Similar. It came on a cover CD with minimal instructions for a complete noob. I like to tell the story of how I managed to get X running before I learned the command to delete a file (having learned DEL with DOS and ERA with my 8bit Amstrad CPC) -- rm is obvious in hindsight, but then so much with Linux is only natural and intuitive in hindsight. A couple of years later a few friends I was sharing a house with managed to fashion a primitive internet router using a spare 486, a 56k modem, and IIRC FreeBSD, and you would connect to the internet by plugging it into the telephone line, telnetting in to the 486 and running a script to bring up the modem. We're truly spoilt these days.
Mine was a few boot floppies included with a book. Took me a month to figure out how to get everything I wanted in a desktop. I had dug the computer out of a neighbor's trash. It had a 250meg hdd and 64 megs RAM... the only thing I paid for was the book, and a case of floppies. It took about 10 of them for a full install. Netscape and all.
I like to tell the story of how I managed to get X running before I learned the command to delete a file (having learned DEL with DOS and ERA with my 8bit Amstrad CPC) -- rm is obvious in hindsight, but then so much with Linux is only natural and intuitive in hindsight
Funnily enough, I learned how to remove files on Unix a decade before I actually saw a Unix machine. The joys of layman parents buying their children the wrong computer books... (Well, not really "wrong" in retrospect -- it preconditioned me to like Unix like I imagine it would do to any impressionable eight year old!)
Same here. Funny thing is I bought disks and never installed it myself..a good friend borrowed and installed and we played with it quite a bit, then I loaned them a guy who was running an ISP in town at the time and never got them back.
Everyone has fond memories of Slackware. There's a name for it. It's called Stockholm Syndrome.
That's harsh, perhaps. But look at your feelings of nostalgia. Slackware is the distro everyone feels fond about but won't put in a new installation of because that would be suicide. You can afford to feel fond about it because it never changes. We all have "fond" memories of hand editing XFree86 config files and feeling proud when we not only got X running, but got AfterStep working with it and made it look nice. We all forget that it took a solid week of staying up 24 hours a day in our basements living on coffee and potato chips to do it, or that after that feat when we emerged unwashed and blinking into the sunlight we looked like an unholy cross between a vampire and a zombie.
Slackware had a legitimate place because it was the first after SLS died, and it continued to have a place for a time because it was conservative when everyone else wanted to make radical changes to the base all the time. But the fanatical lack of dependencies, abandonment of Gnome, and basically the refusal to address any issue that was too hard for one guy to do in his garage has left Slackware far behind. There is a word for what you would get if you take Slackware at its best and project it forward to what it should have become. And that word is Debian. Debian holds the torch for the conservative distro now. After the heat death of the universe, there will be a Debian server still running somewhere. Debian made the hard choices with dependencies, and for a while it looked like it was going to drag them to dependency hell, but they pushed through and now it's a system that just works.
Debian works because Ian Murdock, for all his flaws, made a community around making the distro work. Pat can't work with people to save his life. And so Slackware will remain the Apple ][ of Linux. The garage-made distro that was successful beyond its wildest dreams for a time, but which never actually matured and remains today ever the same way it was.
Please, let it die. It deserves better than what is being done to it.
Hey, fuck you too, ya know? Debian was the last straw for me before I went to FreeBSD. Permanently. ONE good reason to run slack is to get away from the bloat that is most distros, and particularly to get away from abominations like systemd.
Nowadays, setting up slack takes me about the same amount of time as anything else... go figure. And hand-editing config files? I *wish* we still had that simplicity, and granular level of control over the hardware. The sort of thing that you used to get from initscripts
I would say that Slackware does have support for dependency check for packages. It is true that the Slackware packages themselves does not support dependency check (for good and bad). So your best bet is to make a full install of Slackware. However, once you have this rather small full install of Slackware you can continue to install packages from slackbuilds.org. Slackbuild.org does track dependencies between packages and you can use tools like slpkg to easily install a package with all its dependencies. E
once you have this rather small full install of Slackware you can continue to install packages from slackbuilds.org
That's the point, exactly. Because at that point, once most of your software is an external repository that supports good dependency checking and easy installs, well, you OS isn't actually Slackware any more, now is it? Your OS might was well be called "Slackbuild".
