Slashdot Mirror
Why Slackware Still Matters
An anonymous reader writes "In a rebuttal to the recent opinion column "Does Slackware still matter?" at Linux Watch, cRaig Forrester provides insight into Why Slackware DOES still matter--and not just to "hard-core group of hobbyists" or "highly professional" Linux server administrators--but desktop users and newcomers too."
which is based on slackware. Aren't here a bunch of other awesome distro's, besides slackware itself, that are based on slackware?
Meh.
I used to use Slackware, and I'd imagine it hasn't changed that much since then. Granted it was fun while it lasted, I think it was too high caliber for me. When I finally switched to using distros with package management, everything felt alien. Recently I've been using Ubuntu though which I'd like to say is absolutely amazing so far.
$fortune
Tomorrow has been canceled due to lack of interest.
Slackware was the first distro I was successful using (had trouble making SLS work) and despite trying 'the big three' (Red Hat, Debian, Mandrake) over the years, I'm still a dedicated Slackware user. Why? It's simply the best. Straightforward, secure, easy to customize using vim, with helpful comments from Patrick everywhere one what to do. Not some flakey graphical 'wizard' which removes all the comments you put it!
Go, go Slackware, keep up the good work!
Yes, because new users are the ideal market for an operating system that looks like DOS meets a colour display?
Its far better for machines where fancy grahics are neither required or desired, such as using older hardware for remote storage/backup...
Just my two cents...
I didn't hear about this newbie distro "Slackware" since I'm using SLS and I'm happy with my kernel v0.97.1 (a.out)
I guess I'll look into upgrading.
I still need to have a "boot" floppy and a "root" floppy for my system to IPL, right?
Slackware was my very first distro. After Slack, I tried suse and mandrake, but found that when I had problems with using the GUI or configuration tools, that the experience I had gained in Slack was my most useful tool in solving the problems. No, I'm no Linux guru. I use XP on my box for various reasons: particular software availability being the primary reason, and ease-of-use quite honestly being the second. I just don't have time to learn a new OS as well as I know Windows. I use the tool that works best for my situation. Frequently, this means OSS. Sometimes, it means Microsoft. Oh well. But anyway, just gauging from my own experience, Slackware definitely has a place, even for new Linux users.
I don't think most people would agree with the following: "So, does Slackware matter? Simply put, YES. Slackware matters because Slackware IS Linux." The reality is that many people who are experimenting with Linux for the first time now use Fedora or Ubuntu.
I will say this though. I definitely harbor fond memories of using Slackware from 1995. I remember vividly those Boot and Root 1.44MB floppies and trying to install from their extremely early packaging system. Ah the memories...
--
Free 411! 1-800-411-SAVE
Free Conference Call -- No Spam, High Quality
and now I'm wondering why I ever left. That's it, I'm going back to the Slack *now*.
In all seriousness though, I will always feel that Slackware (and others like Gentoo, or home-rolled linux) will matter because installing and using these sorts of distros really do give you an understanding into how Linux works(tm), and maybe more importantly, how to change how it does something. You can't make improvements to something as complicated as Linux without first understanding how it works.
Pete/Petri "damn, my chainsaw is clogged with 1's and 0's again." --clyde
Throw me in the "newcomer" camp.
As it happens I just installed Slackware on an old PC I had lying around. Though I had installed and used other distributions before my experience with them was quite limited and I've been mostly a Windows user.
I chose Slackware merely because it was the easiest to acquire. They offer the torrents right from the official website and they're always well-seeded. I got both CD's in what seemed like no time at all.
After about a week of usage, it's been holding up fairly well, even with the ancient specs my old PC has. It was even able to support a wireless adapter I stuck in there after I installed madwifi. However I definitely needed a lot of outside help in accomplishing that task, and overall though I was able to get it installed and running fine, a total newbie would have gotten nowhere. If Slackware wants to appeal to that demographic at all (which it very well may not) it needs to fix that.
audioLibre - freedom of music
The idea that Slackware is hard to install and use is just insane. I began with Slackware eight years ago and I am still using Slackware today. It's so straight forward and simple to configure and use. I really don't understand why people complain about Slackware, frankly I find all those so call "easy" distro like Redhat and others confusing as hell. Why do people continue to perpetuate this Slackware myth?
As an admin of a dozen of boxes that handle almost anything from webserver, Tomcat/SQL Server to mail/OpenXchange Server and since last weekend a Samba Domaincontroller to name a few, I must say I am the most happy Slackware User in the world.
;)
Stability, flexibility and sanity are the main reasons for me to use Slack.
Personally I like my uptime in the three digits and a straightforward configuration. This is where Slack delivers for me. Combined with Dropline Gnome it also makes the most lovely Desktop box.
Keep slackin, Pat!
I could go on.
In my opinion, many things are simpler in Slackware. Since there are no (or very few) GUIs to use to administer your machine you can go right to the configs and make things the way you want. Red Hat, like Microsoft, hides the configs behind layers and layers of GUIs. It also doesn't seem to do things in a standard way. (I ran RH from 4.2 to 7.2)
/. is for geeks. I run Slackware 10.2 on my Dell Inspiron 5100 with everything working, even suspend--the wireless doesn't restore, though.
I'm a geek so my opinion might be skewed toward text-based configs, programs, etc. But then again,
Just a disclaimer, I started with Slackware. I ran it for three years before switching to Red Hat 4.2. I stayed with RH through 7.2. I did it mainly because the company i worked for used RH. I switched back to Slackware in late 2003.
Bottom line: Slackware is very fast, very stable, and very useful. What more could I want?
First working distro on my desktop was Mandrake 7.2 - and it was perfect distro for newcomer from Windows like me. Most of thinks were working from start, there were some small glitches, but they just helped me to better understanding of Mandrake during solving. But later, I was little confused with all drakes, rpms (I've met several inconsistencies in rpm dependencies), all software and deamons which were running, so after Mandrake 10 release (which was not working on my desktop) I have moved to slackware - and it was bliss. Slackware was easy to install (with some basic understanding of Linux) and during it's configuration it has hepled me to understand not only Slackware it's self but the fundaments of Linux. I know where are things, why are they there and mostly how does it works. I think I'm shiny example of non-guru non-geek desktop user of Slackware :-)
My first encounter with Linux was in 1997 with Slackware. I saw it sitting on a shelf in my college library. The name deceived me though, I assumed SLACKware meant it was geared towards slackers who didn't want to learn everything about the OS, but just run it. Man was I mistaken. So I took a hiatus from Slack for a few years to run Red Hat, and ended up coming back to Slack once I knew more of the ins and outs of Linux. I'm glad I did. I'm running Slackware 10 on my home workstation now, and it's been great. Package management is fine, but I like to tinker and compile all my apps from source, optimized for *my* setup. I've tried a few other distros (I use FC1 at work) and they're all fine. It's just what ya like.
Slackware doesn't suffer from all the bloat the "other distros" seem to suffer from. From the simple but sufficient text installer, to just the right number of packages - its not bloatware. They also tend to stay a step or two behind the other distos with respect to upgrading libraries and such so your applications tend not to break as often...
Besides, what other distro has aSmoking Tux Logo?
-everphilski-
It's all about package management. Slackware has long since been replaced as the hobbyist distro-of-choice by Debian and Gentoo, and the casual users who simply want a "basic distribution that works" have turned to Ubuntu, Fedora, Knoppix, etc. Slackware has not evolved.
My roommate, I suspect, is the typical Slackware user... using it because it's what he was using in the 90's, when he chose Slackware for its laid-back, non-commercial attitude and for its geek-chic. More power to him, but I think that the newbie-hobbyists of today are not choosing Slackware as their first distribution crush... it simply doesn't offer the compelling technical advantages of Gentoo or Debian.
(note that the author of the linked article doesn't even mention Gentoo... -1 credibility...)
I stumbled into Slackware out of dumb luck. It was the first distro that actually installed on my laptop with no huge problems. I seem to remember the RedHat installer choking on something and failing to get the SuSE net install working for some reason or other. I had to put in my own ethernet and battery support, but once I found the drivers and some FAQs, it was no biggy. (For the record, I was working with a Dell Inspiron 2200 and with Slackware 10.)
Maybe this is the minority case, but Slackware seemed to work right off the CD with few problems. Why does Slackware have the reputation for being tough to use? It seems most Linux distros have their ups and downs, and whether you're farting around with YAST or rpms or source tarballs, it doesn't seem to make that much difference, IMHO.
I'm by no means a Linux guru, and I use my laptop for fairly mundane things - OpenOffice, GIMP, development stuff. Maybe people that are having huge problems with Slackware are doing something more fancy?
....slackware does matter. I am seeing a trend of ppl who try out linux first with either Mandrake or Fedora core. Nothing wrong with that, but as n00bs the do the usual thing such as install everything and turn everything on. Nothing wrong with that either-
-however-
Instead of going the classic route of tuning a 'big' or 'bloated' installation to fit their needs, they seem to be tossing it all aside and jumping on the Gentoo bandwagon. Not a bad thing in itself, but by comparison Gentoo will *seem* faster to them because the only experience they had was their Mandrake box running KDE, Apache, Samba, et all and having all these background services running. It perpetuates the Gentoo Myth and creates some zealotry. (or maybe the zealotry is unavoidable regardless, i dunno).
