Slackware: I'm Not Dead Yet! 252
New submitter xclr8r writes "The longtime tinkering and learning distro of Linux Slackware found itself at the center of rumors and speculation when its website was down for a few days. Caitlyn Martin, developer of Linux Yarok, voiced concerns in DistroWatch and declared that she would be basing the new project off a distro with a more secure future. Meanwhile contributors continued to plug along with additions to the change log. Eventually Eric Hameleers expanded on his initial communication of 'old hardware — lack of funds' to a more thorough explanation quoted in the article. Have your pop up blocker ready."
not until (Score:5, Funny)
-I'm just sayin'
Re:not until (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot: Yes he is.
Slackware: I'm not.
Distrowatch: He isn't.
Slashdot: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
Slackware: I'm getting better.
Slashdot: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.
Distrowatch: Well, I can't take him like that. It's against regulations.
Slackware: I don't want to go on the cart.
Slashdot: Oh, don't be such a baby.
Distrowatch: I can't take him.
Slackware: I feel fine.
Slashdot: Oh, do me a favor.
Re:not until (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:not until (Score:5, Funny)
I still have my Walnut Creek CD's from Slackware 3.6
Oh. So just those disks.
the only other software I kept from that period is Win 3.11
Of course.
, OS/2,
And that.
and a few DOS versions.
So basically you still have every bit of software you've ever owned.
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Re:not until (Score:5, Funny)
I'm running Ubuntu Norwegian Blue. To be honest, the uptimes aren't great.
Re:not until (Score:4, Funny)
Perhaps, but the plumage must be lovely :-)
It hurt bad when Stampede Linux was no more. (Score:5, Funny)
It can hurt pretty badly when your favorite Linux distribution comes to an end. I've lived through this horrid experience once before, with Stampede Linux. We were as close as a man and Linux could get. I ran it on all of my PCs. Then one day it was no more, and I was destroyed. For several months, I had no purpose in life. But eventually the pain does go away, and I found other Linux distributions. I'm using Debian now, and while it isn't as glorious as Stampede Linux was, at least it's still Linux.
Re:It hurt bad when Stampede Linux was no more. (Score:4, Interesting)
Slackware has at least has the history to have been continually in existence since '93, almost since the beginning of Linux itself. Mind you, I and a whole bunch of other people jumped ship over the Libc5 debacle and I ended up on Debian where I've remained since. I would be saddened to see Slackware go away, but it wouldn't lead to a loss of purpose in my life.
You wouldn't happen to be Matt Wood, would you?
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You've been using Linux since '95 and you can't find a distro's website?
http://www.stampede.org/introduction.php [stampede.org]
And while Wikipedia is very useful, it's pretty lame for a longtime Linux user to use that as the yardstick for a distro.
Now, if it didn't appear on Distrowatch, I'd agree that it's obscure.
Please switch permanently to Windows or Mac; you're bringing down our technorep.
Re:It hurt bad when Stampede Linux was no more. (Score:4, Informative)
I used Stampede for a while, and it was pretty much Slackware but compiled for 686 processors, where Slackware was still using 386 as the target. You could achieve a similar speed up to Stampede's level by just compiling your own Slackware packages for the most heavily used libs and applications.
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It was basically the original Gentoo
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You'd have more purpose if you'd develop a Herd mentality.
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It hurt bad when Stampede Linux was no more.
Was it like, say... getting run over by a herd of your favorite quadruped?
Re:It hurt bad when Stampede Linux was no more. (Score:5, Funny)
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Correction (Score:5, Informative)
The summary is, as usual, misleading. Caitlyn Martin didn't post this in a DistroWatch article, she (and some other posters) mentioned it in the comments section of that website. She also didn't say she was moving the derived distro to a new base, she said she and the rest of the development team would be voting on the issue as to whether to move to a different base.
Honestly, how bad does a person's comprehension skills have to be to submit this kind of summary?
Re:Correction (Score:5, Funny)
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The summary is, as usual, misleading. Caitlyn Martin didn't post this in a DistroWatch article, she (and some other posters) mentioned it in the comments section of that website. She also didn't say she was moving the derived distro to a new base, she said she and the rest of the development team would be voting on the issue as to whether to move to a different base.
Honestly, how bad does a person's comprehension skills have to be to submit this kind of summary?
