Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old | Hacker News Reader

Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

theregister.com

217 pointsakoster126 comments

I ran Slackware for ~6 years, my first serious distro. It's kind of the perfect learning distro for Linux - a super stable base, but if you want more you need to learn how to do it yourself. You didn't need to compile your own kernel or set up tons of configuration just to boot, but if you wanted certain graphics drivers or other software, you quickly learned how to write shell scripts and manage builds and dependencies. I remember spending quite a few hours learning how to build my own media stack with mpv and all dependencies (Slackware only shipped with MPlayer in those days, and with no system ffmpeg). I found it to be a much better experience for that than other distros like Arch or Void, those are just too much at the beginning. Because of Slackware, for a good while my most comfortable programming language was bash!

I stopped using it when I had less time for tweaking my computer in my life (I moved to Debian), but it was a very formative experience. Good defaults, but with all the power to change whatever you want and the simplicity to make it manageable.

Happy birthday Slackware!

I was just telling a co-worker literally yesterday that a few years of Slackware was the single most effective thing I did to learn Linux well.

I ran it on my desktop and an old (old in the early 2000s!) laptop with 32 MB of RAM, and learned a TON. It's the perfect generic "Linux" system, and you can take it in any direction you want, but you have to do it yourself.

Funny enough, I also got too busy and moved to Debian.

I can only imagine in that era there was quite a bit more learning forced upon you than these days with our plethora of (somewhat) standards-compliant hardware and in-tree drivers. Though I'm definitely going to be channeling some of those experiences as I got a kernel-panic during the first boot after installing Slackware 15.0 on a newly built AMD B550 chipset / AMD Ryzen 5700G -based PC. I'm thinking its likely something to do with a combination of LILO, an NVMe interface SSD and EFI/CSM but I hope to get to the bottom of it. Worst case scenario, I perhaps can update the kernel via the bootable ISO as that was stable as a rock during the install.

> I can only imagine in that era there was quite a bit more learning forced upon you than these days with our plethora of (somewhat) standards-compliant hardware and in-tree drivers.

It's romanticized a lot, but boy was it painful! hear my story and weep.

In 1995 I got slackware with a textbook from the university library. I had a brand-new 486 paid for by a dad with 2 other kids in college and nothing more than a factory job to pay for things.

So my 486 had no CDROM. And it only had 4MB of RAM. And a pirated version of DOS, until I got slackware.

After 3 months of saving from weekend work I made enough to get a shitty soundblaster pro clone. And then I returned it for another unit, because, as I complained to the store owner "this doesn't work". When the replacement didn't work either I realised it must be my computer, more specifically, those "drivers" provided on the floppy disk were for msdos :-/

So then I started reading a bit, and digging into the driver sources, and reading the little pamphlet that came with the soundcard. "Hah!" I thought, "the IRQ channel for the soundcard appears to be hardwired!"

And thus begun the longest 3-day weekend of my short life up to that point; Linux had no modules, everything was compiled into a single binary image. You have any idea how long it takes a lowly 486 with 4MB of RAM to compile a kernel?

The entire weekend was "make this change, type make $SOMETHING, then wait for 50m, then watch it fail to boot, then examine how far the bootloader got, then boot with previous image, then undo that change and repeat the process".

Eventually had the soundcard working though. On a system on which no bloody games would run ...

My first Linux experience was very similar, except graphics card driven.

My neighbor told me to try Linux, and my computer at the time was a Mac (old PPC 603e cpu), which I’d put a PC Voodoo3 in and flashed it with a Max bios. Couldn’t afford a Mac card, PC ones second hand were much cheaper.

Anyway, the basic X frame buffer was so slow I needed accelerated 2D. The Voodoo3 driver was available as a patch to 2.2.18 and I was on 2.2.16. So, had to learn to patch and compile a kernel as one of my first acts of learning Linux.

But it got me accelerated 2D which made X bearable, so I could use KDE (2) or Gnome (1.4, still my fav).

After that it was enough to get me to build my next desktop as a Linux PC through college.

> The entire weekend was "make this change, type make $SOMETHING, then wait for 50m, then watch it fail to boot, then examine how far the bootloader got, then boot with previous image, then undo that change and repeat the process".

This is me still when I try to build Gentoo

I also used Slackware in the same period and remember having to edit the code of the Kernel to get the CD-ROM to use the correct IRQ/IO to get it to work. This was CD-ROM that used the sound card (Creative Labs) not IDE.

I used Slackware, among quite a few others in the early 00's. Moved to Ubuntu and Debian for awhile, but then got too busy to deal with all the questionable design decisions, and have been back on Slackware for the last 5-7 years or so.

It just keeps working, and when a new release comes out, it keeps working better. Better than I can say for my experience on most other distros. That it moved to pulseaudio eventually in the first place was a bit of a gasp moment, but it's generally been very good at adhering to the Unix design philosophy -- a rare thing these days.

Many years ago, I remember a guy working for an ISP saw me using NetBSD, I must have made some comment about how I liked it, and he said "That's what Slackware was supposed to be." I knew relatively little about Linux at the time but I always remembered that statement. (Today I use both on a daily basis.)