Very "straight forward" distros like slackware and debian will always have a place for advanced users to build the linux they need. It also serves as a good demonstration that the benefits of linux aren't unique to Gentoo. Whether Gentoo's model is good or bad is up for debate, but it is good to have different philosophies and different development strategies.
Besides, Slackware is classic.
do() || do_not();
Where is the FTP install, damnit. NFS sucks and I don't always have a CD burner handy.
It's been a long time since i've installed linux from scratch so things may have changed but Slackware will always have it's purpose. I understand the reasoning behind dumbing down Linux for the masses since the more users the more relevant and main stream Linux will become. But there will always be the need for a distribution who's purpose is only to provide a framework (scheduler+filesystem+[IP stack]) for services or specialized applications to run on and Slackware is the best way to get there short of building a custom dist. IMO.
Again, it's been maybe 4-5 years since i've installed Linux from scratch rather then recompiling/patching so maybe the modern distributions can be stripped down but in what experience i have with them they're all aimed at setting up a home computer.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Great experience for serious newbies who want a richer "Linux" experience without going to extreme of the LFS (linux from scratch) experience.
After reading the guest column by Alan Canton, I've concluded, along with many peers that Linux watch has lost any credibility they once had by printing pure tripe. The column made no meritous points, had no real information and provided no solutions, it was simply Mr Canton's voice to gripe about something he has little clue about. It's been more than 3 years since slackware has had an automated package management system (swaret). If Mr Canton had actually USED slackware, he would understand the difference between the need for updates on fedora and slackware (50/month versus 50/RELEASE). It's frankly sad that this article was run, if Linux watch is that hard up for content, perhaps you should not bother publishing at all.
(1) I like technology X, Y and Z.
(2) I don't like technology A, B, and C.
(3) A,B, and C shouldn't exist, because by existing, they distract people who don't know they really shouldn't like A,B, and C, and if I could just force them to see things my way, they'd do as I do.
I find it amazing that people bother reading the original article, to which this article responds, and dignify it by any response at all. Slackware will exist as long as at least one slackware developer/maintainer finds it useful, pleasant, or in some way desires for it to continue to exist, and thus Slackware, or something very like it, is likely to continue to exist. It's the oldest surviving linux distribution, with a longer history that even RedHat or Debian, if I remember correctly.
I'm a Debian fan. I like their packaging, I like their stable/unstable/testing partitioning. I like the community and the debian process. That doesn't mean I feel any need to impugn the Fedora/RedHat fans, or the Slackware, or any other Linux distro fans. Guess what guys, it's splitting hairs. I have compiled thousands of tar.gz (tarballs) containing thousands of software packages, on over 100 different versions of over 20 different distributions, and the differences are so vanishingly small, compared to amount of things that are the same, that any kind of "my distribution is better than your distribution" discussion ends up mostly moot. If Ubuntu has some better feature than basic Debian, or if Slackware people invent something neat, chances are most of the rest of the Linux world will borrow, adapt, and absorb whatever they can into the environment they prefer.
These people who claim it should be otherwise should go to Apple, or Microsoft, and say, "here's my money, now control everything and make it uniform, and make sure everybody does things the same way, all the time". Those who are attempting to do this in the Free Software World, suggesting that something is irrelevant, dead, unimportant, or detrimental to the free software world, because it exists, are idiots. Ignore them.
If technology really has become irrelevant, it requires no commentary to establish it. Anybody remember Yggdrasil Linux? I can now dare to say that Yggdrasil Linux is probably pretty close to dead. Anyone want to disagree with me?
Regards,
Warren/Franciscan
Is (was? I'm not sure, it's been a while) a slackware derivative and it worked great on the first really old laptop I ever installed Linux on.
Judging by distrowatch's numbers, they are holding steady, but not as popular as some others.
Here's a distro that's been around forever and doesn't really get the buzz that some others get. It's an interesting problem and I'm wondering if anyone has any insight as to why it may be that way.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I have been using Slackware since 7.0. In the mean time I have worked in places where I was told to use Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, etc. In that time I have always found Slackware far easier to setup and keep runnng. No strange configuration tools, such as Yast, where if I change something in the file and then run Yast, it reverts all my changes. I am not a PHD and when I started using Slackware I was new to Linux. However in the time, I have learned more about the inner workings than any other distro could have taught me. As far as package tools, I can use RPM or TGZ's, how much more free and flexible could you ask for. My only gripe is the lack of Gnome in the more recent releases. Even with this, I am far too commited and happy to leave. Thank you Pat, you gave us a distro to be proud of.
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
I started with RedHat 5.0 back in the day, but didn't feel like I really "got" linux until I started with Slackware. Learning the real way of doing things got me more in line to handle things like Solaris, AIX and FreeBSD. While I don't use Slack anymore (ubuntu on my desktops, freebsd/openbsd and gentoo on my servers) I'm glad it's still around, and have sent newbies (ones that WANT to learn) slacks way.
fak3r.com
I started with Red Hat (5.2?) but got tired of RPM and changed to Slackware. I think I've been using Slackware with fwvm2 for about 6 years. I install a minimum number of packages, disable all remaining daemons and then set up fwvmw2 to show a blank screen with mouse button activated context menus for selecting programs.
Gentoo could be better, but that was too difficult for me to install. I never tried Debian. I find Slackware relatively easy to install and use. Then again, my favourite OS is OpenBSD.
Regarding more 'modern' distros, I find them bloated, slow, and difficult to configure and use. It would take quite an effort to uninstall unnecessary things that are installed automatically. And Gnome and KDE are more a nuisance than progress. If I wanted a Windows UI, I'd use Windows.
AFAIK, He seems to think that, because he is some sort of entrepreneur, Patrick Volkerding should abase himself in front of his intelligence and follow his every advice. Since Patrick Volkerding avoids this Usenet newsgroup like the plague, Alan Canton is very unhappy and disses him, and his distro, every chance he gets. In short, he behaves in a very unprofessional and immature manner, criticizing and belittling everyone who disagrees with him.
As an aside, if you haven't tried Slackware, give it a spin. Its simplicity and power are enough to shame many other well-established distribution...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
http://www.slackware.com/~fizban/ftpinstall.php
I use Slackware tarballs to extract libs needed for Linux compatibility on NetBSD. This way I don't need to install a full-blown Linux tree including rpm tools when I just need some library.
.tar.gz!
Yay for
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
I'm currently using vectorlinux. It's extremely light and fast. I'ts running on my 300mhz laptop and it feels close to a new system in responsiveness.. Definantly something people should tryout if they have old hardware laying around. Even if they're newbies!
After cutting my Linux teeth on Slackware I tried different versions of Red Hat, Debian and SUSE. In every case I came back screaming to Slackware.
Whenever I need Linux, I get Slack.
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
I had been using SLS for a while, but found it too bloated, so I switch to the very nice MCC "Interim" release. I've upgraded my kernel to 0.99.7a, as well.
In all seriousness, it is interesting to go back into history. I remember the first release Slackware, where Patrick has basically put everything under the sun into it (and tested very little of it). At that time, so many things were busted that I didn't see the point. I actually did use MCC for a while for just that reason -- it was lighter/cleaner than either SLS or Slack. Of course it didn't have X11, but back then on my 386sx16 I was far happier using text consoles with vi or emacs and using the virtual console switching. (X11 was just too slow.)
From the article: "Certainly, Slackware's installer doesn't win any beauty contests, but it's fast, it's easy, and it's stable."
Simplicity and predictability are essential to intrinsic beauty in software. Perhaps a more suitable word is flashy? Slackware's installer doesn't win any flashy contests. IMHO
I switched all our servers from redhat to slackware about three years ago. Having tried many distros I found slackware was the most stripped down yet contained all the basic stuff you need for a server environment (sendmail, IMAP, POP, apache, etc.). The main reason I switched was library conflicts. Most other distros come with too much stuff and as you install more stuff on top you inevitably run into probelms. Slackware is nice coz it's bare bones.
I've had way more problems with config programs and package managers on other distros than I've had learning to rebuild the kernel, compile software, and edit config files on slackware. Plus I've learned a hell of a lot along the way.
I also run slackware on a laptop as my sole OS. If you're a slackware fan like me you might also want to check out Linux from scratch
Happy hacking:)
Doesn't everyone start on slackware?
Distro-wars make Billy laugh.
I'd planned to submit an Ask Slashdot about the article this one rebutts, but decided that it was really too childish to spend any time one. I suppose that since it's come up now I can go ahead and ask.
Does Slackware really still matter? The author of this article seems to think so, but he also doesn't seem to be the most partial. So, what do you guys think? (No need to be partial, but it sure would help.)
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
I first used Red Hat 6.2, and while it was interesting, I didn't really learn a lot about how it worked. Slackware was the first distro that I actually spent a lot of time with. I installed it on a couple home computers and a previously unused server at work. Nowadays, I use mostly Ubuntu and CentOS (RHEL clone), but I do nearly all my administration work from the command line. Slackware is the most logical of the Linux distro's I've tried, and therefore very good for learning. Not too suitable for desktops though. Got a lot of SIGSEGV crashes when I tried KDE on it.