I think it's more likely sensationalism rather than poor comprehension. I don't think there are any "news" sources that don't participate in sensationalism these days. Slashdot has the misfortune of having a reader base that is likely to notice.
Re:Correction (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot also has the dubious honour of adding to the problem, simply by posting this as "news" 11 days after Eric clarified the issue and 5 days after the linked story was posted.
How is it that actual "news for nerds" takes a week or more to appear here, while everyday events like new Firefox versions are often posted before they're released?
(And no, I'm not new here...)
Re:Correction (Score:5, Funny)
there just around ~25 letters in the alphabet?
You must be a physicist.
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German has 26 'regular' letters of latin style, and the "Sharp S", . Often even native speakers will only count the 26. German also commonly uses umlauts over three vowels, but these are nearly never counted as seperate letters.
So, there are actually an average of 26.5 letters in the 2 alphabets - the parent poster has subtracted when he should have added and then set an arbitrarily low threshold for precision and relied on a rule of thumb for rounding, ergo he's an engineer.
Re:Correction (Score:5, Informative)
And? (Score:2, Insightful)
Uh - a substantial fraction of Linux distros out there are derived from Slackware
Any of them that I (or anyone else) has heard of?
Slackware simply doesn't provide the basic features most distros call for these days, such as a package management paradigm. No, the "old UNIX way of doing things" isn't sufficient in today's world for widespread deployment across multiple systems and configurations.
Simply put, slackware fills a niche, which seems to be shrinking ever-smaller as the years pass.
It was great as an introduction to UNIX back in the Windows 98 days when I first tried it. Its flopp
Re:And? (Score:4, Insightful)
Any of them that I (or anyone else) has heard of?
SuSE Linux was originally based on Slackware, if I remember well.
Slackware simply doesn't provide the basic features most distros call for these days, such as a package management paradigm.
I truly don't care about package management -- or paradigms -- much, really.
Slackware gives me 95% of what I need - the rest I can compile on my own, thank you very much.
No, the "old UNIX way of doing things" isn't sufficient in today's world for widespread deployment across multiple systems and configurations.
Simply put, slackware fills a niche, which seems to be shrinking ever-smaller as the years pass.
I would say exactly the reverse: Slackware allows one to deploy software and updates quickly and effectively, by knowing exactly what has been installed and how.
If by "niche" you mean people who know what they are doing, and like having a system with a minimum of hand-holding, then, yes, I agree that this is an ever-shrinking niche. I am in charge or recruiting people here at my work, and it's astounding the number of Linux "experts" who are unable to go beyond "yum install" or "apt-get install" into the real nitty-gritty of compiling software exactly as you want it.
Let's face it: a lot of so-called "Linux administrators" these days are little more than clicky-clicky Windows drones, people who almost never use a command-line and prefer staying with dumb GUI tools. Yes, I blame Ubuntu and Debian and Red Hat and the like for this sorry state of affairs. People who know Slackware are, at least, a lot more aware and a lot more knowledgeable in all things UNIX and Linux. The same cannot be said of a lot of people out there.
Feel free to moderate me to oblivion while I go and donate money to Slackware.
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I'm a Slackware user. Since at about 1995. Just recently I was googling for solution for some problem. And I've found a solution that basically said "run the tool that Ubuntu uses to reinstall everything and that should fix it". And everybody in the discussion thread hailed how great advice that is. For me
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The niche that Slackware fills still better than any other distro is: small, highly customized, floppy-sized (or close, USB stick-based these days) "live" bootable mini-distributions aimed at a very specific goal. Such as system repair, etc. Slackware is just easier to adapt to such a role, because of the lack of those basic features you mention.
Debian (Score:5, Interesting)
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There must be some level of agreement given that the Project Lead (Stefano Zachiroli) was just re-elected to his third term in a row.
Debian forever!
Re:Debian (Score:4, Informative)
If you think Slackware is going away anytime soon I have a bridge to sell you.
Re:Debian (Score:5, Insightful)
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I agree development would continue and life would go. It just wouldn't be the same with out Pat though.
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What does debian's survivability have anything to do with slackware's webserver going down
Everything if Slackware's webserver is running Debian.
