Slashdot Mirror
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."
netcraft confirms it!
-I'm just sayin'
It can hurt pretty badly when your favorite Linux distribution comes to an end. I've lived through this horrid experience once before, with Stampede Linux. We were as close as a man and Linux could get. I ran it on all of my PCs. Then one day it was no more, and I was destroyed. For several months, I had no purpose in life. But eventually the pain does go away, and I found other Linux distributions. I'm using Debian now, and while it isn't as glorious as Stampede Linux was, at least it's still Linux.
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?
RIP Linux - we're all using Macs now.
If you want a reliable distro that will survive every other distro, you go with Debian. The developers fight like cats and dogs and it just keeps going on, getting better and better.
I know he got sick years back, but ... is the dude ok?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
entering an 85 year old man in to the WWF
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Can someone please tell me what Linux Yarok is?
Googled it, you get shampoo. Who cares about some developer for some project nobodys ever heard of?
but I use it for leering at much younger women
(sometimes I even flirt)
Still end up with a bent nose sometimes tho
and every once and awhile I get that moment where you yell *Wee-Haa There's a naked woman in my bed*
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!
That kind of outage doesn't really help Slackware. I've used Slackware since 1992 or 1993, I believe, and I would not change to any other distribution, but it is quite scary when you have a lot of work on top of a distribution that has its website off-line for that long. You simply start thinking if it won't last much more, and many people might start migrating to more popular distros. Anyway, the best way to avoid that is to support it, subscribing to it, or buying some stuff from the store. I won't hurt.
...deader than a Chinese fetus cut from its mother's womb and skewered on a Jap bayonet.
Considering a Google search for Linux Yarok more or less only returns hits for her and not the project, I call bluff, hype or a new KDE/Gnome skin. All three are ofc much needed.
is http://store.slackware.com/cgi-bin/store
Although I hope to keep my Slackware box running for the foreseeable future, I do wonder what other distributions people would consider if Slackware became unmaintained.
So, Slackware appreciation thread? Why do you use Slackware, what other distros have you considered, and why don't they quite cut it?
I think for my home PC, I'd consider Arch Linux. Like Slackware, it keeps its packages reasonably vanilla, and has a transparent configuration system. On the other hand, I think it's far too unstable for servers that do important work.
For servers I'm already mostly using Debian... It's a good distro, but I'm assuming that people with Slackware configurations have some special requirements that it doesn't meet?
It’s nice to take a vacation once in a while because this gives you physical and mental refreshment. I can still remember my unforgettable experience when I was in Bantayan Island. The place was indescribable. The surroundings were rare, pleasant to your soul.
I'm a relatively new Slackware user, having only been using it for the past 2 years, but I can't think of another distro I'd rather use. So I'd be devastated if Slackware did die.
However, I knew from the start that this was just people overreacting. Eric regularly posts updates on his blog, and although the changelog and updates in -current aren't as frequent as some other distros, they are there.
I'll definitely be getting a subscription as soon as the next release comes.
Network Cards & PCI Cards Firmware: No protection or detection of rootkits / malware, & AMD CPU issue
# Designing and implementing malicious hardware
"Hidden malicious circuits provide an attacker with a stealthy attack vector. As they occupy a layer below the entire software stack, malicious circuits can bypass traditional defensive techniques. Yet current work on trojan circuits considers only simple attacks against the hardware itself, and straightforward defenses. More complex designs that attack the software are unexplored, as are the countermeasures an attacker may take to bypass proposed defenses.
We present the design and implementation of Illinois Malicious Processors (IMPs). There is a substantial design space in malicious circuitry; we show that an attacker, rather than designing one speciïc attack, can instead design hardware to support attacks. Such flexible hardware allows powerful, general purpose attacks, while remaining surprisingly low in the amount of additional hardware. We show two such hardware designs, and implement them in a real system. Further, we show three powerful attacks using this hardware, including a login backdoor that gives an attacker complete and highlevel access to the machine. This login attack requires only 1341 additional gates: gates that can be used for other attacks as well. Malicious processors are more practical, more ïexible, and harder to detect than an initial analysis would suggest."
