Slackware: I'm Not Dead Yet!

New submitter xclr8r writes "The longtime tinkering and learning distro of Linux Slackware found itself at the center of rumors and speculation when its website was down for a few days. Caitlyn Martin, developer of Linux Yarok, voiced concerns in DistroWatch and declared that she would be basing the new project off a distro with a more secure future. Meanwhile contributors continued to plug along with additions to the change log. Eventually Eric Hameleers expanded on his initial communication of 'old hardware — lack of funds' to a more thorough explanation quoted in the article. Have your pop up blocker ready."

Comments

Correction

[Anonymous Coward]

The summary is, as usual, misleading. Caitlyn Martin didn't post this in a DistroWatch article, she (and some other posters) mentioned it in the comments section of that website. She also didn't say she was moving the derived distro to a new base, she said she and the rest of the development team would be voting on the issue as to whether to move to a different base.

Honestly, how bad does a person's comprehension skills have to be to submit this kind of summary?

Re:Correction

[Iron Condor]

Uh - a substantial fraction of Linux distros out there are derived from Slackware: http://futurist.se/gldt/wp-content/uploads/12.02/gldt1202.png

Re:Debian

[wmbetts]

If you think Slackware is going away anytime soon I have a bridge to sell you.

We're not dead, but an old server is.

[volkerdi]

Good hello folks! It's wonderful to see we've made it onto Slashdot in-between releases again!

However, our website hardware is nearly toast, and is also co-located a long way away from where I live. It is an ancient VIA based system with a Celeron and 512MB of RAM. It also sports a Maxtor hard drive connected to a Promise Technology PCI IDE card, and LILO boots from a 3.5" floppy drive. Frankly, this wasn't really great hardware even when it was brand new, but it ran our site and mailing lists with excellent uptimes for over a decade in spite of that. It looks like the trouble could be a flaking Tulip based Ethernet card (getting DUP and dropped packets, and RX/TX errors). It was doing OK again after a reboot, but I'm having some trouble reaching it again for some reason.

We're looking for a new place to put the main site. Perhaps it could move to our other server, connie.slackware.com (in which case we need a PHP guru to port it to the latest version). There are other Slackware related servers that might be able to host us as well. To be honest, connie is also getting a little long in the tooth (that's a Pentium III with 256MB of RAM).

RIP bob.slackware.com, and long live Slackware!

Re:We're not dead, but an old server is.

[X0563511]

Indeed, I've got a nice server sitting here in my apartment collecting dust, since I stopped working at the datacenter. (by nice I mean quad core 2.8 with 4gb of ram).

Re:We're not dead, but an old server is.

[JWSmythe]

  Honestly, there are a lot of old servers still out there. Sometimes it's budgets that keep them in place. Sometimes it's poor management. Sometimes it's the simple fact that it still works. I've encouraged people to upgrade. Sometimes they don't do it because of money (small hosting, no significant change, they don't upgrade), or sometimes stupidity (small hosting, large customer base, fear of change).

    I won't totally agree with all the reasons.

    One of my own servers is an dual Opteron 240, 1.3Ghz with 2Gb RAM. It started out life with 3 250Gb IDE drives as a RAID5. All of the drives have failed at some point, and they've been swapped with 320GB drives. It happens to be currently running Slackware64 13.37. It started out life with Gentoo, then Redhat, then Slamd64. I only went the Gentoo and Redhat route, because there was no 64bit Slackware at the time. That server, when it was new, cost about $3,500.

    The new servers are AMD FX-8120, 8 core, 3.888Ghz with 16GB ram and mirrored 1TB SATA drives. I went the route that Google did with their open rack mount servers, so I saved a good bit of money on cases. Each of those cost just about $600. I suspect most datacenters wouldn't allow me to run with the open rack style, so I'd have to drop an extra $300 to $600 on cases. These run a fresh install of Slackware64 13.37.

    Both the Opteron and the FX machines are still running. I just haven't moved everything away from the Opteron yet, but I do have the hardware to move it to.

    I wrote to Patrick (Slackware) about some good options. I won't go into depth on them here. It's up to him and his folks if they want to use them.