I still hate to use vi though. It's very unintuitive, and sometimes it'll slightly corrupt text files, saving something that does not match what it displayed on the screen or the edits I made. I don't care much for emacs either.
I find Slackware the easiest distro. I use it on servers, desktops, and laptops. Granted, I came to Linux from FreeBSD so I had no fear of text files. Doing everything in a GUI can only take you so far, especially when the GUI tools do not fix the problem. I find it is also the easiest install for selecting what you want and do not want based upon what you intend to do with the computer. I also tend to be very eclectic in the software that I run. I like to pick and choose the best file manager, text editor, etc. for the job. I use fvwm for my window manager. I use Linux because it affords the best choices. I try to get new Linux users to try Slackware because once they understand how to do things they learn that they can do almost anything with their computers. I have heard of people that use Linux for a year and still don't know how to do anything with it because they are limited to what they can point and click in the default menu.
The author makes some really good points that apply not just to Slackware, but to distros in general, and I wish more people would realize them.
``What Slackware advocates are telling you is that in order to truely appreciate Slackware for what it is, you must learn how Linux works first, because Slackware is just unadulterated Linux.''
Right! Slackware is a very good distribution to learn how GNU/Linux really works. Very little is automated, so you have to figure out how to do it yourself. This is useful even if you later switch to a different distro, as you may be able to understand and fix problems better, because you've already been in similar situations.
``I would assert that a distribution's viability is based on its usefulness to a user-base, regardless of the size of that user-base.''
Indeed. Just because something isn't your cup of tea, doesn't mean it's not anyone's. Multiple paths lead to enlightenment.
`` Canton: I think Slackware has a lot going for it... but not enough for it to sustain itself should Linux become as popular as the pundits say it will. To those who run and who love Slackware, that's fine. To the rest of us, well, it doesn't matter.
That may be true, but then, that could be said of any other distribution as well. SUSE makes no bit of difference to me... or Mandriva, or Linspire, or.... but this is what makes Linux so great! CHOICE!''
Right again. It's all about choice. Some people feel it's bad that not all distros are compatible, so that binary software can be easily installed on all of them. Well, who cares? If you want a distro on which binary software X works, then use such a distro. If you don't care about software X, but you like a feature of some distro that happens not to work with software X, then you can pick that distro. To each their own. It's through the many choices that Linux can be all things to all people - everyone can adapt it to suit their needs, with no regard for anyone else's need.
``I chose Slackware because I disliked other distributions' bloated installs.''
That tops it off. Here's a great example of why Slackware still matters. Where all other distros in the DistroWatch.com top 10 try to attract users by adding ever friendlier features, creating ever larger installers and base installs, Slackware stays slim. And guess what? People appreciate that. That's why Slackware still matters.
This post brought to you by a long-ago Slackware user, who has since switched to Debian to get quick and easy package installation.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I'm thinking of building a file server that will be storing a bunch of media files. So, probably will use RAID 5 or something. Probably in the 1-3 terabyte range to start.
What OS should I use for that? If Linux, would Slackware be a good choice? I'm hearing good things about Solaris and ZFS, so I'm also considering using that.
Also, I might decide to put a couple thin terminals around the house. I'm wondering if the file server should also be running the X sessions, or if I should get another heftier box for that.
You do realize that you can use rdev to set the root filesystem on your kernel, don't you? That way, you can copy your "root" floppy contents to a hard drive partition, stick your boot disk in the drive, and "rdev /dev/fd0 /dev/hda1". Now, next time you boot from that floppy, it will mount your hard drive partition as it's root filesystem. :-)
(ok, I'm really showing my age here
More than most other distro's, Slackware has a clean focus on what it is trying to accomplish. Pat does his thing, and does it extremely well. He does not fall into the hole of trying to be all things to all people. Slackware has been amazingly consistent, and reliable. Keep it up Pat!
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
When I first decided to switch to linux, I did it with RedHat. Then I quickly realised that it was hard to know exactly how things were working since the system wasn't transparent. A month after, a friend of mine introduced me to Slackware and I've kept using it since that time. In facts, Slackware is easy to use because you don't get what you don't want from it. Why a prefer it beside other distros for real life applications ? In short: fast packaging system (installpkg and it's all done), clear install process (you know what you do) and not full of the last software gadgets. I started with Slackware as a newbie and I didn't get much trouble as people tend to say !
FTA:
"Slackware's package management may not come installed, but that's because on Slackware, you have a choice of package managers! Swaret? Slapt-get? SlackUpdate? Take your pick!"
What are the pro's and con's of the package managers with respect to Slackware? Which package manager would the die hard Slackware users use. Well, maybe a die hard might not use a package manager; however, which one is recommended. AKA what is your personal preference?
These are honest questions; and not meant to start a flame war.
I donate refurbished computers to different people who otherwise could not afford them. Of all distros of Linux, Slackware is the only one I can get to run on older computers without a lot of toil. I also use it on all of my computers with the exception of one, and on that one, I use a self-created distro. If you think i am partial to Slackware, that is because I am :-)
http://www.freelink.cx/
I have used Linux since 2002. I started with Mandrake, then used SuSE for awhile, and then Red Hat 8/9. I tried Slackware around 8.0 or so, but it didn't click with me.
Anyway, after using those distros for awhile and becoming aggravated with them in one way or another, I thought I'd give Slackware another go about a year ago at version 10 I think. This time, it _totally_ clicked with me. I now understand what people mean when they say Slackware is "simple" and "clean." It's like a well-built computer, with all the cables tied down *just right.* I have learned more about Linux in the past year running Slackware than I had in all the previous years combined. I love how everything is exactly where it should be, how compiling apps works for me 99.9999% of the time, and how I never have any stability problems. It really does just rock.
I see that people sometime carp on and on about Slackware being the best that 1995 had to offer or how the install is not pretty or how X needs be configured from the start. Well, sometimes things made back in the day beat the pants off crap made today.
Thanks, Pat, for keeping Slackware going. I hope it never, ever changes.
I don't want to sound like a broken record, but I too started with slackware around 1997/98, then tried some more gui'ish distro's and kept coming back to slack and still use it today.
The biggest development i've seen against this distro was the addition of package management (swaret is my personal choice, but the others are just as good)
Thanks for everything Patrick, David, Chris, and all the other folks on this distro (oh yeh, and the umpteen million developers who actually write all the programs/libraries/etc that make up this distro)
<end/>
Argument A: Slackware doesn't matter anymore.
So what if it matters! There are a lot of distributions out there that don't matter, yet people seem to find good use for them. A lot of people are still finding good use for it. Because of that, it does matter. So what if it matters to you.
Argument B: Slackware does matter, and here's why
You shouldn't return a troll with a troll. Talking about how much more elitist your distribution is doesn't help your cause one bit. I've used slackware before for an extended period of time. It was no better or worse than others. It was no more difficult or easy than others. I'm glad you like and and still find use for it, but really it's nothing special. There's only a select few distributions that really do anything innovative or special. The rest are either speciality distros or just garbage. Sorry to say Slackware isn't really considered a general purpose distribution anymore. Get over it. That doesn't mean your distribution is bad. It just doesn't serve the same purpose it did ten years ago.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Slackware is simple, light and powerful
I have been using Linux for the past 10 years. I have used it all, from RedHat to Linux From Scratch to Slack to Debian to (my current) Gentoo.
No distro is any "faster" or "more powerful" than any other by itself. They are all running the same (or simmilar) kernels, they are all using the base software packages. They can all be configured to run or not run certain services at start up, and load or not load certain modules.
What is and is nto a distro boils down to four things:
None of these things will make your system any faster or slower by themselves. It all depends on what you have configured. Personally, I find gentoo is by far the easiest distro ti install and configure software on.
Now, for my personal opinion - I have never had to do anything more than 'emerge ' to get a non-trivial piece of software downloaded,compiled,installed, and running. I have had issues with .deb and .rpm based distros with dependancies and not, and this soured me to them. Slackware, I just find requires too much manual jockying around to get things ina decent state - in Gentoo all that trivial crap is taken care of for me, and I can "just use it right now". If I want to configure it at a lower level, I can always do so. But I am not *required* to do so.
Forrester simply made the common mistake that people always make regarding OSs and software in general. He thinks that if Slackware can't "beat" all of its "competition", then it doesn't matter. As long as anyone still maintains Slackware, and someone else uses it, things are exactly as they should be.
... There doesn't have to be a "winner" here. I for one wish there were more operating systems, it would only encourage standards and inter-operability.
The same applies to Linux v Windows v OSX v Solaris v
Back in summer of 98 I bought a cheapbytes package. It came with Slackware 3.4, and whatever the Debian and RedHat were of the day. I tried Redhat at first. The debian install was broke. Redhat didn't agree with me... I was used to and fond of unix, and I couldn't understand why things were going so poorly.
... again, how the hell should I know what's easy for you? I tell them all the same thing: go on a binge, try as many different ones as you can and pick one you like.
Then I tried slack... and it made perfect sense. I've been a big fan ever since. I work for an ISP, and we have standardized on mostly redhat variants.
I understand Linux in general because I learned on slack. I feel comfortable with any distribution. There are slight differences, but slack was very raw, powerful and simple. My machine at home and all my personal servers run slack.
