from Hacker News

Slackware Linux distribution turns 30 years old

by akoster on 7/21/23, 7:17 PM with 126 comments

• by jbovlaste on 7/21/23, 8:36 PM

  I ran Slackware for ~6 years, my first serious distro. It's kind of the perfect learning distro for Linux - a super stable base, but if you want more you need to learn how to do it yourself. You didn't need to compile your own kernel or set up tons of configuration just to boot, but if you wanted certain graphics drivers or other software, you quickly learned how to write shell scripts and manage builds and dependencies. I remember spending quite a few hours learning how to build my own media stack with mpv and all dependencies (Slackware only shipped with MPlayer in those days, and with no system ffmpeg). I found it to be a much better experience for that than other distros like Arch or Void, those are just too much at the beginning. Because of Slackware, for a good while my most comfortable programming language was bash!

  I stopped using it when I had less time for tweaking my computer in my life (I moved to Debian), but it was a very formative experience. Good defaults, but with all the power to change whatever you want and the simplicity to make it manageable.

  Happy birthday Slackware!

• by pjmlp on 7/21/23, 8:16 PM

  My first Linux distribution was Slackware 2.0, bundled with Linux Unleashed book in 1995's Summer.

  I had to copy all the floppy images from the CD-ROM into the hard disk and then boot the installation from floppy, as my IDE CD-ROM still wasn't supported by the Linux kernel 1.0.9, and my Trident card was downgraded to 800x600, as X couldn't do 1024x768 with it.

  Happy birthday Slackware.

  EDIT: kernel version.

• by Corrado on 7/21/23, 9:41 PM

  My first Linux distro was Slackware. I tried downloading it but my modem was too slow and people in the house kept picking up the phone. So, I supported OSS by purchasing a copy from, I want to say, Walnut Creek sometime around 1995. I still had the 7 disks 10 years ago or so. They are probably still around here somewhere.

  I learned so much from Slackware and basically owe my livelihood to it. Everything from compiling the kernel to trying (and failing) to get X11 working. On the flip side, I'm super glad I don't have to do that anymore and can just use Linux without having to fiddle with the internal parts.

• by jmclnx on 7/21/23, 7:44 PM

  Congratulations on the 30th

  I am posting this from Slackware 15.0 right now, my main driver, but I do boot a BSD once in a while. If not for Slackware, I would have left Linux for a BSD years ago.

  I hope Slackware can avoid all what I believe are crazy changes occurring in Linux Land. Already Slackware was forced to import PAM, but in good Slackware fashion PAM stays out of my way, so not a big deal.

• by F00Fbug on 7/21/23, 7:32 PM

  That was my first exposure to Linux in 1995. I remember downloading 30-something floppy disks over a painfully slow T1. I deployed our company's sendmail email server a few months later, running on an old PC. In 2006 I switched to Linux as my daily driver and if I need windows these days, it runs as a VM.

• by dsXLII on 7/21/23, 9:06 PM

  In 1995 or so, I wanted to play with something not-Windows, but wasn't yet advanced enough in my degree to have access to my school's AIX setup. Bought a Slackware disk set, and a BSD (probably FreeBSD, honestly don't remember), took them both home. Slackware had drivers for my weird non-IDE CD-ROM drive, the other one didn't, and it's been nothing but fun since then.

  Without Slackware, I would not have learned how to build a web server, wouldn't have learned about UUCP (which thankfully I haven't needed to use in about 20 years)... basically the entire course of my life would have changed.

  (Entirely random aside: I returned the opened BSD disks for a full refund. Remember when you could do that without them assuming you copied the disks?)

• by rascul on 7/21/23, 8:25 PM

  Just want to make a note that Slackware 14 (the previous major version), from 2012, which shipped with the 3.2.29 kernel, is receiving updates as recently as today.

• by ipcress_file on 7/21/23, 11:05 PM

  Back around 2007 or so, I discovered BasicLinux (https://distro.ibiblio.org/baslinux/), a stripped down version of Slackware for old PCs, compatible with Slackware 4.0 packages. It installed from a couple of floppies onto my ancient ThinkPad 365X.

  BasicLinux had a great community and introduced me to mailing lists. I learned a lot about how Linux works, tracking down dependencies with ldd and modifying config and init scripts. After a year or so of playing with BasicLinux, I moved on to Slackware, but continued to use the mailing list for help.

  So happy 30th to Slackware and cheers to anyone who provided assistance on the BasicLinux mailing list!

