"Erik "alphageek" Jan Tromp passed away in 2020 after a long illness. He was
a long-time member of the Slackware core team doing a ton of stuff behind
the scenes and a master of lesser-known programming languages like Tcl. :-)
For a long time he lived closer to me geographically than anyone else on
the core team, but unfortunately with an international border between us
we never did meet in person. But he was there in chat every day and was a
good friend to everyone on the team. He is greatly missed. Sorry I didn't
get 15.0 out in time for you to see it...
My old friend Brett Person also passed away in 2020. Without Brett, it's
possible that there wouldn't be any Slackware as we know it - he's the one
who encouraged me to upload it to FTP back in 1993 and served as Slackware's
original beta-tester. He was long considered a co-founder of this project.
I knew Brett since the days of the Beggar's Banquet BBS in Fargo back in
the 80's. When the Slackware Project moved to Walnut Creek CDROM, Brett was
hired as well, and we spent many hours on the road and sitting next to each
other representing Slackware at various trade shows. Brett seemed to know
all kinds of computer luminaries and was an amazing storyteller, always
with his smooth radio voice. Gonna miss you too, pal."
Slackware was my first Linux too. I remember making the installation floppy disk set. And then it was my first introduction to running a computer others could remotely control. After learning how to dial up AOL from Linux then join an IRC chat room, I was immediately "pwned" by someone in that chat room who guessed my root password and rm -rf /'d my entire hard drive. I was probably 8 or 9 at the time and cried.
it's remarkable how dumb kids are (compared to adults). most people understand intuitively when talking to a child that they are going to be dumb and we need to treat them differently (or have a different standard), but the internet's anonymity shields you quite a bit and it's easy to think you're talking to a really dumb adult when really you're being a horrible person. If that person knew you were an 8 or 9 year old child I would guess they would have praised you for your curiosity, tenacity, etc.
Slackware was actually my second distro. My first one came on CD-ROM :). Bought my first ever CD-ROM drive specifically for the purpose. Yggdrasil Linux. As I recall, that was around 0.98 or 0.99, and the support for networking was a bit rough. But it's been damn near 30 years so my memory is hazy.
Slackware was my first Linux distro. There was someone with a Linux box in my college dorm at the time and I looked at his desktop and awesome custom terminals, and I was hooked. I asked him how to get started and he handed me a case with Walnut Creek Slackware CDs.
Slack was my second distro with the first one being the original Red Hat, but i discovered them on IRC, through the glorious mIRC Simpson, if any other Italian is around, back then ^^
Slackware 9 was my first Linux. I knew next to nothing about computers at the time but discovered the cheapest way to get one was refurbished office machines with no OS. Another student gave me a CD and then things were difficult. Changed my life.
Slax was my introduction both to Slackware and Linux. I miss those days. My parents don't: I think I wiped their computer a half dozen times messing with things (usually killing the MBR IIRC)
One of the last entries in the -current changelog before the 15.0 release was the following:
Wed Feb 2 04:17:39 UTC 2022
fortune -m "I will be finished tomorrow" fortunes2
a/kernel-generic-5.15.19-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
a/kernel-huge-5.15.19-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
[...]
This gives the following:
%% (fortunes2)
A manager asked a programmer how long it would take him to finish the
program on which he was working. "I will be finished tomorrow," the
programmer promptly replied.
"I think you are being unrealistic," said the manager. "Truthfully,
how long will it take?"
The programmer thought for a moment. "I have some features that I wish
to add. This will take at least two weeks," he finally said.
"Even that is too much to expect," insisted the manager, "I will be
satisfied if you simply tell me when the program is complete."
The programmer agreed to this.
Several years later, the manager retired. On the way to his
retirement lunch, he discovered the programmer asleep at his terminal.
He had been programming all night.
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
No matter how practical it is to use Slackware in the current year (works for me!), it makes me very happy that projects like this are still going. Congratulations Patrick on a fantastic release.
I remember staying up all night downloading Slackware 96 (version 3.0) floppy sets over my 28.8kbps modem. I think I used it for my first 6+ months of home Linux use.
In retrospect it was probably a good thing to learn on because Slackware was so simple but did so little for you. I remember having to read a long HOWTO from the Linux Documentation Project about how to get XFree86 working. Hand crafting /etc/X11/XF86Config, including experimenting to find modelines that worked for my CRT monitor. Learning how to get Apache setup, which was kind of pointless but fun since I was on dialup.
And setting up auto dial up with a PPP session whenever I used anything that needed to get online. That seemed like magic!
