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Slackware Being Spun Off
gaj writes, "The answer to "What about Slack?" given the WCCDROM/BSDi merger has been answered. Patrick & Co. (literally now!) are spinning off into a new company called (oddly enough) Slackware Linux, Inc. They've confirmed this on the Slackware site. " BTW, Patrick will be next week's Interviewee - so start thinking of questions.
For the first two years the only distro I knew was Slackware and things were "weird" in RH2.1 in my view at that time.
/dev/null
Still, when talk falls on Sl.W, people kinda finds it "outdated", mostly because they ran it once and now they don't so it must be outdated.
All is a matter of taste, but last I checked it worked more than fine, it even still installs from 3.5"'s, and it may save some old notebooks from the
:-) = I am happy
:^) = I am happy with my big nose
C:\> = I am happy with my OS
That's somewhat disturbing. I immediately had visions of the Slackware core team skipping and twirling down the street, all decked out in pastel colors, taped glasses and little pointy elf shoes. Ugh, I need more coffee.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
I am not exactly sure about my feelings when I read this article. For sure I am not glad that the new company has decided not to support Slackware.
Then again, perhaps it's better this way. Because, even if I haven't been following the financial situation of Walnut Creek, I almost can bet it's not very good. Correct me if I am wrong, but from the agreement (i.e. the merger contract) it seems that BSD Inc bought itself a large portal. One that has been very popular for years (not only in the Linux side of the world) and which could bring them come more popularity. Which for the moment the need just as much as they need air. Let's face it : who is (Free)BSD ? No, I'm not throwing stoones at them (I wouldn't dare since I never used their OS) - I'm just looking at their share of the OS market. am I right, or are they in the Other Unices slice ?
On the other hand it seems unlikely that Walnut Creek would give up a Linux distribution, knowing that the trend is pointing towards a Linux growth.
Conclusion : this is a takeover like any other (see also AOL and Netscape) nicely disguised in a merger (lately it seems very fashionable to merge your company with another one).
Who has to loose the most ? The Linux community. Or maybe not. Slackware may survive and I will be among the first to enjoy that. Because I always liked their distribution, because it is the first one I bought, because it is so damn' cool.
And if they don't succeed I wouldn't wonder in about two years to see BSD-WC releasing Slackware 9.0 (yes - it does mean 7.0 + 2.0 - skipping 8.0).
- Are they going to go public or, will they remain privately held?
- What about a revenue stream? How the heck are they going to raise long term funding?
- Can I get in on the ground level as an investor? If I do, will there be dividends?
and many more. As a user who is interested in the long term health of Linux I'd like to hear more of the details.My office has been taken over by iPod people.
You're not wrong. But its not your call. It would be nice if one of these companies came up with a new piece of software rather than producing Yet Another Linux Distro(TM). Still, Slackware have been around forever, so they have more cause to keep doing the same than a lot of the newbies.
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
Of course, most will disagree with me, and I'm not here to start holy wars, just to praise a great distribution. In my view, the spin-off is good news. I fear that the larger the company Slackware is associated with, the more pressure they would feel to change (i.e. become more like RedHat) Their continued independance reassures me that they will stay true to form.
CaptainZ
MANkind? What? I can only assume that you are talking about the professional wrestler of that name, because in my world (green, third from sun), the dominant species has TWO genders, and is called "humankind". I'm sick and tired of people always assuming that just because I'm a girl I don't know anything about computers. Actually I have Red Hat 6.0 and am learning Python. And I don't take kindly to people acting as if I don't exist. Not in the classroom, not in the street and not on the Internet. Mankind, my pert little ass.
Speak for yourself, dmg. If you don't like the consequences of writing open source software, then don't write open source software. Open source programmers, while terribly impoverished, still can buy a local newspaper and find the jobs section.
My local newspaper runs like 32 pages of hi-tech wanted ads per week.
So what's your problem again?
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Industrial space for lease in Flatlandia.
First, I was not being gender specific, and second, how do you know what gender I am? Get off of your horse and quit your political correctness attitude. It is this liberal bullsh@#$ that divides us, not a general term, that, up until a few years ago, meant: Mankind: THE HUMAN RACE If you ain't human, I'll withdraw the comment.
I use Slackware and have since Q2'95. I've been tempted to get over my quirks with RedHat and bite the bullet and migrate from my preferred distribution. (Various reasons - most of you will be fully aware of what they are).
This news will certainly delay this move and I hope to find a more professional gilt-edged version of Slackware 7.1 (or 8) on the horizon which has more support from third parties.
Is it just me or are other people infuriated by organisations such as 3dfx only distributing their stuff in rpm format?
No, it's not the pretty X that makes Slack great.
I've installed Red Hat and Slackware. I have machines at home running Red Hat 5.0 and Slackware 7. I admin both Slackware and Red Hat. I configure, compile, and install software on both. I can make valid comparisons between Slackware and Red Hat. I don't have any ground to stand on when talking about other distros, so I won't talk about other distros.
