Slackware is 21 Years Old | Hacker News Reader

Slackware is 21 Years Old

slackblogs.blogspot.com

178 pointsrobobro60 comments

Slackware is the first Linux distro that I used. I recently (last year or so) I got back to it, because all the crap Debian was pouring over upstream got harder and harder to use, and with all the udev and llvm and consolethis and policythat crap setting up a Gentoo installation with decent encryption proved way beyond the free time and patience I had.

Turns out Slackware still rocks! It's simple and literally just works. Slackbuilds.org wasn't around when I first tried Slackware and my life is a lot easier than it was back then. It's great. Happy birthday guys!

My first too, 3.0. I remember laughing at the package descriptions while installing, one in particular: bison: a parser-generator in the style of yacc. I eventually left because the lack of meaningful package management was becoming too much of a hassle maintaining systems longer term. For years I then roamed between various distros, trying most of what was out there, and finally settled on Gentoo around the mid noughties which I found to offer the same or higher degree of control but without the manual process overhead.

Strangely, with the way containers are going, I think I'm actually becoming more likely to head back towards Slackware's userspace as a well tested and documented minimalist environment, in the near future than in the recent past.

Lack of package management drove me away, too, but now I don't find it so much of a hassle because I have developed an active distaste for programs that bring a ton of dependencies. There are legitimate cases (e.g. Calibre -- has many dependencies because it must be able to read many kinds of files), but a depressingly large proportion of the programs with dependency headaches are just bloated or badly packaged.

I've always been keen to try Slackware (probably dating back 10 years or more) but always been too daunted by the installation instructions.

I tried again today - it's completely different from what I remember and very straightforward. I am installing it now (under VirtualBox) - wish me luck!

I played around with Slax for a while, it was alot of fun. Most of my current experience is with apt and yum-based distros so having something different for packages is alot of fun. Slax is also fairly small.

Whoa there, don't throw llvm into the mix with those other names.

Interesting; Slackware was my first distro (dozen floppy disks) as well. I too am interested in not having policykit or much of the modern desktop stuff.

I think it still has them, but I can pretend not to care about them because I don't have to set them up, which I would have had to do on Gentoo. You literally just install Slackware and it works.

It can skip the "modern" desktop crap though, that's cool. They don't distribute Gnome anymore, so it doesn't cram hundreds of libwhythefuckisthisalib and libgnomewhythefuckisthisagnomelib and their dependencies on the drive, and all the KDE stuff is nicely tucked away so you don't have to install it.

Dozen!

I remember when Slackware fit on a single 3.5" floppy. There was a second disk, but you only needed that if you wanted to install X, and why would you want X when you had virtual terminals you could just switch between?

Thanks for making me feel young :) When I first used Slackware, I think the base set was 13 floppies, and that didn't include networking or X. This was before insmod/modprobe and I had to re-compile the kernel once I'd saved up the 80 pounds to buy a sound card. The compilation took the whole night on my 486, and I needed several attempts before I got it working. Kernel 1.1.59 I think.

Slackware was my first taste of Linux as well. I'm hoping to go back to my first love once I get new hard drives on my computer.

To me Slackware was the distribution that made everything understandable. Nothing was hidden from you, everything was installed where the manuals said it would be.

I loved that Slackware didn't try to move stuff around in third party software to fit idea about a official disc layout.

Also the init system made so much more sense (still do I think).

Slackware is a wonderful distribution for people who want to learn Linux, not just use it.

I can't second these statements enough, especially the last one.

I'd tried every major distro before settling on Slackware sometime around '99 and that's when I finally learned Linux.

I'm using Arch today and to me it's a very similar philosophy with some bonuses. If it weren't around, I would surely be using Slack.

I took a similar approach, although not with Slackware.

I was tired of not knowing what was inside my distro, nor how it worked... so one day I decided to build my own distro (following the very good Linux From Scratch book, and then later the Cross-Linux From Scratch book).

It's even more bare-bones than a base arch or slackware -- but the best part was knowing exactly how everything worked, and no longer fearing of changing something, because I understood what it was doing now.

The experience and knowledge of "rolling my own distro" is very applicable elsewhere -- from understanding kernel panics better, to understanding "dependency hell", to how the entire boot process even works.

A linux distro is really a thing of beauty once you understand what is going on under the hood.

I've done LFS a couple of times and also contributed packages to a few other Linux distributions (GoboLinux mainly) since learning on Slack, but I think the experience was better having learned my way around a Slack system first.

LFS was definitely a helpful step to "dive deeper" though.

The difference between Arch and Slack tho is, a Slackware system is rock solid and doesn't need to be touched. An Arch system not maintained for a couple months is in pacman hell. :)

No matter what Linux distro I hop to, I ultimately always keep returning to Slackware. Pat really is a visionary: he's one man who has always gotten it right over 21 years, amidst a landscape like Linux, known for its chaos and constant reinvention. He should be an example to all distro maintainers.

The system is so neatly designed that you don't even notice the lack of automatic dependency resolution. This is simply because of the sheer breadth of choices you have when it comes to installing software on Slackware.