Other people have been stepping up to fix the balls Pat has dropped. The problem isn't that he's rabidly anti-dependency, or anti-gnome, or anti-anything. The problem is that he's anti-help. Linux has grown past the stage where one person ca
most of the XFree86 improvements came through X Consortium and Xorg itself, such as the autoconfig patches brought over from kdrive. That X was hard to set up was not unique to Slackware. Actually a simple config that worked on any VGA card was included and always seemed to work out of the box. What people struggled with was getting their SVGA card recognized and modes configured with timings compatible with their mo itor. Unfortuntantly most of the drivers didn't know how to query EDID and the older monitors didn't support it anyways.
A lot of kids spent many hours tweaking Linux because they were chasing an optimized setup that a normal person wouldn't have bothered with. You could fire up Slackware 96 and be working in very short order if your hardware was supported. If not well supported then you gave up things like max resolution, audio, your modem, etc.
My personal laptop currently runs Slackware, as have all my machines for the past 10+ years. Stuck with CentOS at work, and have tried Debian and a few others in the past, but I keep coming back to Slack, its stability and minimalism being the main attractions. SBO makes adding other software less-painful than it used to be, and all-in-all it rarely gives me any trouble.
Why would I "let it die" when as far as I can see it's still alive and well?
Whatever you claim on configuration 24/7 in the basement, it hasn't been true this century. I used to do install reviews, and it's true that on some cases some hardware wasn't well supported, but on well selected hardware, getting everything running would be 2 to 3 hours tops. Including printer, scanner, webcam, not just mouse, keyboard, monitor, sound.
slack was my first (Score:2)
Slack was my first distro in 1995/6 IIRC... fond memories. Running it on an old 486DX4 with X. Congratulations Slackware!
Re: (Score:0)
486DX4
Mine too, a Compac Prolinea. Might even have had crinklepaint.
Re:slack was my first (Score:4, Interesting)
Similar. It came on a cover CD with minimal instructions for a complete noob. I like to tell the story of how I managed to get X running before I learned the command to delete a file (having learned DEL with DOS and ERA with my 8bit Amstrad CPC) -- rm is obvious in hindsight, but then so much with Linux is only natural and intuitive in hindsight. A couple of years later a few friends I was sharing a house with managed to fashion a primitive internet router using a spare 486, a 56k modem, and IIRC FreeBSD, and you would connect to the internet by plugging it into the telephone line, telnetting in to the 486 and running a script to bring up the modem. We're truly spoilt these days.
Re: (Score:1)
Mine was a few boot floppies included with a book. Took me a month to figure out how to get everything I wanted in a desktop. I had dug the computer out of a neighbor's trash. It had a 250meg hdd and 64 megs RAM... the only thing I paid for was the book, and a case of floppies. It took about 10 of them for a full install. Netscape and all.
Re: (Score:2)
I like to tell the story of how I managed to get X running before I learned the command to delete a file (having learned DEL with DOS and ERA with my 8bit Amstrad CPC) -- rm is obvious in hindsight, but then so much with Linux is only natural and intuitive in hindsight
Funnily enough, I learned how to remove files on Unix a decade before I actually saw a Unix machine. The joys of layman parents buying their children the wrong computer books... (Well, not really "wrong" in retrospect -- it preconditioned me to like Unix like I imagine it would do to any impressionable eight year old!)
Re: slack was my first (Score:2)
Same here. Funny thing is I bought disks and never installed it myself..a good friend borrowed and installed and we played with it quite a bit, then I loaned them a guy who was running an ISP in town at the time and never got them back.
Let it die (Score:4, Insightful)
...fond memories...
Everyone has fond memories of Slackware. There's a name for it. It's called Stockholm Syndrome.
That's harsh, perhaps. But look at your feelings of nostalgia. Slackware is the distro everyone feels fond about but won't put in a new installation of because that would be suicide. You can afford to feel fond about it because it never changes. We all have "fond" memories of hand editing XFree86 config files and feeling proud when we not only got X running, but got AfterStep working with it and made it look nice. We all forget that it took a solid week of staying up 24 hours a day in our basements living on coffee and potato chips to do it, or that after that feat when we emerged unwashed and blinking into the sunlight we looked like an unholy cross between a vampire and a zombie.
