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

[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.

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.

[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

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

[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: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: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.