8 ms·

Slackware is 21 Years Old

178 points by robobro 12y ago

Nux 12y ago
Happy Birthday and many more maintained years to a special project! :-)
dragonquest 12y ago
And hats off to Patrick Volkerding who announced 1.0 and so many years later still going strong announcing 14.1.
alokyadav15 12y ago
Respect for Patrick Volkerding .
fibo 12y ago
Best Linux distro ever
cyphax 12y ago
The oldest surviving distribution, and yet it never lost its identity and its core values which makes me a very happy user to this day. Congratulations Patrick Volkerding!
fu86 12y ago
This was my first linux distribution and I loved it!
- mikegriff 12y ago
  It was the first one I installed myself. I spent a long time trying to download all the floppy disk images for A and X over dial up. Trying to do it while on work experience on the only PC that had an internet connection made it all the more fun.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  My very first as well. Had to install it to a MS-DOS partition and from there to the real Linux partition as IDE CDROM drives were still not properly supported back then.
  - yebyen 12y ago
    ZipSlack? I seem to remember it was called ZipSlack because I actually had a ZIP drive at the time. That was definitely the coolest thing ever.
    - pjmlp 12y ago
      No, a pile of floppy disks. I cannot remember anylonger the exact version. It was the last version of Slackware to use a.out executable format and IDE ATAPI had just recently been added. My CDROM IDE wasn't supported during boot time, only after installation, hence the workaround.
lunchladydoris 12y ago
This was my second Linux distro, after Mandrake. Mandrake showed me that an alternative OS was viable. Slackware (and the trouble it took to get it working) taught me how computers work.
- teekert 12y ago
  Same here! That first Mandrake boot was magical so different from windows (KDE3) yet so functional. I remember burning my first CD with K3b, that worked perfectly and it was just as functional as the expensive Nero! Man those were the days, having to manually mount your usb stick with the 2.4 kernel. Dropline Gnome (still alive I see http://www.droplinegnome.org/ http://www.droplinegnome.org/) made Slackware a lot easier to keep up to date and pretty and slapt-get provided a nice update mechanism. I went to Gentoo afterwards and then to Arch, I haven't looked back for years now. To bad DO dropped Arch support so now I'm using Debian on the server VM's. Remember Patrick got sick and the whole community was sending drugs? Nice. And that whole drama about jumping version numbers...
  - lunchladydoris 12y ago
    I think about Patrick's illness almost every time I brush my teeth. If I remember right, he got some bacterial infection after swallowing dislodged oral flora, or at least that was the working theory.
weland 12y ago
Slackware is the first Linux distro that I used. I recently (last year or so) I got back to it, because all the crap Debian was pouring over upstream got harder and harder to use, and with all the udev and llvm and consolethis and policythat crap setting up a Gentoo installation with decent encryption proved way beyond the free time and patience I had. Turns out Slackware still rocks! It's simple and literally just works. Slackbuilds.org wasn't around when I first tried Slackware and my life is a lot easier than it was back then. It's great. Happy birthday guys!
- pjc50 12y ago
  Interesting; Slackware was my first distro (dozen floppy disks) as well. I too am interested in not having policykit or much of the modern desktop stuff.
  - jballanc 12y ago
    Dozen! I remember when Slackware fit on a single 3.5" floppy. There was a second disk, but you only needed that if you wanted to install X, and why would you want X when you had virtual terminals you could just switch between?
    - rahimnathwani 12y ago
      Thanks for making me feel young :) When I first used Slackware, I think the base set was 13 floppies, and that didn't include networking or X. This was before insmod/modprobe and I had to re-compile the kernel once I'd saved up the 80 pounds to buy a sound card. The compilation took the whole night on my 486, and I needed several attempts before I got it working. Kernel 1.1.59 I think.
  - weland 12y ago
    I think it still has them, but I can pretend not to care about them because I don't have to set them up, which I would have had to do on Gentoo. You literally just install Slackware and it works. It can skip the "modern" desktop crap though, that's cool. They don't distribute Gnome anymore, so it doesn't cram hundreds of libwhythefuckisthisalib and libgnomewhythefuckisthisagnomelib and their dependencies on the drive, and all the KDE stuff is nicely tucked away so you don't have to install it.
vezzy-fnord 12y ago
No matter what Linux distro I hop to, I ultimately always keep returning to Slackware. Pat really is a visionary: he's one man who has always gotten it right over 21 years, amidst a landscape like Linux, known for its chaos and constant reinvention. He should be an example to all distro maintainers. The system is so neatly designed that you don't even notice the lack of automatic dependency resolution. This is simply because of the sheer breadth of choices you have when it comes to installing software on Slackware. In short, it's the last bastion of sanity in Linux.
- teekert 12y ago
  You mean like slapt-get? What would be the best one?
  - vezzy-fnord 12y ago
    Manual compilation, wget+installpkg on precompiled packages (whether by AlienBob or anyone else), sbopkg without queue files/with queue files, slapt-get/slapt-src, the FTP repository that can be queried from slackpkg, etc. Most of the time I use slackpkg to apply updates and version upgrades, sbopkg for third-party software by handpicking the dependencies, and precompiled packages for software with lots of dependencies that are tedious to sort. It's clean, easy and avoids the bloat of unneeded packages lying on your system.
