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LinuxQuestions Interviews Slackware Founder Patrick Volkerding
An anonymous reader writes "In this in-depth interview with LinuxQuestions.org, Patrick Volkerding discusses how he got involved with Linux and Open Source, the succession plan for Slackware, the Slackware development model, his opinion on the current trends in desktop environments, potentially disruptive changes to Linux such as systemd, his favorite beer and much more."
Every time I read a story about Patrick, I wonder if he ever resolved the weird health problems he shared with the Linux community...
Well, economically speaking the past few years have been pretty thin. If I hadn't made the strategic decision to head back to Minnesota several years ago there's no way I could have stayed afloat living in the bay area. California is not at all a cheap place to live, and I was always cutting it close out there. Lately I've been cutting it pretty close here, too. I don't even have insurance any more... knock on wood. Personally, absolutely. I've made friends all over the world. I hear from people every day who love Slackware and depend on it for critical tasks, and who don't want to run something else. Working on the project is exciting and fun, and the folks on the team are some of my best friends. It's just not possible to put a dollar value on that.
It's too bad the Bay Area is unaffordable for many of those who want to devote a significant amount of productivity towards open source projects.
I'd like to believe these projects could make much more money if only the right people knew about them, but we all know that's not the point in the first place.
Similar to social workers and others who do the noble work in our society, communities should devote resources to provide nice affordable housing for these people.
The problem, of course, is convincing local governments.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
Nope, Slackware is well and still around. Sure, they aren't big, but at least they are pretty good and pretty stable. Troll someplace else.
Social worker, teachers, and others doing the "noble work" are always underpaid. That's just the way it is. As long as people are willing to do that work for cheap, it will be done for cheap. Local governments don't care because they have to balance the budget, unlike the Feds.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Social worker, teachers, and others doing the "noble work" are always underpaid. That's just the way it is. As long as people are willing to do that work for cheap, it will be done for cheap. Local governments don't care because they have to balance the budget, unlike the Feds.
I don't think anyone is disputing that.
Nevertheless, something other than material gain is usually driving those who pursue such careers. In a theoretical world where valuation is solely capitalistic, these individuals are consequently severely undervalued based on their importance to social development.
Even though our world isn't solely capitalistic, these individuals are still undervalued and should therefore have recompense to bring greater balance into social valuation.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
His dad was a navy dentist. That's like rain on your wedding day.
It's partially (or maybe heavily?) because of the underpayment that the jobs are considered "noble work." Being a politician (in America, at least) was, from what I can tell, intended to be noble work at the inception of the nation, with the idea that if you're not compensated monetarily for your work, and your job isn't a no-skill grunt job, presumably you love your work and will put forth greater effort.
We can all see how well that's turned out, both for politicians and schools, but I digress.
It's too bad the Bay Area is unaffordable for many of those who want to devote a significant amount of productivity towards open source projects.
I'd like to believe these projects could make much more money if only the right people knew about them, but we all know that's not the point in the first place.
Similar to social workers and others who do the noble work in our society, communities should devote resources to provide nice affordable housing for these people.
The problem, of course, is convincing local governments.
That housing problem in Silicon Valley will be a moot point at some time in the not-so-distant future. Granted that the economic situation has driven down housing prices, it has also reduced salaries & the number of available jobs. Either Silicon Valley will fall into the ocean due to a massive earthquake, Silicon Valley & the rest of the West Coast will be abandoned due to a persistent & growing issue with radiation leaking from Fukushima Dai-ichi, or the Chinese will buy up all of Silicon Valley and put in low-cost employee housing including anti-suicide netting.
In 1993, I started using Slack exclusively (except school, where Sun owned the place).
Thanks for all your hard work. Your efforts launched several careers, and many more hobbyists.
So, Thanks!
not the kind of distro you wanna risk your business on.
Neither is Ubuntu, Damned Small Linux, and thousands of other ones. There are niches for them, just as Slackware has a niche.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
They're valued perfectly. You're just incorrect about the world not being solely capitalistic. You get paid what it makes sense to pay you - enough to satisfy minimum wage (this helps prevent riots/race wars etc) if you do something which doesn't require much in the way of training, and enough to stop you leaving and working elsewhere if you are higher skilled.
Someone who does morally good things doesn't tend to get the rewards a just society would bestow on them because it doesn't benefit the people who'd be paying them. Governments don't pay them because they'll be doing the good deeds anyway, plus doing good doesn't fit into any kind of framework hierarchical systems can understand or deal with. You're supposed to want to be a dick and make your own life better and screw everyone else to get ahead etc - the idea that you might be happy with a low paid job, doing charity work in your part time or working on a free operating system doesn't occur or make much sense to most people.
