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

not until

[hguorbray]

netcraft confirms it!

-I'm just sayin'

Re:not until

[Anonymous Coward]

Distrowatch: 'Ere, he says he's not dead.
Slashdot: Yes he is.
Slackware: I'm not.
Distrowatch: He isn't.
Slashdot: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
Slackware: I'm getting better.
Slashdot: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.
Distrowatch: Well, I can't take him like that. It's against regulations.
Slackware: I don't want to go on the cart.
Slashdot: Oh, don't be such a baby.
Distrowatch: I can't take him.
Slackware: I feel fine.
Slashdot: Oh, do me a favor.

Re:not until

[slackware 3.6]

Slackware will never die. I still have my Walnut Creek CD's from Slackware 3.6 the only other software I kept from that period is Win 3.11, OS/2, and a few DOS versions. But your post is funy none the less you probably are a big Slackware fan.

Re:not until

[The Grim Reefer]

I still have my Walnut Creek CD's from Slackware 3.6

Oh. So just those disks.

the only other software I kept from that period is Win 3.11

Of course.

, OS/2,

And that.

and a few DOS versions.

So basically you still have every bit of software you've ever owned.

Re:not until

[Hognoxious]

I'm running Ubuntu Norwegian Blue. To be honest, the uptimes aren't great.

Re:not until

[VanessaE]

Perhaps, but the plumage must be lovely :-)

It hurt bad when Stampede Linux was no more.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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

[TWX]

I had never even heard of Stampede Linux when you posted this, and I've been a Linux user since 1995 when I had to buy cheap CDs from the local computer store that were distributed by Walnut Creek. It's obscure enough that Wikipedia doesn't even have a page for it.

Slackware has at least has the history to have been continually in existence since '93, almost since the beginning of Linux itself. Mind you, I and a whole bunch of other people jumped ship over the Libc5 debacle and I ended up on Debian where I've remained since. I would be saddened to see Slackware go away, but it wouldn't lead to a loss of purpose in my life.

You wouldn't happen to be Matt Wood, would you?

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

[jimmydevice]

I thought that was a prerequisite for posting on /.

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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, slackware might not be dead, but slashdot sure as fuck is

Re:Correction

[Anonymous Coward]

there just around ~25 letters in the alphabet?

You must be a physicist.

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:Correction

[NoMaster]

Slashdot also has the dubious honour of adding to the problem, simply by posting this as "news" 11 days after Eric clarified the issue and 5 days after the linked story was posted.

How is it that actual "news for nerds" takes a week or more to appear here, while everyday events like new Firefox versions are often posted before they're released?

(And no, I'm not new here...)

Debian

[Svartormr]

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.

Re:Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

There must be some level of agreement given that the Project Lead (Stefano Zachiroli) was just re-elected to his third term in a row.

Debian forever!

Re:Debian

[wmbetts]

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

Re:Debian

[FudRucker]

I think if something happened to Pat V. where he could no longer continue with Slackware, Robby Workman and Eric Hameleers and a few others will pick up the slack (pun intended)

Re:Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian is especially good if you are a historian and want to know what open source computing was like five years ago...

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.

slashdotting slackware.com is like

[FudRucker]

entering an 85 year old man in to the WWF

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.

[volkerdi]

Yo man, are you the deadhead I'm thinking you're supposed to be?

My name is August West.

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

[phantomfive]

Wow, do you need us to take up a collection to buy new hardware? Is there somewhere we can go to donate?

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.

[Tumbleweed]

With a Slashdot ID that low it might really be Adam West!

Don't believe him; he's a liar.

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

[metrix007]

Because cloud is a meaningless buzzword which means "computer on the internet".

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

[lightknight]

No, no.

Cloud means multiple redundant servers, on the internet, running virtual machines. Usually hooked up to some 'pay as you go' billing & provisioning system.

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

[gl4ss]

and have the hellhole of upgrading the cms every few months for exploit bugfixes, needing a gig to serve two simultaneous users, not work with links.. the thing worked for a decade.

now, what they might/should do would be to move the system to a vm installation and run it for another decade.

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:Year of the Linux Deadtop

[lister king of smeg]

and where are all of the mac servers?

Re:I invoke the *Not Dead Yet* clause all the time

[lister king of smeg]

slipping ruffies to people is a crime you know.

Re:what the hell is yarok?

[ClickOnThis]

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.

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:And?

[Noryungi]

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.