I use Slackware on my personal workstation and Red Hat on a machine that I don't use for much other than network routing. I don't fool much with the Red Hat machine, since I have it configured the way I like it. I didn't pick Red Hat to use as a gateway for any logical reason. I just had that machine available that had Red Hat on it at the time, so I configured it as a gateway.
I chose Slackware for my desktop workstation because I like the Slackware philosophy and it fits the way I work. Slackware has a more streamlined configuration that is better suited to manual changes with a text editor than is Red Hat's. I can configure Red Hat by hand, if I must, but Red Hat's SysV style of init is more suited to configuration by software. Overall, this makes Slackware more flexible because you can add scripts to rc.local or remove scripts from rc.d and worry less about breaking things than with Red Hat. Also, when you want some daemon banished from your machine for good, you don't have to remove a link from three or four directories. You can comment it out of one script and be done with it.
I am a tinkerer. I like to know how things work. I like to try different changes to see how they affect the system. I install from source, and you are kind of required to do so with Slackware since most RPMs are designed for some other system. That said, RPMs will work with Slackware, if you create the proper rc.d subdirectories first. Slackware still uses SysVInit, though inittab is set up more like BSD. Anyway, as I was saying, I install from source. I like to peruse the source of most applications before installing. And, yes, I install from source on Red Hat, too. I most recently installed OpenSSH on my Red Hat box. The big bonus of installing this way is there's no RPM database to get corrupted.
Slackware is great for someone who wants to learn about GNU/Linux and really understand what goes on under the hood. It's easier than Red Hat to install and to configure by hand. The rc scripts are all in one directory for the most part and it's easy to find where some daemon gets run so you can shut it down by commenting it out of the script.
If I were to create my own distro, I'd start from Slackware and build up from there. I think we need more GNU/Linux distros, not less. Right now, I feel that there are a lot of users' needs that are not being addressed by the larger distros. They may have three products (a Workstation, Server, and Web Server models) but those don't address everyone's needs. Slack, of course, comes in just one flavor, but that one flavor has most of what you need. Yet, Slackware is not perfect for all situations or all users, just as Red Hat is not perfect in all situations, either.
If Patrick and the gang can't carry the Slackware torch for some reason, then I'll be more than happy to pick it up and run with it. I practically have Slack 7 mirrored on my machine, anyway.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
As a Slackware user I have to admit, I like it when I see Slackware news on Slashdot. Its been on twice in as many days (truely a records for Slack?). However it seems to have had two different icons, with the Slackware Updates we had the "GNU's Not Unix" topic and with this topic we had the "Linux" topic (which seems more logical).
However, I believe its about time that Slackware gains its own topic and respectfully ask da Management for one.(A Slackware stylised "S" perhaps?)
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May contain traces of nut.
I think they need a slogan, to add a business edge to their image, while still remaining true to the spirit and character we all love. How about
Any others?
Daily, I read through the alt.linux, alt.os.linux and comp.os.linux newsgroups, and by far the smallest number of "it doesn't work" messages are from Slackware installs. Most of the problems come from users of the other distros when their nice MSWindows-like gui-based all-in-one Wizard maintenance tools don't do the job. And by far, the best answers come from those people (like those who use Slackware) who don't use those gee-whiz tools, but know their systems from experience.
If PV keeps up the good work, I couldn't care less if they were spun off or still supported by Walnut Creek. Slackware is by far the best distribution for those who expect to use Linux in serious work. It's even a pretty good distro for those who want to have a pretty desktop machine.
To those who post the "for dummies" questions in comp.os.linux.*, I say "Get Slack!".
"values of beta will give rise to dom!"
Since this is one of those rare occasions when Slackware gets mention on the Slashdot site, I think it would be a good time to talk about the origins of the name, and the spirit, of Slackware.
Slackware's name comes from JR "Bob" Dobbs and the Church of the Subgenius. I know that there haven't always been friendly relations between the Subgenius folks and the Slack distro, but it's still an important historical note to recognize.
The Subgenius must have Slack! etc. etc.
I just thought it worth mentioning, because Slackware has cool countercultural roots.
Keep up the good work Pat V. And thanks, from a fellow Minnesotan.
Your answer to #1 is WAY off. How about the manager at RHAT who refered to "The crowd that festers around" rasterman? How professional was that? If you spent your time as a professional programmer just to have some IDIOT in management crap on you like that, would you take it lying down? I don't think so.
Hey Rob, Thanks for that tarball!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
A long time ago, in the SLS (or was it LSL?) & MCC days (1992?)... a distro was untarring a bunch of files to disk. It was ugly, but adventurous.
Slackware was my next stop, and it was a nice change from it's predecessors, a bit more organized. A while after that, RedHat came along. Now, in all my time on #Linux helping people out, I'd always suggest slackware. Not because it was 'better', but because it didn't try to automate anything. IF you wanted to learn Linux, I thought, you better to it the hard way, and tackle slackware. And I think I was right. The only reason I know as much as I do about linux is because of slackware's roughness.
