Slackware Approaches 28th Birthday With New Beta Release

Slashdot reader LeeLynx shares news from The Register about a Slackware 15 beta release (following the debut of February's alpha), "nearly five years after the distribution last saw a major update." (And nearly 28 years after its initial release back in 1993...) Created by Patrick Volkerding (who still lays claim to the title Benevolent Dictator For Life), the current release version arrived in the form of 2016's 14.2... The Linux kernel has been updated to 5.10.30 (at time of writing) with 5.11.14 available for testing. Desktop fans may be pleased to see, among the many updates, KDE Plasma hitting 5.21.4 as well as updates for old faithfuls, such as Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird.

The beta itself dropped on 12 April (with the 5.10.29 kernel) and Volkerding noted: "I'm going to go ahead and call this a beta even though there's still no fix for the illegal instruction issue with 32-bit mariadb. But there should be soon."

Tinkering has continued since, judging by the change log, although the beta tag brings hope there will be a release before long.

slackware and first

[jmccue]

Slackware was my first distro (and I sull use it) and maybe this will be in first "first post".

Re:slackware and first

[jmccue]

Was hurrying through that post to be first :)

If you want to see how things are shaping up, go here. http://slackware.osuosl.org/sl... [osuosl.org]

And you can watch the progress on here http://www.linuxquestions.org/... [linuxquestions.org]

v15 is shaping up to be one of the larger releases with a lot of changes. I think for Slackware it is on par with the move from a.out to elf

Re:

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I think for Slackware it is on par with the move from a.out to elf

Is it weird that I read that as "I think Slackware is about to move from a.out to elf"?

Jokes aside, I'm happy that Slackware is still alive. It was my first distro as well, and, what with the recent explosion of OS complexity, I definitely feel like revisiting old lands.

Re:

[MightyMartian]

Took me two days to download all the floppy images around 1993. But seeing a *Nix # prompt on my 486 was worth it.

Re:

[slashdot_commentator]

On 2400 baud modem, no doubt...

Re:

[MightyMartian]

14.4k modem. Still took a while

Re:

[rickb928]

I bought this thin book about Internet called 'The Internet CD', by Vivian Neou, in 1994. ONLY because it advertised the enclosed CD included a copy of Slackware, 0.9 IIRC. Actually it worked, which was more than I could accomplish at the time with a licensed copy of SCO Unix. Lots of other bits of software on it, and it was so rudimentary it would have been painful if I weren't even less knowledgeable.

Been a long journey. Thanks, Vivian!

Re:

[jmccue]

If you still have that old CD, people on

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14

are looking for a 0.x Slackware Image. Many would be happy if you could put the iso somewhere. I think someone has a 1.x image, but no one could find a 0.x image.

slack was my first

[inode_buddha]

Slack was my first distro in 1995/6 IIRC... fond memories. Running it on an old 486DX4 with X. Congratulations Slackware!

Re:slack was my first

[John Allsup]

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:

[inode_buddha]

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:

[K. S. Kyosuke]

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

[Trailer Trash]

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

[Excelcia]

...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:

[inode_buddha]

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

[AcidFnTonic]

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:

[hencar]

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:

[Excelcia]

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

[OrangeTide]

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

[jwdb]

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:

[BadDreamer]

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

[aRTeeNLCH]

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.

Re:

[angel'o'sphere]

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.

Congratulations, when it's ready

[scalptalc]

Until then let me cat this .au file to /dev/dsp0

"I tried to think but nothing happened!"

Re:

[mark-t]

Please tell me that was some sort of schadenfreude attempt at humor.

Re:

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I believe it's called "shock humor".

Re:

[inode_buddha]

Yah, everything is going to shit lately... even Harbor Freight tools aren't what they used to be.

Slack 4 life

[r0ni]

I run Slackware on my web server and itâ(TM)s always been my favorite distro. Wasnâ(TM)t my first, that title goes to Mandrake, but it was the last one I ever needed. Iâ(TM)m dreading this update as I know itâ(TM)ll be a right pain to update my server at this point, but Iâ(TM)ll get there, probably by the time the first update release comes out! Thanks to Pat for keeping the dream alive all this time.

You never forget your first ... distro

[cascadingstylesheet]

With a name like "Slackware", I just had to buy that CD in the little computer shop. I had only a faint idea what it was.