Learned a lot there before trying out RedHat (4.x, before Enterprise was a thing) and Debian 1.3 (Bo) and then staying a Debian user for a long time until mostly moving to Ubuntu for server things.
Handcrafting XF86Config is how I spent my summer of 95. I was in engineering school in India and we have these 486s in the lab running Win 3.1. I took permission from the lab dude to install Linux/X Windows on it. Monitor I had with the 486 was some noname OEM. So naturally the frequencies or whatever in the XF86Config didn't match. For many many weeks I would randomly change numbers in a line and restart. I think it was Ctrl+Fn7 to get to X screen or terminal. Still remember the joy when I got the login screen to show up.
I also started with Slack floppies, but never really thought about how much it taught me. Disk partitions, files systems, permissions, networking, drivers, etc. It really did force learning at least a base level of all aspects of the system.
I have been a generalist for most of my career and that may not have happened without Slackware.
> including experimenting to find modelines that worked for my CRT monitor.
I remember having to muck around with modelines in X11 in the 1990s - but not this century; and even last century, Windows (both 3.x/9x and NT lineages) and OS/2 (I only ever ran 2.0) never required any such esoteric configuration (I don’t even know whether either exposed any INI/registry settings for it.) Why was this such a big (and painful) part of the 90s Linux GUI experience but not for its contemporary GUI competitors?
Slackware 3.0 in the mid 90's was where I got started too.
I have an nearly 20 year old system that's been upgraded many times from 10.0, 'grep -c "^Subject: Welcome to Linux" $MAIL' indicates 10 times ;) It's been through several hardware replacements, and now exists as a VM guest, since I took the leap some years ago to Slackware64 (its host, of course) with alienbob's multilib support.
Good to see improved multilib, build from scratch/make world, and still a full 32-bit option.
Surprisingly I still use Slackware (current) and actually install it on our physics department computer room using packer to generate virtual golden images and then imaging the computers with clonezilla. Slackware performs well even on those 11 years old machines that we have there (combined with some new ones). Currently students access remotely using x2go and Xfce and it works pretty well. Of course there are some problems sometimes but in general is very stable. My first Linux experience with Slackware forced me to learn how to compile the kennel to get sound... oh I had time on those years. Congratulations and thank you, Patrick!
I've been thinking about Slackware a lot lately. Slackware manuals and the philosophy of the distro taught me how *nix, networking, and computers in general work. Back in the late '90s, that was a great contrast to the voodoo of RedHat, and frankly a humanitarian boon.
In my older enervated state, seeking something that "just works", I keep thinking of Slackware -- the only thing that "just worked" was understanding what was happening from a fairly close approximation to first principles and a software stack that did what it said on the tin. I can't think of a better distro to use in an institution of higher learning.
The irony of Slackware's affinity to the Church of the Subgenious didn't hurt either; Bob Dobbs wants to sell you a bill of goods, but once you see through all of that and achieve a state of Slack, true understanding has begun.
Slackware 2.2 was my first encounter with Linux in 1995. I was already fairly comfortable with Unix having to support a bunch of SCO Unix systems for our customer base.
I gave up a weekend of beer to get it up and running on some random motherboard and pilfering some known good compatible bits from our spares store such as an actual NE2000 NIC :) Within a few days I was doing kernel rebuilds to get a sound card working properly or some such thing. That was a lot of fun.
Due to a career change I ended up running RedHat (then CentOS) mostly, but dipped back into Slackware now and again. It's nice to see what was one of the OG distros still getting releases.
As someone who is from the era of Ubuntu as their first distro, my natural progression towards maintainable OS made me reach Arch. As an OS for your system, it seems like the perfect abstraction layer and does just enough. The next incremental update to my system could be NixOS, Nix package manager in Arch or Nix package manager in FreeBSD.
But I am always happy to see old projects like this kicking.
I see many people mention the fact that they won't be coming back to Slackware. Could that be because they are not changing enough according to the times they are in? Is there something the project can do to attract new users? I definitely wouldn't want Slackware project to stall. It makes me really sad when OSS projects die.
Slackware is really a small/bare bones distro, "old schoolers" like it because in it's time (90s era) just having a Unix like system on a PC was amazing and it is considered very stable, now that GNU/Linux is everywhere today's distros are just easier to use.
Slackware was my first distro, purchased a diskette set by mail from a company in Computer Shopper magazine and installed it on a 386 my parents gave me after buying an IBM PS/1 with a 486DX2 in 1991 (or 1992?).
I used it to get Internet access via SLIP dial-up to a mainframe at the University of Missouri and from there to play MUDs which ended up becoming an obsession for years and resulted in me learning C to modify DikuMUD.
