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?"

Comments

I doubt it

[riggwelter]

Slackware occupies a niche - that of the most UN*X-like GNU/Linux, people who want that will continue to use Slack.

And just cos a couple of apps are no longer going to be developed, the distro doesn't end. It'll keep on going for as long as the project developers want to, simple as that.

Not gameover.. not yet.

[spectrum]

So, the other day i'm trying to install linux (a linux with some sort of package management abilities) onto a firewall (486sx, 40meg HD, 8 meg ram).

The kernel killed debian's setup program shortly after startup.. But trusty 'ol lightweight slakware rose to the challenge to breathe new life into that machine.

I was impressed. :)

Slackware isn't dead. It's just not for everyone.

[Jsprat23]

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

One hobbyist would hope not...

[tarsi210]

From the: But-we-need-you-around,honest! dept.

Slackware has been a stalwart distro for me ever since I discovered Linux, and continues to be the #1 distro I run on my machines. Now, I have many, many vintage machines, as I'm into collecting and restoring older machines. Slackware works very well for this, as well for various servers that I maintain.

Mind you, the setup and interface has never been stellar, and leaves most normal users coughing in the dust. However, for those who need max flexibility and a thin system (like these 386 machines and such need), this is an excellent one. I personally don't see any huge loss by not having these tools....come to think of it, I've never used them anyway.

On the other hand, if Slack exists because of commercial sales, then the loss of these tools and others will be its demise from lack of revenue.

I Love Slackware

[CtrlPhreak]

I have to say I'd still consider myself a newbie when it comes to linux, well not quite but definetly not an expert. I love slackware because it's what you make of it. It isn't bloated like many other distros (Mandrake SuSE, etc...). It comes with a good assortment of apps and doesn't take 2 gigs of your drive installing things which A) aren't documented, B) aren't referenced and C) you have no clue they're there till you go digging and find out they are just peices of crap. It's simple, and it is configured exactly how you want it. People say it's dying because it doesn't cater to the brand spanking newbie like windows does or mandrake is trying to do. I did not start out on slack and would like to thank mandrake for giving me that start in linux life, but at some point you have to take off the training wheels, and move to that 10 speed.

So what if one developer is stopping work on some tools? It's opensource right? Isn't part of the point that if they are needed and people want them someone will pick it up and finish them? 2 tools don't make a distro, and 2 tools stopping development by their primary guy doesn't kill a distro. GO SLACKWARE!

Re:I Love Slackware

[wyren]

As someone who remembers the first Slackware release and has been using Linux since version 0.12 (two-floppy + gcc and uemacs), I'm not only proud, but also determined, to keep using Slackware on my servers. It's dependable and stable, and it installs easily in under 1GB. Slackware doesn't fight me when I want to make configuration changes the traditional way, either, so 31 years of collected wisdom still applies and can be found on UseNet, the Web and in O'Reilly books. Most importantly, Slackware doesn't replace key pieces of software with untested crap. SuSE and Red Hat have their strengths, but for small, reliable server installs you can't beat Slack. If Slackware disappears, I'll probably switch my servers to OpenBSD. Until then, I'm keeping my subscription to Slackware.

Slackware will always have a place...

[Mr. Neutron]

...somewhere in between the "full desktop" linuxes and "build your own linux." Slack doesn't need fancy apps or installations to justify its existence. All it needs is, every few months, to:

-Upgrade to the newest kernel, make sure everything is compatible
-Upgrade to the newest compiler and basic libs, and make sure everything is compatible
-Make sure the system is compatible with the latest, greatest hardware.

A bonus would be up-to-date GNOME and KDE, but is it really necessary? For Slack fans like myself, it's better to get a simple, basic OS and then add whatever desktop stuff I see fit. It's build-you-own, without most of the pain of build-your-own.

Redhat, Mandrake, and SuSE have been pissing me off lately with installs that take 1800 MB of disk space, and 10,000 background daemons that eat up 80% of the available RAM. If I want to install a useful system with X and FVWM to do Web browsing, check e-mail and log into remote UNIX boxen, all on a Pentium-90 with 16 MB RAM and a 600 GB hard drive, the ONLY current distribution good for the job is Slackware.

Slackware is for folks like me, who remember when Linux was *Linux*, and not a Windows wannabe.

Long Live Slackware!

[LazyDawg]

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.

(protopkg && autoslack) != slackware

[snookums]

protopkg and autoslack were interesting concepts, but really little more that than in my view. As a long time (5 years) user of The Slack, I have come to know how to maintain the package database with simple tools like ls and grep, how to build new packages from source with only 1-2 minutes overhead on the normal build time, and how to use rsync and wget to keep my package store current. David's tools were just a way of automating what I do automatically anyway.

I don't mean to down-play his work, just emphasise that these were tools to make life a little easier -- especially for those with a little less time and/or experience. They were not there to bring Slack "out of the stoneage", and the are not necessary for the continued vitality of the distribution.

(By the way, what stoneage is the poster talking about? The lack of framebuffer eye-candy in the install? The lack of a package management system that can't handle alien packages? The lack of non-standard compilers, kernel and C library?)

I don't see Slackware dying any time soon. Things have surely slowed down on the official development front since the developers stopped being paid to work on the distro, but security patches and updates to important packages (kde, vim, emacs) are still coming out.

Slack has gone through some slow periods before, but often there is work going on behind the scenes. Just recently there was a long but very active "unstable" cycle, with many updates and improvements, leading up to the release of 8.0 (which contrary to popular belief DOES contain recent versions of core software). I think it is understandable that the distro is now in a "maintenance" phase, keeping important thing up-to-date but not embarking on major changes or attempting to keep every package at the bleeding edge. I'm confident that development will begin again when Patrick sees value in it.

Slackware has me worried

[mrdisco99]

Slackware is an excellent distribution, which I hope never goes away. I prefer it over anything Red Hat, Mandrake, or SuSE have to offer.

However, it's not the qualities of the distribution that have me worried about its future (so what if it doesn't do RPM?). After the "layoff" Patrick's helpers (David, Chris, Logan) have been forced to get paying jobs elsewhere and only help out on a part time basis, leaving Patrick to handle the bulk of development by himself. He's started a slackware-current which has a few package collections in there, but nothing close to a new distribution tree. I'm also concerned that the latest patches put out for 8.0 were in August.

They've always been on time with security patches, but they've yet to release a patch for the kernel issues found a couple weeks ago. While, I don't mind so much downloading the new kernel source and recompiling it myself, I imagine there are many out there who don't know to do that. And yes, the newgrp exploit thing doesn't work in slackware because it uses shadow passwords instead of PAM, but the kernel bug is still there for exploitation by other means (su perhaps).

The fact that David is no longer developing autoslack and protopkg is unsettling, but it doesn't concern me as much as the seeming lack of activity at the slackware site. Please, Patrick, tell me I'm wrong and that you've got something big cooking up back there...

Re:Ob: Pedantic

[Lew Pitcher]

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.

/usr has always meant 'user' in Unix, and continues to mean 'user' even today. In the original Unix implementations, /usr was where the home directories of the users were placed (that is to say, /usr/someone was then the directory now known as /home/someone ). This has been confirmed many times by references to the historical documents (vid "Unix for Beginners" Bell Labs, 1978, or "The Unix Programming Environment", Bell Labs, 1984, which says (in part) "On many systems, /usr is a directory that contains the directories of all the normal users of the system.")

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.