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Re:Debian (Score:5, Funny)
Debian is especially good if you are a historian and want to know what open source computing was like five years ago...
Re:Debian (Score:5, Informative)
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The way I'd put it, it's like this. There are three rough categories I put distros in.
The first one is for control freaks. That's where you want to know exactly what's running on your system, no extra packages out of the blue, no unwanted fat. It's also a good one if you want to learn a lot about the inner workings of the system in short order. Today, the best representative of that category is Arch.
The second one is the other extreme, "it just works, and all buttons are in the right places" kind of thing.
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If you want a reliable distro that will survive every other distro, you go with Debian. The developers fight like cats and dogs and it just keeps going on, getting better and better.
Except for GNOME3...
slashdotting slackware.com is like (Score:5, Funny)
I invoke the *Not Dead Yet* clause all the time (Score:2, Funny)
but I use it for leering at much younger women
(sometimes I even flirt)
Still end up with a bent nose sometimes tho
and every once and awhile I get that moment where you yell *Wee-Haa There's a naked woman in my bed*
Re:I invoke the *Not Dead Yet* clause all the time (Score:5, Funny)
slipping ruffies to people is a crime you know.
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i wub you *wink*
We're not dead, but an old server is. (Score:5, Informative)
Good hello folks! It's wonderful to see we've made it onto Slashdot in-between releases again!
However, our website hardware is nearly toast, and is also co-located a long way away from where I live. It is an ancient VIA based system with a Celeron and 512MB of RAM. It also sports a Maxtor hard drive connected to a Promise Technology PCI IDE card, and LILO boots from a 3.5" floppy drive. Frankly, this wasn't really great hardware even when it was brand new, but it ran our site and mailing lists with excellent uptimes for over a decade in spite of that. It looks like the trouble could be a flaking Tulip based Ethernet card (getting DUP and dropped packets, and RX/TX errors). It was doing OK again after a reboot, but I'm having some trouble reaching it again for some reason.
We're looking for a new place to put the main site. Perhaps it could move to our other server, connie.slackware.com (in which case we need a PHP guru to port it to the latest version). There are other Slackware related servers that might be able to host us as well. To be honest, connie is also getting a little long in the tooth (that's a Pentium III with 256MB of RAM).
RIP bob.slackware.com, and long live Slackware!
Re:We're not dead, but an old server is. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:We're not dead, but an old server is. (Score:4, Informative)
Indeed, I've got a nice server sitting here in my apartment collecting dust, since I stopped working at the datacenter. (by nice I mean quad core 2.8 with 4gb of ram).
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If you would like a donation of more modern hardware just say so - i have several boxes with far better specs that are decommissioned that i don't have a need for.
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Post should have been modded +5 Funny just for the nostalgia trip hardware rundown
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eh just slap a new nic in it, it will go for another decade, its not like your site is overly complicated, and it works fine (well it used to work fine)
while your in there pop a new coin cell in it, dont want the next update to be "stupid CR2032 shat out its guts and ate the traces off the motherboard"
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Patrick, check your email. :)
I'm volunteering development and other suggestions.
Re:We're not dead, but an old server is. (Score:4, Funny)
Yo man, are you the deadhead I'm thinking you're supposed to be?
My name is August West.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
With a Slashdot ID that low it might really be Adam West!
Re:We're not dead, but an old server is. (Score:4, Funny)
With a Slashdot ID that low it might really be Adam West!
Don't believe him; he's a liar.
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Oh, and Pat, your /. UID is old enough to have used images.slashdot.org which was a Pent 90 box running slackware that I setup in Seattle at Wolfe.net when /. saturated their T1. Slackware was a big part of how /. got started.
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Erm, why are you assuming VPS means cloud?
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Because cloud is a meaningless buzzword which means "computer on the internet".
Re:We're not dead, but an old server is. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, no.
Cloud means multiple redundant servers, on the internet, running virtual machines. Usually hooked up to some 'pay as you go' billing & provisioning system.
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Here's your citation [slashdot.org].
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If it works, is easy to maintain, is understandable with little effort, consumes few resources, why care about those bloated content management systems?
Re:We're not dead, but an old server is. (Score:4, Insightful)
and have the hellhole of upgrading the cms every few months for exploit bugfixes, needing a gig to serve two simultaneous users, not work with links.. the thing worked for a decade.
now, what they might/should do would be to move the system to a vm installation and run it for another decade.