- reddit_clone 12y ago
  > lack of automatic dependency resolution I never really felt this to be a problem. Slackware has everything you need in the installer you hardly ever have to install new stuff for most of the standard things.
- mrottenkolber 12y ago
  Strongly agree. I am writing this from a slackware I broke pretty badly right after install. I accidentally deleted /var/log/packages (don't ask me how), and didn't have any backup. People told me to reinstall. I didn't, I tracked down all the tgz's and hacked on installpkg to regenerate /var/log/packages without reinstalling. Of couse all streaming over a mounted curlftpfs. Oh what a rush. % ls ~/tmp/desaster/ installpkg local-pkgs root slackware64 This was possible because I knew which series I installed at date X. I knew my last security updates were at date Y and which custom (self-built) packages I had installed. Slackware is so simple, so sane, so beautiful. A hallmark of software engineering.
danieldk 12y ago
Almost a quarter century, primarily one man, hat off to Patrick Volkerding! (I used Slackware from 1994 to ~2005.)
Zardoz84 12y ago
Hard as a rock, and keep staying here. Good job Patrick Volkerding!
davidw 12y ago
I remember downloading the disks over a 14.4 modem... It was my first Linux, and I was head over heels in love. Here was a system where I could dig around and learn stuff and explore and get the source code to all the stuff I was running and see how it was put together. That was such an exhilarating feeling! I still love using Linux and think it (or something similar like a BSD) is the best system for a hacker.
gleenn 12y ago
Time to start drinking!
- bestest 12y ago
  Oh yeah. Have a beer, Slack. You deserve it.
- shimshim 12y ago
  I was waiting for one of these comments :D
gteno 12y ago
Happy Birthday, Slackware! and keep update us..
mrweasel 12y ago
To me Slackware was the distribution that made everything understandable. Nothing was hidden from you, everything was installed where the manuals said it would be. I loved that Slackware didn't try to move stuff around in third party software to fit idea about a official disc layout. Also the init system made so much more sense (still do I think). Slackware is a wonderful distribution for people who want to learn Linux, not just use it.
- busterarm 12y ago
  I can't second these statements enough, especially the last one. I'd tried every major distro before settling on Slackware sometime around '99 and that's when I finally learned Linux. I'm using Arch today and to me it's a very similar philosophy with some bonuses. If it weren't around, I would surely be using Slack.
  - mrottenkolber 12y ago
    The difference between Arch and Slack tho is, a Slackware system is rock solid and doesn't need to be touched. An Arch system not maintained for a couple months is in pacman hell. :)
  - Alupis 12y ago
    I took a similar approach, although not with Slackware. I was tired of not knowing what was inside my distro, nor how it worked... so one day I decided to build my own distro (following the very good Linux From Scratch book, and then later the Cross-Linux From Scratch book). It's even more bare-bones than a base arch or slackware -- but the best part was knowing exactly how everything worked, and no longer fearing of changing something, because I understood what it was doing now. The experience and knowledge of "rolling my own distro" is very applicable elsewhere -- from understanding kernel panics better, to understanding "dependency hell", to how the entire boot process even works. A linux distro is really a thing of beauty once you understand what is going on under the hood.
    - busterarm 12y ago
jestinjoy1 12y ago
Years back when starting to use Linux came across Slackware. At that time it was something difficult for noobies to install. Then switched to Ubuntu for ease of use. Now happy with Debian. Glad to know Slackware is alive and strong. What amazed me that time was Slackware was developed and maintained by a single person "Patrick Volkerding" Long live linux community!
- xienze 12y ago
  > At that time it was something difficult for noobies to install. In its heyday (mid-late 90s), Slackware _was_ Linux for noobs. I still remember downloading all those disk images via modem.
mhd 12y ago
One thing that bothers me about slackware nowadays is something I loved when I first got it: It installys almost everything by default. I'd like a minimal install base right now (and manually picking this in the installer ain't that easy), but back in '95, having every kind of editor, programming language, window manager, TeX etc. on disk was awesome. And then I started looking at comp.os.linux.announce and sunsite to see what's new and current and installed that manually (and dependency tracking wasn't an issue at all because a) most libraries on disk anyway -- certainly no silly "-devel" packages and b) we didn't have that many dependencies back then, when "based purely on Xlib" was a badge of honor...
- fuzzix 12y ago
  > I'd like a minimal install base right now (and manually picking this in the installer ain't that easy) I think the best way to do this currently is to select the categories of packages and then choose a "Full Install" (the warning that it will install almost 8GB of software is a little confusing as it only installs what was selected on the previous screen). I think you can do quite a bit with just the A, AP and D sets.
reflect 12y ago
This was my first linux distro, I used it back in the mid 90's and it was such a great learning experience. Amazing how long it's been already.
jqm 12y ago
