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Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

theregister.com

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Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#111

Post by tssva »

sillywalk wrote: post #89
housemusicfan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out Mr. Fancy T1 line over here. I remember downloading Slackware floppy images over 28.8 dialup. Talk about pain. I recently stumbled on a dusty box of them whilst cleaning out the attic.

(Caution: Monty Python Reference) 28.8? I used to dream about 28.8, I had 14.4, and before that 2400baud. Do you remember the dreaded 'floppy disk is probably unreadable' sound during installation of any software on floppy?

2400 baud. I wish. I had to manually dial my rotary phone and then place the handset into my 300 baud CAT acoustic coupler modem.

To be fair by the time I 1st used Slackware that 300 baud modem had long been replaced and I at the time I had bonded ISDN channels for 128kbs connection paid for by my employer. Soon replaced by a T1 to my home also paid for by my employer.

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#112

Post by Gordonjcp »

akoster wrote: post #56
Gordonjcp wrote: post #30

Second distro I ever used, the first being Lasermoon. Prior to that, I used something that was a Linux 0.9 kernel and a bunch of disk images FTPed from some dude's server in Finland. Back in the olden days it ran just fine on a Compaq Deskpro 386SX but needed a whopping 4MB of RAM.

Thanks for sharing! This is the first I've heard of Lasermoon / Linux-FT but it appears that was a popular option back in the day based on these references [0][1][2][3][4][5][6]. How did it compare with Slackware? Or Yggradsil [7] or SLS [8] if you happened to have used those? Also, 4MB doesn't seem like a huge jump from Windows 3.0's minimum required 1MB of RAM or 2MB with Multimedia Extensions [9], but perhaps 4MB…

> How did it compare with Slackware? Or Yggradsil [7] or SLS [8] if you happened to have used those?

I can't remember what it was like running Ubuntu 12 and that was only ten years ago, Lasermoon was 30...

Everything was command-line, not least because I didn't have enough space to install X. It worked okay. I feel like the compiler might not have been gcc? Not sure. I know that around the late 90s there was gcc and egcs, which was kind of a fork, that re-merged - I used that on Redhat 6, not RHEL6 but Redhat 6, with Gnome, and the K Desktop Environment as an option (the first versions of both!).

I guess I could trail about and see if I could find images of Lasermoon and try to install it, probably on a VM. If you're interested I could make a video, I guess?

Edit: this was the CD! https://archive.org/details/Shop0396

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#113

Post by oskarw85 »

It was also my first serious Linux distro. I started using it around Slackware 9.0 (wow, it's twenty years already). It was the PERFECT distro for learning because it was simple (as in uncomplicated) yet workable. I learned a ton about bash scripting, kernel compiling etc. I remember I even "ported" Reiser4 filesystem into the Slackware installer (who remembers that FS today LOL). Slackware did not have ANY dependency mechanism for packages, so often installing them was a lottery. Oh the long hours spent running ldd and strace to find out what's missing.

I switched to Gentoo after Slackware because everything was working just fine and I got bored. After that I learned that my free time is better spent on gaming and I switched to Windows 7. I came back to Linux after few years and damn - systemd took me by surprise. I never learned to use it properly because it's so much more complicated than my beloved Slackware SysV Init.

Congratulations to Patrick Volkerding - managing distro for 30 years is no small feat. Happy hacking.

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#114

Post by qingcharles »

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…

That's great, thank you. In the mid-90s I was running all sorts of large public Internet nodes off 386s with 4Mb of RAM on Slackware. Great to see you can still find Linux to run on these.

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#115

Post by NikkiA »

jmclnx wrote: post #110
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many years ago, I remember a guy working for an ISP saw me using NetBSD, I must have made some comment about how I liked it, and he said "That's what Slackware was supposed to be." I knew relatively little about Linux at the time but I always remembered that statement. (Today I use both on a daily basis.) What hooked me on NetBSD was that early on I had a experience with a laptop where audio was not working. After a…

> That's what Slackware was supposed to be After many many years of using Slackware, I still believe NetBSD was used as inspiration for the design of Slackware. BTW, I really like pkgsrc, I wish that ended up being a standard for Linux instead of all the multiple package/dependency managers that exist. And NetBSD is really my favorite BSD, I only wish it worked without a minor hardware issue on the Laptop I have. I m…

More likely 386BSD than NetBSD back then, although the timeline between the two is only a year and a bit apart.

Back in '92 I was interested in 386BSD, but told to check out linux (which was at 0.12 at the time), back then it was the root/boot disk distro, then mcc, then slackware.