In short, it's the last bastion of sanity in Linux.

Strongly agree. I am writing this from a slackware I broke pretty badly right after install. I accidentally deleted /var/log/packages (don't ask me how), and didn't have any backup.

People told me to reinstall. I didn't, I tracked down all the tgz's and hacked on installpkg to regenerate /var/log/packages without reinstalling. Of couse all streaming over a mounted curlftpfs. Oh what a rush.

  % ls ~/tmp/desaster/
  installpkg
  local-pkgs
  root
  slackware64

This was possible because I knew which series I installed at date X. I knew my last security updates were at date Y and which custom (self-built) packages I had installed. Slackware is so simple, so sane, so beautiful. A hallmark of software engineering.

> lack of automatic dependency resolution

I never really felt this to be a problem. Slackware has everything you need in the installer you hardly ever have to install new stuff for most of the standard things.

You mean like slapt-get? What would be the best one?

Manual compilation, wget+installpkg on precompiled packages (whether by AlienBob or anyone else), sbopkg without queue files/with queue files, slapt-get/slapt-src, the FTP repository that can be queried from slackpkg, etc.

Most of the time I use slackpkg to apply updates and version upgrades, sbopkg for third-party software by handpicking the dependencies, and precompiled packages for software with lots of dependencies that are tedious to sort.

It's clean, easy and avoids the bloat of unneeded packages lying on your system.

The oldest surviving distribution, and yet it never lost its identity and its core values which makes me a very happy user to this day. Congratulations Patrick Volkerding!

I remember downloading the disks over a 14.4 modem... It was my first Linux, and I was head over heels in love. Here was a system where I could dig around and learn stuff and explore and get the source code to all the stuff I was running and see how it was put together. That was such an exhilarating feeling! I still love using Linux and think it (or something similar like a BSD) is the best system for a hacker.

Almost a quarter century, primarily one man, hat off to Patrick Volkerding!

(I used Slackware from 1994 to ~2005.)

Slackware is awesome and I spend more time with it (much more time actually) than with my girlfriend.

I've tried other distros like Open Suse and Ubuntu but they weren't for me. I don't need all the overhead to do simple thing that can be done by editing a text file. (Mint is pretty nice though... I install it sometimes for friends and family members).

I appreciate the effort behind apt-get type package mangers, but often they often aren't up to date. With a slack build I get the latest source and know exactly what I am getting rather than installing some mysterious black box binary. Sure, apt-get might save 5 minutes but I'd rather spend the 5 minutes and do it right. Just my personal fetish.

If you are new to Slack or Linux in general I recommend trying Slax or Porteus. Since they are live, you can change whatever you want and experiment, and just restart your machine when you inevitably bork something. This is how I came to Slackware in the first place. I needed a live distro for a kiosk I was building (was an Open Suse user at the time) and started taking apart and re-assembling Slax. Eventually the light went off in my head and I saw the beauty of simplicity and have never looked back.

I will never forget bricking my first Windows PC with Slackware before I knew anything. Turned out to be recoverable but was a crazy experience as a teenager.

Ditto! I think it's beneficial to have grown up breaking computers :D

This was my second Linux distro, after Mandrake. Mandrake showed me that an alternative OS was viable. Slackware (and the trouble it took to get it working) taught me how computers work.

Same here! That first Mandrake boot was magical so different from windows (KDE3) yet so functional. I remember burning my first CD with K3b, that worked perfectly and it was just as functional as the expensive Nero!

Man those were the days, having to manually mount your usb stick with the 2.4 kernel. Dropline Gnome (still alive I see http://www.droplinegnome.org/) made Slackware a lot easier to keep up to date and pretty and slapt-get provided a nice update mechanism. I went to Gentoo afterwards and then to Arch, I haven't looked back for years now. To bad DO dropped Arch support so now I'm using Debian on the server VM's.

Remember Patrick got sick and the whole community was sending drugs? Nice.

And that whole drama about jumping version numbers...

I think about Patrick's illness almost every time I brush my teeth. If I remember right, he got some bacterial infection after swallowing dislodged oral flora, or at least that was the working theory.

And hats off to Patrick Volkerding who announced 1.0 and so many years later still going strong announcing 14.1.

Slackware was my first encounter with Linux back in early 1995 (I was a field engineer at the time looking after BT supplied SCO Unix and Xenix boxes in doctors surgeries in the highlands of Scotland).

It was very exciting times. I learned to build my own kernels which took hours on the crappy old dell I owned at the time, but very satisfying. It was even more exciting when I managed to get a Novell NE2000 clone to work with it as well and set up my first web and FTP server in my bedroom and then got it to talk to my Hayes compatible modem and Demon Internet.

Happy hacky days :)

I use CentOS these days, mainly because it's our company standard, I must go back and give it another spin. Congrats Slackware!

The shell scripts that installed the floppy disks looked for a file called 'install.end'. They did not look at the contents of the file, only checked for its existence.

Here is the contents:

    For information about getting "Bob" in your life, send $1 to:

        Church of the SubGenius
        P.O. Box 140306 Dallas TX 75214 USA ($2 US extra if outside US)

        http://www.subgenius.com

I'm pretty sure the URL has changed. It was on sunsite.unc.edu.

http://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-3.5/slaktes...

