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Linux Software

Slackware Turns 10 341

Sir_Stinksalot writes "DistroWatch is reporting that Slackware is 10. 'Yes folks, it is exactly 10 years today since the release of Slackware Linux 1.0, complete with a brand new Linux kernel 0.99pl11 Alpha, XFree86 1.3 and even a PS/2 mouse support!' Let's all say happy birthday to Slackware."
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Slackware Turns 10

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  • HB, Slack... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GeckoFood ( 585211 ) <geckofood@nosPAM.gmail.com> on Thursday July 17, 2003 @11:24AM (#6461383) Journal
    In spite of some serious competiton by Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE and other very good distributions, a lot of people still prefer Slackware as their distro of choice. That's a nice 10-year birthday present.
  • by turgid ( 580780 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @11:29AM (#6461456) Journal
    For me Slackware is the best Linux distribution period. It's the first one I tried back in 1995 and I've yet to find one that's better. Slackware is compact yet comprehesive, stable, simple ans user friendly. If you're an old-timer like me and you don't mind a non-GUI installer, Slackware rules.
  • by acidtripp101 ( 627475 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @11:29AM (#6461458)
    On a serious note... that's kind of the point. Slackware has NEVER been geared towards being 'better' or 'faster' than anything else. It just tries to be as stable and trustworthy as it can. I know of someone that runs a very large mud (about 400-500 people on all the time) on slackware. Been running it for several years now and has never upgraded his base system. No need to.
  • by IIRCAFAIKIANAL ( 572786 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @11:34AM (#6461549) Journal
    I think he meant the original Slackware distro, though I could be wrong...
  • by slackingoff ( 690210 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @11:45AM (#6461689)
    Without going into a huge rant about how completely wrong the poster is on every point he attempts to make, I think all enlightened Slackware users should step back and ponder whether this shmuck is trolling or just has a really bad sense of humor.

    For a quick rebuttal of the normal arguments RedHat users and their brethren use against Slackware, you can refer to my handy-dandy already composed never-sent reply [darktech.org] to this message I found on Google. To sum it up: If you don't think Slackware is a serious distro, you probably don't have the ability to properly maintain a Slackware system. You'll just have to sacrifice the serious Slackware advantage for a.. less serious distribution.

  • by harrkev ( 623093 ) <kevin.harrelson@ ... om minus painter> on Thursday July 17, 2003 @11:53AM (#6461785) Homepage
    Been running it for several years now and has never upgraded his base system. No need to.

    I hope that he at least applies patches. Otherwise, his machine is probably spamming the world right now.
  • Re:I remember ... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by djrisk ( 689742 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @11:59AM (#6461851)
    hahahaha, cool, I started off with Yggdrasil too! Though, I never could get X to work. Booo! But it was cool to have a bootable CD (who knew CDs were bootable, at that time!).

    Having used Slackware almost exclusively for a year or two, and then switching amongst various OS' afterwards, I found it hard to go back to "old school" ways of Slack, esp. in recent times.

    Regardless, Slackware is a great distribution, and contributed to my general understanding of Linux and how things operate within it. It's always a good idea to try other distros (or other OS') and increase your breadth of knowledge.

    As they say in ebay: RECOMMENDED! A++++++0x!!!

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 17, 2003 @12:00PM (#6461854)
    without an obligatory microsoft bash.
  • by garysears ( 628452 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @12:03PM (#6461900)
    a freshly cleaned diskette drive, and six hours of downloads at 2400 baud. them were the days.

    When you got X up and running on your monitor, you really HAD something. FAQ entries were a woundrous archive of arcane material that made you want to call up the author and say "Thanks, man!" Motherboards that topped out at 64 MB.

    Wow.

    I STILL remember comparing it to the SCO I had at work, and kept comparing the man pages to the IBM XENIX manuals I had stashed away.

    Thanks for the memories, Slakware!
  • by Etyenne ( 4915 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @12:46PM (#6462427)

    darkstar login :

  • Not just stable (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 17, 2003 @01:31PM (#6462943)
    Despite stability being the most commented feature of Slackware, people often forget to mention other Slackware's strong points.

    Fast. My slackware 9 system actually run most apps faster than any other distro I've ever installed, including Gentoo with custom flags and their overbloated kernel.

    Simple. Debian is always regarded as the de-facto GNU distro, but slackware is a distro where software is always compiled with standard instructions from authors, so configuration files, compile flags and etc are always As You Expect.

    Up to date. Everybody thinks slackware lacks the latest glibc or kde version, but those that really use it, knows that it is almost a bleeding-edge distro comparing to more conservative distros, and it still keeps stability.

    Congratulations Patrick and all other slackware friends for the long-lived high quality work!

    Davi
  • by Punk Walrus ( 582794 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @01:38PM (#6463034) Journal
    That's all I kept hearing before I tried Slack, whining about the "Non-GUI" installer. "You'll never figure it out. It's primative and incomprehensible."

    Bollocks.

    This is what they mean by "non-GUI" installer. Instead of pretty windows and shiny icons shaped like big-eyed penguins, you get something that looks like this:

    __________________________________________________ _
    Here is our completely and utterly incomprehensible non-gui installation screen:

    [ ] I can't stand it, help! What? Where are my shoes? Stupid Slack!
    [ ] I think my mouse is broke... stupid Slack!
    [ ] Hmmm... I think I may have to use the keyboard... Stupid me!
    [ ] Hey, I found the space, arrow, and tab keys! Yay me!
    [X] This is pretty easy!

    [ OK ] [ Cancel ] [ Back to other Distro ]
    __________________________________________________ _

    *That's* "Non-GUI?" The way people bitched, kvetched, and whined, I thought when I put in the CD, I'd get a flashing cursor, waiting for me to do some "pull out of the air" command like LOAD"$",8 and enter in the hex value of the primary IDE boot sector address or something. Dude, that may not be mouse-enabled or have fancy anti-aliasing, but it's "GUI" to me because:

    - It is graphical (it has lines and colors!)
    - It is a user interface (it's for me!)
    - It's how I have been installing Red Hat via Serial interface/low RAM anyway - Back when I started computing, the only GUI we had was a menu system like that...

    There he goes again... "back in the day" man...

    I think Slackware is a pretty tight distro, I wouldn't call it non user-friendly. I'd say it's friendlier than Debian! [not to knock Debian, it also has great uses and noble goals]

    I'd say anyone who knows Liunx/UNIX, and has an i386 box should give this a try at least.

    __________________________________________________ ____
    www.punkwalrus.com - They'll only take away my gun when they pry my cold dead fingers off Logitech gamepad

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 17, 2003 @01:57PM (#6463258)
    Slackware is a toy distribution, useful to poke around with in Linux, nothing more. It isn't any more stable, it has no tools to keep your system up-to-date short of reformatting, re-installing the next release.


    The only answer to this is to point you up the page to the part where it says slackware is 10 years old. Do you think it would be around this long if you are right?

    You sound like you approached slack, tried it and didn't like it. Thats fine, it does require a certain level of linux/unix knowledge and it never pretended not to. There are huge benefits from doing things the way slackware does them, just because you did not find them does not mean they don't exist.
  • by Phibz ( 254992 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @06:18PM (#6465995)
    I just wanted to say thank you to Patrick and all the other fine slackware developers. You got me started with Linux. It has been a hobby, a passion and now a career. Thank you.

    Trey

A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson

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