Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 128 posts

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#61

Post by akoster »

dsXLII wrote: post #20

In 1995 or so, I wanted to play with something not-Windows, but wasn't yet advanced enough in my degree to have access to my school's AIX setup. Bought a Slackware disk set, and a BSD (probably FreeBSD, honestly don't remember), took them both home. Slackware had drivers for my weird non-IDE CD-ROM drive, the other one didn't, and it's been nothing but fun since then. Without Slackware, I would not have learned how t…

Thanks for sharing! And glad to hear you are still using Slackware! (which still seems to have drivers for just about everything!) If you recall, where did you purchase your Slackware and BSD disk sets? I recall Micro Center and Fry's Electronics both sold some Linux and BSD distributions on DVDs but I never saw too many folks buying them (then again, this was circa 2010). And that's a great comment about the return policy! I'm curious when the law was changed (unless it was a per-state thing, assuming you are from/in the US).

Also with regards to UUCP, it appears there are some modern uses for it [0]. I have no perspective with regards to UUCP but from someone who used it (if it doesn't bring back painful memories), do you recall what you used it for or what using it was like? Essentially email + USENET newsgroups + FTP wrapped into one protocol?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Current_uses_and_legacy

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#62

Post by lelanthran »

akoster wrote: post #32
jlarocco wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just telling a co-worker literally yesterday that a few years of Slackware was the single most effective thing I did to learn Linux well. I ran it on my desktop and an old (old in the early 2000s!) laptop with 32 MB of RAM, and learned a TON. It's the perfect generic "Linux" system, and you can take it in any direction you want, but you have to do it yourself. Funny enough, I also got too busy and moved to Debi…

I can only imagine in that era there was quite a bit more learning forced upon you than these days with our plethora of (somewhat) standards-compliant hardware and in-tree drivers. Though I'm definitely going to be channeling some of those experiences as I got a kernel-panic during the first boot after installing Slackware 15.0 on a newly built AMD B550 chipset / AMD Ryzen 5700G -based PC. I'm thinking its likely som…

> I can only imagine in that era there was quite a bit more learning forced upon you than these days with our plethora of (somewhat) standards-compliant hardware and in-tree drivers.

It's romanticized a lot, but boy was it painful! hear my story and weep.

In 1995 I got slackware with a textbook from the university library. I had a brand-new 486 paid for by a dad with 2 other kids in college and nothing more than a factory job to pay for things.

So my 486 had no CDROM. And it only had 4MB of RAM. And a pirated version of DOS, until I got slackware.

After 3 months of saving from weekend work I made enough to get a shitty soundblaster pro clone. And then I returned it for another unit, because, as I complained to the store owner "this doesn't work". When the replacement didn't work either I realised it must be my computer, more specifically, those "drivers" provided on the floppy disk were for msdos :-/

So then I started reading a bit, and digging into the driver sources, and reading the little pamphlet that came with the soundcard. "Hah!" I thought, "the IRQ channel for the soundcard appears to be hardwired!"

And thus begun the longest 3-day weekend of my short life up to that point; Linux had no modules, everything was compiled into a single binary image. You have any idea how long it takes a lowly 486 with 4MB of RAM to compile a kernel?

The entire weekend was "make this change, type make $SOMETHING, then wait for 50m, then watch it fail to boot, then examine how far the bootloader got, then boot with previous image, then undo that change and repeat the process".

Eventually had the soundcard working though. On a system on which no bloody games would run ...

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#63

Post by akoster »

ipcress_file wrote: post #60

Back around 2007 or so, I discovered BasicLinux ( https://distro.ibiblio.org/baslinux/ ), a stripped down version of Slackware for old PCs, compatible with Slackware 4.0 packages. It installed from a couple of floppies onto my ancient ThinkPad 365X. BasicLinux had a great community and introduced me to mailing lists. I learned a lot about how Linux works, tracking down dependencies with ldd and modifying config and i…

Great story and thanks for sharing! As someone newer to mailing lists, how did (or do) you use them without flooding your inbox? Lots of rules/filters and directories? Using mutt, alpine or gnus? I appreciate the USENET newsgroups perspective of having a separate directory (other than your inbox) to read and respond to posts but it seems not many projects use NNTP these days.

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#64

Post by akoster »

0xbs0d wrote: post #18
pjmlp wrote: post #8

My first Linux distribution was Slackware 2.0, bundled with Linux Unleashed book in 1995's Summer. I had to copy all the floppy images from the CD-ROM into the hard disk and then boot the installation from floppy, as my IDE CD-ROM still wasn't supported by the Linux kernel 1.0.9, and my Trident card was downgraded to 800x600, as X couldn't do 1024x768 with it. Happy birthday Slackware. EDIT: kernel version.

I had the same book and Slackware 2.0 was also my first distro. I think the book is still in some box at my parent's house. I remember trying to figure out how to compile the kernel for everything in my desktop.

That must have been painfully slow but rewarding if and when everything finally worked! I definitely was spoiled trying Fedora Core 6 on a Pentium III with 512MB of RAM, a SoundBlaster Live!, an ATI Rage 128 graphics card, a WD Caviar 40GB IDE HDD, 2x IDE optical drives (a SONY DVD-ROM drive and a SAMSUNG CD-RW drive) and a 3Com Ethernet PCI card without any major (if any) hiccups! (The machine had a 3Com 56k PCI modem but we had just switched to SBCGlobal ADSL (either 128, 256 or 512kbps down) in 2006 which I used to download the live CD ISO(s). I remember being very confused that our 10/100 Linksys Ethernet hub was now being used to distribute the always-on internet between our family desktop and my laptop in addition to sharing files over SMB / Windows File Sharing / Network Neighborhood.)

