Slashdot Mirror
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. "
Here's a good companion piece, from the second issue of the Linux Journal way back in 1994:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=2750
Read the shocking truth about Patrick's Grateful Dead tape collection, and the possibility of a Slackware/Debian merger!
in his teaming up with Bob to work on Slackware?
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.
But I don't think slackware is for everyone. Linux is going to see huge growth in the next couple of years, and the n00bs can't reasonably be expected to do everything from a command line. There is a place for the relatively bloated redhats and mandrakes of the world that automagically work in (nearly) every case. If you were just getting started with linux, which would you prefer?
A best-of-both-worlds type compromise: slackware and webmin. Small, fast, stable, with an easy web-based configurator.
There is one. It's called "autopkg". A great tool, can do something quite similar to apt-get.
Red Hat and SuSE have had the excellent RPM system for a decade now, while Debian's apt-rpm system is equally impressive.
/etc/ are much easier to deal with, but they miss the point that they're married to the exact same concept with the RPM database.)
And all of them lose, hands down, when compared to Slackware's package management.
Slackware's package management (and yes, it IS package management) conforms to the principles on which Unix is based.
Instead of one (nonstandard, multifunction) tool, Slackware uses standard command line tools, such as grep, ls, and cat. These are commands that every sysadmin already knows. The package database is a list of plain text files, not a binary mishmash (I've seen Redhat people bitch about the Windows registry, and how plain text files in
Ever had the RPM database become corrupt on a Redhat box?
How about if the RPM command itself gets hosed?
If you have, you'll appreciate the simplicity of Slack's system. If not, pray that you never do.
A good package management system doesn't necessarily need to include a plethora of automated utilities that allow you to forget how to be a system administrator. RPM actually discourages thorough knowledge of your system in the same way M$ approaches updates / "package management." With RH, you'll eventually need to reboot (unless you're very good; but the distro discourages you from being very good).
I've upgraded glibc on a slackware server 2000 miles away before without a reboot. And, yes it worked just fine for another couple hundred days until I got on a plane and traveled to where it was so I could get it.
People put way too much emphasis on package management. I prefer to maintain my own as closely as possible. Creates much less work in the long run...
www.dedserius.com
VB != VisualBasic