Nowadays people often ask me what distribution they should try. I say the same thing. How the hell should I know? I can make recommendations for me, not you. Then they say "Well, what's easy?"
Back to TFA: appearently we have a guy who likes slack and one that doesn't. BF deal. I side with the guy who likes it.
FLR
Slackware is probably the best Linux Distro I've used. I got started on Fedora. Tried what was then called Mandrake. I got frustrated with Red Hat when they stop producing the free version which became fedora. Mandrake seemed like a crippled version of red hat to me (i.e not everything was available unless you purchased the full version). Then I tried Slackware. I honestly have to say that was when I dove into linux. I personally learned more about Linux running slack then when I was running any previous version. Yeah it still comes with the 2.4 kernel. For most people that is still sufficient. However if you want the 2.6 you can choose to install it. Or you can grow up and learn to recompile the kernel and intall from source. Slackware HAS PACKAGE MANAGEMENT!! God I can't say that enough. To those that say it dosen't have it, have you tried using it for more then an hour. I however perfer to compile from source. That way i'm sure it will work on my system and i'm generally getting the lastest version. I can not emphasise the fact you will learn more about linux running slack in my opion then most other distros. Does Slack Matter Give me a break. Pat keep up the oustanding work!!
I made the switch to Linux probably about 3 years ago, and I've used it ever since. (I would use it exclusivly, but the damned airport extreme specs are closed.) The distro I setteled on way back then was Slackware and, you know, then I would have said pretty much exactly what cRaig Forrester(sic?) did: Slackware IS Linux.
(For the sake of the argumentation let's assume that he means the whole philosophy of choice thing surrounding Linux. Of course the assertion is wrong from a technical standpoint, but who cares?)
Now, this is a curious assertion, at least to my mind. I've since used multiple distros and, you know, once I've understood how they work the differences don't really seem to be that much. So why that statement, and why would I have said it? What is it about Slackware that, in the minds of some of its more impressionable users, makes it Linux?
It's a part of the culture, mixed with a bit of naivety. Slackware is old and it's got a good reputation as a distro to cut your teeth on, so it attracts a lot of new users. But new users have a tendancy to edge toward fan boy. Hence the assertion that Slackware is Linux.
The author happily points out you have a choice of several pre-packaged package managers to choose from. Is this a good or a bad thing? Who knows. Technically, every distro has a choice of package managers. I used both portage(Gentoo) and pkgsrc(Netbsd) on my Linux From Scratch playtoy for a while. Sure, you've got a lot of choices. It's just tha the choices you get to make sometimes seem a bit dubious. It certainly is flexible and you certainly do have a lot of choice, but the question still stands. Is Slackware still relevant?
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
I put Slackware 10.1 on my current home workstations. Why? Well, I used to use RedHat, and I was a paying subscriber. But they dumped me at 7.3 and refused to support me any more unless I switched either to their Enterprise license (no thanks, I am a *home user*) or else go to Fedora. I have heard that Fedora is supposed to be a kind of "bleeding edge, let the community work out the kinks" distro. Now I fall into that strange middle ground - I am not a casual user (I run a website with hundreds of users) and I do not want to run a bleeding edge distro, and yet I can't afford a commercial license, and in any case I feel quite a bit of resentment so I suppose all the other reasons are moot. Anyway, that eliminated RedHat and Fedora.
/etc/rc.d. But there is no easy way to restart cron, for example. And there's no /etc/crontab. So it's harder to make quick changes to that. It's somewhere else, but I always forget where. And I always have to look for /var/spool/cron/crontab, for some reason. Again, these are my problems - it's just a little irritating that it's different from the way other distros work. In any case, why on earth co
I considered SuSE, but I just don't trust corporate distributions after RedHat abandoning me like that. If RedHat can do it, and they were the shining light of commercial distros, then who knows what other so-called "stable" companies could do at the drop of a hat? Sorry, but that's just the way my thinking goes now. RedHat, are you listening? Your decisions have repercussions for real people like me. We remember stuff like that. It doesn't really matter if you employ a lot of kernel developers or contribute a lot of code to the Open Source community - I feel burned. So that eliminated the commercial distros.
So, what else? Debian. Well, when I had to do this install, Sarge was not stable yet. Woody was way too old, and I just didn't want to mess around with testing or unstable. So that sort of put Debian out of the running (then - now is different, since Sarge is now stable). I had heard of Gentoo, Ubuntu and so on, but I am just nervous going with anything too new. Also, I don't particularly relish the idea of Gentoo's "build everything from source" ethos. Just sounds like a lot of work, even if it is all amazingly optimized afterward.
So I came to Slackware. It sounded like a worthy candidate because it was not run by a big corporation, but rather by a passionate individual who's been doing it for long enough to have demonstrated (at least to me) his dedication and perseverence. So I tried 10.0, and was very pleasantly surprised. It "just worked" right out of the install. I had heard people say that it was bloat-free, and this is pleasantly so. It is very smooth and surprisingly "professional feeling". I have had absolutely no problems with slackware crashing on me or otherwise creating grief. I was especially pleasantly surprised at how all my previously "difficult" peripherals worked without any special tweaking - DVD burning, sound and so on.
There are issues, but they are more failings on my part than on slackware's. Probably the two main issues I have are:
1. Package availability and installation. I know about slapt-get, and I use it to get security updates. However I find quite often that some little utility that I need is just not available as a slackware package. I know it's no big deal, I can just go and get the source and build it, but as I said earlier, I am lazy. Debian works much better in this regard, since I can mostly just type "apt-get install xxx" and (usually) it will just be there a few seconds later. This is nice, a good thing. I can have confidence that Debian packages have been reasonably tested and will work well with the rest of the system. But, like I said, this is a somewhat minor gripe.
2. Different locations for config files. Again, this is my problem, not slackware's, but it's just something that trips me up occasionally (less as time goes on). So stuff is generally under
Ubuntu froze during the disk partitioning program on my PIII 700MHz, 64MB Thinkpad. SuSE spelled it right out, "You have too little memory to run the installation program, please activate a swap partition." (Sure, if you would just let me run fdisk!) Slackware installs and runs without a hitch. Slack matters to me.
When I started the long move to linux, a year or two ago (almost complete - I mostly needed to wait until I was sick of the games I liked), I spent a while looking for some non-existant "official" linux distribution. I doubt I am alone in this. Sites like distrowatch cleared this up for me, and so I looked for the most standard distribution. I found slackware.
/etc/rc.conf - WTF?
To be fair, part of this is also in the fact that the first LXF I bought came with slackware 10.0, but on the other hand I'd downloaded and tried Vector Linux (an old version - wasn't impressed at all).
Anyway, the point is, slackware is the closest thing I know of to just "Linux". Not that it sets standards or is the king of the world or anything.
Reading through the distrowatch rankings to jog my memory, I have tried the following: ubuntu, mandriva, suse, fedora, debian, damn small, gentoo, vector, puppy, arch, opensolaris, openbsd, auditor, feather, gentoox, condorux, goblinx, big.... not the longest penis^H^H^H^H^Hlist of distros ever, but a substantial set of data nonetheless.
If you look around the slackware linuxquestions forum, you'll notice this little phenomenon - people try to leave slackware and try other distros but are attracted back by this magical force. The closest I came was arch linux - truly amazing package management, but too flashy and customised -
So yeah, slackware rules.
Will Al Canton sign an official piece of paper saying I'm a "highly professional" with a Ph.D because I love slack?
FLR
My first REAL linux distro was Slackware. I believe, as I recall, Slackware 96 that I bought at a bookstore... But thats beside the point... I do not run a massive server cluster, or administrate a huge network. I use Linux on my home computer basically, because I hate microsoft with a burning rage and hatred, and because Unix does what I need it to when I need it to do it. Usually, that means running a web server so I can build and test pages on my computer rather than have to upload them to a site just to find out what I need to fix, or running an IRC client for excessively long periods of time (ehh, forever?). The point is that I use slackware because thats what I really learned unix off of. Granted, I don't think I ever even bothered to install X11 until the turn of the millenium, because I started out with a 486 DX/2 and a 1MB video card that couldn't barely handle windowmaker, much less anything more system intensive, so I spent most of my time in CLI, and when I finally got frusterated with vi, I figured out that pico and jed were very effective tools for modifying the many files I found in /etc, which inevitably is what I believe led to my unix addiction.
So to summarize this whole stupid story, I don't go as far as most gurus to argue with other linux users about which distro is best. I've used plenty of others over the years, whether that was redhat or debian or suse, and I've even used other unix flavors like FreeBSD and OSX (don't laugh. Its worth the knowledge). I think that its really a matter of user preference. If I like slackware because it is such a raw installation, thats MY preference. If someone else likes redhat because of its graphical interface, or because RPM is convenient, that doesn't make one distro more or less useful than the other.
I think it is very rude of someone to accuse a distro of being outdated, or no longer useful simply because it is not to their liking or preference. I may hate microsoft and specifically dislike windows for reasons which would take the next 10 pages to list, but that is not reason for me to go tell every windows user on the planet that their preference is wrong. Frankly, MOST people wouldn't be able to handle the workings of even a minor linux distro like lindows, much less a full blown unix installation, nor should they have to. Windows, as much as I may dislike it and consider it useless, is appropriate for the vast majority of those people. Before anyone else goes off accusing slackware or ANY OTHER distro or software of being useless should consider the point of view of people who use such software before making any judgements, and remember that we're not in competition with each other. We need to support each other if this is going to succeed.