Slackware is awesome and I spend more time with it (much more time actually) than with my girlfriend. I've tried other distros like Open Suse and Ubuntu but they weren't for me. I don't need all the overhead to do simple thing that can be done by editing a text file. (Mint is pretty nice though... I install it sometimes for friends and family members). I appreciate the effort behind apt-get type package mangers, but often they often aren't up to date. With a slack build I get the latest source and know exactly what I am getting rather than installing some mysterious black box binary. Sure, apt-get might save 5 minutes but I'd rather spend the 5 minutes and do it right. Just my personal fetish. If you are new to Slack or Linux in general I recommend trying Slax or Porteus. Since they are live, you can change whatever you want and experiment, and just restart your machine when you inevitably bork something. This is how I came to Slackware in the first place. I needed a live distro for a kiosk I was building (was an Open Suse user at the time) and started taking apart and re-assembling Slax. Eventually the light went off in my head and I saw the beauty of simplicity and have never looked back.
mrottenkolber 12y ago
I couple years ago I vowed I will never install another operating system than Slackware again. I have been happy since! :)
bobx11 12y ago
I will always remember the original slackware and Wallnut Creek FreeBSD distro cds I could buy from microcenter 20 years ago... I had so much fun installing, partitioning, install packages, then write my own code and compile it. Thanks to any old slackware maintainers out there - you made this 12 year old kid (20 years ago) love computing and learning about how computers worked.
snarfy 12y ago
The shell scripts that installed the floppy disks looked for a file called 'install.end'. They did not look at the contents of the file, only checked for its existence. Here is the contents: For information about getting "Bob" in your life, send $1 to: Church of the SubGenius P.O. Box 140306 Dallas TX 75214 USA ($2 US extra if outside US) http://www.subgenius.com I'm pretty sure the URL has changed. It was on sunsite.unc.edu.
- wcummings 12y ago
  http://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-3.5/slaktest/a1/install.end http://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-3.5/slaktes...
teh_klev 12y ago
Slackware was my first encounter with Linux back in early 1995 (I was a field engineer at the time looking after BT supplied SCO Unix and Xenix boxes in doctors surgeries in the highlands of Scotland). It was very exciting times. I learned to build my own kernels which took hours on the crappy old dell I owned at the time, but very satisfying. It was even more exciting when I managed to get a Novell NE2000 clone to work with it as well and set up my first web and FTP server in my bedroom and then got it to talk to my Hayes compatible modem and Demon Internet. Happy hacky days :) I use CentOS these days, mainly because it's our company standard, I must go back and give it another spin. Congrats Slackware!
harrystone 12y ago
I've been using Slackware for years now both at home and at work. It's a great distro and that's because of Pat!
brickmort 12y ago
Reading through the comments here makes me appreciate how great the HN community is. happy birthday Slackware!
shimshim 12y ago
I will never forget bricking my first Windows PC with Slackware before I knew anything. Turned out to be recoverable but was a crazy experience as a teenager.
- libraryatnight 12y ago
  Ditto! I think it's beneficial to have grown up breaking computers :D
Patrick_Devine 12y ago
Slack was pretty cool, but like SLS before it, it was a little unwieldy. This was especially true if you didn't have a CD-ROM drive (or a CD-ROM with the right bits!). Instead, I used MCC Interim Linux to get a base set of bits since it had such a tiny foot print. I also somehow managed to cobble together X11 and get it working, but I seem to remember it being a real pain in the ass. Coincidentally, my first X11 background image was also of JR Bob Dobbs, but I wasn't running Slackware.
bitwize 12y ago
Slackware is what I started with, and what I keep coming back to. I tried Debian, but its complexity overwhelmed me. Back to Slack. Gentoo? Took too long to compile stuff, and the words "revdep-rebuild" should fill anyone with dread horror. Then I tried Arch which seemed to offer the best mix of Slackware simplicity and Gentoo comprehensiveness. But after the nth complete breakage of a running system and the "fuck you and your simplicity, we're using systemd" kerfuffle, guess what? I was back to Slack again. And Ubuntu? I tried it in 2008. Decided it used way too much RAM. Scraped it off.
webnrrd2k 12y ago
Wow. I remember when Slackware was distributed on six floppies, and I had to download it from BBS about a thousand miles away. I had a 386 computer with a 40Mb MFM hard drive that was about the size of a loaf of bread, and the computer had the bare minimum of ram to run it -- 4 Mb. You had to directly copy a floppy image to the hard drive, and then manually edit a few bits to tell it to boot from the HD. I had no idea what I was doing -- none of my friends had even heard of Linux, but it was a lot of fun. Linux: You've come a long way, baby!
keithpeter 12y ago
"The machine is a Pentium III, 600 MHz, with 512 megabytes of RAM. It runs (of course) Slackware Linux, and does an efficient and reliable job even with moderately old hardware. The slackware.com site has been known to run for well over a year without a reboot." Dogfooding the Web site. I learned quite a lot from zipslack, a live distro booted from an Iomega Zip disk. Edit:http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/interviews-28/interview-with-patrick-volkerding-of-slackware-949029/ http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/interviews-28/interv... Some historical stuff
fit2rule 12y ago
Bring back Yggdrasil!