You can't go wrong with Slackware

[fustakrakich]

Who else still includes the full featured Netscape [seamonkey-project.org]? Who needs Firefox and Thunderbird?

Re: Meanwhile...

[OrangeTide]

When I first used sysvinit I didn't think I needed a new init system. Boy, I'm glad everyone forced me to use it because now my computer boots up a shit ton of daemons and adding or changing stuff requires me to look up onli e guides in order to discover --user and that systemd even takes over my login process.

Re:

[Joey Vegetables]

I guess nearing age 54 I must not be a "grown-up" yet because I prefer a polyculture, choice, the Unix philosophy, and freedom, not to mention the smallest possible attack surface. If "growing up" means trading those things for something that works great, albeit in a Windows-esque fashion, until it doesn't? Then consider me an eternal child.

Supporting Pat

[Orgasmatron]

For anyone who doesn't already know, the CDs and swag used to generate income for Pat, but they don't any more. See here [linuxquestions.org] for more information on the situation.

If you have a subscription, you should probably cancel it before the next release.

If you want to support Pat, he has a paypal link for direct donations, and his mailing address is known if you want to send him a check or money order. See the first post [linuxquestions.org] in that thread.

He also has a patreon link [linuxquestions.org] if you want to contribute monthly.

Re:

[jmccue]

Please mod parent (Orgasmatron) up

If I could I would give you the mod points from that dumb (but fun for me) "first post" I made. This is the other important information people should know about Slackware.

Re:Supporting Pat

[flatulus]

I have been a supporter via Patreon since Patrick first started taking donations. In an odd way, I am happy that I have donated more than the cost of several Windows 10 Pro licenses and continue to do so. Odd how that works.

Slackware still has value in this day. It doesn't have to be everything for everybody. And it's not the only distro I use. But when I need that "simply install and run" elegance, I can rely on it. I have a good friend that uses nothing else. His influence led me to use Slackware as the starting point for an embedded Linux in a headless compute node in my employer's product. I thrashed around for several months before I turned to Slackware and was then able to "just get the job done." Perhaps I could have done that with some other distro, if I had equivalent experience with it. But still, Slackware saved me on that one, and I am grateful.

Slackware no longer has a niche

[metrix007]

Who is Slackware supposedly for?

It was my first distro, and I fell in love with it for how simple it was. It allowed me to have a minimal system and install exactly what I needed, without worrying about dependency hell.It was clean, simple and efficient.

Then things changed. They wanted to start competing with desktop distros. Suddenly a full install was required/advised and you were considered foolish if you didn't do that. I found this out when I asked why mplayer needed Samba as a dependency and if that s

Re:

[inode_buddha]

One thing slack is good for, I have found its good for a dedicated dev box. Particularly when I was following the Linux From Scratch project, slack was almost ideal platform to build that distro from. Because they are built in such a similar way... http://www.linuxfromscratch.or... [linuxfromscratch.org]

Re:

[metrix007]

Slackware is pretty far removed from the minimalism LFS provides these days.

Re:

[ArchieBunker]

Arch can't be bothered to even include a damn installer script. I know that's their whole gimmick but come on. The distro is at the mercy of the developers who write a hello world program that needs a dozen different libraries. When I can buy a $20 SSD and Slackware uses 5% of that I'm not really concerned.

Re:Slackware no longer has a niche

[Orgasmatron]

In a very real sense, Slackware is for Pat. He does what he likes, and people who want to follow along, can. He isn't seeking a segment of the market or anything like that.

I always felt like the transition to full installs had more to do with drive space than anything else. A full install of 14.2 is under 10 gigs. Anyone who wants to install it on an 8 GB SD card can trim it down as needed. For the rest of us, 120 GB SSD drives are like $20, and the time (our time) to figure out which packages to include or exclude will be 2 or 20 times that cost, so why bother? Just exclude any disk sets you don't need and install all the rest, and then simply don't turn on anything you don't need running.

Oh, and tagfiles are still a thing, so if you actually need a repeatable stripped install, you can easily set that up. And it is trivial to merge your own packages in, if you need to include extra stuff.

And -current is running PAM, as will -15.