https://db.usenix.org/event/leet08/tech/full_papers/king/king_html/
# Attacking network cards
"I've reached my goal of writing a totally transparent firewall bypass engine for those firewalls which are PC-based: you simply overwrite the firmware in both NICs and then perform PCI-to-PCI transfers between the two cards for suitably formatted IP packets (modern NICs have IP "offload engines" in hardware and therefore can trigger on incoming and outgoing packets). The resulting "Jedi Packet Trick" (sorry, couldn't resist) fools, amongst others, CheckPoint FW-1, Linux-based Strongwall, etc. This is of course obvious as none of them check PCI-to-PCI transfers. "
https://lwn.net/Articles/284162/
http://www.links.org/?p=330
# 'Super-secret' debugger discovered in AMD CPUs
# Password-protected feature goes beyond x86
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/15/amd_secret_debugger/
# Super-secret debug capabilities of AMD processors !
http://www.woodmann.com/collaborative/knowledge/index.php/Super-secret_debug_capabilities_of_AMD_processors_!
# Hidden Debug Mode Found In AMD Processors
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/11/12/047243/Hidden-Debug-Mode-Found-In-AMD-Processors
# A microcode reliability update is available that improves the reliability of systems that use Intel processors
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936357
# Google: attacking network cards malware, PCI rootkit, PCI rootkits, rootkit firmware, etc.
Too lazy (or whateve - I don't actually believe people are lazy as much as I think they feel more or less angst about doing things) to ... now I forget what I was too lazy for. Anyway.
Isn't this old news? Didn't I hear German Mc Schnizel rant about this issue a week or more ago and wasn't he saying that it's just a website that is down due to not having funding for the website or whatever, while ftp servers and things were chugging along as they always had been?
So no need to panic. Slackware is slackware and don't need no stinking websites, but could possibly use some donations for renting a webserver for people who like that kind of thing to look at.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
a) "Cut me a little bit of Slack" ware
b) "Our developers are known for their propensity to Slack" ware
c) "If you don't want to pay Red Hat support prices you can always download some old Slack" ware
Okay, how many base distros are there in Linux? So far, I've counted 6 - Debian, RedHat, Slackware, Gentoo, Arch, TinyCore.. Any others? I'm open to being corrected if any of those I listed are actually derivatives.
Ahhh, so since it's a Slashdot Love Fest, death-by-tables is fine. Of course ***ANY*** other site, you all would be SCREAMING and proper web design and CSS and so on. DOUBLE STANDARD
Looks like a market opportunity for any company that could take, say FreeBSD, get from Apple whatever utilities it needs and port them to FreeBSD, and then make that the basis of servers for the Macs. For the hardware, they could buy boxes from HP, Dell or any other server company, and put everything together. After that, target Mac corporate users.
Uh - a substantial fraction of Linux distros out there are derived from Slackware
Any of them that I (or anyone else) has heard of?
Slackware simply doesn't provide the basic features most distros call for these days, such as a package management paradigm. No, the "old UNIX way of doing things" isn't sufficient in today's world for widespread deployment across multiple systems and configurations.
Simply put, slackware fills a niche, which seems to be shrinking ever-smaller as the years pass.
It was great as an introduction to UNIX back in the Windows 98 days when I first tried it. Its floppy-disk sized images were helpful for a person like who me still had dialup. The experience I gained installing it and playing around was valuable, and it led me on to purchase a RedHat starter kit in the mall gaming store.
So yeah, Slackware has value as a basic bare-bones UNIX intro system.....but this is 2012....who needs that these days? Why install that with great pain and anguish when you can just install a complete, modern operating system with pretty desktop and everything, then get at the UNIX stuff little by little as needed or preferred?
Speaking of Caitlyn Martin, why are so many of the females in computing (esp. system development/security) M2F transexuals?
I know it's a male-dominated sport, even among those who positively discriminate eye candy like Google, so why in particular does it attract women who were born in a guy's body?
I remember uploading slackware to pirate bbs boards when I was in college (1996-1997), once I found out about that there was no need for os/2 or windows of even pirated programs, I stopped playing video games, spend the next decade trying a lot of distros, and here I am 34 and still single, wasted my life with fiddling linux, and I don't even work in IT field, just still a newbie user as well. I use Fedora now but am thinking of going back to ubuntu, we'll see.
everyone else I know has kids, is married, but hey at least I have compiled a kernel before... that and I am rich!
It's nice to see that you're still into that minimalist Slack thingy. And regardless of some of the ruder comments here, many of us still understand that Slackware is designed to run on even the most graceless, aimless, feckless, and pointless hardware, and to do so for a decade or so, with minimal intervention. Even if parts occasionally fall off.
