the Web site has not changed in all this time. I am getting all nostalgic now. I cut my teeth with linux on slackware. Think it was slackware 3.x Found out about linux by chance, at a flea market a guy was selling a bunch of used software. browsed them, but once I read the bit in the slackware manual he had printed out 'setting incorrect settings can blow your monitor' I was sold. back then you had to recompile your kernel for new hardware, and no google to search for answers just irc.
Slackware 14.1 is released
51–60 of 68 posts
Re: Slackware 14.1 is released
#52I consider myself a newcomer in Linux. Started playing with Redhat then Ubuntu. After being introduced (more like forced) to Slackware, I can't get back to any other distro.
However, nowadays I've been torn between Slackware and Debian for the server setup since I've started exploring Ansible to quickly get a server up. But as long as Slackware doesn't offer package dependency management, Ansible won't be that much help, unless of course I do all of them in bash script.
Re: Slackware 14.1 is released
#53Slackware is irrelevant and outdated. No package manager. No net install. Give me one reason to use it instead of Arch or Debian.
In case you are not trolling: 1. Everything is as close to the upstream package as possible. Debian maintainers sometimes heavily modify their packages and that makes finding help difficult. Slackware rarely changes their packages or only does if necessary. 2. Package manager does not do dependency checking. This makes installing packages from source easier because I don't have to worry about breaking the system when…
Linux From Scratch?
Re: Slackware 14.1 is released
#54Nice to see Slackware still around. Slackware 2.0 back in 1995 was my first Linux distribution. :)
Re: Slackware 14.1 is released
#55I ran Slackware many moons ago. It was very bare bones and it took a lot of work, but I was young and it was an immersive experience. As another commenter wrote, people on IRC played up how 1337 they were for running Slack. I disagree slightly with that statement. I spent a lot of time building my Slack system on a PII 266, and I was 12, so it took me a long time with a lot of false starts. I don't think anyone was t…
> Force yourself
to just sit there on the command line.
That's good advice in general but instead of using the bare CLI I'd suggest that you learn about screen and tmux early on. It'll make you miss the windowing system less.
Re: Slackware 14.1 is released
#56I've passed through a few distributions (Slackware -> Conectiva -> RedHat -> Mandrake -> SuSe -> Debian -> Slackware) till I stuck with Slackware and have been using it for the last 10+ years. Slackware 3.6, my first distribution was really scary but it's been a few years since I had to do too much of basic configuration by hand. Of course some stuff took me sometime but right now I can use the touchscreen on my lapt…
I could almost have written this myself. ;)
I've been waiting for this release for about 2 weeks, since my laptop died and I had to replace it, and the installation of Slackware 14 didn't transfer too well (no networking) so I decided to wait out 14.1, since the changelogs were saying there were so close to release time anyway.
Lots of people are sceptical of Slackware and I can understand those sentiments fine. Slackware is simply my personal preference for two super simple reasons (and a lot of other minor reasons).
1: It makes me feel at home. I never fear I won't be able to do something, or find something. The whole thing is made to be configurable and it is.
2: It's never in my way when I want to do something. I never cussed at Slackware for doing something stupid. I have to do everything myself anyway! :D
Packages; I love the package management. Not that Debian's package manager doesn't absolutely rock imho, because I think it does, but Debian is like the neighbor: the house is almost the same, but it still feels more foreign than my own house, which I decorated myself and all that. I get my packages from SlackBuilds most of the time. I love SlackBuilds, too. I think that there's almost nothing missing between Slackware's fairly broad software library and SlackBuilds for almost everything else.
I did run Ubuntu on my laptop for years. I tried every new release of Ubuntu for 5 or 6 years and I was always genuinely excited. But then they started making mistakes. PulseAudio didn't work the first time they included it. One time, an update broke X. The video driver (Nvidia) was updated too and they decided that my videocard was suddenly no longer supported. That was plain stupid. And then they moved to Unity, which I didn't really care for. I've been back on Slackware since 13, I think, and I will not let go of it. It's just my OS of choice, even if there are other beautiful Linux distributions out there. :)
Patrick, my hat is off to you and your team, for keeping this beautiful operating system going. May it have many, many years of life left in it. I'll be there to see it and use it. :)
Re: Slackware 14.1 is released
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would compute If you explored a little further than the front page, or even carefully considered the meaning of "bedrock". http://bedrocklinux.org/introduction.html#what_bedrock_does
"And you thought getting support for your distro was hard now , we've provided n! combinations of software for you"
That should be n^m where n is the number of packages and m is the number of distributions (for software that's common to all distributions).
And anyhow, perhaps it would easier get support this way since you could get each software package to run in the distro where it's the easiest and then set them up to interact over IP like they would in containers.
Re: Slackware 14.1 is released
#58All these slackware haters! Go back to heroku, lusers. Glad to see slackware is still kickin', still have fond memories of my first linux install :>
That actually made me laugh. I was just having a discussion with a colleague on this matter. He suggested that we don't need to know about the OS these days with Heroku, Azure, GAE etc. My argument is that is fine until something goes wrong or you need something slightly outside the comfort zone of those products.
comes down to generalised knowledge versus product knowledge.
Re: Slackware 14.1 is released
#59So is it the new thing to ask for money for CDs/DVDs before putting the ISO's up on the mirrors? Or is it just a timing thing? Would love to throw one on a Virtualbox to see how it differs with Mint.
It's pretty normal or at least was. It wasn't uncommon for a pile of Debian/FreeaBSD CDRs to appear on my doorstep or even have to go to London to purchase them once. I still purchase OpenBSD CD sets: one for every machine we provision.
Re: Slackware 14.1 is released
#60I ran Slackware many moons ago. It was very bare bones and it took a lot of work, but I was young and it was an immersive experience. As another commenter wrote, people on IRC played up how 1337 they were for running Slack. I disagree slightly with that statement. I spent a lot of time building my Slack system on a PII 266, and I was 12, so it took me a long time with a lot of false starts. I don't think anyone was t…
The first non-windows system I installed was FreeBSD and later on moved to slackware and then other linux distros. I would really recommend FreeBSD to a novice who'd like to install an un*x and really understand how it works.
It's mostly the same steps as slackware but 1/ FreeBSD docs are godly (I didn't have internet at the time and managed to do all I wanted with just the FBSD user manual, I hope it hasn't changed since then) and 2/ Slackware is sometimes hard to get to work for the wrong reasons. Lack of proper dependency tracking in the package manager for instance is just insane unless you only plan to install a couple packages or you plan to spend your life manually installing and updating your packages (or never update which seems to be how most slackware users deal with that in my limited experience).
In the end I don't think it requires more skill to properly set up a slackware install versus some BSD or even Gentoo or Arch. And if you don't really care about having a maintainable OS and just want to know how everything fits together in a modern linux system you might as well try Linux From Scratch, it's meant for that.