Slackware is still my go-to for just about everything:

• My home router is a pair of Slackware servers running keepalived, conntrackd, samba, bind9, gpsd, ntpsec and kea with three virtual network namespaces to provide access, infrastructure and management for my private (samba in AD-mode), guest and public networks. This is my 5th instance of using Slackware for my home router, going back to about 1994 or 1995 when I had an old 386 doing dial-on-demand and IP masquerading. The one I just replaced had 150,000 hours logged on the hard drive when it started developing bad sectors - it had been rebooted maybe 6 times in that interval.
• At work, my entire VMware farm users Slackware servers running targetcli for their SAN storage. Multipath iSCSI over independent isolated 10GB networks, targeting striped (LVM) mirrored (MD) SSDs. It screams.
• Back when I had cable, my DVR was a pair of Slackware servers running Myth-backend and my clients were Slackware workstations running Myth-frontend. If the QAM gods smiled on me, I could peak at around 16 simultaneous captures between my HDPVRs and my tuner cards.
• My email system is a Slackware server in a remote location, running sendmail (with all the goodies) and horde. My web stuff is also there.
• My home CCTV system is a Slackware server running motion with a script to mirror new stuff to my remote colo box.
• My home fileserver is a Slackware server running LVM, nfs, samba, smartd and mdadmd. It currently has 33 disks attached, with over 150TB of nameplate capacity. Not counting the OS/boot SSDs and the SSDs dedicated to the databases, the disks range from 4 TB to 16TB. A few are just mounted raw (well raw-ish, a full-disk GPT partition and in fstab by UUID), but mostly they are raid-1 or raid-5 plus LVM, so usable storage is around 100 TB.

That last one feels a bit like bragging, and that wasn't my intention. When I started that list, my point wasn't about my insanely over complicated home network and server farm. (If you can believe it, there is more that I didn't mention.). The point was that Slackware is an excellent starting point for just about any work that you need done. I have no opinion on desktop environments or games or office suites, but I do know that for serious work that I need to do, the shortest path is almost always to install Slackware and tweak it a little bit.

The simple (some would say primitive) init system using shell scripts leaves you in full control. Consider my routers. Each one has 23 network interfaces in the main namespace, plus 2 to 5 more in each of the 3 named namespaces. Most of those are virtual, and the associated bridge and VLAN filtering configurations are not trivial, so I run a 5 kilobyte script to create all of them, and assign VLANS (and other configuration) before I even get to the point where the standard Slackware network init scripts can start assigning IPs. I've got no idea how to set any of that up in systemd or nm, but in Slackware, shell script is text-file-easy, so I just write a diff to p

Re:

[metrix007]

If Slack is only for Pat and not really for the userbase that have stuck with him, then that's fine, but it doesn't really challenge my point that Slack currently serves no niche.

It's not an issue of drive space at all, but control. Saying people can trim down the full install as needed is simply not the case, because Pat built so many packages with bizarre depends, like mplayer needing samba.

The problem with the advantages you mention is that they are not advantages unque to slack, but they are advantages

Re:

[Orgasmatron]

The configure script comes directly from the tarball provided by the MPlayer developers. It automatically detects samba libraries and enables that functionality if present. Since you seem obsessed with that dependency, here is the trivial one line patch to disable it:

367a368
> --disable-smb \

This patch is specific to the stock version found in slackware64-14.2/source/xap . I would post the -u diff that would apply to just about any version, but the /. lameness filter eats it.

Save as nosmb.patch and a

Re:

[metrix007]

You keep trying to defend Slackware when it doesn't need defneding, just bad decisions being acknowledgied.

Saying the configure script belongings to mplayer is one of the worst attempts at passing the buck I've ever seen. Slackware didn't always ship with a version of mplayer that required samba, that was a specific change Pat made.

I'm not obsessed with that dependency, but it's a good example of the problem. A minimal desktop install shouldn't require samba to watch a movie.

I don't mean to be insulting, bu

Re:

[Orgasmatron]

Slackware didn't always ship with a version of mplayer that required samba, that was a specific change Pat made.

As far as I can tell, the "specific change Pat made" was adding MPlayer in 13.0. The SlackBuild for that package has remained essentially unchanged since then, and the tarball at that time included the samba autodetection.

