Slackware 14.1 is released | Hacker News Reader

Slackware 14.1 is released

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115 pointsuggedal66 comments

I ran Slackware many moons ago. It was very bare bones and it took a lot of work, but I was young and it was an immersive experience. As another commenter wrote, people on IRC played up how 1337 they were for running Slack. I disagree slightly with that statement. I spent a lot of time building my Slack system on a PII 266, and I was 12, so it took me a long time with a lot of false starts. I don't think anyone was trying to be "1337", they were just proud of what they'd accomplished. I know I was.

In any event, it's cool to see Slack is still around. I installed ArchLinux on my MBP a couple weeks back. After installing Mavericks, the modified EFI partition I created no longer lets me boot Arch, so I think I'll give Slack a try. It's the challenge that makes it worth it.

Also, I have to strongly suggest to anyone who is not all that into Linux but is interested in learning: Skip the window environment. Force yourself to just sit there on the command line. It's surprising the kind of focus you have when you can't be distracted by all manner of visual eye candy. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it was a real pleasure to use only the CLI. It's sort of like the difference between writing with sidewalk chalk and a fine fountain pen. You find yourself writing /differently/. It's a subtle change with lots of unintended consequences that cause you to think about your work from a different perspective. As Alan Kay put it: Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

Also, since package managers seem to be the common gripe. I never used one, and I'm glad I didn't. I learned a lot by not having a proper package manager as a crutch. The creature comforts were never the point for me, inventing creature comforts that fit me was an enlightening experience and one that I think ought to be recognized for what it was: It wasn't "efficient" or "awesome" -- it was the basics. It was nuts and bolts, and so few things are these days. Sometimes it's not about nostalgia, it's about first principles.

Around the tenth time you re-run configure and hope that app picks up those dev libraries you installed for it, you'll get a wee bit jaded.

I'd rather recommend a weekend spent with Linux From Scratch in a VM.

> Force yourself to just sit there on the command line.

That's good advice in general but instead of using the bare CLI I'd suggest that you learn about screen and tmux early on. It'll make you miss the windowing system less.

Personally I use Xmonad for my desktop (all servers are headless, of course -- running screen but tmux looks interesting). It's a no-nonsense tiling WM for managing all your xterm windows. I also have dmenu installed, launching apps directly from the WM is more convenient than you'd think.

I guess the two of you refer to not having X installed at all, but while it does provide some distractions, I can't see myself getting shit done (i.e. procrastinate on hnews) without a real browser.

The first non-windows system I installed was FreeBSD and later on moved to slackware and then other linux distros. I would really recommend FreeBSD to a novice who'd like to install an un*x and really understand how it works.

It's mostly the same steps as slackware but 1/ FreeBSD docs are godly (I didn't have internet at the time and managed to do all I wanted with just the FBSD user manual, I hope it hasn't changed since then) and 2/ Slackware is sometimes hard to get to work for the wrong reasons. Lack of proper dependency tracking in the package manager for instance is just insane unless you only plan to install a couple packages or you plan to spend your life manually installing and updating your packages (or never update which seems to be how most slackware users deal with that in my limited experience).

In the end I don't think it requires more skill to properly set up a slackware install versus some BSD or even Gentoo or Arch. And if you don't really care about having a maintainable OS and just want to know how everything fits together in a modern linux system you might as well try Linux From Scratch, it's meant for that.

I've passed through a few distributions (Slackware -> Conectiva -> RedHat -> Mandrake -> SuSe -> Debian -> Slackware) till I stuck with Slackware and have been using it for the last 10+ years.

Slackware 3.6, my first distribution was really scary but it's been a few years since I had to do too much of basic configuration by hand. Of course some stuff took me sometime but right now I can use the touchscreen on my laptop, listen to music using my bluetooth headphones, use the HDMI to show video and play audio with THAT much work. <ad> If you need some tips checkout my blog http://dallarosa.tumblr.com </ad>

For the people complaining about Slackware's package system: I don't what's people's problem with dependency management. Doing everything from existing packages is great while packages exist. When you're out in the wild and can't have proper packages You'll see all kinds of weird stuff. The most interesting problem I had was Debian trying to uninstall the kernel and all basic libs cause I was trying to install a newer version of Qt.