What hooked me on NetBSD was that early on I had a experience with a laptop where audio was not working. After a small amount of reading, I edited a file, recompiled the kernel and voila I had audio. The fact I was able to do that as a total novice was what made me a loyal user for the ensuing decades.

> That's what Slackware was supposed to be

After many many years of using Slackware, I still believe NetBSD was used as inspiration for the design of Slackware.

BTW, I really like pkgsrc, I wish that ended up being a standard for Linux instead of all the multiple package/dependency managers that exist.

And NetBSD is really my favorite BSD, I only wish it worked without a minor hardware issue on the Laptop I have. I may end up putting in a PR for 10.0 BETA once I am sure of the issue.

More likely 386BSD than NetBSD back then, although the timeline between the two is only a year and a bit apart.

Back in '92 I was interested in 386BSD, but told to check out linux (which was at 0.12 at the time), back then it was the root/boot disk distro, then mcc, then slackware.

What's the minor hardware issue?

I have a Laptop with 2 video Chips, Intel and Nvidia.

The Nvidia chip gets very hot, even when I disable it on boot. The CPU Temp stays low.

The Nvidia chip is in the lower left corner of the Laptop, and it cannot be disabled by a BIOS Switch. Since NetBSD has Nouveau support, I want to be sure 10.0 BETA supports that specific chip before deciding what to do.

FWIW, same thing heat issue happens with OpenBSD, but OpenBSD has no Nvidia support, luckily OpenBSD is able to ignore it. Slackware, no issue with Nouveau and heat.

I see, interesting. Definitely sounds like a kernel thing, and I honestly wonder if it isn't a BIOS/firmware issue with the Nvidia GPU handling incomplete initialization sanely. I wonder what would happen if you just tried booting DOS or some other OS on the thing. Or just sat in the BIOS?

If booting into something barebones leaves everything cool, and depending on how long it takes for the chip to get warm, perhaps you could move a `for (;;);` further and further down into the OpenBSD kernel and find the point things get cranky that way.

Extremely hacky approach though, I'll definitely concede that point >.>

(But if you want to try it, I would wholeheartedly recommend looking into something like iPXE, which would let you download each test kernel over HTTP at boot time and make the iteration process tolerable. This assumes you have a second machine though...)

Good points about Slackware being perfect for learning. It really was, for the reasons you gave. I started with Slackware 9.0, which I think was the last release to fit on a single CD-ROM. Like you 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.

Congrats Patrick and Slackware.

My first Linux distribution was Slackware 2.0, bundled with Linux Unleashed book in 1995's Summer.

I had to copy all the floppy images from the CD-ROM into the hard disk and then boot the installation from floppy, as my IDE CD-ROM still wasn't supported by the Linux kernel 1.0.9, and my Trident card was downgraded to 800x600, as X couldn't do 1024x768 with it.

Happy birthday Slackware.

EDIT: kernel version.

I had the same book and Slackware 2.0 was also my first distro. I think the book is still in some box at my parent's house.

I remember trying to figure out how to compile the kernel for everything in my desktop.

That must have been painfully slow but rewarding if and when everything finally worked! I definitely was spoiled trying Fedora Core 6 on a Pentium III with 512MB of RAM, a SoundBlaster Live!, an ATI Rage 128 graphics card, a WD Caviar 40GB IDE HDD, 2x IDE optical drives (a SONY DVD-ROM drive and a SAMSUNG CD-RW drive) and a 3Com Ethernet PCI card without any major (if any) hiccups! (The machine had a 3Com 56k PCI modem but we had just switched to SBCGlobal ADSL (either 128, 256 or 512kbps down) in 2006 which I used to download the live CD ISO(s). I remember being very confused that our 10/100 Linksys Ethernet hub was now being used to distribute the always-on internet between our family desktop and my laptop in addition to sharing files over SMB / Windows File Sharing / Network Neighborhood.)

Spoiled indeed.

The computer I used Slackware 2.0 on, was a Pentium 90 with 32MB RAM, 512MB HDD, Trident with a 1024x768 max, IDE CD-CDROM and Sound Blaster. Alongside a 14" monitor.

Getting Linux and BSD stuff had to be via Walnut Creek CD-ROMs, as going to the university computer lab and splitting across multiple floppies didn't scale.

I also think I had that book, or another one that was 4 inches or so thick..

X11 MODELINES, ipfwadm, BNC network cards, and PPP, tcl/tk shell scripting..

My first Linux distro was Slackware. I tried downloading it but my modem was too slow and people in the house kept picking up the phone. So, I supported OSS by purchasing a copy from, I want to say, Walnut Creek sometime around 1995. I still had the 7 disks 10 years ago or so. They are probably still around here somewhere.

I learned so much from Slackware and basically owe my livelihood to it. Everything from compiling the kernel to trying (and failing) to get X11 working. On the flip side, I'm super glad I don't have to do that anymore and can just use Linux without having to fiddle with the internal parts.