178 points by robobro 12y ago

Nux 12y ago

Happy Birthday and many more maintained years to a special project! :-)

dragonquest 12y ago

And hats off to Patrick Volkerding who announced 1.0 and so many years later still going strong announcing 14.1.

alokyadav15 12y ago

Respect for Patrick Volkerding .

fibo 12y ago

Best Linux distro ever

cyphax 12y ago

The oldest surviving distribution, and yet it never lost its identity and its core values which makes me a very happy user to this day. Congratulations Patrick Volkerding!

fu86 12y ago

This was my first linux distribution and I loved it!

mikegriff 12y ago
It was the first one I installed myself. I spent a long time trying to download all the floppy disk images for A and X over dial up. Trying to do it while on work experience on the only PC that had an internet connection made it all the more fun.
pjmlp 12y ago
My very first as well. Had to install it to a MS-DOS partition and from there to the real Linux partition as IDE CDROM drives were still not properly supported back then.
- yebyen 12y ago
  ZipSlack? I seem to remember it was called ZipSlack because I actually had a ZIP drive at the time. That was definitely the coolest thing ever.
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    No, a pile of floppy disks. I cannot remember anylonger the exact version. It was the last version of Slackware to use a.out executable format and IDE ATAPI had just recently been added. My CDROM IDE wasn't supported during boot time, only after installation, hence the workaround.

lunchladydoris 12y ago

This was my second Linux distro, after Mandrake. Mandrake showed me that an alternative OS was viable. Slackware (and the trouble it took to get it working) taught me how computers work.

teekert 12y ago
Same here! That first Mandrake boot was magical so different from windows (KDE3) yet so functional. I remember burning my first CD with K3b, that worked perfectly and it was just as functional as the expensive Nero! Man those were the days, having to manually mount your usb stick with the 2.4 kernel. Dropline Gnome (still alive I see http://www.droplinegnome.org/ http://www.droplinegnome.org/) made Slackware a lot easier to keep up to date and pretty and slapt-get provided a nice update mechanism. I went to Gentoo afterwards and then to Arch, I haven't looked back for years now. To bad DO dropped Arch support so now I'm using Debian on the server VM's. Remember Patrick got sick and the whole community was sending drugs? Nice. And that whole drama about jumping version numbers...
- lunchladydoris 12y ago
  I think about Patrick's illness almost every time I brush my teeth. If I remember right, he got some bacterial infection after swallowing dislodged oral flora, or at least that was the working theory.