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You know, Celerons weren't really all that bad. We ran groups of redundant web servers with Celeron CPUs. They weren't blazing fast, but they were cheap. For the price, it was an easy sell to buy more servers, and let them all work a little easier. That was with an amazingly high load site too, and despite the claims of fire and brimstone the first thing to go after 4 or 5 years was usually just the CPU fan. As generic home grown servers, they out performed the name brand comparables at
Re:We're not dead, but an old server is. (Score:4, Informative)
Honestly, there are a lot of old servers still out there. Sometimes it's budgets that keep them in place. Sometimes it's poor management. Sometimes it's the simple fact that it still works. I've encouraged people to upgrade. Sometimes they don't do it because of money (small hosting, no significant change, they don't upgrade), or sometimes stupidity (small hosting, large customer base, fear of change).
I won't totally agree with all the reasons.
One of my own servers is an dual Opteron 240, 1.3Ghz with 2Gb RAM. It started out life with 3 250Gb IDE drives as a RAID5. All of the drives have failed at some point, and they've been swapped with 320GB drives. It happens to be currently running Slackware64 13.37. It started out life with Gentoo, then Redhat, then Slamd64. I only went the Gentoo and Redhat route, because there was no 64bit Slackware at the time. That server, when it was new, cost about $3,500.
The new servers are AMD FX-8120, 8 core, 3.888Ghz with 16GB ram and mirrored 1TB SATA drives. I went the route that Google did with their open rack mount servers, so I saved a good bit of money on cases. Each of those cost just about $600. I suspect most datacenters wouldn't allow me to run with the open rack style, so I'd have to drop an extra $300 to $600 on cases. These run a fresh install of Slackware64 13.37.
Both the Opteron and the FX machines are still running. I just haven't moved everything away from the Opteron yet, but I do have the hardware to move it to.
I wrote to Patrick (Slackware) about some good options. I won't go into depth on them here. It's up to him and his folks if they want to use them.
I am a huge Slackware fan. Anything Slackware didn't provide directly in the distribution, I used to get from linuxpackages.net. For the last few years, I've gotten additional stuff from slackbuilds.org. Between Slackbuilds and the sources on Slackware, it's been real easy to roll up my own updated packages. It's much easier than the old days of just installing additional stuff from source, and not having a clean removal path.
For a big commercial company, I don't recommend leaving hardware running for over 5 years. That's the end of the usable life. In 5 years, there is bigger, better, and faster available. It's also usually close to the end of life for the drives. I know some places upgrade yearly, which is fine and dandy if you have a huge fiscal budget, and IT people who like to keep real busy. :) It seems that places that really do the yearly upgrades have things set up and documented better to allow for smooth migrations between machines. Places that stagnate on solutions tend to have more stuff tied in closely to a specific setup, and it's difficult for them to move.
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You don't get it. We want the Slackware server to run on that kind of antique hardware. That's how we know it'll stay lean and mean! ~
That might not help Slackware (Score:2)
Slackware User (Score:3)
I'm a relatively new Slackware user, having only been using it for the past 2 years, but I can't think of another distro I'd rather use. So I'd be devastated if Slackware did die.
However, I knew from the start that this was just people overreacting. Eric regularly posts updates on his blog, and although the changelog and updates in -current aren't as frequent as some other distros, they are there.
I'll definitely be getting a subscription as soon as the next release comes.
Too lazy (Score:2)
Too lazy (or whateve - I don't actually believe people are lazy as much as I think they feel more or less angst about doing things) to ... now I forget what I was too lazy for. Anyway.
Isn't this old news? Didn't I hear German Mc Schnizel rant about this issue a week or more ago and wasn't he saying that it's just a website that is down due to not having funding for the website or whatever, while ftp servers and things were chugging along as they always had been?
So no need to panic. Slackware is slackware an
How many base distros... (Score:3)
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Suse, Puppy, Arch, a number of Mandriva forks, etc
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SUSE and Mandriva are RPM-based and are thus based on Red hat.