I’m really glad to see that Slackware is still alive and kicking even though I’m now mostly a FreeBSD and MacOS user.
I’ve already seen countless comments about Slackware being a lot of folks first Linux distro. For someone like me who didn’t get into programming until the last 5 years or so, can you guys explain what was it about Slackware, that was so appealing or inviting to new users?
As a primarily Ubuntu user in my time, was part of it that the Linux landscape was much less mature back then? Was it the principals/ ethos that the project stood behind? The community? All of the above? Haha, I’m very curious. I’ve always knew of the distro, but never had a good reason to use it these days. It still clearly has a cult like following, and I don’t know the history of it honestly.
Slackware was my first linux distribution, and one that I used continuously before moving to Arch.
As it happens, I think Arch embodies many of the original Slackware principles, but its focus on more modern hardware led to it growing a larger community - one that includes great documentation.
It's amazing to see how many of us had Slackware as our first distro. I remember meeting Patrick when I was in high school, at Linux World Expo. Every just (barely) worked (kinda... except printing...)
I mirrored current religiously for over a decade and used to hand out ISOs to friends. All through my Google years, until I just couldn't hammer it into enough shape to keep the auth working on the corp network any more, I ran it as my only distro.
Congratulations to the Slackware team for releasing another one. I'm always shocked when it happens but happy to see it.
I started with Slackware in the early 1990s, downloaded it over a 2400 baud modem (I skipped downloading X11 stuff at 2400 baud, and just got enough for text terminals and GNU compilers, Emacs, etc. Good times, even with my family almost killing me for tying up our landline telephone for so long while downloading Slackware.
I'd played with Linux before, but Slackware 7 was my first full-time laptop linux distro. My laptop when I was at uni used to always overheat when trying to boot into Windows; Slackware would easily boot before it overheated and then just idle. Loved Slack, ran it on other machines until v12 when I got lazy and started running Fedora Core. Might try this out.
I recently reformatted my personal machine from Slack 14.2 to Ubuntu, and did not have a fun time. The second time that Ubuntu randomly bricked my machine with an update, I changed tack. I'm now running Alpine Linux as my desktop, and I have to say it's absolutely a spiritual successor to Slack. Very similar installation process, very simple design, and I've had to re-learn how to set up a desktop, hardware, etc. It's been fun! It's extremely fast too. (and as a bonus: no systemd!)
[+] [-] wrycoder|4 years ago|reply
"Erik "alphageek" Jan Tromp passed away in 2020 after a long illness. He was a long-time member of the Slackware core team doing a ton of stuff behind the scenes and a master of lesser-known programming languages like Tcl. :-) For a long time he lived closer to me geographically than anyone else on the core team, but unfortunately with an international border between us we never did meet in person. But he was there in chat every day and was a good friend to everyone on the team. He is greatly missed. Sorry I didn't get 15.0 out in time for you to see it...
My old friend Brett Person also passed away in 2020. Without Brett, it's possible that there wouldn't be any Slackware as we know it - he's the one who encouraged me to upload it to FTP back in 1993 and served as Slackware's original beta-tester. He was long considered a co-founder of this project. I knew Brett since the days of the Beggar's Banquet BBS in Fargo back in the 80's. When the Slackware Project moved to Walnut Creek CDROM, Brett was hired as well, and we spent many hours on the road and sitting next to each other representing Slackware at various trade shows. Brett seemed to know all kinds of computer luminaries and was an amazing storyteller, always with his smooth radio voice. Gonna miss you too, pal."
[+] [-] anonymousiam|4 years ago|reply
(I also used Yggdrasil, but always ran it from CD and never installed it to a hard drive.)
[+] [-] racl101|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dangrossman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rfrey|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperpl|4 years ago|reply
I chose Slackware and he told me I chose well and that I would be strong.
[+] [-] freedomben|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rootusrootus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spicymaki|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joemazerino|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lnxg33k1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beermonster|4 years ago|reply
Did you re-install and continue with Slackware after that?
[+] [-] rcpt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] girvo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ww520|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kdtsh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kelp|4 years ago|reply
In retrospect it was probably a good thing to learn on because Slackware was so simple but did so little for you. I remember having to read a long HOWTO from the Linux Documentation Project about how to get XFree86 working. Hand crafting /etc/X11/XF86Config, including experimenting to find modelines that worked for my CRT monitor. Learning how to get Apache setup, which was kind of pointless but fun since I was on dialup.
And setting up auto dial up with a PPP session whenever I used anything that needed to get online. That seemed like magic!
Learned a lot there before trying out RedHat (4.x, before Enterprise was a thing) and Debian 1.3 (Bo) and then staying a Debian user for a long time until mostly moving to Ubuntu for server things.