weland 12y ago

Slackware is the first Linux distro that I used. I recently (last year or so) I got back to it, because all the crap Debian was pouring over upstream got harder and harder to use, and with all the udev and llvm and consolethis and policythat crap setting up a Gentoo installation with decent encryption proved way beyond the free time and patience I had. Turns out Slackware still rocks! It's simple and literally just works. Slackbuilds.org wasn't around when I first tried Slackware and my life is a lot easier than it was back then. It's great. Happy birthday guys!

pjc50 12y ago
Interesting; Slackware was my first distro (dozen floppy disks) as well. I too am interested in not having policykit or much of the modern desktop stuff.
- jballanc 12y ago
  Dozen! I remember when Slackware fit on a single 3.5" floppy. There was a second disk, but you only needed that if you wanted to install X, and why would you want X when you had virtual terminals you could just switch between?
  - rahimnathwani 12y ago
    Thanks for making me feel young :) When I first used Slackware, I think the base set was 13 floppies, and that didn't include networking or X. This was before insmod/modprobe and I had to re-compile the kernel once I'd saved up the 80 pounds to buy a sound card. The compilation took the whole night on my 486, and I needed several attempts before I got it working. Kernel 1.1.59 I think.
- weland 12y ago
  I think it still has them, but I can pretend not to care about them because I don't have to set them up, which I would have had to do on Gentoo. You literally just install Slackware and it works. It can skip the "modern" desktop crap though, that's cool. They don't distribute Gnome anymore, so it doesn't cram hundreds of libwhythefuckisthisalib and libgnomewhythefuckisthisagnomelib and their dependencies on the drive, and all the KDE stuff is nicely tucked away so you don't have to install it.

vezzy-fnord 12y ago

No matter what Linux distro I hop to, I ultimately always keep returning to Slackware. Pat really is a visionary: he's one man who has always gotten it right over 21 years, amidst a landscape like Linux, known for its chaos and constant reinvention. He should be an example to all distro maintainers. The system is so neatly designed that you don't even notice the lack of automatic dependency resolution. This is simply because of the sheer breadth of choices you have when it comes to installing software on Slackware. In short, it's the last bastion of sanity in Linux.

teekert 12y ago
You mean like slapt-get? What would be the best one?
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  Manual compilation, wget+installpkg on precompiled packages (whether by AlienBob or anyone else), sbopkg without queue files/with queue files, slapt-get/slapt-src, the FTP repository that can be queried from slackpkg, etc. Most of the time I use slackpkg to apply updates and version upgrades, sbopkg for third-party software by handpicking the dependencies, and precompiled packages for software with lots of dependencies that are tedious to sort. It's clean, easy and avoids the bloat of unneeded packages lying on your system.
reddit_clone 12y ago
> lack of automatic dependency resolution I never really felt this to be a problem. Slackware has everything you need in the installer you hardly ever have to install new stuff for most of the standard things.
mrottenkolber 12y ago
Strongly agree. I am writing this from a slackware I broke pretty badly right after install. I accidentally deleted /var/log/packages (don't ask me how), and didn't have any backup. People told me to reinstall. I didn't, I tracked down all the tgz's and hacked on installpkg to regenerate /var/log/packages without reinstalling. Of couse all streaming over a mounted curlftpfs. Oh what a rush. % ls ~/tmp/desaster/ installpkg local-pkgs root slackware64 This was possible because I knew which series I installed at date X. I knew my last security updates were at date Y and which custom (self-built) packages I had installed. Slackware is so simple, so sane, so beautiful. A hallmark of software engineering.

danieldk 12y ago

Almost a quarter century, primarily one man, hat off to Patrick Volkerding! (I used Slackware from 1994 to ~2005.)

