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Patrick Volkerding Interviewed by The Age
boa13 writes "The Age, a major newspaper in Melbourne, Australia, has published an interview with Patrick Volkerding, The Man behind Slackware. Covered are the early history of Slackware, its business model, its current state, Patrick's plans for the future and his opinion about the commercialisation of Linux. "
Well I use RedHat for work (I am a self-employed Linux coder) and slackware for myself.
You cannot sell slackware to a business, it is just not designed for it - which does not make it bad btw.
It is in my opinion one of the greatest Linux distro's out there. I have been using slackware since the time when kernel versions started on 0 and I still love it. But it isn't designed for non-geeks, it is good that we have geek distro's surviving.
Debian is great too - now if only they would have a release often enough so you could have a semi-up-to-date software set without spending hundreds of bux on your net connection (in South-Africa you pay per minute so it is a real issue).
I am actually a great LFS fan and ran it for a long time, same problem though, you need to be online more than I can afford to do it.
Slackware is briliant in that respect, nothing is forced on you, you can modify it anyway you want with little risk of breaking things, and there's a new CD out fairly frequently.
There is however one part of my business where I get to uses slack, custom systems, there is a lot of work in this area amongst SME's and the fact is simply that for this job slack kicks butt as a startoff platform.
Ciao
A.J.
"Semper in excretum set alta variant"
debugger on Sun gear, and later ported it to Linux.
ESR was the world's expert on Unix for Intel IA32 hardware, long before Linux was invented.
He maintained the definitive Usenet list of i386 Unix. He personally tested and reviewed them all.
Before Slackware, my first association with Patrick Volkerding was when he took up a collection to help Linus Torvalds financially when Linus was still a student. Patrick collected several thousand dollars in dontations for Linus, and very penny of it went to Linus. Very cool.
I like all these guys. If they weren't doing Linux, they'd be doing something else equally fine.
Here is my experience with slackware.
.......Now all my machines run Slackware ( including my Sony VAIO XG18). When i got my Sun E250 last month , it took me only 2 hours to get it all set up with Solaris 9 ( Having NEVER worked on Solaris at an admin Level ). All this because i did not have a automagic install and had to learn/piece it all together.
The first linux CD i had was Slack 2.0 in the fall of 1995 and the Windows partition survived only 2 days. I can't say it was the easiest distro to work with but it forced me to buy the Linux bible and RTFM to get it working.
The memory of having my first X-session after hacking modelines etc for 2 days
Keep the good work going Patrick.
YJ87
The VCs will give you money to expand, but then if the climate turns, they might not be willing to keep funding. Now you have made lots of commitments to customers, employees and supliers that you just can't keep up.
About three years back I got a great job with a dotcom just when they got funded by a VC. By the end of the year, the company had doubled in size and by the next spring they had to lay off about half of the current staff. When I shook hands with the CEO on my way out I could tell he was very sad that he had let all of us down this way. The CTO that I reported too couldn't even look me in the face, but that's another story. Recently I heard the were absorbed by the VC and pretty much closed up their operation.
I really like slackware's simplicity. I agree. Myself, I went from DOS to slackware (in the 1.2 kernel days). Configuration flipped from editing autoexec.bat/config.sys to rc.d files.
/. crowd would be why someone chooses Debian over slack or vice versa. I'm not trying to start a "which is better" war, but although I've tried Debian, I keep coming back to slack.
Using slackware in those early days made me LEARN how the whole system works (since, like today, there are no GUI tools for anything). Over time I've tried most of the other distros, but I keep coming back to slack because I know what file to edit to get the job done.
Don't get me wrong, GUI tools are great and are required to bring Linux to a larger audience. However, they never quite have the flexibility, and at times are unusable (shell only).