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#65

Post by trevithick »

jbovlaste wrote: post #15

I ran Slackware for ~6 years, my first serious distro. It's kind of the perfect learning distro for Linux - a super stable base, but if you want more you need to learn how to do it yourself. You didn't need to compile your own kernel or set up tons of configuration just to boot, but if you wanted certain graphics drivers or other software, you quickly learned how to write shell scripts and manage builds and dependenc…

Good points about Slackware being perfect for learning. It really was, for the reasons you gave. I started with Slackware 9.0, which I think was the last release to fit on a single CD-ROM. Like you I learned a lot about Linux, I wrote lots of simple shell scripts and did a lot of ./configure; make; make install.

Slackware lets you do things your way.

Congrats Patrick and Slackware.

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#67

Post by omgmajk »

akoster wrote: post #55
omgmajk wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, technically my neighbor who was a CS prof. helped me out and I was 12 years old so I can't really elaborate a lot. He really wanted me to use Linux and gave me that laptop and I started programming in Perl and C - just tiny programs and learned the basics of Linux. I remember him helping me out with the install and it took quite some time but that's all I really can say about it. Honestly, now that I think abou…

Thanks for sharing! I take it that was a hand-me-down laptop? My first PC I could call my own was a hand-me-down 6-year-old Toshiba Tecra Pentium II laptop with a 5GB IDE HDD and 192 MB of RAM running Windows 98 SE I received when I was maybe 10. I wish I would have installed Linux or had a compiler handy to learn how to write "real" software (as opposed to Logo in a MicroWorlds Pro environment), though eventually I…

This was my second computer, I had a Compaq Presario Pentium 75 mhz that ran Win 95 and later 98 SE. The laptop in question was a hand-me-down from the neighbor and it had a white-black screen so instead of it being a black screen with white text it was reverse. A very strange "little" computer that my mother sadly threw out when I moved out many years ago. This was in the 14.4kbit modem days and I think it was an actual copy of Slackware 3.1 on diskettes.

But as I said, my memory is very sketchy. I just remember the good times I had fiddling around with that thing.

Thank you as well for the good talk!

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#68

Post by hnbear »

lelanthran wrote: post #62
akoster wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can only imagine in that era there was quite a bit more learning forced upon you than these days with our plethora of (somewhat) standards-compliant hardware and in-tree drivers. Though I'm definitely going to be channeling some of those experiences as I got a kernel-panic during the first boot after installing Slackware 15.0 on a newly built AMD B550 chipset / AMD Ryzen 5700G -based PC. I'm thinking its likely som…

> I can only imagine in that era there was quite a bit more learning forced upon you than these days with our plethora of (somewhat) standards-compliant hardware and in-tree drivers. It's romanticized a lot, but boy was it painful! hear my story and weep. In 1995 I got slackware with a textbook from the university library. I had a brand-new 486 paid for by a dad with 2 other kids in college and nothing more than a fa…

My first Linux experience was very similar, except graphics card driven.

My neighbor told me to try Linux, and my computer at the time was a Mac (old PPC 603e cpu), which I’d put a PC Voodoo3 in and flashed it with a Max bios. Couldn’t afford a Mac card, PC ones second hand were much cheaper.

Anyway, the basic X frame buffer was so slow I needed accelerated 2D. The Voodoo3 driver was available as a patch to 2.2.18 and I was on 2.2.16. So, had to learn to patch and compile a kernel as one of my first acts of learning Linux.

But it got me accelerated 2D which made X bearable, so I could use KDE (2) or Gnome (1.4, still my fav).

After that it was enough to get me to build my next desktop as a Linux PC through college.

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#69

Post by xmonkee »

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.

oh man, i got mandrake (or maybe redhat?) from pcquest in like 1998 and what a ride that was. The monthly pcquest drop was always a monumental event to my 12yo self.

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#70

Post by ipcress_file »

akoster wrote: post #63
ipcress_file wrote: post #60

Back around 2007 or so, I discovered BasicLinux ( https://distro.ibiblio.org/baslinux/ ), a stripped down version of Slackware for old PCs, compatible with Slackware 4.0 packages. It installed from a couple of floppies onto my ancient ThinkPad 365X. BasicLinux had a great community and introduced me to mailing lists. I learned a lot about how Linux works, tracking down dependencies with ldd and modifying config and i…

Great story and thanks for sharing! As someone newer to mailing lists, how did (or do) you use them without flooding your inbox? Lots of rules/filters and directories? Using mutt, alpine or gnus? I appreciate the USENET newsgroups perspective of having a separate directory (other than your inbox) to read and respond to posts but it seems not many projects use NNTP these days.

Thanks! The mailing list was never that busy, so it wasn't really a problem. I'd probably automatically redirect to a folder if I needed to do that.

Funny that you mention USENET. I'm subscribed to about 20 newsgroups, using Claws-mail. It is quite nice that they're separate from my other mail accounts.

Post reply on HN