Zardoz84 12y ago

Hard as a rock, and keep staying here. Good job Patrick Volkerding!

davidw 12y ago

I remember downloading the disks over a 14.4 modem... It was my first Linux, and I was head over heels in love. Here was a system where I could dig around and learn stuff and explore and get the source code to all the stuff I was running and see how it was put together. That was such an exhilarating feeling! I still love using Linux and think it (or something similar like a BSD) is the best system for a hacker.

gleenn 12y ago

Time to start drinking!

bestest 12y ago
Oh yeah. Have a beer, Slack. You deserve it.
shimshim 12y ago
I was waiting for one of these comments :D

gteno 12y ago

Happy Birthday, Slackware! and keep update us..

mrweasel 12y ago

To me Slackware was the distribution that made everything understandable. Nothing was hidden from you, everything was installed where the manuals said it would be. I loved that Slackware didn't try to move stuff around in third party software to fit idea about a official disc layout. Also the init system made so much more sense (still do I think). Slackware is a wonderful distribution for people who want to learn Linux, not just use it.

busterarm 12y ago
I can't second these statements enough, especially the last one. I'd tried every major distro before settling on Slackware sometime around '99 and that's when I finally learned Linux. I'm using Arch today and to me it's a very similar philosophy with some bonuses. If it weren't around, I would surely be using Slack.
- mrottenkolber 12y ago
  The difference between Arch and Slack tho is, a Slackware system is rock solid and doesn't need to be touched. An Arch system not maintained for a couple months is in pacman hell. :)
- Alupis 12y ago
  I took a similar approach, although not with Slackware. I was tired of not knowing what was inside my distro, nor how it worked... so one day I decided to build my own distro (following the very good Linux From Scratch book, and then later the Cross-Linux From Scratch book). It's even more bare-bones than a base arch or slackware -- but the best part was knowing exactly how everything worked, and no longer fearing of changing something, because I understood what it was doing now. The experience and knowledge of "rolling my own distro" is very applicable elsewhere -- from understanding kernel panics better, to understanding "dependency hell", to how the entire boot process even works. A linux distro is really a thing of beauty once you understand what is going on under the hood.
  - busterarm 12y ago

jestinjoy1 12y ago

Years back when starting to use Linux came across Slackware. At that time it was something difficult for noobies to install. Then switched to Ubuntu for ease of use. Now happy with Debian. Glad to know Slackware is alive and strong. What amazed me that time was Slackware was developed and maintained by a single person "Patrick Volkerding" Long live linux community!

xienze 12y ago
> At that time it was something difficult for noobies to install. In its heyday (mid-late 90s), Slackware _was_ Linux for noobs. I still remember downloading all those disk images via modem.

mhd 12y ago

One thing that bothers me about slackware nowadays is something I loved when I first got it: It installys almost everything by default. I'd like a minimal install base right now (and manually picking this in the installer ain't that easy), but back in '95, having every kind of editor, programming language, window manager, TeX etc. on disk was awesome. And then I started looking at comp.os.linux.announce and sunsite to see what's new and current and installed that manually (and dependency tracking wasn't an issue at all because a) most libraries on disk anyway -- certainly no silly "-devel" packages and b) we didn't have that many dependencies back then, when "based purely on Xlib" was a badge of honor...

fuzzix 12y ago
> I'd like a minimal install base right now (and manually picking this in the installer ain't that easy) I think the best way to do this currently is to select the categories of packages and then choose a "Full Install" (the warning that it will install almost 8GB of software is a little confusing as it only installs what was selected on the previous screen). I think you can do quite a bit with just the A, AP and D sets.

reflect 12y ago

This was my first linux distro, I used it back in the mid 90's and it was such a great learning experience. Amazing how long it's been already.

jqm 12y ago

Slackware is awesome and I spend more time with it (much more time actually) than with my girlfriend. I've tried other distros like Open Suse and Ubuntu but they weren't for me. I don't need all the overhead to do simple thing that can be done by editing a text file. (Mint is pretty nice though... I install it sometimes for friends and family members). I appreciate the effort behind apt-get type package mangers, but often they often aren't up to date. With a slack build I get the latest source and know exactly what I am getting rather than installing some mysterious black box binary. Sure, apt-get might save 5 minutes but I'd rather spend the 5 minutes and do it right. Just my personal fetish. If you are new to Slack or Linux in general I recommend trying Slax or Porteus. Since they are live, you can change whatever you want and experiment, and just restart your machine when you inevitably bork something. This is how I came to Slackware in the first place. I needed a live distro for a kiosk I was building (was an Open Suse user at the time) and started taking apart and re-assembling Slax. Eventually the light went off in my head and I saw the beauty of simplicity and have never looked back.