My favorite Slackware memory was how the version I downloaded disksets of (on a 14.4k modem, yeah) had a broken bootloader. Not sure of the Slackware release, but it was kernel 1.2.8, before the ELF transition. Anyway, every time I reinstalled, the bootloader hung on `LI` because the config was just broken, and I had to remember how to fix it.. every time.

So many hours recompiling kernels. My 4MB-equipped 486 took about 8 hours per. I only realized many years later after somehow finding the $400 for a memory upgrade, that it was only slow due to swapping. Going from 8 hours to 10 minutes was eye-opening.

X11 failed to run, for the same 4MB reason. I mean, it would launch, but I want to say it took 20 or 30 minutes.

Great story and thanks for sharing! $400 is a lot for a RAM upgrade! Did that upgrade double your ram to 8MB or something greater perhaps?

I think I had 4 slots with 4x1MB so $400 would have been 4x4MB for 16MB. I made do for a few more years though, I didn't have anywhere near that much cash for "just" memory.

That 486/DX33 ended up being upgraded to a Cyrix 5x86/120 (?) and I think I went to 16MB at that point. Memory prices were cratering around this time (99?) so in the end I think that whole upgrade was cheaper than the 16MB would have been a few years earlier.

Kernel 1.0.9 was the first with ELF support, and I remember it quite well, because it is written on the CD from Slackware 2.0 ("now with ELF support").

Man. Talk about a terrible time for me to have installed :D

I remember X11 modelines were not that fun.

OMG! I think I still have nightmares about X11 modelines! I spent so much time changing one thing and restarting X. Definitely not one of my favorite things about my Slackware experience.

Very good point about owing your livelihood. Same here. I learned a ton from installing Slackware 8.1 in the early '00s (from printing out the manual no less -- something I would be aghast to do today). I should probably cut Patrick Volkerding a check!

Anyway, happy birthday, Slackware!

Congratulations on the 30th

I am posting this from Slackware 15.0 right now, my main driver, but I do boot a BSD once in a while. If not for Slackware, I would have left Linux for a BSD years ago.

I hope Slackware can avoid all what I believe are crazy changes occurring in Linux Land. Already Slackware was forced to import PAM, but in good Slackware fashion PAM stays out of my way, so not a big deal.

You haven’t specified which BSD but FreeBSD[1] and NetBSD[2] have used PAM for about twenty years by now, haven’t they?

[1] https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/pam/

[2] https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-pam.html

Yes I know :)

I have used then all to test what I developed on Slackware for use in work, I like to be sure what I due can work on most "free" OSs. But their PAM, from what I understand is a different code base (bsdpam). But in these cases, PAM is invisible to me too.

What do you like about Slackware? Is it super bare bones? Have they resisted Systemd? If that’s it, why not something like Void? Are “packages” really just tarballs that you extract into /? I have so many questions! Haha

The main reason is it is very easy to set up and maintain. One big thing is I can use grep(1) to find what package a file came from, ls(1) to get a list of packages. No need to remember various obscure commands to search to query what is installed.

That was my first exposure to Linux in 1995. I remember downloading 30-something floppy disks over a painfully slow T1. I deployed our company's sendmail email server a few months later, running on an old PC. In 2006 I switched to Linux as my daily driver and if I need windows these days, it runs as a VM.

It was T3 that was the bomb back then, wasn’t it?

Yeah, sounded cool too. Back then 512kbit ADSL was exciting.

T1, T2, T3, OC-3, OC-12, and OC-48 are terminologies you don't hear anymore.

Where I’m living ADSL is still exciting (and one of only 2 options for wired Internet service). Currently on 2 (semi-stable) 60mbps down / 15mbps up pairs bonded together sold as a 100mbps down / 20 mbps up service. I keep it because the cable provider charges a ton for anything over 10mbps up when not on a promotional rate.

In 1995, many early ISPs were still on fractional T1s or even 56K leased lines! I remember upgrading one from 56K to T1 in mid 1995. T3s were rare: large regional ISPs and backbone providers.

A T1 was about ten times faster than a 3-1/2" floppy drive wasn't it?

I never thought of a T1 as "slow" until I started downloading CD images for Linux distros. The first cable modem connections I had were so much faster for downloads.

T1 is about 1.54mbit/sec IIRC

You could download a floppy in like..10-15 seconds on a T1

It would take a minute to copy the files to a floppy.

I remember being a kid and hearing about T1 lines and being amazed at their speed and how the server for the game I played was running off one. I pictured it as some special commerical offering that was rare to have.

Funny learning how slow those are by today standards.

Check out Mr. Fancy T1 line over here. I remember downloading Slackware floppy images over 28.8 dialup. Talk about pain. I recently stumbled on a dusty box of them whilst cleaning out the attic.

I'm thankful I never experienced that. My family switched from AOL dial up to an AT&T ADSL connection (either started out as 128, 256 or 512kbps down circa 2006 IIRC). It still didn't make downloading FreeBSD and Fedora Core 6 ISOs easy but it definitely was doable in a reasonable amount of time!

