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Is Slackware Fading Away?
A reader writes "I just read over on userlocal.com about how David Cantrell announced he is no longer actively developing protopkg and autoslack (these are 2 apps that could have brought slack out of the stoneage but still kept to slacks philosophy of K.I.S.S.). So is it almost "game over" for the first commercial linux distribution which used to be the heavyweight champ?"
I don't think Slackware is quite dead. I switched to Slackware 7.0 after Red Hat screwed up my partition tables. I now use Slackware 8.0 and haven't looked back since or regretted my dicision. Sure Slackware takes a little more time to maintain, but the people who use Slakware aren't above using ./configure; make; make install to get the programs they need/want.
I've never had a problem with the stability of a Slackware distro because Patrick Volkerding puts out a quality distro with out a ot of bloat.
Thanks for such a good distro Patrick.
Adam
Stable out of the box.
Easy to configure (for the average Unix guy).
Rarely has software which contains security holes.
BSD style init scripts
No RPM locking dependancy. If there's an issue, you can upgrade from source quickly.
There's an article here explaining why one site runs Slackware, which you might find interesting.
If you'd grown up on it, or come from another Unix-alike (such as OpenBSD, etc), you'd probably find Slackware quite friendly... most Slackware-heads would find Red Hat or even Debian restrictive and unfriendly.
To each their own.
Even if they stopped developing it, made it illegal in the lower 48 states, systematically jailed or impounded Slackware users or fed us to ravenous wolves, I'd not stop using this distro. It has everything I want on the CD, plenty of office suites and window managers, no shortage of development tools, and a small/fast enough footprint to still work on an i386 with 16 megs of RAM. That's not half bad for software I started using six years ago.
Lacking really ultra-advanced package management has never been much of a problem either. While the setup programs weren't quite as "saleable" as the pretty GUI frontends, they were colorful, used an easy-to-follow menu system, and gave a very detailed description of what they were doing, when, at all times. Compare that to, say, the Corel setup wizard, which kept crapping out on even slightly non-standard hardware.
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
I'm assuming userlocal.com is alluding to /usr/local. They're wrong. /usr is not "User", it's "Unix System Resources", and is pronounced "Yew Ess Ar"
Sorry, you are wrong. "Unix System Resources" is a retro-nym for /usr, much like "Packet InterNet Groper" is a retro-nym for ping; both are incorrect 'explanations' for for terms who's origin and meaning have been hidden by time.
In current Unices, /usr is where user-land programs and data (as opposed to 'system land' programs and data) hang out. The name hasn't changed, but it's meaning has narrowed and lengthened from "everything user related" to "user usable programs and data".
So, you are wrong. Deal with it.
"values of beta will give rise to dom!"
Just want to recommend that all RH users (and slackware too) check out checkinstall.
It's a utility that automagically changes tarball installs into RPM or slackware package installs.
I run it like this:
./configure
make
make test (if necessary)
checkinstall
Checkinstall first installs the build into a temp directory, builds the RPM or slackware package, and then installs the package.
I've been using it for the past 8 months and it's saved me many times from giving up on the RPM database. The developer is working on getting Debian pkgs going too.
It's available here.