I remember playing with Slackware around 20 years ago - it was so nice fast distribution with dead simple package management. Non-standard software you had to compile yourself with all the dependencies resolved on your own :) Oh fond memories…
Same for me but two years later, 1998. Using Slackware was likely one the biggest contribution to my career. The fact that it forced me to really understand what was going on taught me so much about operating systems, software development and open source. I haven’t used Slack in a looong time, but I hold it dear in my memories!
Exactly! And these were times before Google, even, so everything had to be learned the hard way. Like patching Joliet support into the kernel for cdroms.
LFS was another big thing. I ran that for quite a while too, think with Debian packaging.
The switch to Debian, after forays into Red Hat and Mandrake, felt like a nice retirement from that, like something I’d earned through self-education.
Nowadays the package management is as simple as ever, but the collection of binary packages is huge and very up to date (much more so than ubuntu). For example, there are only a few days between a new release of gcc or clang and their official slackware packages, so you always run a really modern system.
Slackware was my first Linux distro circa 1997. The only installation method available to me at the time was to download something like 20 floppy images via FTP over dialup. And then of course 25% of the floppies (mostly reused AOL disks) would end up going bad, so I’d have to copy the failed ones again, and then a few of those would be bad, etc, etc until finally I was greeted by a login prompt and then a bash prompt. I stared at it for a while, unsure of how to proceed.
So I rebooted into Windows 95, played Quake for a while, and finally downloaded a bunch of guides from the Linux Documentation Project and the rest, as they say, was history.
I started out with Slackware 2.1 in 1994, and it is still my go-to Linux distribution for self-hosted servers. The installation and configuration has changed very little, and when combined with SlackBuilds, it is as current and competitive as other distribution out there. I’m currently finalizing the deployment of a Slackware-current (14.2+) GPU+CPU compute cluster for genome comparison. NOAA Gulf Coast hurricane forecast models also run on a Slackware cluster.
I remember playing with Slackware around 20 years ago - it was so nice fast distribution with dead simple package management. Non-standard software you had to compile yourself with all the dependencies resolved on your own :) Oh fond memories…
I started off with Slackware in 1996. I got a six-pack (I believe) of Linux distros on cdrom. It shipped Red Hat, Debian and Slackware.
My friend told me Slackware is the hardest-core so I decided to jump in the deep end immediately.
Zero regrets!
Same for me but two years later, 1998. Using Slackware was likely one the biggest contribution to my career. The fact that it forced me to really understand what was going on taught me so much about operating systems, software development and open source. I haven’t used Slack in a looong time, but I hold it dear in my memories!
Exactly! And these were times before Google, even, so everything had to be learned the hard way. Like patching Joliet support into the kernel for cdroms.
LFS was another big thing. I ran that for quite a while too, think with Debian packaging.
The switch to Debian, after forays into Red Hat and Mandrake, felt like a nice retirement from that, like something I’d earned through self-education.
Those were likely Infomagic ones, like these https://archive.org/details/Linux_Developers_Resource_InfoMagic_March_1995_Disc_1
Nowadays the package management is as simple as ever, but the collection of binary packages is huge and very up to date (much more so than ubuntu). For example, there are only a few days between a new release of gcc or clang and their official slackware packages, so you always run a really modern system.
Slackware was my first Linux distro circa 1997. The only installation method available to me at the time was to download something like 20 floppy images via FTP over dialup. And then of course 25% of the floppies (mostly reused AOL disks) would end up going bad, so I’d have to copy the failed ones again, and then a few of those would be bad, etc, etc until finally I was greeted by a login prompt and then a bash prompt. I stared at it for a while, unsure of how to proceed.
So I rebooted into Windows 95, played Quake for a while, and finally downloaded a bunch of guides from the Linux Documentation Project and the rest, as they say, was history.
I started out with Slackware 2.1 in 1994, and it is still my go-to Linux distribution for self-hosted servers. The installation and configuration has changed very little, and when combined with SlackBuilds, it is as current and competitive as other distribution out there. I’m currently finalizing the deployment of a Slackware-current (14.2+) GPU+CPU compute cluster for genome comparison. NOAA Gulf Coast hurricane forecast models also run on a Slackware cluster.