(Caution: Monty Python Reference) 28.8? I used to dream about 28.8, I had 14.4, and before that 2400baud.

Do you remember the dreaded 'floppy disk is probably unreadable' sound during installation of any software on floppy?

2400 baud. I wish. I had to manually dial my rotary phone and then place the handset into my 300 baud CAT acoustic coupler modem.

To be fair by the time I 1st used Slackware that 300 baud modem had long been replaced and I at the time I had bonded ISDN channels for 128kbs connection paid for by my employer. Soon replaced by a T1 to my home also paid for by my employer.

Noice!

Did you employer give you a spec-'d out computer/workstation too? I don't even know how you hook up ISDN equipment, but I know an SGI Indy had it built in.. ~1993.

We were a DEC partner , so I had a DEC 3000 AXP which was eventually replaced by a 500 series AlphaStation.

I just heard it again as I read your comment, and it sent shivers down my spine.

I set a kitchen timer to 12 minutes for each floppy disk's worth of download at 14.4k. It took many evenings of interrupting my TV watching every 12 minutes to kick off a new zmodem download. If it was indeed 30 disks (which seems reasonable; some of the disksets were only 3 or 4, others were 8 or more, depending on which packages you wanted), that would have been 6 hours in one shot with no overhead.

I have fond memories of installing Slackware and messing around with it in high school, around ‘98. I had access to a cable modem and cd burner. If I recall correctly at that time booting directly from cdrom was still not always available so the default method to install Slackware (and also to boot it after installation) was using a floppy plus cdrom.

I soon figured out that it was easy to skip the cdrom altogether and make a minimal install using just the boot disk and ftp. So easy yet you had to be deliberate and understand what you were doing. Such a great learning exercise.

In 1995 or so, I wanted to play with something not-Windows, but wasn't yet advanced enough in my degree to have access to my school's AIX setup. Bought a Slackware disk set, and a BSD (probably FreeBSD, honestly don't remember), took them both home. Slackware had drivers for my weird non-IDE CD-ROM drive, the other one didn't, and it's been nothing but fun since then.

Without Slackware, I would not have learned how to build a web server, wouldn't have learned about UUCP (which thankfully I haven't needed to use in about 20 years)... basically the entire course of my life would have changed.

(Entirely random aside: I returned the opened BSD disks for a full refund. Remember when you could do that without them assuming you copied the disks?)

Thanks for sharing! And glad to hear you are still using Slackware! (which still seems to have drivers for just about everything!) If you recall, where did you purchase your Slackware and BSD disk sets? I recall Micro Center and Fry's Electronics both sold some Linux and BSD distributions on DVDs but I never saw too many folks buying them (then again, this was circa 2010). And that's a great comment about the return policy! I'm curious when the law was changed (unless it was a per-state thing, assuming you are from/in the US).

Also with regards to UUCP, it appears there are some modern uses for it [0]. I have no perspective with regards to UUCP but from someone who used it (if it doesn't bring back painful memories), do you recall what you used it for or what using it was like? Essentially email + USENET newsgroups + FTP wrapped into one protocol?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Current_uses_and_legacy

On my case, we did have access to DG/UX on the student lab, and had Windows NT offered proper POSIX support, I might never have bothered with Linux at home.

It only took about 30 years for Microsoft to accept POSIX matters, regardless of its caveats.

Naturally there were a couple of factors that led to that change of mind.

Back on the subject, I have spent endless hours going through the packages on Slackware, specially GCC, given my interest into compilers.

Just want to make a note that Slackware 14 (the previous major version), from 2012, which shipped with the 3.2.29 kernel, is receiving updates as recently as today.

Its quite amazing indeed! For the curious, here's the changelog for stable releases 14.0 [0], 14.1 [1], and 14.2 [2]. Not all packages are updated (such as the kernel version, but many critical attack surfaces are such as curl [3], ca-certificates, and sudo. Also note that for Slackware 14.0 and 14.1 releases, this was prior to the Mon Aug 3 19:49:51 UTC 2015 bump of the build architecture from i486 to i586 builds [4]. This means that one should be able to run currently supported Slackware 14.0 and 14.1 on any 486 compatible processor, and Slackware 14.2, 15.0 and -current on Pentium-compatible i586 CPUs since they are still building 32-bit packages [5][6]!

[0] http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/slackware/slackware-14.0/ChangeLog...

[1] http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/slackware/slackware-14.1/ChangeLog...

[2] http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/slackware/slackware-14.2/ChangeLog...

[3] http://www.slackware.com/security/viewer.php?l=slackware-sec...

[4] http://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-current/sou...

[5] http://www.slackware.com/changelog/stable.php?cpu=i386

[6] http://www.slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=i386

Back around 2007 or so, I discovered BasicLinux (https://distro.ibiblio.org/baslinux/), a stripped down version of Slackware for old PCs, compatible with Slackware 4.0 packages. It installed from a couple of floppies onto my ancient ThinkPad 365X.

BasicLinux had a great community and introduced me to mailing lists. I learned a lot about how Linux works, tracking down dependencies with ldd and modifying config and init scripts. After a year or so of playing with BasicLinux, I moved on to Slackware, but continued to use the mailing list for help.

So happy 30th to Slackware and cheers to anyone who provided assistance on the BasicLinux mailing list!

Great story and thanks for sharing! As someone newer to mailing lists, how did (or do) you use them without flooding your inbox? Lots of rules/filters and directories? Using mutt, alpine or gnus? I appreciate the USENET newsgroups perspective of having a separate directory (other than your inbox) to read and respond to posts but it seems not many projects use NNTP these days.

Thanks! The mailing list was never that busy, so it wasn't really a problem. I'd probably automatically redirect to a folder if I needed to do that.

Funny that you mention USENET. I'm subscribed to about 20 newsgroups, using Claws-mail. It is quite nice that they're separate from my other mail accounts.

That's great, thank you. In the mid-90s I was running all sorts of large public Internet nodes off 386s with 4Mb of RAM on Slackware. Great to see you can still find Linux to run on these.

It was also my first serious Linux distro. I started using it around Slackware 9.0 (wow, it's twenty years already). It was the PERFECT distro for learning because it was simple (as in uncomplicated) yet workable. I learned a ton about bash scripting, kernel compiling etc. I remember I even "ported" Reiser4 filesystem into the Slackware installer (who remembers that FS today LOL). Slackware did not have ANY dependency mechanism for packages, so often installing them was a lottery. Oh the long hours spent running ldd and strace to find out what's missing.

I switched to Gentoo after Slackware because everything was working just fine and I got bored. After that I learned that my free time is better spent on gaming and I switched to Windows 7. I came back to Linux after few years and damn - systemd took me by surprise. I never learned to use it properly because it's so much more complicated than my beloved Slackware SysV Init.

Congratulations to Patrick Volkerding - managing distro for 30 years is no small feat. Happy hacking.

> Slackware did not have ANY dependency mechanism for packages, so often installing them was a lottery.

That's why i switched from Redhat 5.2 to Slackware and never looked back.

In redhat you had circular dependencies: libfoo requires package libbar and libbar requires package libfoo.

Solution: use rpm --force

Also an RPM package will refuse to install when a dependency was not found (when you compiled and install the library yourself).

Slackware was my first personal OS back in 1996. Built a PC for college, and instead of Windows, I got slackware floppies free from the school. Took me 2 weeks to install. Never got the sound card to work.

Very nice! Was there a reason your school gave out Slackware installer floppies? Was it required for a class? Or through a student organization? And if you recall, were you running a Creative SoundBlaster? Ad Lib? Gravis ultrasound?

One of the professors were giving them out. Not a class requirement as we all had school Unix login. Remember pine? I don’t remember the sound card anymore. It was pentium and expensive as hell. Spent all my money earned during summer construction. Like $2K.

I might be mistaken, I think I had a CD rom instead of floppies.

Maybe a boot floppy and then a CD?

Pine finally dropped the weird custom license and became Alpine which I used a few days ago to read my panix.com email

I surely do remeber pine, using it from ambar and green phosphor terminals to check on mails from our lab assignments, which were mostly the only use I had for emails at the time.

Yes I must have wasted entire days of my life messing around with OSS and ALSA over and over again when you add it all up, lol

I loved running Slackware. It is still the only distro I got to feel "right" and was able to trust it to stay that way. The configs were all well documented and approachable, stored in obvious places.

I feel like Arch Linux has taken up that mantle in today's world to a certain extent. I'm glad there are distros like these.

Happy birthday Slackware!

1994 and my friend had a harebrained scheme to start an ISP and we needed to learn Linux to run it. 75 floppies later I was hooked and Free Software and Linux have been my computing lifeblood ever since. Thanks Slackware!

Wow! 75 floppies! That sounds like a lot! Was that Slackware 1.x? 2.x? And this sounds like a very interesting story: can you elaborate on any architecture details, equipment, getting other ISPs to peer?

It was Slackware 2.1 and the 3.5 floppy disks came in 3 collections (1 required and 2 optional). If I remember right they were the base OS, X-windows and development files. As for the ISP, that idea ended up flopping (heh) and never made it out of the "fun discussions" phase.

I guess not unlike the software sets [0] Slackware seems to still use these days. Hearing this definitely makes me understand how spoiled we are to have reliable and inexpensive flash media, optical disks and network connections! I imagine just getting the base OS set downloaded, imaged and installed was a chore! And that's too bad to hear about the ISP idea. I've heard of stories of how one could run a small and viable ISP out of a garage or small office with descent wiring and a bank of modems. I'm glad a few providers still exist like Sonic.net, Xmission Internet and Panix.com and hope with the way things are going with funding for wiring and Internet connectivity (at least in the USA) we might be in such an era again in the future (hopefully!)

I installed it in the same time frame running a pre-1.x kernel. I was in a dorm with no Ethernet and the school only had 1200 baud modems so I had to FTP onto floppies from a computer lab. That earned me my first and only DOS boot sector virus.

It's funny how most comments here are on the line of "Slackware was my first distro, I have a soft spot due to the memories, but now I moved on to $MODERNDISTRO...". My case was the exact opposite.

My Linux journey started in May 2000 with Red Hat 6.2 (a Deluxe boxed edition). I then upgraded Red Hat up to 7.2, and then went to Mandrake, from 8.2 and up to 9.2. Then, a special version of dependency hell that was the Mandrake 9.2 framebuffer console forced me to switch to Slackware, which I was already using for experimenting.

This Register article hits it in the nail; Slackware might look primitive but it's in fact quite advanced. It's my regular desktop driver, working as a lawyer, translator and university lecturer. There are many things who are automatically detected and configured, and whatever stuff you had to configure by hand, it lives on legendarily over and over.

I had to configure stuff by hand, yes; but I have configs from those early days almost 20 years ago which still are there, unmodified. They just keep working.

So, if you would like a reasonably stable, fast, modern and simple Linux system, and you are not afraid of using a text editor, then you should give Slackware a try.

Slackware was my first distribution! One of my sister's friends came over and installed some 7.x release and left me on my own to configure xfree86.

Needless to say, for my first time using linux, it didn't work out. But a short time later I was dual booting mandrake & slackware 8.1. Ahhh...the sweet nostalgia of gnome 1.4.

Youngin's these days don't have any challenge left. Now where's my cloud to yell at? And why are you on my lawn?!

I agree! Although I just had a kernel panic on my first boot after installing Slackware 15.0 on a Ryzen 5700G chip / B550 board. Likely due to LILO + EFI (or defaulting to CSM / legacy BIOS boot?) + an NVMe SSD + MBR partition table. I hope to chroot into it and figure out whats wrong since the installer ISO booted and ran without any hiccups. But I agree that in general, I have only count on one hand the times I couldn't load X11, lost network connectivity, or couldn't boot after an update or installing new hardware. We definitely are in the year of (the relatively compatible) Linux desktop(s) :-P

I came across slackware when I was 10 years old on an Indian computer magazine cd, pcquest.

I ran into a ton of issues installing sound cards, running X11 on a cyrix mediaGX card. And learned how to compile kernels, ask questions on mailing lists and debug C programs.

Truly the start of my serious engineering career haha.

Loved seeing how others have similar experiences and are all on hn. Small world.

A small world indeed! I'm in the process of rebooting my engineering career and hoping forcing myself to use Slackware may help in a small way!

Back in 2015, I worked with Pentium III -class Cyrix processors on a legacy but still supported and in-production embedded system released in the mid 2000s AFAIK. But I never came across a Cyrix-based consumer PC or laptop (growing up in Southern California). Were Cyrix processors common on consumer PCs in India?

yeah! a lot of compaq presario machines came with cyrix mediagx with embedded graphics cards.

oh man, i got mandrake (or maybe redhat?) from pcquest in like 1998 and what a ride that was. The monthly pcquest drop was always a monumental event to my 12yo self.

haha did we know each other?!

I'm still running a Slackware box.

While not my first distro, that would be the copy of Red Hat Linux 5.2 I got with the Unleashed book, it is the distro I'm most comfortable with.

I’m still getting more comfortable with it myself but appreciate the ethos and decisions made by Pat and the development team. Just installing 15.0 now as a second OS on my mom’s newly built PC.

Slackware was one of my first Linux distros, installed on a 286 laptop with 2mb of ram. We had to trick the installer that we had 4mb or else it wouldn't install. Good times. That's where I learned Perl.

Edit: It was probably a 386, memories of that time are sketchy.

Thanks for sharing! Could you elaborate more? I was unaware there was any Linux distribution that was compatible with anything but 386-class processors?

Well, technically my neighbor who was a CS prof. helped me out and I was 12 years old so I can't really elaborate a lot. He really wanted me to use Linux and gave me that laptop and I started programming in Perl and C - just tiny programs and learned the basics of Linux. I remember him helping me out with the install and it took quite some time but that's all I really can say about it.

Honestly, now that I think about it, it might have been a 386 but I was entirely sure it wasn't. Memories are weird.

Thanks for sharing! I take it that was a hand-me-down laptop? My first PC I could call my own was a hand-me-down 6-year-old Toshiba Tecra Pentium II laptop with a 5GB IDE HDD and 192 MB of RAM running Windows 98 SE I received when I was maybe 10. I wish I would have installed Linux or had a compiler handy to learn how to write "real" software (as opposed to Logo in a MicroWorlds Pro environment), though eventually I discovered Linux from a friend's dad recommendation to try Fedora Core 6. IIRC it was painful downloading the ISO(s) over a 512kbps DSL connection, which had a copy of GCC!

This was my second computer, I had a Compaq Presario Pentium 75 mhz that ran Win 95 and later 98 SE. The laptop in question was a hand-me-down from the neighbor and it had a white-black screen so instead of it being a black screen with white text it was reverse. A very strange "little" computer that my mother sadly threw out when I moved out many years ago. This was in the 14.4kbit modem days and I think it was an actual copy of Slackware 3.1 on diskettes.