Its only illegal if you don't get caught
This is not meant to be a flame, but a simple observation. As a windows user, I've noticed that every so often a story comes up that attempts to justify the importance of a particular flavor of *nix. Are different flavors in danger of dissapearing into irrelevance overnight if stories are not done on why they are still valid?
I use windows because that's what my employer has on the network and there is no room for nix. At home I've used FreeBSD, Slack, and Mandrake. For the desktop I don't really see much difference. They all do pretty much the same thing. I can surf the web, write my emails, and chat to my friends on Yahoo. Why is it then that we must continually justify the existance of one flavor or another? Is there some piece of Slack that I missed that makes it a n00b flavor or something? I'm just not really understanding I guess.
Back in summer of 98 [...]Redhat didn't agree with me...
This was the early RedHat 5.x days; RedHat had a lot of problems at the time because it had just moved from libc5 to glibc. glibc had a lot of issues which made the distribution pretty buggy. During this period, I stuck to RedHat 4.2; RedHat was really good about making sure RH4.2 had security and other upgrades until their glibc distribution became stable.
The Fedoras are really buggy but CentOS is a good stable RHEL clone; I'm using Centos 3.6 right now and it's pretty good.
Well, yes, it still matters to us and our company (a mid-sized ISP) since slack is installed on all the servers, firewalls, etc.
...and don't even mention slamd. Anyone prepared to risk production servers with a hodge-podge patchwork such as slamd is a fucking idiot.
However, that being said, slackware's severe lack of support for 64-bit is now becoming a major problem. Patrick needs to wake up, forget his bullshit ailments, and do what needs to be done.
Personally, I think Gentoo is a godsend for everything from teaching beginners step-by-step how their system is structured to creating a quick and powerful system 100% designed around YOUR machine.
Back in the day I used Slack because I didn't want bloat - just wanted barebones install with working network. Even when it came to installing packages... selecting from a list of pre-compiled bloated binaries is still bloat.
It's not truly optimized for YOUR system.
But there was a downside - say you wanted KDE, you'd have to compile by hand ALL the dependencies. Not fun. But I wasn't gonna sacrifice performance with the pre-compiled binaries.
I'm not bashing Slack, it was a great distro back in the day, but now that Gentoo exists, which gives you infinitely more control over your system not to mention automatic compile/emerge for anything you choose to install, why would you stick with the former?
It just seems counter productive to run a production based system on pre-compiled packages OR compiling everything yourself by hand and dealing w/ the dependencies.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
I installed Slackware 10.2 on my new out of the box laptop yesterday. X and the network card worked with only the smallest effort. A startx and modprobe later was golden.
All wireless utilities were included to make using the Wireless NIC easy enough. Getting the Wireless NIC working wasn't the easiest thing but that's not Slackware's fault. The Wireless NIC isn't well suported in Linux to begin with and required me to download the latest drivers from the NIC's Source Forge project site.
Once I did that it just worked.
All in all I've been pretty happy with how Slack 10.2 and this laptop work together.
SLS? yggdrasil, you mean..
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Slackware is good, simple, robust and efficient because it works exactly like a BSD : you set it up using your brain, then you definitely forget it because it works and does never play magic tricks under you. It does what you want. Recently, I installed FreeBSD on a machine, and felt as if I was "at home" on my slack. Same philosophy, etc...
It's the best distro to start Linux for people coming from the BSD world (including those of the old SunOS 4.1.3 era), and probably for anyone too. It can be hard to setup uncommon hardware, but when you manage to do it, you understand how everything works and that matters.
The only distros that don't matter are the ones that disappear. Linux has come a long way, and offers so many wonderful choices. I "learned" on Slackware. Many of my peers try the latest and greatest, frequently prodding me to try their current favorite distro. I find much to like about all distros I have tried, but always find Slackware fills my comfort zone. I enjoyed playing with Gentoo while I worked on a customers FreeBSD system. There was a warm squishy feeling to be had with Gentoo after working on BSD. I have customers who find Linspire easy requiring very little nuts and bolts knowledge and letting them feel free from the Redmond Beast, whle following their new guru Michael Robertson. Mandrake/Mandriva always very respactable. The plethora of Live CD distros are fun, and great introductions to Linux for skeptical windows users to see a different reality, and I have great respect for Ubuntu because of Mark Shuttlworth's vision.
I would never have enjoyed Linux as I do, though, if I hadn't started with Slackware 7. It fits me like Mac OS X. My PC has been upgraded numerous times as my Mac systems have over the years. Never once have I had to reinstall, nor have I had my OS's break through numerous hardware and software upgrades. Slackware has kept me in my comforts zone.
I admin about 60 or so Slackware boxes and amd sure glad they are Slackware. Things just work, you stick on what you need and have slick and easy installs without all the fluff that other distros seem to automatically install. You say NO X and you get NO X, not a secret X install because of some dependency for some silly package you will likely never even use. Long live slack!
Um...Ubuntu.
"God of Rock, thank you for this chance to kick ass. "
In any event, I won't disagree with Slackware being a nich distro - but lots of distros appeal to certain niches. Additionally, use of the term "irreleva(nce|nt) is kinda strong - and I repecfully disagree that Debian and Slackware are even remotely "irrelavent." Polish? That's quite a subjective term. Lots of folks may think Debian or Slackware or F00ware are polished. Some may even think Gentoo looks like crap. However, I won't sit here and type this-distro-vs.-that-distro bullshit. Folks who do that miss a huge point about F/OSS - choice. I just think a good distro should be validated as a good distro if one thinks highly of it.
Anyway, no setting myself up, no parade, no advertising. Just a happy Slackware user, and happy developer of/on Slackware systems.
I love slackware! If anything, newbies that want to get 'hardcore' fast should start with Slack. I started off with Slackware and setup my own web, SQL, and mail server. It was painful, not easy, and took a few weeks of hard work (and much reading). But in the end I came out with a fantastic understanding of the inner workings of Linux.
I find that people install linux 'to play around', install one of the pre-packed distros and once on the desktop say something like "okay, now what?" Or apt-get a few things and figure they've learned what they needed to learn about Linux (which they may have - if they want to learn just the basics).
"When one learns a distribution such as Red Hat, one learns Red Hat. When one learns Slackware, one learns Linux." - A frequently seen signature on alt.os.linux.slackware
Find Escorts, Strippers, Massage Parlours, Swingers
I fully agree with the reasoning behind this article. A lot of users will only want a pretty desktop, intelligently-designed apps and a lot of hand-holding. For the geeks among us, they will want to 'figure out' the system, and distros like Suse and Redhat make that a little bit more difficult. It makes sense to start from scratch and build up the knowledge from there. In fact, I highly recommend it. I remember back in '98 using Debian on a 386-33 with 8 megs of ram. I learned the system, the file structure, the startup scripts, samba for windows sharing and ipfwadm to let the windows systems on the newly built network share the net connection. It must have been seven or eight months into using it, on a 40 meg hard drive, with a floppy drive controller that wasn't supported by the kernel, before somebody told me about kde. I thought 'Is that like that X thing I've heard about?'. I looked at kde.org and I was absolutely amazed at the screenshots. I honestly was blown away. Before that, I honestly thought that there was no gui for linux because the command line is all that you need.
Since then I've worked on near every architecture linux supports, beowulf clusters of intel and amd systems and most every major piece of server software in common use. I now know that I can come across any new hardware/system/os and get it to work in any environment, all because I started out with among the most difficult linux installations you can imagine.
So, in summation, Slacware does indeed matter. Just not to everybody.
Do you see the sig? Do you have it in your sights? Why yes, Miss Moneypenny...
Slackware was my first linux and I must say that I had only a tiny bit of linux experience prior to slackware. I am a programmer but Slackware is useful for teaching people linux command line so that they don't become reliant on GUIs in Fedora, SuSE, Mandrake, etc. and get completely lost when they have to figure out how to use a command line tool.
Today there's a lot more drive space and memory to play with so bloat isn't as big a deal. I find it comical how much junk a base RedHat install provides, especially in comparison to a BSD box. But the major difference, to me, is apt and yum and the progress of the package management systems (dpkg, rpm). It's trivial today to get a complex piece of software up and running because someone else has already put the thought into solving dependencies. Doing things the hard way just seems like a waste of time.
There are ways to make slack do what you want it to, but the larger distros have taken a lot of the work out of it. For a new sysadmin, this means less insight into the "behind the scenes" stuff, but hey that just makes me look smarter.
In my endless quest to build the perfect "at home" workstation, I'm more or less narrowed down to Novell/SuSE or Ubuntu. One has a lot of history, it pretty danged polished, and has a large corporation behind it. The other does pretty much everything I need it to do and it fits on a single CD. Right now, I'm leaning toward Ubuntu. I've kind of discounted Slackware, not because of the lack of graphical auto-configuration "gee-gaws and gimcracks" (couldn't avoid the hat-tip to J.R. "Bob" Dobbs), but more because the lack of sohphisticated package management.
