Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old • Hacker News Board

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#41

Post by eikenberry » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 10:01 PM UTC

akoster wrote: post #28

eikenberry wrote: post #25

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.

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#42

Post by pram » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 10:06 PM UTC

aynyc wrote: post #23

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.

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

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#43

Post by chrsig » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 10:10 PM UTC

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?!

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#44

Post by akoster » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 10:10 PM UTC

teddyh wrote: post #21

tiahura wrote: post #17

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/

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#45

Post by viksit » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 10:11 PM UTC

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.

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#46

Post by akoster » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 10:12 PM UTC

omgmajk wrote: post #37

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?

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#47

Post by inhumantsar » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 10:12 PM UTC

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!

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#48

Post by rconti » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 10:16 PM UTC

Corrado wrote: post #31

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 compili…

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.

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#49

Post by rconti » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 10:18 PM UTC

F00Fbug wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#50

Post by akoster » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 10:18 PM UTC

viksit wrote: post #45

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?