Thank you Patrick Volkerding. Slackware was my first real distro. Almost exactly 20 years ago, I was a kid who spent a week downloading a slackware iso. I sat and read through everything in the slackware installation and that taught me so much! Your philosophy of simplicity and purity in software and systems design has left a deep imprint on me. Thank you so much.
Me too :)
I was one of the young student in 1995 downloading Linux in plenty of 1.44M floppy disks (7 for GCC, I remember).
Nice to Know Slackware is still here with us in 2022!
I started with Slackware 9.0, which I think was the last release to fit on a single CD-ROM. Like others I learned a lot about Linux, I wrote lots of simple shell scripts and did a lot of ./configure; make; make install.
My first Linux distribution, circa 97 I believe? Oh the fun of setting monitor with the warning that if I screw the timings I might fry it...
I quickly decamped off to Debian as soon as apt came into the picture because "install everything or do your own dependencies" was not palatable, but I'm amazed there's still this very independent distribution out there. I never expected it to last so long.
Slackware was my first distro too. Painstakingly downloaded 40 disk images onto floppies at university, brought them to a friend's house to test on his PC, and it turned out the very last disk ended up corrupted. It was the last of the X11 set, so that first install couldn't run X11. Fortunately, there was Doom on svgalib.
While technically my first Linux was a generic boot/root floppy pair in late 1995, my first distro was Slackware in 1996. I've used Red Hat, SuSE, OSX, Solaris, Unixware and (rarely) Windows since then - but last night I updated my home PC to Slack 15RC3...
Gosh, its been ages since I’ve used Slackware. I remember doing a distro shootout back in high school and coming across Slax Kill Bill edition thinking it was the weirdest choice of Live CD.
(Slax is now based on debian I think, used to be based on Slackware)
> So, how onerous is package management in Slackware if there is no dependency checking?
I can't say that I have used Slackware ever, so I don't know. But I have used a Linux distro where every package was statically linked by default. In that case they didn't use any dependency management since every package was just a tarball of some fully statically linked executables or libraries. The only real dependency was the Linux kernel.
Patrick has already done this for us :-) The standard practice for Slackware is to install the entire distribution - roughly 12GB. If you don’t do this then your mileage may vary, and you may find yourself wasting time doing your own dependency management. For additional packages from SlackBuilds.org, there are various third-party package manager, some of which can handle dependency resolution in the usual way (e.g. sbotools, slapt-get).
It is very, very rarely onerous, since 98% of the time you already have the libraries/other dependencies installed. The other 2% of the time you might be stuffing around with community-built SlackBuild scripts or writing your own, but I have never had any major dependency-related issues before myself.
(I have been daily driving Slackware64-current on my personal laptop for a year or so.)
Back when I ran slackware, it was pretty easy. You installed packages from the disk sets and the packages had the files they needed. It kept track of which packages wrote out which file in some text file so on removing a package it would know if removing the file was safe.
If I found software that didn't have a package, I would compile it. When I got more advanced, I'd create slack packages for the software. Since I'd compiled it on my system, dependencies were already met. I don't remember for sure, but I believe that the tools to build autoconf software were something in the core package set.
Slackware’s built-in set of packages is pretty small by today’s standards, and the preferred way to install Slackware has always been to include everything that comes on the distribution media. That alone would go a long way in making sure that you will not get unresolved dependencies when you try to install a third-party package.
On the other hand, I found that, often, not having to install all the dependencies, and not having the installation of a package fail because of some missing little optional dependency, is a blessing in disguise.
A couple of things that make installing software and keeping it up to date a breeze are slackpkg (built-in) and sbopkg (third-party).
Slackware was the first linux distro I tried back when you would write it to 3.5" disks for installing. I remember it fondly, but soon after is when I then tried red hat and rpm; I was pretty much sold at that point. Slackware has the better name though. ;)
Slackware was the first linux distribution I used, and it taught me everything I know about Linux; and, thanks to how low-level it is, I'd say it's taught me a lot. I think it was the last linux system I enjoyed using, too, the last system I felt like I had control over.
Dark star crashes, pouring its light into ashes.Reason tatters, the forces tear loose from the axis.Searchlight casting for faults in the clouds of delusion.Shall we go, you and I while we canThrough the transitive nightfall of diamonds?
Mirror shatters in formless reflections of matter.Glass hand dissolving in ice, petal flowers revolving.Lady in velvet recedes in the nights of good-bye.Shall we go, you and I while we canThrough the transitive nightfall of diamonds?
Darkstar takes me back. I never knew it was from the Grateful Dead either. In the age of personality-less distributions, corporate jargon, it's nice to see random bits of Pat's tastes and personality finding themselves in server rooms around the world.
Likewise, I moved to gentoo for about 10 years after that, but have since given into systemd (mostly for pulseaudio, which was for Bluetooth audio) and moved to Ubuntu.
Edit: and a thank you to the slack team of the early 2000’s. I’d tried many linux distros but could never fully migrate to desktop use, Slackware finally helped me achieve that. Almost 20 years on and I owe my entire career to an early interest in linux and software dev
I remember the stack of disks, each with different categories of apps. (around 1998 or 1999) Good times. Though I did later pick up a RedHat set at First Friday in Dallas later, and using the CD drive was a nice change :-)
After Xenix and DG/UX, only available at the campus, getting Slackware 2.0 as cover CD on the Linux Unleashed first edition was the workaround of having a UNIX at home given that NT POSIX wasn't going to cut it.
I had to copy the files into the disk and do an installation from hard disk to hard disk via boot floppy as my SATA-IDE CD-ROM wasn't reckognised by it at the time.
SATA-IDE CD-ROM? SATA is from 2000 and onward, and Slackware 2.0 is from 1993. I had a Plextor SCSI CD writer (bought in ~1998), it worked very well on Linux.
Slackware was the distribution I used for quite some time, and which got me into the BSDs, as well as into Debian (I grew fond of the package management, but the release cycle was still slow).
Systemd isn't my cup of tea, but I have a feeling that people who never grew accustomed to its predecessors like it more. Baggage I guess.