For those calling Slack users arrogant: I think we can talk about arrogant people in any area. But as someone already mentioned, if you take a look at LinuxQuestions, you'll see that people have been nice for the last 10 years or more. I never had a question been answered with arrogance or bad manners. Most people were very helpful.

Slackware is a great distribution and I intend to keep using it for as long as I use a computer :)

I had a similar route as you and for a great many years I ran Slackware and Debian before eventually just settling on Slackware.

That was the moment that I finally really started to learn how to run a Linux system properly. I learned how to fix problems on my own, build packages from source while managing dependencies and everything. I got to spend a lot of time tinkering and could finally tinker without breaking anything.

Sadly, work and gaming led me back towards Windows and after a few years break, I just couldn't go back to Slack (I tried). Moreover, it seemed like there was a slight shift in the Slackware community and a lot of folks were now using Arch.

I gave it a try and haven't looked back. I still love and respect Slackware, but Arch is totally kickass-good-to-me.

I could almost have written this myself. ;)

I've been waiting for this release for about 2 weeks, since my laptop died and I had to replace it, and the installation of Slackware 14 didn't transfer too well (no networking) so I decided to wait out 14.1, since the changelogs were saying there were so close to release time anyway.

Lots of people are sceptical of Slackware and I can understand those sentiments fine. Slackware is simply my personal preference for two super simple reasons (and a lot of other minor reasons).

1: It makes me feel at home. I never fear I won't be able to do something, or find something. The whole thing is made to be configurable and it is.

2: It's never in my way when I want to do something. I never cussed at Slackware for doing something stupid. I have to do everything myself anyway! :D

Packages; I love the package management. Not that Debian's package manager doesn't absolutely rock imho, because I think it does, but Debian is like the neighbor: the house is almost the same, but it still feels more foreign than my own house, which I decorated myself and all that. I get my packages from SlackBuilds most of the time. I love SlackBuilds, too. I think that there's almost nothing missing between Slackware's fairly broad software library and SlackBuilds for almost everything else.

I did run Ubuntu on my laptop for years. I tried every new release of Ubuntu for 5 or 6 years and I was always genuinely excited. But then they started making mistakes. PulseAudio didn't work the first time they included it. One time, an update broke X. The video driver (Nvidia) was updated too and they decided that my videocard was suddenly no longer supported. That was plain stupid. And then they moved to Unity, which I didn't really care for. I've been back on Slackware since 13, I think, and I will not let go of it. It's just my OS of choice, even if there are other beautiful Linux distributions out there. :)

Patrick, my hat is off to you and your team, for keeping this beautiful operating system going. May it have many, many years of life left in it. I'll be there to see it and use it. :)

I genuinely had no idea Slackware was still going!

Slackware and Debian were my first Linux experiments in the 90's after spending a few years with commercial UNIX. Debian stuck in the end but was replaced with FreeBSD after a couple of years.

The first rule about Arch linux is that we don't talk about Arch linux.

Better take the wiki down then

On that note, the wiki is amazing. I use Debian but I constantly find myself on the Arch wiki due to the in-depth explanations yet simple instructions for everything.

Same with me on OpenBSD - it's awesome!

Makes me want to play with arch Linux. There goes the weekend!

Usually people are skeptical about Slackware package manager (slackpkg). I thought I'd just throw in some links to alternatives. If you want to try another package manager you can install it and start using it in under one minute. Package manager is a package just like any other :)

One is slapt-get [0], supports third party repos, resolves dependencies if you use it with repos that have dependency metadata, if you really really must :) Salix repos are a nice source of extra packages, and have dependency metadata. You'll have to wait a bit for them to upgrade to 14.1.

Another nice package manager is slackroll[1]. This one doesn't do dependencies, but has other nice options.

For slackuilds (build script repo, like BSD ports) you can use sbopkg [2] or sport [3], both are nice.

Have fun.

[0] http://software.jaos.org/#slapt-get [1] http://rg3.github.io/slackroll/ [2] http://sbopkg.org/ [3] http://slackermedia.info/sport/

UPDATE: I think there's a lot more to a distro than just a package manager, and these tools might help someone. Of course you'll probably get most stuff you need out of the box, some others from slackbuilds.org.