Actually, as long as the documentation is there, I think I'd prefer just editing the config files myself. At least I'd get familiar with them that way. The "purist" nature of Slackware appeals to me, but what is holding me back is a perceived journey into "dependancy hell" as I try to manually sort out package management.
So, if you don't mind my picking your brain, how do you manage packages on Slackware?
Thanks,
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Slackware will always be the first choice for any self-respecting BSD nerd who must use Linux for whatever reason. For that reason alone, I hope Slackware stays afloat.
hello dear sirs my name is jamesh i are india (bihar) can u guide me install red had linux 9?
I have been using Slackware since kernel .9x. and I am running Slack on every box that I install. Slackware is elegant, powerful and gets out of the way so you can do your job.
No stupid GUI, no RPM nightmare. It is simply the best.
Does Patrick make money out of this? I don't know. I hope so. I always buy my Slack copies so I do my part.
Alan Canton: Who asked you if Slackware matters? Go on with your miserable existence and leave the
real Linux work to the pros.
I think you are running Windows and don't know a fucking thing about Linux. That would explain your stupid patronizing attitude. It would also explain your lack of knowledge.
Oh, Sorry... Did I just call you an asshole? My bad.
There I said it. Mod away.
Although I've tried all the distros, I have stuck with slackware over the years. A lot if comes down the lean basic installation and easy installation depending on what I have to get done.
Last year I was taking care of a student computer lab. We had a couple servers for remote use, some old computers suitable for networked dumb terminals using XDMCP, and a few powerful regular desktop computers.
The beauty of slackware is I can sit down at each of these computers and quickly get an appropriate installation working in each case. No mess of wizards to go through but all the software is there in easy packages if you want to install it. Slackware has never stressed me out, because I can (and do) use the command line to get most of what I need working.
I have used several distros and i really dont see the difference much in one over another, Currently ubuntu is my fav, *is waiting for everyone on slashdot to say something smart @ssed about my comment* but seriously, cant i do all the same things on just one distro? other than package management, whats the diff? (for example, why would i run redhat over mandervia, or gentoo, etc) if they can all run gnome, kde, fluxbox, etc
Slackware was my first distribution, I started using Linux in 1995 with Slackware 2.3. Slackware taught me how a Linux system works. After I got comfortable with Slackware, I tried FreeBSD and was surprised by how much I already knew about the BSD internals. If you know one you will be able to use the other. Slackware is the only distro that I know I can trust to work right. I have tried all the other major distributions and a few of the smaller ones, but none of them come close to doing thing the way that I think things should be done. My only gripe is the lack of binary packages for the current version. There are places to get binaries, but they aren't always up to date and not everything is available. However installing from source isn't that bad, and I get to customize whatever I want installed.
I really like the Debian package system, and the Red Hat/Fedora setup and admin tools. Red Hat, Debian and Novell/Suse have done great work making Linux better as a whole. I,m very grateful for all the things the other distros have done, but Slackware is what I know, and I know I can trust it.
As long as Slackware is actively developed and maintained I'll keep using it. Keep up the good work Pat.
If you have a look at the posting history of the original article writer in alt.os.linux.slackware you will see that his article is not an unbiased look at Slackware but an attempted hatchet job on the distro, he tends to post under the name ANC but morphs his email address to escape killfiles.
Dam! Slackware post comes up on /. again and I'm too pissed/stoned to post anything intelligent. Hold on... thats it... I'm a slacker in the Richard Linklater sense, as well as the Patrick Volderking sense. Slackware will still be there long after Alan Canton is just a distant memory on a.o.l.s.
As cRaig said, Slackware IS Linux (with apologies to RMS)
I started on slackware and though it had me screaming "why can't this be automated!!" I'm glad I was forced to hunt my solutions down and learn Linux as it should be. Trust me, I have tired other distros such as debain, Arch, Vector, Suse, RH/Fedora and a butt ton of others and always in the end I come back to Slackware. Though recently I have found fustration that 10.2 wasn't 2.6 based and the lack of raid/lvm configuration from the installer but in the big scope of things thats minor Sure other distro have mechenisims to help find hardware and this and that but half the time they don't perform to my expectation. I'm down with a package system that doesn't dep check too, sure sometimes is handy but most of the time its like "WHY IN THE WORLD IS THAT A DEP!!"
Generally, anyone who uses the phrase "RPM Hell" has not used a modern RPM based system with yum/apt. A common attitude of Slackware fans is that Slackware is a real man's Linux distro. Me Grog, me no need RPM. Build from source, satify own dependency! So fast, only need 3 days! Raahhh!
Slackware may have it's strenghts, but since I haven't used it in 8 or 9 years, I am ignorant of what those strenghts are, besides maybe a good learning tool. I can say with a fair amount of confidence, that package management is not a major strength of Slackware. I have met Slackers that have said "I don't want to use RPM, I prefer to compile from source." But this statement shows a complete ignorance of how RPM works. In fact, if you like compiling your own stuff, an RPM based distro is certainly superior to slackware. With the source rpm, you can simply tweak and build off of someone else's work, rather than doing it over from scratch. Just, edit the spec and rebuild it. In general, Slackers complaints about RPM are simply unfounded.
Slackware was my first distribution and using it certainly taught me how to build software from source. But shortly after that, I found RPM and learned how to build RPMs. Since then, I've never looked back, even when "RPM Hell" was a reality.
-- Knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
Hard drive? Ah, those monstrous things with 20 Mega-freakin-bytes! I'd like one of those...
My late post will likely go unseen, buried on page 2, but here it goes...
/etc/slackware-version
As many others have stated, Slackware is unadulterated Linux, and this is what cRaig means by, "Slackware matters because Slackware IS Linux."
Slackware was my first install of Linux about 1996, and I, too, have tried all the distros over the years, and have come to love Slackware. It IS easy to install and maintain, and I have no idea where some of the "Slackware is only for gurus" opinions originate. I work in a company supporting many "Enterprise" and free Linux distributions, as well as all of the BSD's and some commercial UNIX's. Slackware makes up a small number of our customers, but we never hear from them for support because the OS is so stable, and security updates simply don't break the server, as other distributions have been known to do. If a user wants bleeding-edge, then they can track slackware-current - or just track the stable versions. Updating and the package management tools work perfectly. Period.
I think the relatively small number of Slackware installs is simply due to marketing. Patrick does not dole out dollars for advertising or "push" for enterprise level adoption. BUT! Once users and Linux admins become aware of Slackware and try it out (and I mean *really* use it - not just bitch about, "I can't find..." and give up), I think there is only a tiny percentage that throw up their hands and resort to the big names. (I had a hard time, just now, writing 'big names' - Slackware has always been one.)
And not to just post a male-member extention, but it just keeps on ticking for me:
michael@aesop 17:00:05 ~ $ cat
Slackware 9.1.0
michael@aesop 17:00:07 ~ $ uptime
17:00:08 up 402 days, 16:05, 3 users, load average: 0.15, 0.12, 0.13
Another zealot that is completely and totally oblivious of the real world:
What's so difficult about downloading a program and typing "installpkg" and the package name?
That's entirely too hard. You may as well say "what's so hard about rebuilding your carbureator?" "InstallPKG"? Where does somebody get that information? Does a window pop up when I install that says "if you need to install new software, type installpkg""? And where's the list of applications? Do I do "InstallPKG Firefox"? "installpkg firefox 1.0.7"? "Install fire fox"? Really, there's literally no way that a normal user could figure this out without buying a book. That's certainly not easy.
What Slackware advocates are telling you is that in order to truely appreciate Slackware for what it is, you must learn how Linux works first, because Slackware is just unadulterated Linux.
Why do I want to learn Linux, exactly? I want to play games, surf the net, and do work. Learning Linux is NOT some kind of universal thing that everybody likes. Personally, I'd rather have bamboo shoots hammered under my fingernails than learn Linux.
Like a lot of the people who have responed Slackware was my first (Slackware 96 with the Slackware Unleashed book). Reading that article made me miss Slack and I placed an order today to support and check out 10.3. Looking forward to the latest Partick and the gang have produced. j
I help manage ~700 linux machines all running Slackware. Actually it's a very customized Slack-based distro but that's part of Slack's beauty, how easy it is to modify for specific needs.
FWIW I work here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have tried Corel, Redhat, Mandrake, SuSe, Debian, and a bunch of other distros and I keep coming back to Slack. It's not that the others don't have something to offer. I have found something I like in each one. I just like to know what is going on with my PC. Pat makes sure that stuff is up to date but stable at the same time. I don't want a distro with a kernel that is patched all to hell by the distributor. Plus with Slack I don't have to worry about RPM dependency hell.
The flexability is great too. I have Slack running as a Secondary workstation PC at work, On our company web server, and I even switched my mom over to Slack since she seemed to have a knack for collecting viruses and spyware when the computer had Windows 2000 on it.
Looks like Slack is outlasting many a distro. If Slack weren't important, this guy wouldn't be writing an article about why it's not important. Long live Slack.
Penny - plain text accounting
A long time friend of mine needed a computer for web surfing/shopping and email. Specifically a computer connected to the *Internet*. The one she had was a 600 Mhz eMachine from college, 64MB RAM, WindowsME.