In other words, there has never been a MPlayer Slackware package that behaves the way you think it did. Did you perhaps pick it up from slackbuilds or out of Alien Bob's repo?

Re:

[metrix007]

Fair enough. 13 was probably when I stopped using it. Anything not in the official repositories I generally built from source and installed with checkinstall.

It doesn't affect my point though, which is that it is asinine to compile mplayer in such a way. There were other similar issues with other dependencies (I don't remember which), and when discussing with slack folk, such complaints were met with a negative response, saying a full install is recommended and that is the end of it.

You said maybe Slack isn

Re:

[i.r.id10t]

Yeah, when I tried Slackware (v 7.0 and 8.0) I quickly learned to "install everything but the BSD Games package, and any additions are compiled form source OR big binary tarballs (quake, etc) with an install path under /opt"

 

Bad memories of Slackware

[93 Escort Wagon]

Although they are sorta second-hand memories.

I was maybe a year in to a new job as part of a small computing group - at the time I was still somewhat getting acquainted with Linux. The boss told our main Linux sysadmin to build a new mail server - and to use Red Hat, since we were standardizing on that (this was early 2000s). Well, that sysadmin wanted to "learn Slackware" better (whatever that means), so he ignored the boss and built the mail server on Slack - without bothering to tell anyone. Then, he shu

slackware

[bgpepi]

Still exactly the same: - It is the most unix like linux distro, where everything is as simple as possible and with less layers. Only on this 15 release slackware will finally add pam support, not because it really needs it, but more software requires it. Gentoo and debian have many layers to allow then to be flexible, but that also makes everything more complex - it just works! either server or desktop, everything included works and was well tested. If i need to compile anything, everything i need is already there. Gentoo is too complex and with too many software combinations that makes things fail. Debian also works well, but if you want to compile something, you will need to hunt for many packages to be able to get everything ready to compile things - small , fast and clean. As no extra layers are added and do not aim to have all packages, slackware installs are small and simply enough to understand - KISS! keep it simple, stupid! Neither debian or even worse, gentoo are simple. Try to understand how everything works on those systems and you will have a hard time - excellent disto to learn about linux as you can follow how things are connected and very few "black magic" is needed, unlike gentoo and debian. Even packages are simple tar.gz. No dependency check, if you fail to install a dependency, you will learn that package X needs package Y too. Not to say that learning is simple, but on each failure you will learn lot more than using other distros. For learning, the only distro that surprass slackware is LFS (linux from scratch) - while 14.2 is old already due to the age, 15 have up to date packages... that work!. No need to choose a stable but outdated software distro (debian) or a unstable bleeding edge distro (gentoo) in recent years you also get this one: - systemd free! slackware uses still simple BSD scripts to boot and session management and likes use elogind - pure arch or multilib. officially slackware is either 32bit or 64bit, but you can make it multilib by replacing the glibc... so you choose if you want a pure system or a multilib one - while many people want other software not included in the distro, external slackbuilds allow one to quickly compile most of those software, similar with gentoo... but you also have external repos, namely the biggest one, Alienbob, with most of those packages already build. Yes, steam and games work perfectly in slackware

Re:slackware - Speedy Gonzales

[flyingfsck]

To me the main selling point of Slackware is that similar to OpenBSD, Slackware is very fast. Slack really makes one see how much junkware other distributions carry and how terribly bad the performance of other distributions have become. I do find that OpenBSD is easier to install and work with though.

They were good times

[Dan9999]

A few of us got together to tackle this and after a couple of days to download 0.99.11 and printing out the readme, one of the first commands we ran was vi. We didn't know how to quit so we rebooted to solve that issue. I used that distro for years until the other ditros had stable packaging which wasnt until well into the 2000s. I had setup several servers for companies that ran single pieces of software for years without issues. But over time, requirements end up needing the bloat which mostly includes auto updates and infra automation. Slackware didn't keep up but I'm sure I learned dep hell and core userland of the Linux continent 10 times faster on slackware. It was a clean setup and a clear list of tasks to get where you wanted to go. The latter is not so popular anymore, but using slackware for so many years had an effect on my work ethic to turn ad-hoc procedures into a product. Thank-you Slackware.

The King is coming.

[linuxcelo]

God saves the King Slackware.