Slackware pkgtools (installpkg, upgradepkg, removepkg) are really simple, manpage for each is under 2 screens of text, and they really get out of the way, and never betray you.

Further, init system is classic sysvinit with rc style scripts in /etc/rc.d and it supports normal SysV scripts like other distros, in /etc/init.d. No pulseaudio out of the box (it's available on slackbuilds.org if you want it). You can disable NetworkManager and install WICD from /extra in no time, and it's not gonna magically re-enable itself later.

There's also slackpkg+[0], an extension for the regular slackpkg program that enables third-party repos (e.g. Alien Bob's multilib repo.[1])

[0] http://slakfinder.org/slackpkg+.html

[1] http://connie.slackware.com/~alien/multilib/

I know that this is no way of judging a distribution - which never had a decent package manager as far as I know - but all the assholes, hacker-wannabes from my early IRC era (1999-2004) were pompously bragging about how elite they were using slackware.

I know many of you find that behavior childish but I'm 100% others encountered the same behavior as I did.

I never knew if it was the founders/dev's (I think was only 1 at the time) own attitude but seriously, slackware attracted idiots like honey bees.

> how elite they were using slackware

Actually, before the Slackware 14.0 version there was the 13.37 version. So yes, that's elite.

there will always be idiots.

there will always be people catching on to something, being loud, creating the first noise other people see.

Seriously. Fuck it. Ignore it. Ignore them.

I haven't followed Slackware dev for 10+ years (too old etc), but it was the awesome thing in the 90s (to me); at a time I was curious to learn about all the weird details, it gave me the opportunity,

I hope it still does give that opportunity, AND that young people take advantage of this.

Looking back, this is (part of) the magic and joy of computers. People doing a lot of cool shit, and then sending it off for free for other people to do other cool shit. No app store in sight.

Amen. I can't believe what people do for free, and that OSS has taken off at all. While there's room in this world for all kinds, my soul dies a little when someone comments, "wow, kids these days are so smart with computers!" While they watch them install iPhoto off the App Store.

It's not true, but there will always be awesome people with awesome ideas and be willing to share them with the community. It's like http://bedrocklinux.org/ Damned if I need to use it, but it's awesome that someone is pushing boundaries like that. Or CoreOS, or Docker, or Debian, or Sugar (OLPC)... It just goes on. Be a hacker, and enjoy life. Loud people are everywhere, but it's the quiet ones in the corner doing the cool work.

For example, if you would like your system to be mostly stable and unchanging, like Debian or a Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone, but would like access to cutting-edge packages from Arch, Bedrock Linux can provide this simultaneously and transparently.

Does... not... compute. If you want your system to be stable and unchanging, why would you care about the most cutting-edge packages? Those are the buggy ones, the reason Arch was always breaking my libraries or fucking up GRUB. Debian stable is stable because the packages in it have been tested as they made their way through "unstable" and "testing". If you want cutting-edge Debian packages, you run "testing"--that's basically the Arch experience, down to the periodic fuckups.

It would compute If you explored a little further than the front page, or even carefully considered the meaning of "bedrock".

http://bedrocklinux.org/introduction.html#what_bedrock_does

"And you thought getting support for your distro was hard now, we've provided n! combinations of software for you"

That should be n^m where n is the number of packages and m is the number of distributions (for software that's common to all distributions).

And anyhow, perhaps it would easier get support this way since you could get each software package to run in the distro where it's the easiest and then set them up to interact over IP like they would in containers.

> which never had a decent package manager as far as I know

This is false. The package management tools work fine, they're just different from some others. Slackware users find the design decisions in the provided tools to be a strength, but opinions may differ.

Slackware actually had, and still has, the best package manager I've ever used. http://www.slackware.com/config/packages.php

The "elite"ness of Slackware was a bit valid. It it has no automatic dependencies system, which in itself is a powerful tool that you can do awesome things with. The second fantastic thing (which sort of ties into the first) is that packages are modified as little as possible from the original author, save some metadata. So if you know what you are doing, and an openssl vulnerability is found, you can have a package built in minutes without waiting for the upstream.

Not only that but if somebody finds the bug/vulnerability in working with the distro, they can very easily contribute the fix upstream.