mrottenkolber 12y ago

I couple years ago I vowed I will never install another operating system than Slackware again. I have been happy since! :)

bobx11 12y ago

I will always remember the original slackware and Wallnut Creek FreeBSD distro cds I could buy from microcenter 20 years ago... I had so much fun installing, partitioning, install packages, then write my own code and compile it. Thanks to any old slackware maintainers out there - you made this 12 year old kid (20 years ago) love computing and learning about how computers worked.

snarfy 12y ago

The shell scripts that installed the floppy disks looked for a file called 'install.end'. They did not look at the contents of the file, only checked for its existence. Here is the contents: For information about getting "Bob" in your life, send $1 to: Church of the SubGenius P.O. Box 140306 Dallas TX 75214 USA ($2 US extra if outside US) http://www.subgenius.com I'm pretty sure the URL has changed. It was on sunsite.unc.edu.

wcummings 12y ago
http://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-3.5/slaktest/a1/install.end http://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-3.5/slaktes...

teh_klev 12y ago

Slackware was my first encounter with Linux back in early 1995 (I was a field engineer at the time looking after BT supplied SCO Unix and Xenix boxes in doctors surgeries in the highlands of Scotland). It was very exciting times. I learned to build my own kernels which took hours on the crappy old dell I owned at the time, but very satisfying. It was even more exciting when I managed to get a Novell NE2000 clone to work with it as well and set up my first web and FTP server in my bedroom and then got it to talk to my Hayes compatible modem and Demon Internet. Happy hacky days :) I use CentOS these days, mainly because it's our company standard, I must go back and give it another spin. Congrats Slackware!

harrystone 12y ago

I've been using Slackware for years now both at home and at work. It's a great distro and that's because of Pat!

brickmort 12y ago

Reading through the comments here makes me appreciate how great the HN community is. happy birthday Slackware!

shimshim 12y ago

I will never forget bricking my first Windows PC with Slackware before I knew anything. Turned out to be recoverable but was a crazy experience as a teenager.

libraryatnight 12y ago
Ditto! I think it's beneficial to have grown up breaking computers :D

Patrick_Devine 12y ago

Slack was pretty cool, but like SLS before it, it was a little unwieldy. This was especially true if you didn't have a CD-ROM drive (or a CD-ROM with the right bits!). Instead, I used MCC Interim Linux to get a base set of bits since it had such a tiny foot print. I also somehow managed to cobble together X11 and get it working, but I seem to remember it being a real pain in the ass. Coincidentally, my first X11 background image was also of JR Bob Dobbs, but I wasn't running Slackware.

bitwize 12y ago

Slackware is what I started with, and what I keep coming back to. I tried Debian, but its complexity overwhelmed me. Back to Slack. Gentoo? Took too long to compile stuff, and the words "revdep-rebuild" should fill anyone with dread horror. Then I tried Arch which seemed to offer the best mix of Slackware simplicity and Gentoo comprehensiveness. But after the nth complete breakage of a running system and the "fuck you and your simplicity, we're using systemd" kerfuffle, guess what? I was back to Slack again. And Ubuntu? I tried it in 2008. Decided it used way too much RAM. Scraped it off.

webnrrd2k 12y ago

Wow. I remember when Slackware was distributed on six floppies, and I had to download it from BBS about a thousand miles away. I had a 386 computer with a 40Mb MFM hard drive that was about the size of a loaf of bread, and the computer had the bare minimum of ram to run it -- 4 Mb. You had to directly copy a floppy image to the hard drive, and then manually edit a few bits to tell it to boot from the HD. I had no idea what I was doing -- none of my friends had even heard of Linux, but it was a lot of fun. Linux: You've come a long way, baby!

keithpeter 12y ago

"The machine is a Pentium III, 600 MHz, with 512 megabytes of RAM. It runs (of course) Slackware Linux, and does an efficient and reliable job even with moderately old hardware. The slackware.com site has been known to run for well over a year without a reboot." Dogfooding the Web site. I learned quite a lot from zipslack, a live distro booted from an Iomega Zip disk. Edit:http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/interviews-28/interview-with-patrick-volkerding-of-slackware-949029/ http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/interviews-28/interv... Some historical stuff

fit2rule 12y ago

Bring back Yggdrasil!