To be honest, what with the population explosion, global warming, governments being too busy working with the banks to screw everyone over and billions of illiterate people all wanting nice cars and air conditioning means we're all pretty much fucked anyway so I wouldn't worry about it too much.
Oh come on! The most interesting question did not make it to the list?!
What does the "J" stand for in "Patrick J. Volkerding"?
They're valued perfectly.
[...]
To be honest, what with the population explosion, global warming, governments being too busy working with the banks to screw everyone over and billions of illiterate people all wanting nice cars and air conditioning means we're all pretty much fucked anyway so I wouldn't worry about it too much.
If my concern is teachers/social workers/open source engineers aren't justly compensated, and your concern is a general lack of awareness or apathy about global warming, overpopulation and wealth disparity, you'd think there'd be a way we could meet in the middle here....
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
I never understood this type of argument. Linux is still similar enough between distros that switching from one distro to another is not an insurmountable hurdle if it should become necessary.
Slashdot viewers should hit the paypal button for them to stick around. They need ot add a paypal button to their site. Would probably bridge the gap nicely.
I still have my 60+ 3.5" floppies of Slackware with kernel 0.94 I believe. Took over a month to download on a 28.8 modem. The first time I typed startx after hand configuring X (yes XFConfig was available back then but my video card required hand coding) and the grey screen came up I went "Whoa!"
Patrick is the best. He doesn't release a new Slackware unless its been tested tested tested.
Anytime MythTV releases a new version I'll slap together a machine, put Slackware on it and give it a whirl. If you're a Ubuntu user and want to learn more about *nix but don't want to mess with Gentoo or a BSD, I totally recommend Slackware.
Doctors aren't underpaid, and that's one of the most noble professions there is.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
God yes! Google is going down fast 'cause they've based their existence on linux! Google is such a niche search engine....
soylentnews.org Go there to enjoy the people!
I started using Slackware since it came with the 2.0.30 kernel
I have used Slackware ever since. For my webservers I run Debian. But my home pc is Slackware. Long ago when I first got into linux as it was told to me the best way to learn is start on Slackware. You compile everything yourself unlike redhat or debian based systems with their package downloaders that did it all for you and put everything where it supposed to go, etc. :)
Slackware "put hair on your chest" hehe, you want a specific program you downloaded the source and compiled it, if it required other libraries, then you downloaded those library sources and compiled them then go back and compile the other.
It was a "flavor" of linux I always recommend for learning, as I tell people once you know Slackware, all other flavors are easymode.
Course it's just my opinion and I've always loved Slackware for my personal machines, and yes I do see use for other "flavors" as I always run Debian on webservers and such for the simple package downloaders can just apt-get whatever needed. Course it won't be compiled specifically for you but it runs.
My top 2 linux distros are #1 Slackware, #2 Debian and that's all I use, I've played with SUSE, and such. But everyone jumped on the Ubuntu fad, and to me it's good that it's noob friendly, but it's way too noobish imo, I consider Ubuntu to be linux-light :) But again that's just my opinion.
Each has their purpose.
Slackware fanboi though.
It's also incredibly highly skilled, and most people are priced out of the education required to become doctors, even if they have the natural talent and desire to do the job. In the US there's even an open conspiracy to allow only a slow trickle of new doctors to be licensed so that prices for their services can be kept artificially high. A non-free education system is always going to misuse/squander some human talent.
Then there's the massive amount of man hours and intelligent people who go into law, a profession which does nothing but -- in theory -- enable the rest of the system to function. It's the overhead of civil society. Or at least it was meant to be just the overhead, but now is a self-serving end unto itself which creates more work for its own members where there need not be any.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
You sir are 100% correct. I recently committed some code to a large open source project and my wifes first response was "So are you getting paid for it?". She couldn't understand why I'd want to do something like that for free and she was a little upset, because she felt I should be doing something to better our family. It didn't matter how I tried to explain I do make money off of the project, because she doesn't understand something of value being offered for free. I have a feeling she's like 99% of the people in the world and I can't really blame them, because we as people have been told "free == garbage, paid for == top shelf" for so long that it's ingrained in us now.
Nice try. Too bad you totally ignore what it takes for a primary care physician to make his or her income. Surgeons are another story.
As a physician (posting anonymously for obvious reasons), I work an average of well over 85 hours per week. At this very moment I am in the middle of my 1-week-out-of-3 call, which means that I am working 168 hours straight (no call pay either) this week, and will then do the next 2 weeks mostly in the office. Rinse and repeat.
I make the annual equivalent of 85K before taxes when normalized for a 40 hour work week as a primary care physician. As a private practitioner I get no paid benefits or paid vacation. If I take time off, I lose money.