We miss you at T.R.'s. We miss T.R.'s as well; Mark got respectable, sold the place off, and is now raising hell in Sacramento.
We now go up the street to Phair's. Great selection of craft brews, and decent pub grub.
Best wishes from the Knights of the Square Table.
Damn. Posting as AC, as I've forgotten my old low-five digit Slashdot ID.
Oh, well.
... has taken away a lot of user from slackware. Better package manager, bleeding edge software, rolling release ....
I had been a slackware user for year, but now I have
arch almost everywhere.
guys, try this one. :)
you can just plug in a debian kernel in it and you have arch, but gentoo
@http://www.funtoo.org
Apple once did a Linux distro based on the Mach kernel, called MkLinux. I doubt it ever took off. MacOS, or more precisely OS-X (since MacOS also refered to System 7.x on PPC) is based on NEXTSTEP, which is FreeBSD userland on XNU, along w/ the Quartz display manager, but not directly on Mach.
It is therefore more accurate to call OS-X as BSD or FreeBSD, although some purists object to that due to the fact that Apple uses the XNU kernel (i.e. Mach 3.0 with FreeBSD) instead of a pure FreeBSD kernel. Either case can be defended, but it's totally inaccurate to describe OS-X as Linux. Particularly now, when Apple is explicitly removing all GPL3 software from its OS, and replacing it w/ BSDL software instead. I know Linux ain't GPL3, but usually, when it's pointed out that OS-X ain't Linux, the next line of defense is to point to the GPLed stuff, which is Linux userland. But even that Apple is moving away from - I doubt they'll keep bash - will probably go for a different shell under a different license, such as zsh or even the original bourne shell sh, since Apple doesn't have problems w/ licenses such as CDDL or Common Public License.
At this stage, I do wonder - is there a strong reason for OS-X to retain the XNU kernel, instead of just adapting the FreeBSD or PC-BSD 9 kernel, and then putting Quartz on it and letting it loose? What does XNU bring to the table that FreeBSD can't provide? As it is, Apple doesn't use Mach as a microkernel (NEXTSTEP was originally based on Mach 2.5, and when they moved to Mach 3, they used it in a monolithic configuration w/ FreeBSD), and besides, Mach is one of the slower microkernels that are there - more recent ones, like Minix 3.2 and L4 are available. So what exactly does Apple gain w/ XNU?
Slackware forever ... until world exist!
The original SuSE Linux distribution was a German translation of Slackware. Slackware was initially based mostly on SLS. Over the years SuSE Linux incorporated many aspects of other Linux base distros. SuSE incorporated some Red Hat Linux feature and tools , such as its RPM Package Manager and its file structure. wabi sabi Matthew
The site may be down but you can still get slack through torrents, assuming you know how to use google.
while
I have been using Linux for 1.5-2 years now, still a Linux noob by anyone's standards. I started out on Ubuntu, and liked it for a while until the introduction of Unity, which to me was awful. This made me want to change distros, along with the fact that I didn't feel like I was learning anything about Linux beyond apt-get. So, bravely I jumped into Slackware(and supported the project by purchasing the install cd through their website) and haven't regretted it one bit. Slackware is a fun to learn distro, and it's very true that this operating system will not hold your hand. I've been on forums, wikis, read man pages, manuals etc... This distro encourages it's users to learn and be active in the Linux community. Over just a few months, as compared to a year on Ubuntu, that I've had Slackware on my box, I've learned how to partition a hard drive, how to edit .conf files, how to install apps and their dependencies, how to use SlackBuilds, how to extract and convert files, how to navigate and execute files in a terminal, how to configure wireless the nitty-gritty way. Most importantly, I'm learning how to not need Windows for anything.(other than school's VB class...) I've learned all this and i'm still learning the ins and outs, and I'm just a 1st year Community College Student(for programming, switched from web-design) with only one programming class under my belt, so those devs out their afraid to make the jump, you have no excuse, if I can do it, you can. I am a huge fan of Slackware, and would like to thank Pat, and Eric, and all the others who put the work into deving up this great distro, it just flies on my little netbook, and when I get my alienware m11x I'll promptly be installing and running slackware on that as well. Wish I could run it on the Vivaldi when I purchase that as well...
when slackware founder ditched Gnome for Kde, many Gnome and non-Kde users suffered. now, it is like all Kde distros are failing ?
move to FOSS,save ur nation's resources.