But as I said, my memory is very sketchy. I just remember the good times I had fiddling around with that thing.

Thank you as well for the good talk!

My first distro. I remember buying a Linux Magazine that gave installation CDs as a bonus and had a quick walkthrough to install it.

I ended up deleting windows from my pc by destroying all partitions...It has been quite a ride :-)

Great story and brings back great old and recent memories! I recall the massive magazine rack at my local Fry's Electronics and was very glad to see that on a recent trip to Micro Center, they still have quite a selection in their newsstand / checkout aisle including the print editions [0] of Linux Magazine [1] which still includes free Linux distribution installer DVDs! Are you still using Slackware these days? As a daily driver? On a hobby box?

[0] https://linuxnewmedia.square.site/ [1] https://www.linux-magazine.com/

Slackware was my second Linux distro, after SLS. I ran a heavily customized Slackware for about 4 years: custom kernel, aout->ELF upgrade, many packages built from source.

Wow! It sounds like you have seen a lot of major changes! But so far, no SysVinit->systemd nor dropping 32-bit i586 package builds for Slackware 15.0 and -current [0][1]. As someone new to Slackware I appreciate the balance of having lots of pre-built packages and just about everything that's not included as a build script on SlackBuilds.org (known as SBo by many) [2]. Are you still using Slackware today?

[0] http://www.slackware.com/changelog/stable.php?cpu=i386

[1] http://www.slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=i386

[2] http://www.slackbuilds.org/

I've been working with Linux in one form or another for 30 years now! I almost can't believe it's been that long. Though I haven't used Slackware since the late 90's, I might take another look.

> I've been working with Linux in one form or another for 30 years now! I almost can't believe it's been that long.

Congrats on that personal milestone! Quite amazing for something community-developed and supported throughout several generations of hardware and changing technologies!

> Though I haven't used Slackware since the late 90's, I might take another look. I would encourage it! The latest stable 15.0 release has pipewire and many other modern improvements, and I have been using the -current rolling release on my desktop PC without any hiccups since early 2022!

Hey, how about the gcc->egcs->foo->gcc upgrades?

Upgrades ? My main issue with gcc is not being able to compile old version on newer systems and the new versions not being able to compile old programs. But Slackware is great. My only complaint is that it doesn't ship static libraries anymore.

Relative young'un here, my first introduction to Linux was Ubuntu 12.04 in 2013, when I was in elementary school :). The very first day I installed it, I managed to disable admin access for my user, so I had the pleasure of obtaining a recovery root shell and learning about the sudoers file.

These days I run Arch Linux, which is the closest I can get to total control of every aspect of my system (without sacrificing prebuilt binary packages - I do not have the patience to wait for my browser to be built from scratch!). I'm quite happy with my understanding of the modern Linux stack! Though I still look longingly at the early days of Linux, when you really had to do everything yourself, and bringing up a Linux system from scratch was worth serious bragging rights.

Do you think I would gain something by trying out Slackware today in 2023? Perhaps see how Linux used to work in the good old days, without SystemD or a fully working Xorg? And should I do so with modern Slackware, or an older version to truly experience the floppy install process (hardware support may be an issue--might try to source an ancient Thinkpad)?

> The very first day I installed it, I managed to disable

your keyboard?

Ha, got distracted in the middle of typing out my comment. Fixed now.

Was saying that I managed to disable admin access for my user, so I had the pleasure of obtaining a recovery root shell and learning about the sudoers file.

I started using computers at the age on 10 on a Timex 2068, so I am bit curious at what age that was.

While coding BASIC and Z80 Assembly were a bit of challenge, but doable, installing a UNIX based OS is another level.

Regarding trying Slackware today, I think it would be more interesting to try out another UNIX like one of the BSDs, or getting hold of HP-UX, Solaris, Aix somehow, as they do provide a complete different experience, while Slackware it is still a Linux distribution, dispite the differences.

I started using Slackware in the early 2000s. Tired of Windows (and rebelling a bit against The System), I ended up installing Slackware into the family desktop and used it as my daily driver. After a while I got a refurbished horizontal case desktop that I repurposed into a home server, installed Slackware and learned to deploy a mail server and a LAMP stack so I could offer hosting (email and sites) to my high school friends - then gmail came around and everyone forgot about my little cool hosting provider. After a while I got hooked into FreeBSD, but for some reason, and apart from using it for some niche projects, it didn’t really stick for me, since I always find a way back into either Slackware or Arch nowadays. As you can probably tell, reading through all the other comments brings back a certain nostalgia.

Awesome!! Slackware is still my favorite Linux distro. I like to think of it as Linux From Scratch for the lazy.

Likewise! I appreciate how the developers set sensible defaults and a descent package selection for general productivity within the installer defaults but I have often found myself building many packages from scratch from scripts on SlackBuilds.org. It forces me to learn while not loosing too much productivity compiling everything from scratch - though I hope to try to set up LFS one of these days!

Brings back memories! I cut my teeth on Slackware 4 and then 7.