My kid is *starting* out at my annual equivalent pay with a bachelor's in Chemical Engineering, 40 hour work week, full benefits this summer. For me it was 4 years college, 4 years medical school, 3 years residency, and then years to build a practice to make the same money for the equivalent work hours.
"Doctors aren't underpaid"? You're welcome to the medical expertise you'll be getting in a few years with that attitude.
You're correct in this, because most of Slashdot's current generation of posters are simple distro hoppers determined, evidently, to try every Ubuntu-based distro in the Linux goobersphere. As if they were different. I used Slack for years to fabulous effect, and when I moved on it was not to another Linux distro.
Arch is also doing a Hurd project. How's that coming along?
Back in the mid-nineties Slackware is how is discovered Un*x and Linux. I bought a book that came with the CD-Rom (my modem wasn't that great to d/l all and, anyway, the book came in handy to get me started). Damn... More than 15 years ago it seems :-/
I've used Linux as my main system ever since then: I then switched to Debian then Red Hat then so many distros I don't remember the names and... Back to Debian.
I'm running Debian both on the dedicated servers I'm renting and on my workstation.
But I'll never forget Slackware so lots of thanks to Patrick!
Thanks Patrick!
That is the -stable version, released more than one year ago... check the -current version instead:
http://www.slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=x86_64
usually there is a -stable release once a year, but this time the 13.37 version is taking longer to be replaced. many people use the -current directly, it's almost just as stable, as long you read the changelog before updating things
the -current is using firefox 12 (and the new firefox 13 should go out in a few days) and kernel is 3.2.13 and the kde is 4.8.2
finally, the $SLACKWARE_VERSION.$KERNEL_VERSION is just a joke, for people like you (that take things way too seriously) to accept the 13.37 version number without protesting :)
slackware always have fun with version numbers, it jumped from slackware 4 to 7 (to joke about version race from other distros) , slackware 13.37 , with RC 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716. and RC 4.6692. (the first Feigenbaum constant) :}P
Pat and many slackers are believers of the Church of the Subgenius
Higuita
Social workers do nothing noble, they are maggots feeding on sores.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
My home machines have had Slackware Linux as their primary OS since around 1995, and I still maintain that Slack is the most Unix-like of all the Linuxes. This classic, verging on historic, distro has always been rock solid, dependable, and reliable, and has always accepted that I'm the one in charge of my hardware, not Patrick.
But thanks to a new job, I've been forcibly immersed in a bunch of "modern" Linux distros lately, and have finally been seduced by the dark side. Yes, after Slacking for something like 17 years, I've decided to reinstall my home box with a modern desktop-type distro. (Not with the cell phone / tablet style interface, I haven't gone completely crazy).
Using Slackware has been tremendously educational and consistently rewarding over the years. It has been a dream OS for this old-time, Unix-y hacker type, and I wouldn't have missed it for the world. Thanks for everything, Patrick! And for you young whippersnappers out there, if you're interested in learning Linux / Unix, there are worse things you could do than installing a "traditional" distro like Slackware and figuring out what makes it tick.
"not the kind of distro you wanna risk your business on."
I work for a large state agency (of a large state) and we have installed several Slackware servers because we got tired of SUSE and Redhat updates bricking machines.
I'm a relative newcomer to the Linux scene, but I have a similar story to many here- in 2006 I started using Linux, and decided to use Slackware. I learned so much so fast there, it makes me think of the old saying every time- 'if you use Redhat you'll know Redhat, if you use Slackware you'll know Linux.' Anyways I just wanted to say thanks and there are also newer Linux users out there who appreciate a robust minimal approach to Linux.
I`m currently using Slackware on every server i have at home. And i used it since version 7.0. All old school console... no X, no GUIs... i manually pick every driver for every server and recompile the kernel to be lightning fast.
/dev/root 3.0G 2.0G 1.1G 65% / /dev/shm
The best thing about this distro is... u actually know what happens with your system and once configured... ohhh it never fails. Never. I can forget that machine for years, still doing its job quietly and it just works.
My oldest machine is still alive and kicking.. i`m using it mainly for SVN mirror and local Git server. Here is the machine:
Linux v0dka 2.6.31-v0dka #2 Sat Jan 14 00:14:04 EET 2012 i586 Pentium 75 - 200 GenuineIntel GNU/Linux
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 5
model : 2
model name : Pentium 75 - 200
cpu MHz : 89.809
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 93140 89440 3700 0 60744 9512
-/+ buffers/cache: 19184 73956
Swap: 28216 1384 26832
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs 46M 0 46M 0%
Thank you, Patrick!
"Is it a point of pride that your distro is considered difficult to install/use and expert level, or do you view that negatively because it keeps new users from wanting to try Slack?"
Huh, Slackware was the first Linux disto I managed to successfully install, and it's still the one I turn to for Linux.
$ echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'