• by oskarw85 on 7/22/23, 8:06 PM

  It was also my first serious Linux distro. I started using it around Slackware 9.0 (wow, it's twenty years already). It was the PERFECT distro for learning because it was simple (as in uncomplicated) yet workable. I learned a ton about bash scripting, kernel compiling etc. I remember I even "ported" Reiser4 filesystem into the Slackware installer (who remembers that FS today LOL). Slackware did not have ANY dependency mechanism for packages, so often installing them was a lottery. Oh the long hours spent running ldd and strace to find out what's missing.

  I switched to Gentoo after Slackware because everything was working just fine and I got bored. After that I learned that my free time is better spent on gaming and I switched to Windows 7. I came back to Linux after few years and damn - systemd took me by surprise. I never learned to use it properly because it's so much more complicated than my beloved Slackware SysV Init.

  Congratulations to Patrick Volkerding - managing distro for 30 years is no small feat. Happy hacking.

• by aynyc on 7/21/23, 9:30 PM

  Slackware was my first personal OS back in 1996. Built a PC for college, and instead of Windows, I got slackware floppies free from the school. Took me 2 weeks to install. Never got the sound card to work.

• by inhumantsar on 7/21/23, 10:12 PM

  I loved running Slackware. It is still the only distro I got to feel "right" and was able to trust it to stay that way. The configs were all well documented and approachable, stored in obvious places.

  I feel like Arch Linux has taken up that mantle in today's world to a certain extent. I'm glad there are distros like these.

  Happy birthday Slackware!

• by eikenberry on 7/21/23, 9:31 PM

  1994 and my friend had a harebrained scheme to start an ISP and we needed to learn Linux to run it. 75 floppies later I was hooked and Free Software and Linux have been my computing lifeblood ever since. Thanks Slackware!

• by sombragris on 7/22/23, 4:33 AM

  It's funny how most comments here are on the line of "Slackware was my first distro, I have a soft spot due to the memories, but now I moved on to $MODERNDISTRO...". My case was the exact opposite.

  My Linux journey started in May 2000 with Red Hat 6.2 (a Deluxe boxed edition). I then upgraded Red Hat up to 7.2, and then went to Mandrake, from 8.2 and up to 9.2. Then, a special version of dependency hell that was the Mandrake 9.2 framebuffer console forced me to switch to Slackware, which I was already using for experimenting.

  This Register article hits it in the nail; Slackware might look primitive but it's in fact quite advanced. It's my regular desktop driver, working as a lawyer, translator and university lecturer. There are many things who are automatically detected and configured, and whatever stuff you had to configure by hand, it lives on legendarily over and over.

  I had to configure stuff by hand, yes; but I have configs from those early days almost 20 years ago which still are there, unmodified. They just keep working.

  So, if you would like a reasonably stable, fast, modern and simple Linux system, and you are not afraid of using a text editor, then you should give Slackware a try.

• by chrsig on 7/21/23, 10:10 PM

  Slackware was my first distribution! One of my sister's friends came over and installed some 7.x release and left me on my own to configure xfree86.

  Needless to say, for my first time using linux, it didn't work out. But a short time later I was dual booting mandrake & slackware 8.1. Ahhh...the sweet nostalgia of gnome 1.4.

  Youngin's these days don't have any challenge left. Now where's my cloud to yell at? And why are you on my lawn?!

• by viksit on 7/21/23, 10:11 PM

  I came across slackware when I was 10 years old on an Indian computer magazine cd, pcquest.

  I ran into a ton of issues installing sound cards, running X11 on a cyrix mediaGX card. And learned how to compile kernels, ask questions on mailing lists and debug C programs.

  Truly the start of my serious engineering career haha.

  Loved seeing how others have similar experiences and are all on hn. Small world.

• by bena on 7/21/23, 8:07 PM

  I'm still running a Slackware box.

  While not my first distro, that would be the copy of Red Hat Linux 5.2 I got with the Unleashed book, it is the distro I'm most comfortable with.

• by omgmajk on 7/21/23, 9:53 PM

  Slackware was one of my first Linux distros, installed on a 286 laptop with 2mb of ram. We had to trick the installer that we had 4mb or else it wouldn't install. Good times. That's where I learned Perl.

  Edit: It was probably a 386, memories of that time are sketchy.

• by korpsey on 7/21/23, 8:19 PM

  My first distro. I remember buying a Linux Magazine that gave installation CDs as a bonus and had a quick walkthrough to install it.

  I ended up deleting windows from my pc by destroying all partitions...It has been quite a ride :-)

• by icedchai on 7/21/23, 8:39 PM

  Slackware was my second Linux distro, after SLS. I ran a heavily customized Slackware for about 4 years: custom kernel, aout->ELF upgrade, many packages built from source.

