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Slackware, Oldest Actively Maintained GNU/Linux Distribution, Turns 25
sombragris writes: Slackware, the oldest GNU/Linux distribution which is still actively maintained, turned 25 this week. The latest stable version, Slackware 14.2, was released two years ago, but the development version (-current) is updated on a fast pace. Today the development version offers kernel 4.14.55, gcc 8.1.1, glibc 2.27. mesa 18.1.4, xorg 1.20, and the Xfce and KDE desktop environments as default, with many more available as third-party packages. Other points of note are that Slackware is systemd-free, opting instead for a simple BSD-style init.
Since its first release ever, this has been a distro with a strong following due to its hallmarks of simplicity, speed, ease of maintenance and configuration. Happy birthday Slackware!
Since its first release ever, this has been a distro with a strong following due to its hallmarks of simplicity, speed, ease of maintenance and configuration. Happy birthday Slackware!
Slackware was my first (of many) attempts at using Linux, and it was less than successful. I love the fact that it's still going after such a (relatively) long time, compared to other OSS projects that often don't last very long. My question is: Is it usable yet? Is it worth trying again? Or, is it still only for super hardcore Unix people, only?
I don't respond to AC's.
I considered moving to slackware during the height of the anti systemd ruckus, but went with Manjaro i3 instead. However, for a focus non-bloated Linux slack should a good choice, even if you have to keep a eye on your dependencies. ... I wouldn't want to install a full KDE setup on it though.
Either way, distros like slack are very much needed in the distro ecosystem IMHO.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Installed from about 6 x 3.5" floppies onto a 386SX system with less than a meg of memory. Needless to say, no X and no GUI :-)
Seriously, why does Slashdot tolerate this spam? Trolls have decided to harass a user, creimer, and continue to post spam comments about him even though he apparently doesn't post here any longer. It contributes nothing of value, isn't really even trolling, and gets posted in multiple threads in story after story. Given that it often references people by name, this content is actually defamatory in nature. Surely Slashdot can do something more to combat this persistent spam. Moderation just isn't preventing it from being posted repeatedly.
All 24 users gathered online to commiserate
Linux has support for newer drivers for more hardware. BSD works or doesn't work. Sometimes you are better off with a buggy driver then not being able to use the hardware.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Cue systemd hating crowd blah blah slackware is the best, no "shitstemd", the unix way, tradition, "stupid package managers and who needs them", "it's like BSD but it's not BSD and I have no clue why I'm not running BSD if I admire it so much", etc....
Savvy?
I wouldn't want some monolithic daemon infecting my system even if it was GOOD, but the systemd virus sucks. It isn't good at a single aspect of what it has sucked in.
-- http://anonet.org -- The internet the way it was meant to be. Check it out, you may be surprised.
I remember back in the mid 90's I hosted images.slashdot.org on a Slackware box (Pent 90, IIRC) because Rob Malda's T-1 circuit was getting constrained. I was working for the Seattle ISP Wolfe.net and we had a whopping T-3 with 45Mb/s direct to Sprint.
Slashdot start off on Slackware.
This, of course, was back in the dial-up days. Nothing like trying to find a ring-no-answer in a 400 line hunt-group.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Slackware wasn't my first attempt at Linux, that was SLS version 1.0 (kernel 0.95), downloaded from a BBS onto floppies. But Slackware was the second-longest distro I used, way back in the day. Today I use Ubuntu, but only on a low-power web-surfing machine.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Because they don't care about versions. In 1999 Slackware jumped from version 4.0 to version 7.0 for marketing reasons. The other big distros were putting out higher versions and the visuals made it look like Slackware was behind. I don't recall the exact statement but the general message was something like "if we bumped versions like other distros, we'd be at 12 (or something) by now." It was a weird move but there was some sense to it. Linux isn't new. People understand that distro versions and kernel versions aren't the same thing. They don't need to uprev but -current is always moving.
It was my first, and I still use it for some things.
Like many, I cut my teeth on Slackware in 1995. There was just something about it -- even then, Windows sucked, OS/2 was cool but lacked the "tinker" factor and unix was unix. I would have never thought back then that Linux would become what it is today.
Congrats Slackware, you've certainly helped many a generation of sysadmins and tinkerers along the way.
...But when I did, it was slackware. I moved onto FreeBSD and then MacOS X after that, and now I'm not sure I really need a desktop computer at all anymore.
Slackware was, counter-intuitively, the easiest Linux distro for me to use. I was already used to Unix systems from university, and slackware only gave you the stuff you asked for, not anything more than that. I always had trouble getting Redhat running, but Slackware did what I told it. I'm glad it's still around, just in case I ever decide I need a do-everything server-ish machine again.
Wow, you want to bring out the three and four digit uids just post a story about Slackware! :-)
I still like it, though I haven't used it in the last couple of years.
This is not an illusion, a rip-off, or a ninja technique!
Congratulations, Patrick Volkerding. You have made a linux user out of me, and a lot of others. (I recall being surprised that you replied to my question back then when I was attempting to install it on *gasp* a 486DX. Many moons later, and after printing out a bunch of HOWTOs, I am now a command-line penguinista, with a healthy disdain for candy colored icons on an even more horrid desktop. I'm looking at you, Ubuntu.
As was mentioned above, ...if you install Slackware, you'll know Linux.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
I have been using slackware for over a decade and its development version works fine for production purposes. It is updated frequently and uses a stable version of the linux kernel. /etc/slackware-version
noneya@noneya:~$ cat
Slackware 14.2+
noneya@noneya:~$ uname -a
Linux noneya.business.com 4.14.55 #1 SMP Wed Jul 11 19:33:43 CDT 2018 x86_64 AMD A6-3620 APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux
And now that you can easily update it with slackpkg its even easy to maintain. I highly recommend using it because of its lack of cruft. You can identify everything in the process list which is really nice compared to things like redhat.
Long live slackware
Recent releases from the "big boys" have gotten so bogged down with complexity that they're pretty much impossible to safely do updates to. You're often better off creating a partition for a brand new installation---especially if it's a major version update.
I hadn't used Slackware since the days when the `Linux Unleashed' book was on the shelves at the local chain bookstore but after I wasted wa-a-ay more time that it should have taken trying to make Tumbleweed and systemd run a working firewall script--which had dutifully been doing it job on a truly geriatric version of Red Hat (on hardware that I was fearful would soon fail)--I finally threw my hands and decided to give Slackware a try. Now I haven't used it since the mid-90s but was pretty impressed that, after a fresh install of Slackware, tweaking a couple of files in /etc/rc,d, and rebooting, I had the firewall back up and running. Elapsed time: just over an hour---and a good 25% of that was waiting for the md device to finish initializing. There's a lot to be said for keeping things simple. I can add any necessary complexity if I need it. So many other distributions insist on it right out of the box.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I remember my first Linux install. It was Slackware ages ago on a 486 DX50. I stayed loyal to Slackware for a very long time. Perhaps it is time to take another look.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
And now I feel old. Started using it in 95 or 96 and after failing for several days to download all those floppies I went and paid the $5 to get the CD from Walnut Creek CDROM and made floppies from that. Still own that CD and it sits in my cube window as my Geek Card.
Time to offend someone
My first free unix was FreeBSD in 1995, but it was not useful for my purposes, so I tried Slackware in 1996. I even bought "the book" (Slackware unleashed, i do not remember the version), mainly for the CD (In venezuela, BW was and still is scarce).
Sadly, slackware and linux were also not fit for purpose (my thesis), so I moved past of Slackware to the greener pastures of RedHat and Suse. Nonetheless, I also learned HP-UX, Solaris, and Even Sinix, so I think my *nix is quite Ok.
Nonetheless, I still have fond memories of Slackware, and get very happy when I hear news about them.
A toast to patrick for the 25 years of his project, and a pint for his tenacity to overcome the obstacles (financial, health and others) to keep it running.
Here is for 25 moreyears!!!
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Pretty sure you can find info on systemd in the Book of Revelation.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Oxymoron spotted. "Kernal"b = look it up. The central, essence, core part of something. I don't mind say, a scheduler or a driver or an app being "monolithic" as they do...one thing and do it well. Systemd on the other hand -tries to do everything and does most of it poorly. Further it breaks some things such that if say, something is mounted remote but can't be unmounted due to a bad connection or the thing being down, it takes many minutes to remotely reboot - if at all. So if your machine is in a place you have to drive to - or crawl through a tunnel to, or be exposed to radiation in, you got trouble right here in system city.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
My first experience with Linux was with Slackware in the mid 90s. I was in school, working after hours at a mom and pop dialup ISP in town, their equipment was a turn-key setup and the RADIUS server was a pre-installed Slackware box. One of the RAID controllers on it broke and I was the only one in the office who knew how to navigate at a bash command prompt. 19 year old kid on a conference call with engineers typing in Unix commands. Slackware didn't fail us!
Slackware introduced Pulseaudio recently, and if I'm going to run Linux at all, it'll be Poettering-free. So far they've rejected systemd at least, but I don't think they can hold out much longer on that front, since all the major desktop environments have been co-opted by now.
Running Slackware without pulseaudio is supported. Slackware provides a basic series of packages which are pulseaudio-free and the instructions to setup a pulseaudio-free system are fairly easy.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
This, and also because versions are realeased "when it's ready". There's no rush to release a great system. If you want cutting edge, you can run the development version (that, IMHO, it's more stable than most distros' stable releases) and you will get the latest and greatest in almost everything.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
Pulse broke audio *again* on raspberry pi 3 b+ and they took it out of the distro - adding it back breaks it all again. But ALSA - if you work it out right, can still mix two sources, which is all I needed. I have a pi doing homestead database, security cam, background radio, and audio alerts on various events sent over the wire from other pies or ESP machine around the place. So it just had to be able to play a .mp3 or .flac while VLC was busy playing background music and I'm happy again...sadly, raspian still has systemd and all the issues of that.
The reduced reliability of booting and shutting down in a network with a lot of things shared/talking to one another is VERY NOTICEABLE with systemd, no matter which workaround you look up and find that actually works - which will only be a fraction of those on the 'net because of so many changes after it was more or less forced on us. Like pulse, cult of personality got it into "production" long before it was ready - again.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
I mostly like Slackware and have used it for many years. But 2 things eventually drove me away:
Point 2 especially makes Slackware hard to take seriously (all the more in corporate environments). The name doesn't help either!
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
Slackware introduced Pulseaudio recently, and if I'm going to run Linux at all, it'll be Poettering-free.
Yes because religion trumps functionality always.
You're absolutely right, the advocacy of systemd et al. is almost religious in its fervor ("convert or die")
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What are you talking about? Latest Ubuntu has gcc 4.8.5. Last release of Slackware has 5.3 (-current has 8.1.1)
It often surprises me how much Ubuntu lags in package versions behind Slackware.
How many floppy disks does it take to install today?
Don Head
UNIX/Linux Administrator
Bionic defaults to 7.3 and has 8 available. The package you linked to isn't installed by default.
Alliteracy is gradually gaining greater global gravity.
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Yes stupid posts like this, and others are posted in every discussion, but they are quickly moderated down to -1, hence becoming hidden with default settings, and thus mostly harmless.
Slashdot has long operated on the policy that it only deletes posts in very limiting circumstances, like they a court order or valid take down request. Other than that all moderation happens in the open. Any user can see all the posts by setting their viewing thresholds to -1, allowing them to notice abuse in the moderation system and correct it. People who don't want to see all the garbage can leave their settings at the default. This transparency is a wonderful feature of slashdot, one that I would really hate to see changed.
... was in college back in a computer science class' lab. I think it was in 1995/1996 for ANSI C programming.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
[citation needed]
Slackware is LinuxQuestion's 2016 Desktop Distribution of the Year
Slackware is LinuxQuestion's 2017 Server Distribution of the Year
I think this speaks clearly about the distro's popularity.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
Via a lot of compilation it's possible to update SLS 1.05 to the latest tools. I haven't the heart to delete /etc/motd. Big challenges were getting ELF going. getting libc6 going and cross compiling 64 bit from 32-bit. Now it's a 100% 64-bit system: /:softland:~$ cat /etc/motd
Softlanding Software (604) 592-0188, gentle touch downs from DOS bailouts. /:softland:~$ uname -a /:softland:~$ ld -v /:softland:~$ gcc -v ../configure --target=x86_64-pc-linux-gnu --build=x86_64-pc-linux-gnu --host=x86_64-pc-linux-gnu --prefix=/usr --enable-languages=c,c++
Welcome to Linux SLS 1.05. Type "mesh" for a menu driven interface.
Fresh installations should use "syssetup" to link the X servers, etc.
Linux softland 4.16.14 #1 SMP PREEMPT Sun Jun 10 02:52:51 EST 2018 x86_64 unknown
GNU ld (GNU Binutils) 2.30
Using built-in specs.
COLLECT_GCC=gcc
COLLECT_LTO_WRAPPER=/usr/libexec/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/7.3.0/lto-wrapper
Target: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
Configured with:
Thread model: posix
gcc version 7.3.0 (GCC)
Total Streisand effect.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
No it's not. Slackware is one among many forums within the site. Equating linuxquestions.org with the whole Slackware community is misleading.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You've quite obviously never used the SysV answer to IPC. Don't be a dunce, look this shit up before posting since you don't work with IPC technologies. (d-bus is the modern IPC mechanism)
You don't get to have d-bus be some kind of criminal, it is in fact a required part of a modern *nix system, because IPC is a thing. And no, nobody is even willing to attempt use of semaphores anymore.