    I am a huge Slackware fan. Anything Slackware didn't provide directly in the distribution, I used to get from linuxpackages.net. For the last few years, I've gotten additional stuff from slackbuilds.org. Between Slackbuilds and the sources on Slackware, it's been real easy to roll up my own updated packages. It's much easier than the old days of just installing additional stuff from source, and not having a clean removal path.

    For a big commercial company, I don't recommend leaving hardware running for over 5 years. That's the end of the usable life. In 5 years, there is bigger, better, and faster available. It's also usually close to the end of life for the drives. I know some places upgrade yearly, which is fine and dandy if you have a huge fiscal budget, and IT people who like to keep real busy. :) It seems that places that really do the yearly upgrades have things set up and documented better to allow for smooth migrations between machines. Places that stagnate on solutions tend to have more stuff tied in closely to a specific setup, and it's difficult for them to move.

Re:Google is not my friend today...

[Anonymous Coward]

Some oddball internal thing written for consulting clients.... of some kind. She claimed that there'd be a public alpha of the thing in 2010 (called Yarok Bereshit, no kidding...). Either based on Salix or Slackware, although they [five people in total apparently with two developers total] did a bit of custom code. As of this spring it was still planned to produce a 'public release alpha at the end of this month.' Funny that someone who claims that any business without a website is doomed turns out to be developing a distro that either doesn't have a website or is so badly advertised that Google plain can't find it. End of the day, I have to agree with the shampoo AC below: who cares?

Re:Debian

[uvajed_ekil]

Debian is a great distro, I must agree. However, I find it to be a little rough around the edges, and prefer Mint's Debian-based edition. LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) offers the fast, clean, stable Debian base with all the bells, whistles, and eye candy that that the Mint team are known for. It is 100% Debian-compatible, and ready out of the box to serve as a great general purpose desktop OS. First Mint took Ubuntu and made it better, and now they have done the same with Debian, and I couldn't be much happier with the result.

Re:Year of the Linux Deadtop

[unixisc]

It may have been made using GCC, but Apple has been using FreeBDS as the basis of the userland in both OS-X and iOS. So how are either of those Debian based?

Re:How many base distros...

[neonsignal]

Using the same package manager doesn't necessarily mean there aren't other major differences. It isn't easy to define 'base distros'; how much does a fork have to change before you consider it a separate distro? I classify Ubuntu as 'based on' Debian, not because it shares the same package manager, but because it currently continues to derive packages from the Debian system (with additional patches). Whereas while Mandriva and its forks have originated in Red Hat, they no longer draw from it.

Re:How many base distros...

[lagi]

refer to this image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Gldt1009.svg

Re:It hurt bad when Stampede Linux was no more.

[dow]

I used Stampede for a while, and it was pretty much Slackware but compiled for 686 processors, where Slackware was still using 386 as the target. You could achieve a similar speed up to Stampede's level by just compiling your own Slackware packages for the most heavily used libs and applications.

Re:not until

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the 3.0 set (ELF binaries!)

I also have 2 Linux Developer's Resource sets from InfoMagic. With Slackware 2.2 and 3.1

From the back of the Walnut Creek Slackware 3.0 set:

Official Slackware Linux turns your machine into a powerful
32-bit multi-tasking Unix workstation. Develop program with
a full range of software development, text editing, and image
processing tools. Play the popular arcade games DOOM from
id Software and awesome new ABUSE from crack-dot-com.
Connect your machine to the Internet!

Patrick Volkerding, the author of Slackware, also authored this
CDROM. The first CDROM contains the easy to install Linux
system (kernel 1.2.13 and 1.3.18) and complete source code.
Patrick carefully selected the best software from Internet Linux
archive sites for the second CDROM

Slackware requires 4 to 8 megabytes of memory, and 12 to 250
megabytes of hard disk space. A typical installation with C and
C++ (v. 2.7.0) development tools, Emacs (v. 19.29),
networking with e-mail and news, the XFree86 X Window
System (v 3.2.3), and several applications uses 50 megabytes.

Slackware Linux is compatible with most Intel PC hardware,
from PCI / Pentium motherboards to 386, and supports all
modern CDROM drives, sound, ethernet, and mice.