This is the big plus in favor of Slackware and Arch and something you don't see so much with say Ubuntu.

There's a good reason why the Slackware and Arch communities have generally always had the best documentation of all Linux distributions and even if you're not a user of either, the information is often friendly to solving problems in other distributions.

That may have been true back in the day, but certainly not anymore.

Most idiots nowadays have migrated to Arch.

Hey, no distro-bashing on HN! ...I like arch... :(

As others have pointed out, Slackware does indeed have an excellent package manager and even slackbuilds, a package depository of sorts. The slackware package manager does not do dependency checking, however. I see this as a good thing because I've broken things by compiling from source on Debian. Slackbuilds is quite helpful and provides most needed dependencies for you to compile first.

>I never knew if it was the founders/dev's (I think was only 1 at the time) own attitude but seriously, slackware attracted idiots like honey bees.

There's still only one and he's fairly hands off when it comes to the community. No one hears much from Pat and he does what he and his small team wants. So it's not the founder that's driving that attitude. I've actually found the slackware community to be one of the most open and helpful around. Check their forums and linuxquestions.org.

I have a similar feeling as you. The few times Pat does speak up end up being about really important issues that have impact for more than just the distro.

I still remember his public dropping of support for GNOME in 2005 to be a really big deal. I feel like it motivated a lot of people into putting in more effort to fix GNOME and got rid of a lot of problems that were plaguing the build process back then.

I started as a hacker-wannabe and felt in love with the simplicity, minimalistic approach, stability and control it gave to me.

Never went back.

Never saw Slackware that way. And I started using it in '96 or so.

Those types of people were attracted to Linux in general, not a specific distro that I can recall. The whole reason had to do with the perception of Unix being a "hacker" OS. And as most know, there is the whole cracker vs. hacker misconception. So naturally, Linux was the place to be. But back in those days, there wasn't as much choice in distro. You used Slackware, Red Hat, or Debian (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Dis...).

Aye. I think the OP's dates need to be revised slightly as well. All of the elitest jerks definitely started using Gentoo starting in '03ish. That's not a slam on Gentoo or anything...Sabayon is a fantastic project...just that's how I remember things.

Maybe you were just surrounded by assholes. I was on Slackware in the 90s, early 2000s and people in the community were friendly and helpful.

All these slackware haters! Go back to heroku, lusers. Glad to see slackware is still kickin', still have fond memories of my first linux install :>

That actually made me laugh. I was just having a discussion with a colleague on this matter. He suggested that we don't need to know about the OS these days with Heroku, Azure, GAE etc. My argument is that is fine until something goes wrong or you need something slightly outside the comfort zone of those products.

comes down to generalised knowledge versus product knowledge.

Slackware uses the 3.10.17 kernel bringing you advanced performance features such as journaling filesystems, SCSI and ATA RAID volume support, SATA support, Software RAID, LVM (the Logical Volume Manager), and encrypted filesystems.

This product release has been brought to you from the Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V* School of Marketing.

*(yy/p?)

I consider myself a newcomer in Linux. Started playing with Redhat then Ubuntu. After being introduced (more like forced) to Slackware, I can't get back to any other distro.

However, nowadays I've been torn between Slackware and Debian for the server setup since I've started exploring Ansible to quickly get a server up. But as long as Slackware doesn't offer package dependency management, Ansible won't be that much help, unless of course I do all of them in bash script.

The reason I gave up on Debian was because Debian was always off doing its own thing (changing default locations, changing how config files were put together, and so on). Slackware was really close to what you'd get if you downloaded the original authors' tarballs and did a ./configure; make; make install.

I think this is particularly relevant to servers. I was always fighting with Debian's ideas of how things should be. Hopefully that's changed in the meantime.

My first dabble with linux (late 90s) was good old ZipSlack on an a Zip100. Good to see Slackware is still alive and kickin'.

Great memories of Slackware, my first Linux. Slackware CD plus the HOWTO's and I was off. Doubt I'd have become a programmer without that fateful day, circa '94, that my friend freaked me out by showing me a Unix on his home PC and loaning me his Slack cd.

Good to see it's still alive. I learned immensely about Linux by using it during the 00's.