The next step, several years later, was using linux in business. Redhat seemed to be growing fast, and there were commercial apps (backup software, etc) that supported redhat. so I went with redhat. It was surprisingly integrated (compared to slackware). I didn't like not knowing what it was doing though.. it did too much for me. It was messy (but rpm was kinda handy).
I tried debian, but it was a cluttered mess.
Then mandrake (6.1). Ahh.. that was nice. redhat, but cleaned up and integrated. But still redhat...
Then one day, I tried a newer version of Debian, mainly because I like their philosophy. I love it now! It's extremely clean, and the package management rocks.
I've had people tell me 'I don't want package management, I want to compile and do everythign myself all the time'. I don't disagree with these poeple, and if that's what they want to do.. debian holds nothing for them. But after compiling and updating the same things for 8 years, I'm quite happy to let the debian developers take care of the compiling/updating of most things and let apt take care of upgrading. It hasn't failed me yet.
So I guess I'm saying, it all depends on what you want, or what you need. If you already have a very strong grasp of linux, debian is a great tool. If you want to learn it in great detail, use slack.
Redhat is messy.
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Industrial space for lease in Flatlandia.
Come on folks lets compare apples to apples.
;) (j/kidding) but I know their distro inside and out.
I use slackware at work. It freed me from my WinNT partition. I have used all of the RedHats up to 6.1 even seen Mandrake 7 more than once. I've installed FreeBSD & Corel Linux. Most of the time just to see what they decided to do differently. I have a partition on my HD at home that gets whatever new linux comes out just to see the differences. I always go back home to Slackware.
It's easy to configure the scripts to make everything run the way you want it to. It doesn't come with RPM support out of the box, but rpm2tgz is a great program. Not only that. I personally prefer tar.gzipped files. I prefer to compile them and get a feel for the programmer who wrote the software.
People that used slak 0.0.0.1 shouldn't compare the early versions to redhat 6.5 or any other current distro. I think Rob Malda still has his Slackware Rant on his web page that he had trouble with one of the early versions.
...and my last beef with the slack discussion is this: Where can you find a more helpful group of people that can fix just about anything Slackware related within 24 hrs, or at least make suggestions that point you in the right direction than http://www.slackware.com/forum They are a good group of guys (and gals) that know the distro well.
I've never met Patrick Volkerding or any of the other crew involved with Slackware. Probably would ruin my image of them
Slackware 7 is right up there with the rest of the Linuces*. Try it, you'll see.
* I think that's the plural.
This space intentionally left blank.
While I wouldn't call myself a "veteran" Linux user, I have been running Slackware since the summer of 1996. I'd say, rather than get[ing] away from the assumption that's taken prevalence lately that Linux distros have to come in shrinkwrapped boxes with colored bitmaps on them. that those ofus who have been using un-shrink-wrapped distributions need to do more advocation. Yes, Linux is moving (has moved?) into the realm of the business world, but we shouldn't allow ourselves to forget where it came from.
One of the main reaons that I still run Slackware, and still personally advocate for Slackware, is that installing it and using it everyday reminds me of the many times when I was first exploring *nix and learning the power that it gave to the user/programmer (and especially to the sysadmin ;) I like the philosophy of Slackware that you should know how your system works and how you want it to work; Slackware encourages a careful reasoned approach and a deep understanding of Linux.
With regards to FVWM1, why not just pull the source off of one of your old CD-ROMs, install libc5, and recompile it?
regards,
niteshad
To email me,subtract my nick from my email address, starting with the second character. (hint: adto.uiuc.edu is wrong)
Since time immemorial, or at least the time of Old English, "man" and "mankind" refer to all humans. This is the primary reason that the words "menkind" and "humen" do not exist. In fact, the *only* time "man" does not refer to a male human is when it is used to distiguish it from "woman".
The word "human" is defined in my dictionary as "of, pertaining to, or characteristic of mankind". It also shows that it is derived from the latin "humanus", which gives a clue as to the origin of your hated "man".
Stop trying to mold the English language to fit your narrow notions of political correctness.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
"The open source revolution has gone too far. Its time for us to take back ownership of our work."
Nobody took your ownership away. It is only on the GNU side of Open Source, and only a very small minority there, that demands software have no owners. No one can tell you what you can or can't do with your software. Not the IPO's and not RMS.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
This agent by whom I mean the "feminist" Anonymous Coward, is what is referred to as a "pink boy", in the official Sub-Genius text. Therefore he is clearly, by definition, not female (see the "boy" part of the appelation) and therefore his ranting may be taken with a grain of salt.
To "Pink Boy" the AC: I hope you will accept J.R. "Bob" Dobbs as your personal Lord and Savior, and leave your servitude to themightyandterribleJehovah1. Fnord.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
As J.R. "Bob" Dobbs would say, "You'd pay to know what you really think." Nothing can be considered more idealistic than that.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Now, how many version numbers does this warrant?
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson