[HN Gopher] Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old
___________________________________________________________________
Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old
Author : akoster
Score : 114 points
Date : 2023-07-21 19:17 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| Corrado wrote:
| My first Linux distro was Slackware. I tried downloading it but
| my modem was too slow and people in the house kept picking up the
| phone. So, I supported OSS by purchasing a copy from, I want to
| say, Walnut Creek sometime around 1995. I still had the 7 disks
| 10 years ago or so. They are probably still around here
| somewhere.
|
| I learned so much from Slackware and basically owe my livelihood
| to it. Everything from compiling the kernel to trying (and
| failing) to get X11 working. On the flip side, I'm super glad I
| don't have to do that anymore and can just use Linux without
| having to fiddle with the internal parts.
| rconti wrote:
| My favorite Slackware memory was how the version I downloaded
| disksets of (on a 14.4k modem, yeah) had a broken bootloader.
| Not sure of the Slackware release, but it was kernel 1.2.8,
| before the ELF transition. Anyway, every time I reinstalled,
| the bootloader hung on `LI` because the config was just
| _broken_ , and I had to remember how to fix it.. every time.
|
| So many hours recompiling kernels. My 4MB-equipped 486 took
| about 8 hours per. I only realized many years later after
| somehow finding the $400 for a memory upgrade, that it was only
| slow due to swapping. Going from 8 hours to 10 minutes was eye-
| opening.
|
| X11 failed to run, for the same 4MB reason. I mean, it would
| launch, but I want to say it took 20 or 30 minutes.
| akoster wrote:
| Great story and thanks for sharing! $400 is a lot for a RAM
| upgrade! Did that upgrade double your ram to 8MB or something
| greater perhaps?
| F00Fbug wrote:
| That was my first exposure to Linux in 1995. I remember
| downloading 30-something floppy disks over a painfully slow T1. I
| deployed our company's sendmail email server a few months later,
| running on an old PC. In 2006 I switched to Linux as my daily
| driver and if I need windows these days, it runs as a VM.
| bluedino wrote:
| A T1 was about ten times faster than a 3-1/2" floppy drive
| wasn't it?
|
| I never thought of a T1 as "slow" until I started downloading
| CD images for Linux distros. The first cable modem connections
| I had were so much faster for downloads.
| rconti wrote:
| I set a kitchen timer to 12 minutes for each floppy disk's
| worth of download at 14.4k. It took many evenings of
| interrupting my TV watching every 12 minutes to kick off a new
| zmodem download. If it was indeed 30 disks (which seems
| reasonable; some of the disksets were only 3 or 4, others were
| 8 or more, depending on which packages you wanted), that would
| have been 6 hours in one shot with no overhead.
| cpach wrote:
| It was T3 that was the bomb back then, wasn't it?
| icedchai wrote:
| In 1995, many early ISPs were still on fractional T1s or even
| 56K leased lines! I remember upgrading one from 56K to T1 in
| mid 1995. T3s were rare: large regional ISPs and backbone
| providers.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Yeah, sounded cool too. Back then 512kbit ADSL was exciting.
|
| T1, T2, T3, OC-3, OC-12, and OC-48 are terminologies you
| don't hear anymore.
| akoster wrote:
| Where I'm living ADSL is still exciting (and one of only 2
| options for wired Internet service). Currently on 2 (semi-
| stable) 60mbps down / 15mbps up pairs bonded together sold
| as a 100mbps down / 20 mbps up service. I keep it because
| the cable provider charges a ton for anything over 10mbps
| up when not on a promotional rate.
| housemusicfan wrote:
| Check out Mr. Fancy T1 line over here. I remember downloading
| Slackware floppy images over 28.8 dialup. Talk about pain. I
| recently stumbled on a dusty box of them whilst cleaning out
| the attic.
| akoster wrote:
| I'm thankful I never experienced that. My family switched
| from AOL dial up to an AT&T ADSL connection (either started
| out as 128, 256 or 512kbps down circa 2006 IIRC). It still
| didn't make downloading FreeBSD and Fedora Core 6 ISOs easy
| but it definitely was doable in a reasonable amount of time!
| bena wrote:
| I'm still running a Slackware box.
|
| While not my first distro, that would be the copy of Red Hat
| Linux 5.2 I got with the Unleashed book, it is the distro I'm
| most comfortable with.
| akoster wrote:
| I'm still getting more comfortable with it myself but
| appreciate the ethos and decisions made by Pat and the
| development team. Just installing 15.0 now as a second OS on my
| mom's newly built PC.
| dsXLII wrote:
| In 1995 or so, I wanted to play with something not-Windows, but
| wasn't yet advanced enough in my degree to have access to my
| school's AIX setup. Bought a Slackware disk set, and a BSD
| (probably FreeBSD, honestly don't remember), took them both home.
| Slackware had drivers for my weird non-IDE CD-ROM drive, the
| other one didn't, and it's been nothing but fun since then.
|
| Without Slackware, I would not have learned how to build a web
| server, wouldn't have learned about UUCP (which thankfully I
| haven't needed to use in about 20 years)... basically the entire
| course of my life would have changed.
|
| (Entirely random aside: I returned the opened BSD disks for a
| full refund. Remember when you could do that without them
| assuming you copied the disks?)
| aynyc wrote:
| Slackware was my first personal OS back in 1996. Built a PC for
| college, and instead of Windows, I got slackware floppies free
| from the school. Took me 2 weeks to install. Never got the sound
| card to work.
| pram wrote:
| Yes I must have wasted entire days of my life messing around
| with OSS and ALSA over and over again when you add it all up,
| lol
| akoster wrote:
| Very nice! Was there a reason your school gave out Slackware
| installer floppies? Was it required for a class? Or through a
| student organization? And if you recall, were you running a
| Creative SoundBlaster? Ad Lib? Gravis ultrasound?
| hurril wrote:
| Oh man, good times. Those diskettes <3
| akoster wrote:
| I can only imagine (sans any floppy disk or drive reliability
| issues)!
|
| Some links just in case you want to re-live the experience :-P
|
| http://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-3.3/bootdsk...
|
| https://www.floppydisk.com/
| eikenberry wrote:
| 1994 and my friend had a harebrained scheme to start an ISP and
| we needed to learn Linux to run it. 75 floppies later I was
| hooked and Free Software and Linux have been my computing
| lifeblood ever since. Thanks Slackware!
| akoster wrote:
| Wow! 75 floppies! That sounds like a lot! Was that Slackware
| 1.x? 2.x? And this sounds like a very interesting story: can
| you elaborate on any architecture details, equipment, getting
| other ISPs to peer?
| eikenberry wrote:
| It was Slackware 2.1 and the 3.5 floppy disks came in 3
| collections (1 required and 2 optional). If I remember right
| they were the base OS, X-windows and development files. As
| for the ISP, that idea ended up flopping (heh) and never made
| it out of the "fun discussions" phase.
| akoster wrote:
| I guess not unlike the software sets [0] Slackware seems to
| still use these days. Hearing this definitely makes me
| understand how spoiled we are to have reliable and
| inexpensive flash media, optical disks and network
| connections! I imagine just getting the base OS set
| downloaded, imaged and installed was a chore! And that's
| too bad to hear about the ISP idea. I've heard of stories
| of how one could run a small and viable ISP out of a garage
| or small office with descent wiring and a bank of modems.
| I'm glad a few providers still exist like Sonic.net,
| Xmission Internet and Panix.com and hope with the way
| things are going with funding for wiring and Internet
| connectivity (at least in the USA) we might be in such an
| era again in the future (hopefully!)
| jbovlaste wrote:
| I ran Slackware for ~6 years, my first serious distro. It's kind
| of the perfect learning distro for Linux - a super stable base,
| but if you want more you need to learn how to do it yourself. You
| didn't need to compile your own kernel or set up tons of
| configuration just to boot, but if you wanted certain graphics
| drivers or other software, you quickly learned how to write shell
| scripts and manage builds and dependencies. I remember spending
| quite a few hours learning how to build my own media stack with
| mpv and all dependencies (Slackware only shipped with MPlayer in
| those days, and with no system ffmpeg). I found it to be a much
| better experience for that than other distros like Arch or Void,
| those are just too much at the beginning. Because of Slackware,
| for a good while my most comfortable programming language was
| bash!
|
| I stopped using it when I had less time for tweaking my computer
| in my life (I moved to Debian), but it was a very formative
| experience. Good defaults, but with all the power to change
| whatever you want and the simplicity to make it manageable.
|
| Happy birthday Slackware!
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Many years ago, I remember a guy working for an ISP saw me
| using NetBSD, I must have made some comment about how I liked
| it, and he said "That's what Slackware was supposed to be." I
| knew relatively little about Linux at the time but I always
| remembered that statement. (Today I use both on a daily basis.)
|
| What hooked me on NetBSD was that early on I had a experience
| with a laptop where audio was not working. After a small amount
| of reading, I edited a file, recompiled the kernel and voila I
| had audio. The fact I was able to do that as a total novice was
| what made me a loyal user for the ensuing decades.
| jlarocco wrote:
| I was just telling a co-worker literally yesterday that a few
| years of Slackware was the single most effective thing I did to
| learn Linux well.
|
| I ran it on my desktop and an old (old in the early 2000s!)
| laptop with 32 MB of RAM, and learned a TON. It's the perfect
| generic "Linux" system, and you can take it in any direction
| you want, but you have to do it yourself.
|
| Funny enough, I also got too busy and moved to Debian.
| akoster wrote:
| I can only imagine in that era there was quite a bit more
| learning forced upon you than these days with our plethora of
| (somewhat) standards-compliant hardware and in-tree drivers.
| Though I'm definitely going to be channeling some of those
| experiences as I got a kernel-panic during the first boot
| after installing Slackware 15.0 on a newly built AMD B550
| chipset / AMD Ryzen 5700G -based PC. I'm thinking its likely
| something to do with a combination of LILO, an NVMe interface
| SSD and EFI/CSM but I hope to get to the bottom of it. Worst
| case scenario, I perhaps can update the kernel via the
| bootable ISO as that was stable as a rock during the install.
| pjmlp wrote:
| My first Linux distribution was Slackware 2.0, bundled with Linux
| Unleashed book in 1995's Summer.
|
| I had to copy all the floppy images from the CD-ROM into the hard
| disk and then boot the installation from floppy, as my IDE CD-ROM
| still wasn't supported by the Linux kernel 1.0.9, and my Trident
| card was downgraded to 800x600, as X couldn't do 1024x768 with
| it.
|
| Happy birthday Slackware.
|
| EDIT: kernel version.
| 0xbs0d wrote:
| I had the same book and Slackware 2.0 was also my first distro.
| I think the book is still in some box at my parent's house.
|
| I remember trying to figure out how to compile the kernel for
| everything in my desktop.
| chrsig wrote:
| Slackware was my first distribution! One of my sister's friends
| came over and installed some 7.x release and left me on my own to
| configure xfree86.
|
| Needless to say, for my first time using linux, it didn't work
| out. But a short time later I was dual booting mandrake &
| slackware 8.1. Ahhh...the sweet nostalgia of gnome 1.4.
|
| Youngin's these days don't have any challenge left. Now where's
| my cloud to yell at? And why are you on my lawn?!
| akoster wrote:
| I agree! Although I just had a kernel panic on my first boot
| after installing Slackware 15.0 on a Ryzen 5700G chip / B550
| board. Likely due to LILO + EFI (or defaulting to CSM / legacy
| BIOS boot?) + an NVMe SSD + MBR partition table. I hope to
| chroot into it and figure out whats wrong since the installer
| ISO booted and ran without any hiccups. But I agree that in
| general, I have only count on one hand the times I couldn't
| load X11, lost network connectivity, or couldn't boot after an
| update or installing new hardware. We definitely are in the
| year of (the relatively compatible) Linux desktop(s) :-P
| viksit wrote:
| I came across slackware when I was 10 years old on an Indian
| computer magazine cd, pcquest.
|
| I ran into a ton of issues installing sound cards, running X11 on
| a cyrix mediaGX card. And learned how to compile kernels, ask
| questions on mailing lists and debug C programs.
|
| Truly the start of my serious engineering career haha.
|
| Loved seeing how others have similar experiences and are all on
| hn. Small world.
| akoster wrote:
| A small world indeed! I'm in the process of rebooting my
| engineering career and hoping forcing myself to use Slackware
| may help in a small way!
|
| Back in 2015, I worked with Pentium III -class Cyrix processors
| on a legacy but still supported and in-production embedded
| system released in the mid 2000s AFAIK. But I never came across
| a Cyrix-based consumer PC or laptop (growing up in Southern
| California). Were Cyrix processors common on consumer PCs in
| India?
| icedchai wrote:
| Slackware was my second Linux distro, after SLS. I ran a heavily
| customized Slackware for about 4 years: custom kernel, aout->ELF
| upgrade, many packages built from source.
| akoster wrote:
| Wow! It sounds like you have seen a lot of major changes! But
| so far, no SysVinit->systemd nor dropping 32-bit i586 package
| builds for Slackware 15.0 and -current [0][1]. As someone new
| to Slackware I appreciate the balance of having lots of pre-
| built packages and just about everything that's not included as
| a build script on SlackBuilds.org (known as SBo by many) [2].
| Are you still using Slackware today?
|
| [0] http://www.slackware.com/changelog/stable.php?cpu=i386
|
| [1] http://www.slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=i386
|
| [2] http://www.slackbuilds.org/
| icedchai wrote:
| I've been working with Linux in one form or another for 30
| years now! I almost can't believe it's been that long. Though
| I haven't used Slackware since the late 90's, I might take
| another look.
| akoster wrote:
| > I've been working with Linux in one form or another for
| 30 years now! I almost can't believe it's been that long.
|
| Congrats on that personal milestone! Quite amazing for
| something community-developed and supported throughout
| several generations of hardware and changing technologies!
|
| > Though I haven't used Slackware since the late 90's, I
| might take another look. I would encourage it! The latest
| stable 15.0 release has pipewire and many other modern
| improvements, and I have been using the -current rolling
| release on my desktop PC without any hiccups since early
| 2022!
| tiahura wrote:
| Am I remembering right that I got it from tsx-11.mit.edu?
| teddyh wrote:
| tsx-11 was, IIUC, primarily a mirror of _Linux_ (i.e. the
| kernel itself). But it could certainly have mirrored Slackware
| as well.
| akoster wrote:
| This sounds like it was a bit before my time but looks like
| there are some references to that FTP site on this HN thread
| here [0] and TLDP article here [1]. Though
| GitHub/GitLab/SourceForge.net are similar, I miss the
| flexibility and simplicity of FTP sites and mirrors (though I
| only experienced the tail-end of that era AFAIK.) I'm glad to
| see that there are many Slackware FTP mirrors still online
| [2] such as OSUOSL [3] and XMission Internet [4] but perhaps
| these are less like the FTP sites containing much more than
| packages and source code?
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28565745
|
| [1] https://tldp.org/HOWTO/META-FAQ-2.html
|
| [2] https://mirrors.slackware.com/mirrorlist/
|
| [3] ftp://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/slackware
|
| [4] ftp://mirrors.xmission.com/slackware/
| inhumantsar wrote:
| I loved running Slackware. It is still the only distro I got to
| feel "right" and was able to trust it to stay that way. The
| configs were all well documented and approachable, stored in
| obvious places.
|
| I feel like Arch Linux has taken up that mantle in today's world
| to a certain extent. I'm glad there are distros like these.
|
| Happy birthday Slackware!
| korpsey wrote:
| My first distro. I remember buying a Linux Magazine that gave
| installation CDs as a bonus and had a quick walkthrough to
| install it.
|
| I ended up deleting windows from my pc by destroying all
| partitions...It has been quite a ride :-)
| akoster wrote:
| Great story and brings back great old and recent memories! I
| recall the massive magazine rack at my local Fry's Electronics
| and was very glad to see that on a recent trip to Micro Center,
| they still have quite a selection in their newsstand / checkout
| aisle including the print editions [0] of Linux Magazine [1]
| which still includes free Linux distribution installer DVDs!
| Are you still using Slackware these days? As a daily driver? On
| a hobby box?
|
| [0] https://linuxnewmedia.square.site/ [1] https://www.linux-
| magazine.com/
| omgmajk wrote:
| Slackware was one of my first Linux distros, installed on a 286
| laptop with 2mb of ram. We had to trick the installer that we had
| 4mb or else it wouldn't install. Good times. That's where I
| learned Perl.
|
| Edit: It was probably a 386, memories of that time are sketchy.
| akoster wrote:
| Thanks for sharing! Could you elaborate more? I was unaware
| there was any Linux distribution that was compatible with
| anything but 386-class processors?
| omgmajk wrote:
| Well, technically my neighbor who was a CS prof. helped me
| out and I was 12 years old so I can't really elaborate a lot.
| He really wanted me to use Linux and gave me that laptop and
| I started programming in Perl and C - just tiny programs and
| learned the basics of Linux. I remember him helping me out
| with the install and it took quite some time but that's all I
| really can say about it.
|
| Honestly, now that I think about it, it might have been a 386
| but I was entirely sure it wasn't. Memories are weird.
| akoster wrote:
| Thanks for sharing! I take it that was a hand-me-down
| laptop? My first PC I could call my own was a hand-me-down
| 6-year-old Toshiba Tecra Pentium II laptop with a 5GB IDE
| HDD and 192 MB of RAM running Windows 98 SE I received when
| I was maybe 10. I wish I would have installed Linux or had
| a compiler handy to learn how to write "real" software (as
| opposed to Logo in a MicroWorlds Pro environment), though
| eventually I discovered Linux from a friend's dad
| recommendation to try Fedora Core 6. IIRC it was painful
| downloading the ISO(s) over a 512kbps DSL connection, which
| had a copy of GCC!
| massifist wrote:
| Awesome!! Slackware is still my favorite Linux distro. I like to
| think of it as Linux From Scratch for the lazy.