Slackware had a legitimate place because it was the first after SLS died, and it continued to have a place for a time because it was conservative when everyone else wanted to make radical changes to the base all the time. But the fanatical lack of dependencies, abandonment of Gnome, and basically the refusal to address any issue that was too hard for one guy to do in his garage has left Slackware far behind. There is a word for what you would get if you take Slackware at its best and project it forward to what it should have become. And that word is Debian. Debian holds the torch for the conservative distro now. After the heat death of the universe, there will be a Debian server still running somewhere. Debian made the hard choices with dependencies, and for a while it looked like it was going to drag them to dependency hell, but they pushed through and now it's a system that just works.
Debian works because Ian Murdock, for all his flaws, made a community around making the distro work. Pat can't work with people to save his life. And so Slackware will remain the Apple ][ of Linux. The garage-made distro that was successful beyond its wildest dreams for a time, but which never actually matured and remains today ever the same way it was.
Please, let it die. It deserves better than what is being done to it.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Hey, fuck you too, ya know? Debian was the last straw for me before I went to FreeBSD. Permanently. ONE good reason to run slack is to get away from the bloat that is most distros, and particularly to get away from abominations like systemd.
Nowadays, setting up slack takes me about the same amount of time as anything else... go figure. And hand-editing config files? I *wish* we still had that simplicity, and granular level of control over the hardware. The sort of thing that you used to get from initscripts
Re: Let it die (Score:3)
You know I don't think it should die but it was my first distro too. (I used debain, freebsd, now Gentoo)
I fondly remember adding "ZAxisMapping 4 5" to my xfree86 config to get middle mouse scrolling working.
Oh the days....
Re: (Score:0)
Re: (Score:2)
But the fanatical lack of dependencies,
I would say that Slackware does have support for dependency check for packages. It is true that the Slackware packages themselves does not support dependency check (for good and bad). So your best bet is to make a full install of Slackware. However, once you have this rather small full install of Slackware you can continue to install packages from slackbuilds.org. Slackbuild.org does track dependencies between packages and you can use tools like slpkg to easily install a package with all its dependencies. E
Re: (Score:1)
once you have this rather small full install of Slackware you can continue to install packages from slackbuilds.org
That's the point, exactly. Because at that point, once most of your software is an external repository that supports good dependency checking and easy installs, well, you OS isn't actually Slackware any more, now is it? Your OS might was well be called "Slackbuild".
Other people have been stepping up to fix the balls Pat has dropped. The problem isn't that he's rabidly anti-dependency, or anti-gnome, or anti-anything. The problem is that he's anti-help. Linux has grown past the stage where one person ca
Re: Let it die (Score:4)
most of the XFree86 improvements came through X Consortium and Xorg itself, such as the autoconfig patches brought over from kdrive. That X was hard to set up was not unique to Slackware. Actually a simple config that worked on any VGA card was included and always seemed to work out of the box. What people struggled with was getting their SVGA card recognized and modes configured with timings compatible with their mo itor. Unfortuntantly most of the drivers didn't know how to query EDID and the older monitors didn't support it anyways.
A lot of kids spent many hours tweaking Linux because they were chasing an optimized setup that a normal person wouldn't have bothered with. You could fire up Slackware 96 and be working in very short order if your hardware was supported. If not well supported then you gave up things like max resolution, audio, your modem, etc.
Re:Let it die (Score:4, Insightful)
My personal laptop currently runs Slackware, as have all my machines for the past 10+ years. Stuck with CentOS at work, and have tried Debian and a few others in the past, but I keep coming back to Slack, its stability and minimalism being the main attractions. SBO makes adding other software less-painful than it used to be, and all-in-all it rarely gives me any trouble.
Why would I "let it die" when as far as I can see it's still alive and well?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If Debian did not run systemd, you would have a point.
As it does, you do not. And Slackware is still needed.
Re: Let it die (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Everyone has fond memories of Slackware. There's a name for it. It's called Stockholm Syndrome.
I installed slackware around 1992/1993.
There was not any of the issues you claim below. Everything including dial up modem an PPP worked just fine.
And I was running an rather obsure board with ESA bus and SCSI drives, and a high end graphics card.