One thing that bothers me about slackware nowadays is something I loved when I first got it: It installys almost everything by default.

I'd like a minimal install base right now (and manually picking this in the installer ain't that easy), but back in '95, having every kind of editor, programming language, window manager, TeX etc. on disk was awesome. And then I started looking at comp.os.linux.announce and sunsite to see what's new and current and installed that manually (and dependency tracking wasn't an issue at all because a) most libraries on disk anyway -- certainly no silly "-devel" packages and b) we didn't have that many dependencies back then, when "based purely on Xlib" was a badge of honor...

> I'd like a minimal install base right now (and manually picking this in the installer ain't that easy)

I think the best way to do this currently is to select the categories of packages and then choose a "Full Install" (the warning that it will install almost 8GB of software is a little confusing as it only installs what was selected on the previous screen).

I think you can do quite a bit with just the A, AP and D sets.

This was my first linux distribution and I loved it!

It was the first one I installed myself. I spent a long time trying to download all the floppy disk images for A and X over dial up. Trying to do it while on work experience on the only PC that had an internet connection made it all the more fun.

My very first as well. Had to install it to a MS-DOS partition and from there to the real Linux partition as IDE CDROM drives were still not properly supported back then.

ZipSlack? I seem to remember it was called ZipSlack because I actually had a ZIP drive at the time. That was definitely the coolest thing ever.

No, a pile of floppy disks.

I cannot remember anylonger the exact version.

It was the last version of Slackware to use a.out executable format and IDE ATAPI had just recently been added. My CDROM IDE wasn't supported during boot time, only after installation, hence the workaround.

Respect for Patrick Volkerding .

"The machine is a Pentium III, 600 MHz, with 512 megabytes of RAM. It runs (of course) Slackware Linux, and does an efficient and reliable job even with moderately old hardware. The slackware.com site has been known to run for well over a year without a reboot."

Dogfooding the Web site. I learned quite a lot from zipslack, a live distro booted from an Iomega Zip disk.

Edit:http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/interviews-28/interv...

Some historical stuff

Slackware is what I started with, and what I keep coming back to. I tried Debian, but its complexity overwhelmed me. Back to Slack. Gentoo? Took too long to compile stuff, and the words "revdep-rebuild" should fill anyone with dread horror. Then I tried Arch which seemed to offer the best mix of Slackware simplicity and Gentoo comprehensiveness. But after the nth complete breakage of a running system and the "fuck you and your simplicity, we're using systemd" kerfuffle, guess what? I was back to Slack again.

And Ubuntu?

I tried it in 2008. Decided it used way too much RAM. Scraped it off.

Wow. I remember when Slackware was distributed on six floppies, and I had to download it from BBS about a thousand miles away. I had a 386 computer with a 40Mb MFM hard drive that was about the size of a loaf of bread, and the computer had the bare minimum of ram to run it -- 4 Mb. You had to directly copy a floppy image to the hard drive, and then manually edit a few bits to tell it to boot from the HD. I had no idea what I was doing -- none of my friends had even heard of Linux, but it was a lot of fun.

Linux: You've come a long way, baby!

Happy Birthday and many more maintained years to a special project! :-)

Slack was pretty cool, but like SLS before it, it was a little unwieldy. This was especially true if you didn't have a CD-ROM drive (or a CD-ROM with the right bits!).

Instead, I used MCC Interim Linux to get a base set of bits since it had such a tiny foot print. I also somehow managed to cobble together X11 and get it working, but I seem to remember it being a real pain in the ass.

Coincidentally, my first X11 background image was also of JR Bob Dobbs, but I wasn't running Slackware.

This was my first linux distro, I used it back in the mid 90's and it was such a great learning experience. Amazing how long it's been already.

I will always remember the original slackware and Wallnut Creek FreeBSD distro cds I could buy from microcenter 20 years ago... I had so much fun installing, partitioning, install packages, then write my own code and compile it. Thanks to any old slackware maintainers out there - you made this 12 year old kid (20 years ago) love computing and learning about how computers worked.

Years back when starting to use Linux came across Slackware. At that time it was something difficult for noobies to install. Then switched to Ubuntu for ease of use. Now happy with Debian. Glad to know Slackware is alive and strong.

What amazed me that time was Slackware was developed and maintained by a single person "Patrick Volkerding" Long live linux community!

> At that time it was something difficult for noobies to install.

In its heyday (mid-late 90s), Slackware _was_ Linux for noobs. I still remember downloading all those disk images via modem.

Hard as a rock, and keep staying here. Good job Patrick Volkerding!

I've been using Slackware for years now both at home and at work. It's a great distro and that's because of Pat!

I couple years ago I vowed I will never install another operating system than Slackware again. I have been happy since! :)

Reading through the comments here makes me appreciate how great the HN community is. happy birthday Slackware!

Time to start drinking!

I was waiting for one of these comments :D

Best Linux distro ever

Happy Birthday, Slackware! and keep update us..

Bring back Yggdrasil!

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