Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's horrible. I hope that person is working tech support for Comcast now.
Or is an Oracle DBA
Why would you curse them with money?
Slackware 15.0
151–160 of 182 posts
Re: Slackware 15.0
#152I remember staying up all night downloading Slackware 96 (version 3.0) floppy sets over my 28.8kbps modem. I think I used it for my first 6+ months of home Linux use. In retrospect it was probably a good thing to learn on because Slackware was so simple but did so little for you. I remember having to read a long HOWTO from the Linux Documentation Project about how to get XFree86 working. Hand crafting /etc/X11/XF86Co…
> including experimenting to find modelines that worked for my CRT monitor. I remember having to muck around with modelines in X11 in the 1990s - but not this century; and even last century, Windows (both 3.x/9x and NT lineages) and OS/2 (I only ever ran 2.0) never required any such esoteric configuration (I don’t even know whether either exposed any INI/registry settings for it.) Why was this such a big (and painful…
XFree86 gained EDID autodetect support later than Windows and this makes people remember issues with high-res modes longer (Windows used to have them too early on, Mac was full of custom crap, unix workstations tended to have explicit data available),
Windows around win95/nt tended to come with preselected list (and woe on you if you choose wrong!), which meant that you could just select reasonably close defaults - or if you had fancy display, it might come with windows driver (actually a parameter file) telling the available options.
Also remember that significant majority of Windows users didn't have hi-res displays in the days before windows 95, and if you were ok with standard VGA modes, you didn't have to mess much.
Personally I remember crafting custom modelines because I wanted more than standard EDID data could give me, cranking up refresh rate to ~81Hz at 1152x864 resolution or so (typical setting on the display was 1024x768)
Re: Slackware 15.0
#153I’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…
> what was ... so appealing or inviting to new users? Back in the early '90s, if you had an "IBM-compatible personal computer" in your home, it almost certainly was running either DOS or Windows as its operating system. And that was fine for most people, but some of us were enthusiasts, geeks, and nerds. We liked technology. We enjoyed fine-tuning our systems, learning all about them, and programming. And sure, you c…
Also windows was a toy back then. All big programs (CAD, CAE, DTP) ran on UNIX. It was later that those programs were ported to Windows, also due to the fact that Intel convinced everyone that Itanium will ship. The rest is history.
Re: Slackware 15.0
#154I love it when there's a Slackware post on HN... it brings out cool stories about people's first discovery into Linux.
<3 Slackware!
Re: Slackware 15.0
#155Re: Slackware 15.0
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Upgradepkg. You need to download the files first, of course.
Re: Slackware 15.0
#157I remember ordering the CD Rom from the States and the nights spent configuring /etc/X11/XF86Config for a Matrox Millennium on a 486DX.
I may be wrong but if I recall correctly, Slackware, was the "De facto" standard at the time.
Re: Slackware 15.0
#158I remember staying up all night downloading Slackware 96 (version 3.0) floppy sets over my 28.8kbps modem. I think I used it for my first 6+ months of home Linux use. In retrospect it was probably a good thing to learn on because Slackware was so simple but did so little for you. I remember having to read a long HOWTO from the Linux Documentation Project about how to get XFree86 working. Hand crafting /etc/X11/XF86Co…
Slackware 3.0 in the mid 90's was where I got started too.
I have an nearly 20 year old system that's been upgraded many times from 10.0, 'grep -c "^Subject: Welcome to Linux" $MAIL' indicates 10 times ;) It's been through several hardware replacements, and now exists as a VM guest, since I took the leap some years ago to Slackware64 (its host, of course) with alienbob's multilib support.
Good to see improved multilib, build from scratch/make world, and still a full 32-bit option.
Re: Slackware 15.0
#159Slackware was the 2nd distro i tried, almost ~22years ago. For 2 weeks I would schedule my dialup modem to connect to the internet for 2-3h every night when everyone was sleeping and the phone was not used to download the cd1 iso with the common packagesets (a/ k/ x/ etc).
Thank you Patrick :)
Re: Slackware 15.0
#160I’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…
I started using Linux around 2003 when I got into college and when I got my first laptop and at the time the most popular distros were Red Hat (transitioning into Fedora Core which had just come out), Mandrake, Suse, Debian, maybe a few others.
Most of these mainstream distros (except maybe Debian) were starting to go in the direction of trying to become more user friendly. They had graphical installers rather then text based and they had all sorts of new graphical utilities for configuration and made various attempts at trying to automate and sort much of that configuration for you.
Except that they were mostly terrible at that in those early years of these attempts. So the first thing I actually ever tried to install on that laptop was RedHat 9 and I couldn't get my USB DSL modem to work as well as other specific laptop hardware features.
Then some folks I knew were using Slackware and told me to try it and there were guides on how to make that modem work with it so I started using it.
And very quickly I realized that while on Slackware you had to generally do a lot more configuration in text files and through CLI utilities, it generally yielded the results you expected and things didn't magically happen.
Meanwhile in those other distros that were trying to become more user friendly, you had all of these crazy graphical utilities that worked half of the time, sometimes mangled configuration files (the Suse ones were specially amazing at producing completely broken xorg.conf files) or just simply didn't work.
I learned a lot about all of those because as I became more proficient with Linux I kinda became the goto guy in my college for a lot of people who are also new to Linux to help them sort out their Linux setups, specially on laptops.
A few years later Ubuntu came along, kinda trying to do the same thing those other distros were doing but using mostly existing UI utilities (rather than creating new ones) and just made sure they actually worked.
I ended up transitioning to Ubuntu (after a couple of years of Gentoo and Arch) and never looked back until I moved to macs in the early 2010s.