| akoster wrote:
| Likewise! I appreciate how the developers set sensible defaults
| and a descent package selection for general productivity within
| the installer defaults but I have often found myself building
| many packages from scratch from scripts on SlackBuilds.org. It
| forces me to learn while not loosing too much productivity
| compiling everything from scratch - though I hope to try to set
| up LFS one of these days!
| jmclnx wrote:
| Congratulations on the 30th
|
| I am posting this from Slackware 15.0 right now, my main driver,
| but I do boot a BSD once in a while. If not for Slackware, I
| would have left Linux for a BSD years ago.
|
| I hope Slackware can avoid all what I believe are crazy changes
| occurring in Linux Land. Already Slackware was forced to import
| PAM, but in good Slackware fashion PAM stays out of my way, so
| not a big deal.
| nequo wrote:
| You haven't specified which BSD but FreeBSD[1] and NetBSD[2]
| have used PAM for about twenty years by now, haven't they?
|
| [1] https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/pam/
|
| [2] https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-pam.html
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| Second distro I ever used, the first being Lasermoon. Prior to
| that, I used something that was a Linux 0.9 kernel and a bunch of
| disk images FTPed from some dude's server in Finland.
|
| Back in the olden days it ran just fine on a Compaq Deskpro 386SX
| but needed a whopping 4MB of RAM.
| akoster wrote:
| Thanks for sharing! This is the first I've heard of Lasermoon /
| Linux-FT but it appears that was a popular option back in the
| day based on these references [0][1][2][3][4][5][6]. How did it
| compare with Slackware? Or Yggradsil [7] or SLS [8] if you
| happened to have used those? Also, 4MB doesn't seem like a huge
| jump from Windows 3.0's minimum required 1MB of RAM or 2MB with
| Multimedia Extensions [9], but perhaps 4MB was often what
| common PCs had back in 1991/1992?
|
| [0]
| https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/03/linux_distro_hopping/
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26503724
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36682277
|
| [3] https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/61777/Linux-FT/
|
| [4] https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/139
|
| [5] https://www.linux.co.cr/distributions/review/1995/0416.html
|
| [6]
| https://techmonitor.ai/technology/lasermoon_touts_inexpensiv...
|
| [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X
|
| [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softlanding_Linux_System
|
| [9]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.0#System_requirement...
| rascul wrote:
| Just want to make a note that Slackware 14 (the previous major
| version), from 2012, which shipped with the 3.2.29 kernel, is
| receiving updates as recently as today.
| akoster wrote:
| Its quite amazing indeed! For the curious, here's the changelog
| for stable releases 14.0 [0], 14.1 [1], and 14.2 [2]. Not all
| packages are updated (such as the kernel version, but many
| critical attack surfaces are such as curl [3], ca-certificates,
| and sudo. Also note that for Slackware 14.0 and 14.1 releases,
| this was prior to the Mon Aug 3 19:49:51 UTC 2015 bump of the
| build architecture from i486 to i586 builds [4]. This means
| that one _should_ be able to run currently supported Slackware
| 14.0 and 14.1 on any 486 compatible processor, and Slackware
| 14.2, 15.0 and -current on Pentium-compatible i586 CPUs since
| they are still building 32-bit packages [5][6]!
|
| [0]
| http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/slackware/slackware-14.0/ChangeLog...
|
| [1]
| http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/slackware/slackware-14.1/ChangeLog...
|
| [2]
| http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/slackware/slackware-14.2/ChangeLog...
|
| [3] http://www.slackware.com/security/viewer.php?l=slackware-
| sec...
|
| [4] http://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-
| current/sou...
|
| [5] http://www.slackware.com/changelog/stable.php?cpu=i386
|
| [6] http://www.slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=i386
| jdmoreira wrote:
| Brings back memories! I cut my teeth on Slackware 4 and then 7.
| akoster wrote:
| I can only imagine, specially back when hardware and drivers
| were much bigger concerns for many! I find it quite amazing
| that Slackware 7 released in late 1999 [0] never had an end-of-
| life (EOL) specified according to Wikipedia [1] but Slackware
| 8.1 released in mid-2002 [2] received updates until August 1,
| 2012 [3], over 10-years of support which I find quite
| impressive for a non-enterprise-oriented distribution! That's
| not to mention the consistency and minimal interface and
| tooling changes between releases to this day.
|
| [0]
| http://www.slackware.com/lists/archive/viewer.php?l=slackwar...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slackware
|
| [2]
| http://www.slackware.com/lists/archive/viewer.php?l=slackwar...
|
| [3]
| https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-8.1/Change...
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(page generated 2023-07-21 23:00 UTC)