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#116

Post by sillywalk »

tssva wrote: post #111
sillywalk wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Caution: Monty Python Reference) 28.8? I used to dream about 28.8, I had 14.4, and before that 2400baud. Do you remember the dreaded 'floppy disk is probably unreadable' sound during installation of any software on floppy?

2400 baud. I wish. I had to manually dial my rotary phone and then place the handset into my 300 baud CAT acoustic coupler modem. To be fair by the time I 1st used Slackware that 300 baud modem had long been replaced and I at the time I had bonded ISDN channels for 128kbs connection paid for by my employer. Soon replaced by a T1 to my home also paid for by my employer.

Noice!

Did you employer give you a spec-'d out computer/workstation too? I don't even know how you hook up ISDN equipment, but I know an SGI Indy had it built in.. ~1993.

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#117

Post by exikyut »

jmclnx wrote: post #110
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many years ago, I remember a guy working for an ISP saw me using NetBSD, I must have made some comment about how I liked it, and he said "That's what Slackware was supposed to be." I knew relatively little about Linux at the time but I always remembered that statement. (Today I use both on a daily basis.) What hooked me on NetBSD was that early on I had a experience with a laptop where audio was not working. After a…

> That's what Slackware was supposed to be After many many years of using Slackware, I still believe NetBSD was used as inspiration for the design of Slackware. BTW, I really like pkgsrc, I wish that ended up being a standard for Linux instead of all the multiple package/dependency managers that exist. And NetBSD is really my favorite BSD, I only wish it worked without a minor hardware issue on the Laptop I have. I m…

What's the minor hardware issue?

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#118

Post by tssva »

sillywalk wrote: post #116
tssva wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2400 baud. I wish. I had to manually dial my rotary phone and then place the handset into my 300 baud CAT acoustic coupler modem. To be fair by the time I 1st used Slackware that 300 baud modem had long been replaced and I at the time I had bonded ISDN channels for 128kbs connection paid for by my employer. Soon replaced by a T1 to my home also paid for by my employer.

Noice! Did you employer give you a spec-'d out computer/workstation too? I don't even know how you hook up ISDN equipment, but I know an SGI Indy had it built in.. ~1993.

We were a DEC partner , so I had a DEC 3000 AXP which was eventually replaced by a 500 series AlphaStation.

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#119

Post by jmclnx »

exikyut wrote: post #117
jmclnx wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's what Slackware was supposed to be After many many years of using Slackware, I still believe NetBSD was used as inspiration for the design of Slackware. BTW, I really like pkgsrc, I wish that ended up being a standard for Linux instead of all the multiple package/dependency managers that exist. And NetBSD is really my favorite BSD, I only wish it worked without a minor hardware issue on the Laptop I have. I m…

What's the minor hardware issue?

I have a Laptop with 2 video Chips, Intel and Nvidia.

The Nvidia chip gets very hot, even when I disable it on boot. The CPU Temp stays low.

The Nvidia chip is in the lower left corner of the Laptop, and it cannot be disabled by a BIOS Switch. Since NetBSD has Nouveau support, I want to be sure 10.0 BETA supports that specific chip before deciding what to do.

FWIW, same thing heat issue happens with OpenBSD, but OpenBSD has no Nvidia support, luckily OpenBSD is able to ignore it. Slackware, no issue with Nouveau and heat.

Re: Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

#120

Post by exikyut »

jmclnx wrote: post #119
exikyut wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the minor hardware issue?

I have a Laptop with 2 video Chips, Intel and Nvidia. The Nvidia chip gets very hot, even when I disable it on boot. The CPU Temp stays low. The Nvidia chip is in the lower left corner of the Laptop, and it cannot be disabled by a BIOS Switch. Since NetBSD has Nouveau support, I want to be sure 10.0 BETA supports that specific chip before deciding what to do. FWIW, same thing heat issue happens with OpenBSD, but Open…

I see, interesting. Definitely sounds like a kernel thing, and I honestly wonder if it isn't a BIOS/firmware issue with the Nvidia GPU handling incomplete initialization sanely. I wonder what would happen if you just tried booting DOS or some other OS on the thing. Or just sat in the BIOS?

If booting into something barebones leaves everything cool, and depending on how long it takes for the chip to get warm, perhaps you could move a `for (;;);` further and further down into the OpenBSD kernel and find the point things get cranky that way.

Extremely hacky approach though, I'll definitely concede that point >.>

(But if you want to try it, I would wholeheartedly recommend looking into something like iPXE, which would let you download each test kernel over HTTP at boot time and make the iteration process tolerable. This assumes you have a second machine though...)

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