

From the Slackbook (http://www.slackbook.org/html/book.html#PACKAGE-MANAGEMENT): "The truth about pkgtool is not that it doesn't exist, but that it doesn't do any dependency checking."

So, how onerous is package management in Slackware if there is no dependency checking?

> So, how onerous is package management in Slackware if there is no dependency checking?

I can't say that I have used Slackware ever, so I don't know. But I have used a Linux distro where every package was statically linked by default. In that case they didn't use any dependency management since every package was just a tarball of some fully statically linked executables or libraries. The only real dependency was the Linux kernel.

That sounds sweet; what distro?

Patrick has already done this for us :-) The standard practice for Slackware is to install the entire distribution - roughly 12GB. If you don’t do this then your mileage may vary, and you may find yourself wasting time doing your own dependency management. For additional packages from SlackBuilds.org, there are various third-party package manager, some of which can handle dependency resolution in the usual way (e.g. sbotools, slapt-get).

It is very, very rarely onerous, since 98% of the time you already have the libraries/other dependencies installed. The other 2% of the time you might be stuffing around with community-built SlackBuild scripts or writing your own, but I have never had any major dependency-related issues before myself.

(I have been daily driving Slackware64-current on my personal laptop for a year or so.)

Back when I ran slackware, it was pretty easy. You installed packages from the disk sets and the packages had the files they needed. It kept track of which packages wrote out which file in some text file so on removing a package it would know if removing the file was safe.

If I found software that didn't have a package, I would compile it. When I got more advanced, I'd create slack packages for the software. Since I'd compiled it on my system, dependencies were already met. I don't remember for sure, but I believe that the tools to build autoconf software were something in the core package set.

Slackware’s built-in set of packages is pretty small by today’s standards, and the preferred way to install Slackware has always been to include everything that comes on the distribution media. That alone would go a long way in making sure that you will not get unresolved dependencies when you try to install a third-party package.

On the other hand, I found that, often, not having to install all the dependencies, and not having the installation of a package fail because of some missing little optional dependency, is a blessing in disguise.

A couple of things that make installing software and keeping it up to date a breeze are slackpkg (built-in) and sbopkg (third-party).

Fond memories of being in high school and wiping the family computer trying to install Slackware. Fall ‘96 so probably 3.1 or something.

Very cool it’s still around.

Slackware was the first linux distro I tried back when you would write it to 3.5" disks for installing. I remember it fondly, but soon after is when I then tried red hat and rpm; I was pretty much sold at that point. Slackware has the better name though. ;)

Slackware was the first linux distribution I used, and it taught me everything I know about Linux; and, thanks to how low-level it is, I'd say it's taught me a lot. I think it was the last linux system I enjoyed using, too, the last system I felt like I had control over.

I named the gateway that I built for our QA network darkstar.

Currently, it runs Oracle Linux, but it's on the 3rd generation now.

Everybody at work uses the name, but I'm the only one who knows where it came from, hat tip to Slackware and the Greatful Dead.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-Xic-CHInek

I hadn't listened to that in years.

Dark star crashes, pouring its light into ashes. Reason tatters, the forces tear loose from the axis. Searchlight casting for faults in the clouds of delusion. Shall we go, you and I while we can Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds?

Mirror shatters in formless reflections of matter. Glass hand dissolving in ice, petal flowers revolving. Lady in velvet recedes in the nights of good-bye. Shall we go, you and I while we can Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds?

Darkstar takes me back. I never knew it was from the Grateful Dead either. In the age of personality-less distributions, corporate jargon, it's nice to see random bits of Pat's tastes and personality finding themselves in server rooms around the world.

I am going to slyly put those lyrics on the darkstar web page tomorrow.

Maybe somebody will notice someday.

Likewise, I moved to gentoo for about 10 years after that, but have since given into systemd (mostly for pulseaudio, which was for Bluetooth audio) and moved to Ubuntu.

Edit: and a thank you to the slack team of the early 2000’s. I’d tried many linux distros but could never fully migrate to desktop use, Slackware finally helped me achieve that. Almost 20 years on and I owe my entire career to an early interest in linux and software dev

I remember the stack of disks, each with different categories of apps. (around 1998 or 1999) Good times. Though I did later pick up a RedHat set at First Friday in Dallas later, and using the CD drive was a nice change :-)

RPMs is what drove me avay from RedHat. Got tired of circular dependencies. Never looked back.

I used to use Slackware back in maybe 2003-2005. It was great. Eventually migrated to Ubuntu but I always appreciated that it got me hooked on Linux.

Now that I think about it I think Unraid uses Slackware, so I guess I'm still running it.

Red Hat was my first Linux (1997), and I had it for three years.

But Slackware was the first Linux I installed myself (2001).

And it was my entrypoint into using the command-line for everything.

This was back when I knew what was inside my Linux installation.

After Xenix and DG/UX, only available at the campus, getting Slackware 2.0 as cover CD on the Linux Unleashed first edition was the workaround of having a UNIX at home given that NT POSIX wasn't going to cut it.

I had to copy the files into the disk and do an installation from hard disk to hard disk via boot floppy as my SATA-IDE CD-ROM wasn't reckognised by it at the time.

Nice to see it still going on.

SATA-IDE CD-ROM? SATA is from 2000 and onward, and Slackware 2.0 is from 1993. I had a Plextor SCSI CD writer (bought in ~1998), it worked very well on Linux.

Slackware was the distribution I used for quite some time, and which got me into the BSDs, as well as into Debian (I grew fond of the package management, but the release cycle was still slow).

Systemd isn't my cup of tea, but I have a feeling that people who never grew accustomed to its predecessors like it more. Baggage I guess.

IDE CD-ROM then, it is not like I always check the dates before commenting and rather rely on fuzzy memories.

Yes Slackware 2.0 with the first version of ELF support on the kernel, summer of 1995 that is when I got my Linux Unleashed book with it.

SCSI always worked very well with Linux in terms of CD-ROM suppport.

Slackware was my first too. I think it was version 3.5 with a bunch of floppies.

Now that so much of my work is in containers, it might be time to go back to slack for the main OS.

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