I wanted to help her out but did not want to do computer support. I have used Slackware almost exclusively since switching to Linux in 2000 so I loaded 9.1 onto her old machine, added 128MB RAM, and a $70 USD GeForce video card from BestBuy.
The machine ran Gnome/Firefox directly connected to the Internet for 190 days before she moved. It currently connects to wireless router via a Linksys Gamers adapter (recommended by the way if you desire a OS and hardware independent device). Photos are also now loaded with gPhoto
... and furthermore
Patrick Volkerding should stop pretending to be sick in order to gain publicity and start focusing on Slackware to gain a modern distro.
I've never considered myself a hard-core of the slack crowd. But slack was my first distro and has always been the favorite. It has not been the most frequently used for various reasons.
.tar.gz files off the internet, and I could just manually install everything. Out of the box slackware worked beautifully (except some painful gcc issues), while redhat tried to me too smart too early (linuxconf), especially for first time learners.
We tried installing redhat, slackware and debian the first time we received the CDs. I tried redhat first, failed. Then debian, and failed too. I knew nothing about linux, and the slackware install went fine. Since then everything in slackware just made sense. The dselect in debian was a pain, and apt-getting was too slow, while it took me years to understand how to work rpm. The tgz files of slackware made as much sense as getting the
Since then I've used redhat more often. Many commercial packages are made just for redhat, and detailed instructions are available for installing commercial stuff on redhat (like oracle), while doing the same on any default distro is more painful. More recently I've been using knoppix and ubuntu. Nothing comes close to slackware, and when I have to get a quick small distro for a virtual machine or something, its slackware. For the longest time, I installed zipslack on every windows machine I had. Easy to recover the space back when you need it. Since then that function has moved to knoppix, and now trying to put slackware (or slax) onto my usb key....
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Slackware is the only distro I run, simply because I learned it early and its simple Unix. The whole point of any Unix-alike operating system is to offer Unix compatibility. Anything added on had better be common to ALL Unix distros or else its not worth as much. Things like GUI autoconfigurators aren't much use if they aren't cross-distro and work on Old Unixes, Linux, and the BSDs.
Slack distro was in 1996, I think I still have the CD package that it shipped in. Kinda neat. Its also the latest distro that my other home pc uses. I am using xp on the laptop. Id convert but Im too lazy, its nice to have the seperation.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
And we wear an onion on our belts. /SLAX on a 1Gb thumbdrive in my wallet
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
The most extreme box I have ever built uses Slackware 8.0 the most recent 2.2 kernel and upgraded apache,ssl,ssh, mysql, php and mod perl. On a P2 300mhz 256MB memory and 1 8 gig hard drive.
System is an email server (qmail) with pop3 and clamAV for virus scanning, a web server (LAMP) with large 100MB file uploading,
a file server with Samba and NETATALK for access to uploaded files from the local net, an ssh and webmin server for remote management, a DHCP server for local network, an ntp time server for local network. It is also the firewall/NAT box for the internal network.
Why all this on one underpowered box? It is in a small business with limited resources and was the only box not used for anything.
It has been in use for 3.5 years so far with a max continuous uptime of 9 months. Box has come fairly close to 9 9's uptime. As of the first of the year I get to move it to a 1.2GHZ P3.
When first putting this box together I chose Slackware due to it's very straight forward and simple bootup scripts.
The fact that it starts out as a fairly light weight system when first installed and started allows for easy customization.
So Yes Slackware matters to me. I use it on just about every box I build. It also runs my personal systems.
I have tried others but I always seem to wind up using Slackware.
Weather Underground ( http://wunderground.com/ ) was awarded " Enterprise All-Star Award" from Network World. Especially after handling 14 million hits in Katrina.
t her.html
http://www.networkworld.com/allstar/2005/112105-o
Reading the article, one thing didn't surprise me at all:
"Weather Underground uses a trimmed-down version of Slackware, one of the only distributions of Linux available in the mid-1990s when Schwerzler was at U-M. In addition, the servers have no hard drives and support Preboot Execution Environment boot, which means they are configurable and deployable via the network"
You should read rest of the article about the stuff they do there to manage such amounts of data. "No bullshit" attitude of Slackware helps? I bet!
And still the most straightforward and easiest to use distro out there IMHO. I succeeded with it 4 years ago after giving up on Red Hat, Mandrake, Corel.
Slackware is has been ware now... Move on....
good luck
A couple of years ago I converted an old desktop into a server. My younger brother, who happeneded to be 10 at the time, wanted to help, so I gave him my Slack install disks (I believe it was version 9.0, but I could be wrong). Aside from some trouble figuring out partitions, I just told him the general idea of what needed to be done and he figured out pretty much everything. At least for me, that was proof enough that Slack has a good installer.
You are starting to loose sight of who started all that is slackness
http://www.subgenius.com/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
just how many rings do we need again?
I complained about memory, couldn't handle the monitor (buttons were off screen).
Yes it's old equipment, K5 AMD slack installs easily and run well on it.
As so many have already pointed out, Slackware will make you learn Linux. But the real question is, does learning Linux really matter?
/etc/fstab, to run XF86config, and to uncomment my soundcard from the list in /etc/modules.conf, which I did, and to unmute it. Then I ran startx, and lo and behold, I had a nicely running Gnome machine where everything worked. Simple. The config files were simple, with comments everywhere to tell you what's what, and all in only a few files. And I already knew more about my system than I had learned in almost two years of all the other distros.
Do you want a box that you don't know, don't understand, can't fix when it breaks? Ok, sure, you're Windows box never breaks... gimme a break, you're looking at Linux already, so I guess we know the answer to that!
I've tried the big three and more, and none of them works first time everytime out of the box. Suse finds my sound and graphics but can't find the network. Redhat still hasn't discovered sound cards. Compiling from source on Mandrake? Good luck. And the RPM dependency hell goes on. And getting the problem solved was hell. YAST is good when it works, but when it doesn't it's a bear. The main reason I tried so many distros was to try and find one that would fix the unfixable problem in the current one.
When I first tried Slackware 7, I'd heard it was hard and primitive, but I did know all my hardware by then... so I chanced it. The text installer was simple and straightforward. Text yes, but quite basic, easy to understand, and it just worked. And it booted to a command line, text again, but again, it worked. The instructions (yes, text also) said to run a few simple commands to set up my networking, to check my
So now I'm typing this on Slack 9.n, as I'm burning the ISO for 10.2, because I haven't looked at another distro since. Slackware is perfect. Fantastic yet simple package system with no dependency hell, all hardware working and tuned to perfection, development tools all work great, fast, stable, and configured to my personal specs. Oh, and did i mention simple?
So for me, yes, learning Linux mattered.
Resurrected a crippling virii/riddled PC belonging to a neighbour using Slackware 10.2 (other distros wouldn't cut). ...
Was offered payment, I refused, but began dating the foreign student lodging there instead.
I have to play really cool, give her time and space - because she is damn pretty and sweet
If she becomes my girlfriend, I really owe Slackware a big one!
Slackware - one distro for the romantic.
Oh, I know, I'm the enemy. No need to flame me anymore, I'll do it myself! I'm a bad person, just because I want to learn something and want to empower other people to learn and also I like compilers and code libraries and Bash shell script configurations. Because I stubbornly insist that we wouldn't have any Linux or BSD or Solaris or OS X or yes, even DOS without programmers, who need programming tools to make them. Because I don't believe that all software comes from the Blue Software Fairy.
Yes, I know, that makes me elitist. Drive us away from Linux, you stupid asses, and watch your operating system sink into the sand when you find out it needs SOMEBODY TO MAINTAIN IT. That it can't update and propegate and compete on it's own. Watch you end up back at Microsoft in five years, saying "I don't know WHAT happened - all of a sudden, source code tarballs became rare as dinosaurs, because everybody hated them, and then somebody told me that that's what you make new packages out of. No wonder the update button did nothing but pop up an error dialog!"
Meanwhile, we "elitists" will be over in BSD or Solaris or BeOS. Laughing like hell. Because as long as an elitist has a tool and a book, an elitist always has just the right operating system. I suppose Paul Volkerding can't die fast enough to please the rest of you, but I'm going to miss him like hell. He UNDERSTOOD.
...you lack slack, Jack.
I've used Debian, Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake and I've built a Linux From Scratch System. For me it is a tough decision between LFS and Slackware as my favorite distribution. Hey they're all Linux, but Slack is GREAT. My first distro was Slackware and I keep retuning to it every so often. Slack has never let me down. Here is what I like about slack (No flames intended, I just call 'em as I seem 'em.)
1. It will install on anything. In fact it has installed flawlessly for me on Compaq Servers, clone desktops and an HP portable or two. If you can't install Slack on a machine, you're going to have a hell of a time installing any of the other distros. When the pressure is on, Slack hasn't let me down yet.
2. The install is clean and quick. No excessive disc juggling like SuSE (I know use the DVD, but that has always bugged me about SuSE.) And it doesn't take a forever like Red Hat (I'm talking about RHEL 3 and the versions 7.x - 9.x).