My question for the
i started using linux a little over two years ago. i went to linuxworld 2000 in nyc and came home with free copies of several distrobution's cds. i went cold turkey off of windows and into redhat. after about a month, i realized that i wasn't really learning much from redhat.
that night i decided i was going to find a distro that i liked. i installed everything (suse, turbolinux, debian, conectiva). finally, i installed slackware an was amazed at its simplicity. it was remarkably voodoo-free. there were no crazy scripts to confuse me, everything made sense.
now i use debian. i forget when or why i made the switch. i still love slack, but i'm hooked on debian's package management and software availability. slackware is the best distro to *learn* linux on. it forces you to do things yourself, and that's important. it's not quite as hardcore as linux from scratch, and i've heard crux and gentoo are similar, but slack will always hold a special place in my heart.
Thanks Pat.
//radiotakeover.
I've been using Slack for about 2 years now. I've tried various other distributions (Mandrake, Red Hat, Debian, Gentoo), but I just love Slack so much I can never leave it. It's the way Linux was meant to be... I know exactly where everything is, and my filesystem isn't dirty like with the rest of the distros.
:B. I guess Joe Sixpack isn't really into that idea, but hey, Slack's not for everyone.
I'm glad to see something like this getting some press... keeps me knowing that Slack is still going strong, despite what some trolls like to say. (Slackware has no money left!)
On a side note, who needs a package manager? I never use packages, except when installing the distro... compiling is better
Happy New Year, it's 1984!
That'd be Minnux now wouldn't it?
Slack vs Deb (Slack!)
:)
/etc files. This is not a dis against RH but I think that to anybody who takes a gander at all the setup files involved it's obvious that if you prefer hand editing your config files to other options Slack is VERY friendly in that regard. Deb configs seem friendlier to me then RH.. but nothing beats the straight forwardness of the Slack configs.
... if you haven't tried Slack yet DO IT. Listen not to the naysayers.. if you can cfdisk/fdisk then you can get it running.. no sweat. And if you have any problems just email me :) (anotherlamenick@yahoo.ILOVEPAT.com) (and to finish.. all distros have pluses and minuses... try them all!)
Ok.. for one.. just to say.. fighting over these is stupid... but you know that.. just want to agree with you and get on with it
I think Slack's big advantage over all other popular distros is it's simplicity. The nice sexy init, the easy to edit
Size. In a help chat I heard someone about to try Slack ask where the 2nd cd was... 'only 1 cd? How does Slack get away with 1 when every other (major) distro uses 2 or more?' My response.. 'Funny, I always wondered how every other distro got away with 2+ cds when Slack works so well with 1'. I think this is a BIG DEAL. What should come on a distro and what should not? Personaly I like nice slim installs. Anybody who's installed Slack knows damn well you can get a fully working distro on one cd AND have plenty of programs you don't want on it. My debian install wanted CD2 just to install the console mouse server. Knowing there isn't 2 or 3 cds worth of extras I'll have to sort through is a big plus to me.
Updating. And this is the clincher. Ok.. so yea.. no apt-get. But I think people make this seem a lot worse then it is. Is hopping on an ftp and upgradepkg * really that hard? Some would say its not automated enough.. But then.. some would say it's perfect. I know what gets updated... every single package. And yes.. I WANT to know. But even if I didn't... a) it just isn't as hard as people make it out to be and b) it doesn't require any setup (you can spend hours in dselect to automate something that never took much time and maybe shouldn't be automated anyway. Yes.. going from distro to distro isn't as easy as it could be... but I hardly see such a move to be taken so lightly as to be typed in one command (although that is an option I envy).
So in the end.. I install Slack.. no cd flipping, a lot less sorting through crap.. setup scripts that are amazingly easy to comprehend. Nab that patch directory and I'm secure and updated... head to current if I want more. Updating mulitple computers is as easy as apt-get... excepting you have to d/l the files by hand (or you could automate it.. if it's worth your time).
Ask yourself.. what do you want out your Linux install.. a working system ready for installation of choice software... or a system with everything and the kitchen sink installed whether you want it or not. Yes... you can make any distro fit the former.. but never so easily as you can with Slackware. For users/admins who want to know what's on their system.. what is not.. and don't want any surprises... Slack is the way.
And that's my $0.02
sigs are for the weak