• by arjvik on 7/22/23, 1:25 AM

  Relative young'un here, my first introduction to Linux was Ubuntu 12.04 in 2013, when I was in elementary school :). The very first day I installed it, I managed to disable admin access for my user, so I had the pleasure of obtaining a recovery root shell and learning about the sudoers file.

  These days I run Arch Linux, which is the closest I can get to total control of every aspect of my system (without sacrificing prebuilt binary packages - I do not have the patience to wait for my browser to be built from scratch!). I'm quite happy with my understanding of the modern Linux stack! Though I still look longingly at the early days of Linux, when you really had to do everything yourself, and bringing up a Linux system from scratch was worth serious bragging rights.

  Do you think I would gain something by trying out Slackware today in 2023? Perhaps see how Linux used to work in the good old days, without SystemD or a fully working Xorg? And should I do so with modern Slackware, or an older version to truly experience the floppy install process (hardware support may be an issue--might try to source an ancient Thinkpad)?

• by foliveira on 7/22/23, 4:59 AM

  I started using Slackware in the early 2000s. Tired of Windows (and rebelling a bit against The System), I ended up installing Slackware into the family desktop and used it as my daily driver. After a while I got a refurbished horizontal case desktop that I repurposed into a home server, installed Slackware and learned to deploy a mail server and a LAMP stack so I could offer hosting (email and sites) to my high school friends - then gmail came around and everyone forgot about my little cool hosting provider. After a while I got hooked into FreeBSD, but for some reason, and apart from using it for some niche projects, it didn’t really stick for me, since I always find a way back into either Slackware or Arch nowadays. As you can probably tell, reading through all the other comments brings back a certain nostalgia.

• by massifist on 7/21/23, 9:54 PM

  Awesome!! Slackware is still my favorite Linux distro. I like to think of it as Linux From Scratch for the lazy.

• by jdmoreira on 7/21/23, 8:25 PM

  Brings back memories! I cut my teeth on Slackware 4 and then 7.

• by tiahura on 7/21/23, 8:39 PM

  Am I remembering right that I got it from tsx-11.mit.edu?

• by InfamousRece on 7/22/23, 11:31 AM

  I used Slackware on Pentium with 16MB of memory. In order for my sound card to be detectable from Linux I had to run a special proprietary program to set it in “Sound Blaster” mode. So my computer actually booted in MS-DOS, ran the sound card utility and then started Linux using LOADLIN.EXE. All from autoexec.bat.

• by ergonaught on 7/22/23, 2:03 AM

  It was my first distro in 1993 or 1994, with I think a 0.99 kernel.

  Still have the warm fuzzies every time I think of it.

• by darthrupert on 7/22/23, 6:15 AM

  My first Linux experience was downloading Slackware installation images from a BBS, writing them to floppy disks and then jumping into the unknown.

  I believe I destroyed a lot of important data that day (what is "a backup"?), but other than that, good times. :-|

• by davidw on 7/21/23, 11:27 PM

  My parents gave me a bunch of my 'old junk' and I found the Slackware floppies I painstakingly downloaded over a 14.4 modem.

• by BizarreByte on 7/22/23, 5:47 AM

  I still run Slack to this day. It’s the only distro of Linux that makes sense to me. Slack or BSD, those are my choices.

• by hurril on 7/21/23, 9:48 PM

  Oh man, good times. Those diskettes <3

• by refracture on 7/22/23, 2:11 AM

  I’ll always hold a special place in my heart for this distro.

  I used it as a very solid file server for a long time.

• by ang_cire on 7/22/23, 12:42 AM

  > Version 1.0 of Slackware was announced on the July 16, 1993

  "Very good year. Nearly as old as I am!"

• by LennyHenrysNuts on 7/24/23, 2:33 AM

  I still use it to this day.

  Hail Patrick!

• by sillywalk on 7/22/23, 4:32 AM

  FTA: IBM S/390 versions have been discontinued.

  Interesting, I wonder who did the port?

• by foogazi on 7/22/23, 12:34 AM

  Good times, that was my first distro, before Ubuntu then SuSE

  All Mac for a while now

• by Gordonjcp on 7/21/23, 9:36 PM

  Second distro I ever used, the first being Lasermoon. Prior to that, I used something that was a Linux 0.9 kernel and a bunch of disk images FTPed from some dude's server in Finland.

  Back in the olden days it ran just fine on a Compaq Deskpro 386SX but needed a whopping 4MB of RAM.