3. No GUI tools to get in the way of configuring your machine. I like Yast, but it gets in the say sometimes. If you really want to learn how to configure a system then can't go wrong with Slack (or Debian for that matter. Of course if you want complete control then LFS or perhaps Gentoo is the way to go). I could amost install Slack without the install program. The only thing is used the install program was to install the packages. I didn't use it for setting partitions on the drives. Never had a problem doing the install this way. Red Hat would sometimes give me problem if I did something it thought was odd.
4. Slack stays true to the package developers. You don't get these modified packages like with SuSE and Red Hat/Fedora. The fact that I can't play DVD video that I recored on a SuSE system really irks me. Same for MP3's.
5. The character on the front of the 5 cd sets (from cdrom.com?) was pretty cool. Did it have a name?
I have run Slackware for quite a while and it was the first distribution I really tried seriously. Because I learned Slackware I feel comfortable on just about any distribution as well as BSD.
I had used Redhat Linux 8, 9, FC2 and ever tried Debian, Mandrake before using Slackware for it was said that Slackware was a professional distribution and was dangerous for newbie. But when I was tired of the so-called package management and lost all my data in an accident, I switched to Slackware in the summer of last year. And I use it until now without focusing on any other distributions. I recompile the linux kernel with custom options and makepkg it for next installation if I like. And also repackage X.org without any built-in video driver for I am using an nVidia card. The X desktop is Xfce-4.2.3.2, I am very pleased with it. I feel that it is my Linux while using Slackware. Sorry for my poor English for Chinese is my tongue language.
I chose Slackware because I disliked other distributions' bloated installs.
I wanted to install Linux a few months ago. I went to the Slackware website because I remembered it as being fast and un-bloated.
Unfortunately, to install it you have to download FOUR CDs.
That's nearly impossible if you don't have broadband.
Last time I installed linux (Debian 2.0), the whole thing was on one disk, and even then I only used a quarter of it at best. Even better, I could just download a 'base' distribution from the website and then download other packages as I need them.
And don't try telling me that linux is 4 times more advanced now than it was then. The kernel still fits on a floppy, bash is still bash, cat is still cat, more is still more (or less). If there is some whizzbang window manager that takes up half a CD, I don't want to waste my datacap and time by downloading it.
Slack may be many things, but non-bloaty install is not one of them.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Then, I tried Slackware. I think my first try was 9.0. I don't know why, but when I installed the necessary programs for playing DVD, it was too slow and choppy. Come to think of it. It doesn't like the nvidia driver very much either. I let that sit there while also trying Red Hat for about 2 seconds and then SuSE for a minute. Meanwhile, I was keeping up to date with Mandrake and using that as my main system. Slackware 9.1 came out and I decided to try it again. I was a little bit smarter this time and got DVD's to play as well if not better than on Mandrake. I managed somehow to massage the nvidia driver on to it and I used-still use Swaret for updates and package management. I learned a lot more about configuration files using Slackware, too. There are two RPM's that I had no trouble installing on it. One was the driver for the Lexmark Printer. The other was the RPM for Scorched3d. This is how easy it is:
rpm2tgz Scorched3d-39.1.rpm
installpkg Scorched3d-39.1.tgz
'rpm2tgz' is your friend. Just like 'alien' in Debian, it allows you to use RPM's. So, could we please quit saying this distro is harder to use package management than this one because I've sampled most of them and they all work just fine.
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.
...distro that I actually managed to install without newly installed programs crashing on me (see Red Hat 5-7). I remember that on all new installations I did with different distros (SUSE, Debian, Red Hate and Mandrake) there was always a program which crashed on me. Stuff like that scared me off, since I was a hardcore windows fanatic (well not hardcore, but I didn't know what else there was).
I'm no good at linux at all, but I still use Slackware now and then on my old machine just to see if I have learned anything new to be able to use it more. Reading FAQ's, man pages and howtos is not my thing, as in I can't concentrate enough to understand them.
It just works, I don't know how or why, it just does! Slackware is a great distro even for beginners like me (been one for 6-8 years now).
I always used to say that Slackware's best feature is that it comes out of the box Broken. It largely works, but there are quirks, things that aren't working quite right, or that need to be tweaked to be most effective. That is probably not true anymore, but it used to be, and this forced me to Learn Linux in order to fix my system. I would never have delved into so many things if everything had just Worked Right from the start. Thank you Patrick for making me fix things for myself! I am now a smarter Linux admin because of that.
splunge (n) -- A good idea.. but it could be lousy... and I'm not being indecisive!
"Hard drives"? Do you mean those newfangled Winchester thingumajigs, or are you talking about those tiny floppy disks in little hard shells?
Disclaimer: I am Distro-agnostic: currently running Gentoo on my Shuttle, MEPIS on my DELL laptop, my own LFS system on my embedded boards, UBUNTU on my powerbook, OE on my Zaurus, and Slackware on my i-opener. My i-opener is my favourite system for hacking/writing code, power be damned...
Yggdrasil was my first 'distro' of Linux - prior to that I rolled my own (was on minix-list looking for 'a free unix' the day linus announced his little kernel) and it was quite a drag to do so, i must say.
But Yggdrasil rocked, plain and simple.. it was one of the first Linux distributions, and certainly was the first "Live CD"-bootable Linux installation around
Its sort of weird how cyclical things are, in the Linux world
I have over the years since that fateful minix-list day used many different linux distro's - Yggdrasil, RedHat, Arch, ROCK, Mandrake, SUSE, gentoo, MEPIS, Debian, but
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
an advantage of slack (and why I *never* liked RedHat and don't really like SuSE YaST) is that what you learn there can be applied on any Linux system - YaST config mayoverwrite what you did, but you can turn that off. RedHat always seemd to be "use our tool or you'll bork your system", sometimes even "use our tool or bugger off". Slack uses few tools and they are usually easy to interpret to what the base system changes are doing. If you can configure Slack, you can configure any of them. It may not be *nice*, mind....
So, I started coming to slashdot about 7-8 years ago. Linux seemed appealing owing to the freedom/philosophical aspects, and all the slashbots going on about how stable it was acted as another tempting aspect -- Win 95 wasn't the most stable MS OS ever! Unless you go right back to BBC Micro's in the 80s, I'd been an MS user forever -- since well before Win3.1, using DOS -- but I knew how to program, so I figured I should be able to sort out this Linux thing anyway.
Got a hold of slackware, and.... well, and nothing. I got into a black command line. OK, that doesn't scare me, I knew DOS, but, it'd be nice to get X going, yeah? So I spent the next 2 or 3 WEEKS scouring newsgroups and the web for help, opening vi or vim or emacs (or whatever) editing arcane entries in usr/bin/x86.conf (or whatever) according to this advice, and I never ONCE got X to load.
Never used linux since. You know, I'm sure it's great and all, but I like to DO things with my computer, not just pointlessly edit config files til hell freezes over.
...as long as there exist people who like a clean, rock-solid and cruft-free distro.
My primary system will continue to run Slack for as long as Patrick continues to release it.
..i am kinda slack..
Can anyone recommend a good therapist for me.. er.. my schizophrenic network card?
Slackware is great, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, you all love Slackware. Fine. But you missed the point of the article... that Slackware does not matter! The original article didn't say Slackware was 'bad.' And the rebuttal was little more than a personal attack on the first author (in true Slackware-zealot tradition!)
/.) yelling obscenities at the top of their lungs cannot change it.
SLACKWARE DOES NOT MATTER... anymore than Sony Beta matters, or Studebaker matters, or CPM matters. Why? Because those who make, mold, and enforce opinions DON'T USE IT. Corporate CIOs don't use Slackware (or know about it.) High-level government bureaucrats don't use Slackware (or know about it.) Non-profits don't use it. The electronic media and the tradtional press don't write about it, nor do they care about it. Slackware only exists on the machines (and in the minds) of a relatively few people who are not considered opinion makers or who do not have the legitimacy to be considered 'worthy endorcers' of the distribution.
Read the posts here. A large number of them say "Yes, I started with Slackware in 1995, but now I use XXXX." Slackware is like the Atari or Amiga. Everyone had one, everyone liked them, but everyone has moved on.
The point of the article was that Slackware is not so much a technical failure (although many in the 'real world' would agree to that seeing as they use something they think is better), Slackware is a marketing failure. The founder/creator does nothing to promote this product, and those who yell the loudest about it are most often those with, how shall I put it... rather base social skills.
You can love Slackware until the moon turns blue and you can shout it from your roof each night. But the 'real world' has passed it by. That's the truth, like it or not. And all the Slackers on the planet (or
Ubuntu, SuSE, RHEL, Linspire, Mandrake, and Xandros have REAL marketing campaigns done by professionals who know their craft.
Kanotix, PCLinuxOS, CentOS, Knoppix, Debian have huge numbers of 'plain users' who have created great word-of-mouth about their 'favorite' platform. These are all platforms that WANT to be more popular and which work to get their software noticed by whomever will listen (in the media, corporatations, etc.) Go visit the communities of any of them and you will see a huge difference in 'tude' as opposed to those who send toward Slackware. (Of course this is a generalization, but seeing is believing.... spend a week in Ubuntu's forums vs. alt.os.linux.slackware and let us know what you find!)
Is Slackware a superior version of Linux? Maybe. Probably. Does that matter? Not in the least.