Ah the good ole days up late dual booting Slackware, hanging out on BitchX, browsing Usenet on Enlightenment while watching Duckman on TV.
Slackware 15.0
121–130 of 182 posts
Re: Slackware 15.0
#122Slackware was my first linux distribution, and one that I used continuously before moving to Arch. As it happens, I think Arch embodies many of the original Slackware principles, but its focus on more modern hardware led to it growing a larger community - one that includes great documentation.
Arch embodied many of the original Slackware principles, once. These days I don't know what they're doing, but Void is basically Arch without the bullshit (and with runit instead of systemd, thank goodness).
What bullshit are you referring to? Void sure seems like an interesting alternative, but I am happy with Arch atm so I have not tried it yet.
Re: Slackware 15.0
#123Slackware was my first Linux too. I remember making the installation floppy disk set. And then it was my first introduction to running a computer others could remotely control. After learning how to dial up AOL from Linux then join an IRC chat room, I was immediately "pwned" by someone in that chat room who guessed my root password and rm -rf /'d my entire hard drive. I was probably 8 or 9 at the time and cried.
Slax was my introduction both to Slackware and Linux. I miss those days. My parents don't: I think I wiped their computer a half dozen times messing with things (usually killing the MBR IIRC)
Haha, I've done that multiple times to the family computer. Just wrecked the MBR like an idiot trying to set up GRUB or something.
Re: Slackware 15.0
#124Poignant remarks. We're not getting any younger: "Erik "alphageek" Jan Tromp passed away in 2020 after a long illness. He was a long-time member of the Slackware core team doing a ton of stuff behind the scenes and a master of lesser-known programming languages like Tcl. :-) For a long time he lived closer to me geographically than anyone else on the core team, but unfortunately with an international border between u…
I'm glad that Patrick is still around to continue this. Slackware was my second Linux distro (SLS being the first).
(I also used Yggdrasil, but always ran it from CD and never installed it to a hard drive.)
Re: Slackware 15.0
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slackware is a no frills distro and arguably the baseline for all linux distros. It’s appealing because of the lack of magic or distro specific customizations. If you want a distro that just lets you do what you need to do without getting in the way, it’s very appealing. If you want a distro that prevents you from shooting yourself in the foot, look elsewhere.
A bonus point is that Slackware does not rely on systemd. it is still a bunch of bash scripts that you can figure out what is going on.
^This!^
Slackware uses a BSD-style init system, where you just have one big shell script for booting the system -- you can read through it and edit it, it's all right there, self-contained.
Additionally, all of the old Unix tomes still largely apply to Slackware. That's increasingly, and distressingly, not true of most other distros.
Re: Slackware 15.0
#126It's amazing to see how many of us had Slackware as our first distro. I remember meeting Patrick when I was in high school, at Linux World Expo. Every just (barely) worked (kinda... except printing...)
I mirrored current religiously for over a decade and used to hand out ISOs to friends. All through my Google years, until I just couldn't hammer it into enough shape to keep the auth working on the corp network any more, I ran it as my only distro.
Congratulations to the Slackware team for releasing another one. I'm always shocked when it happens but happy to see it.
Re: Slackware 15.0
#127I’ve already seen countless comments about Slackware being a lot of folks first Linux distro. For someone like me who didn’t get into programming until the last 5 years or so, can you guys explain what was it about Slackware, that was so appealing or inviting to new users? As a primarily Ubuntu user in my time, was part of it that the Linux landscape was much less mature back then? Was it the principals/ ethos that t…
The reason for me was Slackware back in the 90s had a run Linux on a DOS partition version. I believe this was Slackware 7.0. It was easier to install for a 12-year-old me than to figure out what fdisk outputs meant. Slackware made it super easy in that it just installed within the FAT32 partition.
I learned a lot, I was on AOL at the time so I couldn't figure out certain things like XFree86 or vim since AOL didn't work on Linux. So whenever I was stuck I would literally restart the machine to Windows, go online, look up how to do something, take notes, and restart back to Linux to try what I was doing. It took a long time... But it made me extremely comfortable with the command line, and figure out where Linux breaks since Slackware was such a simple system.
Though I moved on to FreeBSD, then Gentoo, then Debian, and Ubuntu. I still think Slackware was a solid place to start.
I guess it has led me to my current path of running a DevOps consulting company...
Re: Slackware 15.0
#128I’ve already seen countless comments about Slackware being a lot of folks first Linux distro. For someone like me who didn’t get into programming until the last 5 years or so, can you guys explain what was it about Slackware, that was so appealing or inviting to new users? As a primarily Ubuntu user in my time, was part of it that the Linux landscape was much less mature back then? Was it the principals/ ethos that t…
Slackware was one of the first distros and was Debian before there was a Debian[1] Also, there was a convenient offline CD archive version (Walnut Creek, IIRC) of it you could get for ~$20 which included several CDs worth of software (i.e. a couple/few gigs of files) before inexpensive ISPs were a thing and the world was still largely on dialup. (i.e. download times were on the order of minutes per megabyte) So getting those Slackware CDs was a bargain and orders of magnitude faster than attempting to download software for most.
[1] It was released a few months before Debian so there was no Debian, no Ubuntu, no RedHat etc... these were all distros that mostly started taking off in the to mid- to late-90's. (Ubuntu of course didn't start until early this century) For the very earliest releases of Linux you had to download boot and root floppy images and then piece together what you needed for a working system. Usually this also included recompiling or at least re-linking the kernel... it was that primitive. Then there was this new concept of a Linux 'distribution' with the likes of Slackware that took the pain out of the process and caught on very quickly.
Re: Slackware 15.0
#129Pat always gives it a personal touch:
Wed Feb 2 22:22:22 UTC 2022 Slackware 15.0 x86_64 stable is released!
Re: Slackware 15.0
#130If someone was choosing a Linux distro today, what would be some reasons to choose Slackware rather than another popular distro like Ubuntu, Fedora, or Arch?
The biggest one for me is that the mental model for maintaining your system is tiny. As a system it is easy to inspect how it works - you can trace the entire boot process along with a finger, the init system is excruciatingly simple, the package database is a directory with files each containing a brief description the output of a un-tar command, SlackBuild packages are easy to make and modify. The community is also…
Also, how do you patch your system?