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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?
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.
entering an 85 year old man in to the WWF
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
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!
what the hell is shampoo?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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.
and where are all of the mac servers?
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
what the hell is shampoo?
It's an emacs command: ESC-x shampoo (ESC-2 ESC-x shampoo to lather, rinse and repeat.)
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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?
slipping ruffies to people is a crime you know.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
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.
and where are all of the mac servers?
I actually had an apple rep suggest we install mac mini's as servers in a datacenter to support our apple footprint! Apple is clearly not even remotely interested in corporate users.
To be pedantic, though...
As Red Dwarf references go, that one is not so obscure. Or maybe you meant read Dwarf was obscure itself.
Anyway. Anyone not familiar with Red Dward should make sure to google red dwarf torrent. It's the greatest thing since sliced monty python.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
Darwin iMac.local 11.3.0 Darwin Kernel Version 11.3.0: Thu Jan 12 18:47:41 PST 2012; root:xnu-1699.24.23~1/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64
Not sure which part says it's Debian. I have a feeling I got trolled.
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
I never brush. No biggie. It only starts bleeding if I do.
Once I went without showering for 3 months. I think the skin has odor control built in. People who shower often, like just about every normal person, start smelling bad after a day or three without a shower, but just hang in there and don't cave for these "shower" modernities.
what the hell is shampoo?
It's an emacs command: ESC-x shampoo (ESC-2 ESC-x shampoo to lather, rinse and repeat.)
Oh geez ... I was joking. Now I find out that it actually is an emacs command. Dammit, emacs.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Slackware: the only distro of linux where it's always the user's fault.
I am John Hurt.
I believe it's from the cult of the subgenius, or something to that effect. They explain the name on the site somewhere.
I am John Hurt.
Yup, dunno what GP was smoking. If anything, MacOS is FreeBSD, if one ignores the XNU kernel, and in fact, a certified Unix, which Linux is not.
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.
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?
And yet it's apparently not great enough for you to be willing to financially support its creators or actors.
The actors and writers have already been paid for the work they put into the show. The only people you're supporting by buying it on DVD at this stage in the game is the distributor.
Probably because computing is a career which doesn't require a lot of interaction with the public. A lot of transgenders have very serious body image and confidence issues, and it's a very good career choice for somebody who doesn't want to have to face people they don't know.
Any of them that I (or anyone else) has heard of?
SuSE Linux was originally based on Slackware, if I remember well.
Slackware simply doesn't provide the basic features most distros call for these days, such as a package management paradigm.
I truly don't care about package management -- or paradigms -- much, really.
Slackware gives me 95% of what I need - the rest I can compile on my own, thank you very much.
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.
I would say exactly the reverse: Slackware allows one to deploy software and updates quickly and effectively, by knowing exactly what has been installed and how.
If by "niche" you mean people who know what they are doing, and like having a system with a minimum of hand-holding, then, yes, I agree that this is an ever-shrinking niche. I am in charge or recruiting people here at my work, and it's astounding the number of Linux "experts" who are unable to go beyond "yum install" or "apt-get install" into the real nitty-gritty of compiling software exactly as you want it.
Let's face it: a lot of so-called "Linux administrators" these days are little more than clicky-clicky Windows drones, people who almost never use a command-line and prefer staying with dumb GUI tools. Yes, I blame Ubuntu and Debian and Red Hat and the like for this sorry state of affairs. People who know Slackware are, at least, a lot more aware and a lot more knowledgeable in all things UNIX and Linux. The same cannot be said of a lot of people out there.
Feel free to moderate me to oblivion while I go and donate money to Slackware.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
The niche that Slackware fills still better than any other distro is: small, highly customized, floppy-sized (or close, USB stick-based these days) "live" bootable mini-distributions aimed at a very specific goal. Such as system repair, etc. Slackware is just easier to adapt to such a role, because of the lack of those basic features you mention.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
I'm a Slackware user. Since at about 1995. Just recently I was googling for solution for some problem. And I've found a solution that basically said "run the tool that Ubuntu uses to reinstall everything and that should fix it". And everybody in the discussion thread hailed how great advice that is. For me that does not answer the question at all. It does not help other distro users at all and it also does not answer the question what is actually wrong. It reminds me of the Feynman's Wakalixes makes it go. It does not explain anything. The set of people that understand how stuff works is shrinking and shrinking ...