I can only imagine, specially back when hardware and drivers were much bigger concerns for many! I find it quite amazing that Slackware 7 released in late 1999 [0] never had an end-of-life (EOL) specified according to Wikipedia [1] but Slackware 8.1 released in mid-2002 [2] received updates until August 1, 2012 [3], over 10-years of support which I find quite impressive for a non-enterprise-oriented distribution! That's not to mention the consistency and minimal interface and tooling changes between releases to this day.

[0] http://www.slackware.com/lists/archive/viewer.php?l=slackwar...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slackware

[2] http://www.slackware.com/lists/archive/viewer.php?l=slackwar...

[3] https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-8.1/Change...

Am I remembering right that I got it from tsx-11.mit.edu?

tsx-11 was, IIUC, primarily a mirror of Linux (i.e. the kernel itself). But it could certainly have mirrored Slackware as well.

This sounds like it was a bit before my time but looks like there are some references to that FTP site on this HN thread here [0] and TLDP article here [1]. Though GitHub/GitLab/SourceForge.net are similar, I miss the flexibility and simplicity of FTP sites and mirrors (though I only experienced the tail-end of that era AFAIK.) I'm glad to see that there are many Slackware FTP mirrors still online [2] such as OSUOSL [3] and XMission Internet [4] but perhaps these are less like the FTP sites containing much more than packages and source code?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28565745

[1] https://tldp.org/HOWTO/META-FAQ-2.html

[2] https://mirrors.slackware.com/mirrorlist/

[3] ftp://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/slackware

[4] ftp://mirrors.xmission.com/slackware/

I used Slackware on Pentium with 16MB of memory. In order for my sound card to be detectable from Linux I had to run a special proprietary program to set it in “Sound Blaster” mode. So my computer actually booted in MS-DOS, ran the sound card utility and then started Linux using LOADLIN.EXE. All from autoexec.bat.

It was my first distro in 1993 or 1994, with I think a 0.99 kernel.

Still have the warm fuzzies every time I think of it.

How about 0.99 patch level 15g kernel? That's what was shipped with the first version of Slackware that I used (I was upgrading from an SLS distro).

My first Linux experience was downloading Slackware installation images from a BBS, writing them to floppy disks and then jumping into the unknown.

I believe I destroyed a lot of important data that day (what is "a backup"?), but other than that, good times. :-|

My parents gave me a bunch of my 'old junk' and I found the Slackware floppies I painstakingly downloaded over a 14.4 modem.

I still run Slack to this day. It’s the only distro of Linux that makes sense to me. Slack or BSD, those are my choices.

Oh man, good times. Those diskettes <3

I can only imagine (sans any floppy disk or drive reliability issues)!

Some links just in case you want to re-live the experience :-P

http://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-3.3/bootdsk...

https://www.floppydisk.com/

I’ll always hold a special place in my heart for this distro.

I used it as a very solid file server for a long time.

> Version 1.0 of Slackware was announced on the July 16, 1993

"Very good year. Nearly as old as I am!"

I still use it to this day.

Hail Patrick!

FTA: IBM S/390 versions have been discontinued.

Interesting, I wonder who did the port?

Good times, that was my first distro, before Ubuntu then SuSE

All Mac for a while now

Second distro I ever used, the first being Lasermoon. Prior to that, I used something that was a Linux 0.9 kernel and a bunch of disk images FTPed from some dude's server in Finland.

Back in the olden days it ran just fine on a Compaq Deskpro 386SX but needed a whopping 4MB of RAM.

Thanks for sharing! This is the first I've heard of Lasermoon / Linux-FT but it appears that was a popular option back in the day based on these references [0][1][2][3][4][5][6]. How did it compare with Slackware? Or Yggradsil [7] or SLS [8] if you happened to have used those? Also, 4MB doesn't seem like a huge jump from Windows 3.0's minimum required 1MB of RAM or 2MB with Multimedia Extensions [9], but perhaps 4MB was often what common PCs had back in 1991/1992?

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/03/linux_distro_hopping/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26503724

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36682277

[3] https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/61777/Linux-FT/

[4] https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/139

[5] https://www.linux.co.cr/distributions/review/1995/0416.html

[6] https://techmonitor.ai/technology/lasermoon_touts_inexpensiv...

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softlanding_Linux_System

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.0#System_requirement...

> How did it compare with Slackware? Or Yggradsil [7] or SLS [8] if you happened to have used those?

I can't remember what it was like running Ubuntu 12 and that was only ten years ago, Lasermoon was 30...

Everything was command-line, not least because I didn't have enough space to install X. It worked okay. I feel like the compiler might not have been gcc? Not sure. I know that around the late 90s there was gcc and egcs, which was kind of a fork, that re-merged - I used that on Redhat 6, not RHEL6 but Redhat 6, with Gnome, and the K Desktop Environment as an option (the first versions of both!).

I guess I could trail about and see if I could find images of Lasermoon and try to install it, probably on a VM. If you're interested I could make a video, I guess?

Edit: this was the CD! https://archive.org/details/Shop0396

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