Time to try Slackware again. It was my first dip into Linux many years ago. I moved to apt-get supportive distros but the idea of keeping a smaller set of applications around and knowing exactly what's on there is appealing.

So is it the new thing to ask for money for CDs/DVDs before putting the ISO's up on the mirrors? Or is it just a timing thing?

Would love to throw one on a Virtualbox to see how it differs with Mint.

It's almost as easy to rsync the files down and build your own USB image, fortunately.

If by new you mean OpenBSD and Slackware itself since the 90s...

I may still have a Walnut Creek CD-ROM version of Slackware (ELF binaries!) with a partial Sunsite/tsx-11 mirror around here.

x86 - http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/slackware/slackware-14.1-i...

x86_64 - http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/slackware/slackware64-14.1...

> ask for money for CDs/DVDs before putting the ISO's up on the mirrors

Patrick Volkerding is The Man [0], he wouldn't do that.

[0] - http://www.slackware.com/about/

Awesome didn't find those from the http://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware-iso/ page.

Torrents: http://www.slackware.com/getslack/torrents.php

It's pretty normal or at least was. It wasn't uncommon for a pile of Debian/FreeaBSD CDRs to appear on my doorstep or even have to go to London to purchase them once. I still purchase OpenBSD CD sets: one for every machine we provision.

the Web site has not changed in all this time. I am getting all nostalgic now. I cut my teeth with linux on slackware. Think it was slackware 3.x Found out about linux by chance, at a flea market a guy was selling a bunch of used software. browsed them, but once I read the bit in the slackware manual he had printed out 'setting incorrect settings can blow your monitor' I was sold. back then you had to recompile your kernel for new hardware, and no google to search for answers just irc.

Go Slackware! :-)

ohhh fancy. been years since i've run slack but i think it's about time to give it another go.

Nice to see Slackware still around. Slackware 2.0 back in 1995 was my first Linux distribution. :)

Slackware is irrelevant and outdated. No package manager. No net install. Give me one reason to use it instead of Arch or Debian.

One reason: You don't like Arch or Debian.

In case you are not trolling:

1. Everything is as close to the upstream package as possible. Debian maintainers sometimes heavily modify their packages and that makes finding help difficult. Slackware rarely changes their packages or only does if necessary.

2. Package manager does not do dependency checking. This makes installing packages from source easier because I don't have to worry about breaking the system when compiling. If something breaks, it's easy to know what to roll back.

3. Good for understanding the innards of Linux. There are no distro specific config tools or non-standard setups. Packages may come with them, but they are standard and well documented. Good way to understand what's going on.

EDIT: I thought of one more:

4. Documentation. Patrick's documentation is great. If you have no other tools, you could get Slackware setup just reading his documents.

All said, Slackware is a throwback to when distros were just a quick way to get a Linux system running, not OSes in and of themselves. If you took each piece and compiled it yourself, you'd get Slackware. That's pretty cool.

But seriously, that's the beauty of Linux. You go ahead and use Arch or Debian. Absolutely no one is going to stop you. But someone using Slackware has zero negative effect on you.

This thread made me think. Perhaps Slackware is due for a slight comeback due to the ZFS style snapshot / containerization type trends going on right now, since Slackware's quirk of "not having" package management becomes irrelevant.

I'm not trying to counter your argument because you're totally right, but Arch pretty much exactly matches Slackware on points 1, 3 and 4.

Depends on the packages - in AUR land where people thing it is GREAT idea of cloning the git repo instead of some fixed revision there are many times when trying to build something you see

hunk XX of something failed, aborting.

Yeah but that's under point 2, which I left out. :D

Linux From Scratch?

Last 3-4 Slackware releases I installed over the net. It supports FTP and HTTP package sources on the Internet. Or NFS and SMB shares on the LAN.

Slackware's strength is it's simplicity. Makes it easy to understand what's going on.

This also makes it a great learning tool.

There used to be a saying: Install Redhat, you learn Redhat. Install Debian, you learn Debian. Install Slackware, you learn Linux.

> Install Slackware, you learn Linux.

Which is becoming less true since Linux as a full OS is moving to PulseAudio and systemd and has long since moved to PAM (among other things). By default, Slackware doesn't have, and probably will never have, any of those.

Slackware experience is becoming less and less transferable.

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