Re:How many base distros... (Score:5, Informative)
Using the same package manager doesn't necessarily mean there aren't other major differences. It isn't easy to define 'base distros'; how much does a fork have to change before you consider it a separate distro? I classify Ubuntu as 'based on' Debian, not because it shares the same package manager, but because it currently continues to derive packages from the Debian system (with additional patches). Whereas while Mandriva and its forks have originated in Red Hat, they no longer draw from it.
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refer to this image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Gldt1009.svg
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what the hell is shampoo?
It's an emacs command: ESC-x shampoo (ESC-2 ESC-x shampoo to lather, rinse and repeat.)
Re:what the hell is yarok? (Score:5, Funny)
what the hell is shampoo?
It's an emacs command: ESC-x shampoo (ESC-2 ESC-x shampoo to lather, rinse and repeat.)
Oh geez ... I was joking. Now I find out that it actually is an emacs command. Dammit, emacs. [xkcd.com]
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>what the hell is shampoo?
Fake doodoo.
Re:Year of the Linux Deadtop (Score:5, Insightful)
and where are all of the mac servers?
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and where are all of the mac servers?
I actually had an apple rep suggest we install mac mini's as servers in a datacenter to support our apple footprint! Apple is clearly not even remotely interested in corporate users.
Mac servers opportunity (Score:2)
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I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say about Macs and/or servers, but I can appreciate an obscure Red Dwarf reference all the same. Kudos for that, now I have the urge to go watch it.
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To be pedantic, though...
As Red Dwarf references go, that one is not so obscure. Or maybe you meant read Dwarf was obscure itself.
Anyway. Anyone not familiar with Red Dward should make sure to google red dwarf torrent. It's the greatest thing since sliced monty python.
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And yet it's apparently not great enough for you to be willing to financially support its creators or actors.
The actors and writers have already been paid for the work they put into the show. The only people you're supporting by buying it on DVD at this stage in the game is the distributor.
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You only need to buy the DVDs once.
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Darwin iMac.local 11.3.0 Darwin Kernel Version 11.3.0: Thu Jan 12 18:47:41 PST 2012; root:xnu-1699.24.23~1/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64
Not sure which part says it's Debian. I have a feeling I got trolled.
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Re:Year of the Linux Deadtop (Score:4, Informative)
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Care to tell which version? I can post for 10.4 and 10.6.
ares:~ armanox$ uname -a
Darwin ares.home 8.11.0 Darwin Kernel Version 8.11.0: Wed Oct 10 18:26:00 PDT 2007; root:xnu-792.24.17~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc
ares:~ armanox$
hephaestus:~ armanox$ uname -a
Darwin hephaestus.home 10.8.0 Darwin Kernel Version 10.8.0: Tue Jun 7 16:33:36 PDT 2011; root:xnu-1504.15.3~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
hephaestus:~ armanox$
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MacOS *is* Linux. Debian, to be precise.
That's news to me. AFAIK, MacOS is based on the Mach kernel, not the Linux kernel. In other words, *not* Linux.
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[professorial tone] You know that girl, the one in the movie with the dinosaurs?
That's you, that is. [/]
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Some oddball internal thing written for consulting clients.... of some kind. She claimed that there'd be a public alpha of the thing in 2010 ( called Yarok Bereshit, no kidding... [distrowatch.com]). Either based on Salix or Slackware, although they [five people in total apparently with two developers total] did a bit of custom code. As of this spring it was still planned to produce a 'public release alpha at the end of this month.' Funny that someone who claims that any business without a website is doomed turns out to be d
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He's fine now and has been for a while. He got sick because of poor oral hygiene.
That must have been one nasty set of chompers. I've known people who brushed.. maybe monthly, but it was nowhere near enough to actually get them sick.
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I never brush. No biggie. It only starts bleeding if I do.
Once I went without showering for 3 months. I think the skin has odor control built in. People who shower often, like just about every normal person, start smelling bad after a day or three without a shower, but just hang in there and don't cave for these "shower" modernities.
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Holy hell.
Slackware Linux, 13.37 CDROM set $ 49.95
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Slackware: the only distro of linux where it's always the user's fault.
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I believe it's from the cult of the subgenius, or something to that effect. They explain the name on the site somewhere.
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Probably because computing is a career which doesn't require a lot of interaction with the public. A lot of transgenders have very serious body image and confidence issues, and it's a very good career choice for somebody who doesn't want to have to face people they don't know.