Slackware, Oldest Linux Distro Still In Active Development, Turns 24

sombragris writes: July 17 marked the 24th anniversary of Slackware Linux, the oldest GNU/Linux still in active development, being created in 1993 by Patrick Volkerding, who still serves as its BDFL. Version 14.2 was launched last year, and the development version (Slackware-current) currently offers kernel 4.9.38, gcc 7.1, glibc 2.25, mesa 17.1.5, and KDE and Xfce as official desktops, with many others available as 3rd party packages. Slackware is also among the Linux distributions which have not adopted systemd as its init system; instead, it uses a modified BSD init which is quite simple and effective. Slackware is known to be a solid, stable and fast setup, with easy defaults which is appreciated by many Linux users worldwide. Phoronix has a small writeup noting the anniversary and there's also a nice reddit thread.

Comments

Slackware

[Clived]

Wow

I started my Linux adventures on Slackware back in 1998.

Re:Slackware

[ACDChook]

Likewise. Jumped in at the deep end with some guidance from a friend who was definitely a militant linux-ist. Switched to Gentoo after a couple of years for the package and dependency management, and have used it ever since. But Slackware was where it all started for me.

Still king

[Orgasmatron]

I've been using Slackware since before Slackware 96 (a Windows 95 joke, you see, and my memory is dim, but I seem to recall that there was once some semi-serious questions on which one would be released first) and I haven't yet found anything I wanted to do that I couldn't do in Slackware.

Mythtv backends? Slackware. Frontends? Slackware. Webserver? File server? Mail server? DNS server? All Slackware. iptables/ebtables bridge/router/firewall/VPN abomination? Slackware, baby!

Runs great on my litebook too. In fact, not counting my Pis and other appliances, the only linux box I have that isn't Slackware and probably won't ever become Slackware is my CNC controller - and that is because EMC comes as an installable/live ISO.

My personal favorite was setting up iSCSI targets. The examples and documentation are all written for enterprise distros, but they just wouldn't work. Load slackware, write a couple of slackbuild files, fire up the compiler and BAM! $10,000 in hardware outperforms the dedicated SAN boxes other people are spending 6 digits on. Hell, I think I paid less for my entire DRBD bulk slave than some of the quotes that I got for annual maintenance on commercial SAN "solutions".

Oh, and if I recall correctly, Patrick is one of the handful of other 4-digit UIDs still active here. I haven't talked to him in a while. If he is still in MN, I should make a point of getting up to his remote part of the state to buy him a beer.

Yep

[ledow]

Slackware was the first serious distro for me.

I also remember using ZIPSLACK, which booted it via SYSLINUX from a DOS prompt, saved in a normal FAT partition, if I remember correctly. It was the first real "how to use Linux without trashing your partitions or using a boot disk" version.

I remember spending a lot of time on Slack 3.9 which contained just the right versions of GCC and kernel to compile for Freesco (a single floppy router distro that's still around).

For many years, I ran it as my only desktop (8.0 - 13.0 or thereabouts) and - when hardware has failed and I've been forced onto older machines - I've installed Slackware in preference to get as much done as I can on the creaky hardware.

I ran servers on it for all kinds of purposes and in all sorts of places.

Then, I admit, I had to move to Ubuntu when deploying desktops, just for the ease of use. And now, in the virtual machine era, I have a weird switch where - instead of Slack on servers and Ubuntu LTS on clients - I do the reverse. Which gives me one-command app installation with dependencies on servers (who cares what GUI is used), but Slack lets me choose how my personal system works and exactly when and makes it predictable and configurable.

Slackware gave me a lot. From my first glimpses at a real OS that I'd heard only in myth and legend, to the knowledge that you could run machines within machines even before virtualisation was readily available, to my first real exposure to serious programming and working on open-source projects, to a career in deploying boxes equivalent to the more expensive commercial offerings, to running all the backends of my professional setups, to providing me with a free and powerful desktop when I had no money, to giving me control over my server estate and running inside Windows servers to do the things they just can't do as efficiently.

At one point or another, Slackware has shown me everything about a computer that I find interesting and intriguing, which Windows has never managed. DOS and Windows were always a case of spending time trying to get the best out them through guesswork and hope and closed tools (see the EMM386, etc. conversation in the Reddit thread!). Slackware showed me that you can look into the system and change anything you like, because that's exactly how it got made, and everything became understandable, predictable, and Slackware was chosen on merit out of THOUSANDS of other distros that all used the same code (which to me, shows just how good it is - anyone could copy Slackware's entire codebase, and many have, but Slackware is still going).

And then some fuckhead made systemd and all the other modern shite. And still Slackware is out there, competing without even trying.

If I was sent on a mission out of the solar system, where it was just me and a bunch of machines around me to keep me alive, I'd be insisting it all ran Slackware. And taking a bunch of Slackware CDs with me.

Where I caught the Linux bug from

[John Allsup]

I had read about UNIX, had a fascination with it from the start of the 90s, first got to see it for real when I started university in 1995, and Slackware 3.0 appeared on the PCW April 1996 issue. (I think it was this issue and version: google isn't much help here, and neither is the rest of the web.)

Took me a week to work out rm deletes files. My usual solution to finding myself in vi was exiting via ctrl-z followed by jobs -l followed by kill -9. Until I'd learned rm and mv, if I created problems by creating a file, I'd reinstall. I figure out many things I could type by reinstalling and watching the package names. Learned the basics of TeX via a gentle introduction document, and basically taught myself by reverse engineering the gobbledigook one found in .sty packages. (I found out rm via a hint inferred from the openlook file manager asking 'do you want to remove this file', rather than 'delete' or 'erase', which were the two synonyms I knew from DOS. At first, the only UNIX command I knew was ls, since the UNIX column in PCW mentioned it somewhere. cd worked the same way as DOS, and from DOS I recalled that md and mkdir were synonyms, so tried md and mkdir and found the latter worked.)

In those days there were no online howtos (or at least, no easy way to even know such things existed, and no easy way to find out about ways to find stuff -- these were the days when some industry commentators were suggesting that Microsoft Network would make the internet obsolete :-)) ).