[+] [-] mirchiseth|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaxn|4 years ago|reply
I have been a generalist for most of my career and that may not have happened without Slackware.
[+] [-] skissane|4 years ago|reply
I remember having to muck around with modelines in X11 in the 1990s - but not this century; and even last century, Windows (both 3.x/9x and NT lineages) and OS/2 (I only ever ran 2.0) never required any such esoteric configuration (I don’t even know whether either exposed any INI/registry settings for it.) Why was this such a big (and painful) part of the 90s Linux GUI experience but not for its contemporary GUI competitors?
[+] [-] mrspuratic|4 years ago|reply
I have an nearly 20 year old system that's been upgraded many times from 10.0, 'grep -c "^Subject: Welcome to Linux" $MAIL' indicates 10 times ;) It's been through several hardware replacements, and now exists as a VM guest, since I took the leap some years ago to Slackware64 (its host, of course) with alienbob's multilib support.
Good to see improved multilib, build from scratch/make world, and still a full 32-bit option.
[+] [-] pmarin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ArchieMaclean|4 years ago|reply
This is in reference to DistroTube's Linux 2022 predictions which included "no Slackware release"
https://youtube.com/watch?v=YJMm4BXNdX4
[+] [-] t3lp3r10n|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nescioquid|4 years ago|reply
I've been thinking about Slackware a lot lately. Slackware manuals and the philosophy of the distro taught me how *nix, networking, and computers in general work. Back in the late '90s, that was a great contrast to the voodoo of RedHat, and frankly a humanitarian boon.
In my older enervated state, seeking something that "just works", I keep thinking of Slackware -- the only thing that "just worked" was understanding what was happening from a fairly close approximation to first principles and a software stack that did what it said on the tin. I can't think of a better distro to use in an institution of higher learning.
The irony of Slackware's affinity to the Church of the Subgenious didn't hurt either; Bob Dobbs wants to sell you a bill of goods, but once you see through all of that and achieve a state of Slack, true understanding has begun.
[+] [-] teh_klev|4 years ago|reply
I gave up a weekend of beer to get it up and running on some random motherboard and pilfering some known good compatible bits from our spares store such as an actual NE2000 NIC :) Within a few days I was doing kernel rebuilds to get a sound card working properly or some such thing. That was a lot of fun.
Due to a career change I ended up running RedHat (then CentOS) mostly, but dipped back into Slackware now and again. It's nice to see what was one of the OG distros still getting releases.
[+] [-] Gentil|4 years ago|reply
I see many people mention the fact that they won't be coming back to Slackware. Could that be because they are not changing enough according to the times they are in? Is there something the project can do to attract new users? I definitely wouldn't want Slackware project to stall. It makes me really sad when OSS projects die.
[+] [-] joshbaptiste|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] na85|4 years ago|reply
How on earth do people running Slackware manage their library dependencies and keep everything up to date?
[+] [-] tristor|4 years ago|reply
I used it to get Internet access via SLIP dial-up to a mainframe at the University of Missouri and from there to play MUDs which ended up becoming an obsession for years and resulted in me learning C to modify DikuMUD.
I’m really glad to see that Slackware is still alive and kicking even though I’m now mostly a FreeBSD and MacOS user.
[+] [-] 40four|4 years ago|reply
As a primarily Ubuntu user in my time, was part of it that the Linux landscape was much less mature back then? Was it the principals/ ethos that the project stood behind? The community? All of the above? Haha, I’m very curious. I’ve always knew of the distro, but never had a good reason to use it these days. It still clearly has a cult like following, and I don’t know the history of it honestly.
[+] [-] altrus|4 years ago|reply
As it happens, I think Arch embodies many of the original Slackware principles, but its focus on more modern hardware led to it growing a larger community - one that includes great documentation.
[+] [-] igetspam|4 years ago|reply
I mirrored current religiously for over a decade and used to hand out ISOs to friends. All through my Google years, until I just couldn't hammer it into enough shape to keep the auth working on the corp network any more, I ran it as my only distro.
Congratulations to the Slackware team for releasing another one. I'm always shocked when it happens but happy to see it.
[+] [-] joe_hills|4 years ago|reply
Apache/httpd: 2.4.52
Mysql: 10.5.13
PHP: 7.4.27
Source: ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware64-15.0/PACKAGES.TXT
[+] [-] 0xbadcafebee|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beermonster|4 years ago|reply
Kudos to Patrick!
[+] [-] boomskats|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robobro|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Koshkin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway984393|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] trauco|4 years ago|reply