Happy Birthday Slackware, congrats! Started on Redhat personally, then Mandrake, and finally settled on Gentoo for years. Setting that up for the first time was… interesting.
The best way to get Linux in the era was to get a box of floppies from a guy at the 2600 meeting. Got Slackware in 93 and a goofy little video game made by some guys up i45 in mesquite called Wolfenstein. Wonder what happened to them.
I can’t speak for Slackware itself but Unraid is based on Slackware and has been very successful. I’ve been running it for several years now with few hiccups.
On slackware-current. Latest kde, mesa, fairly new lts kernel. All vanilla software (with security patches). Xfce, and more. No official gnome. Everything works, simple system. No official package dependency resolution, install a lot of packages recommended (they in groups). Good for me.
I have an intel arc 380 gpu, i know slackware current has preconfigured kernel. I havent tried building my own kernel but would it be easier using preconfigured or just build it?
I know intel arc requires 6.2 kernel as the driver and i believe mesa 22(or newer) .
Been a while since i built a kernel. Way i did it was (as root):
download from kernel.org into /usr/src/ (wget https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.4.3.tar.xz for example)
cd /usr/src/ and tar xvf the-downloaded-tarball
rm linux - it’s a link to kernel source, so that programs can compile against the kernel (rarely necessary)
ln -s linux-downloaded-one linux - makes new link to downloaded kernel
cp linux-installed-kernel/.config linux/ - copy the old config to the new
cd linux then make oldconfig - a lot of questions about all the new options, that should include the new arc drivers if they are not included into old ones
make menuconfig or make nconfig - are TUI-s to configure the kernel. nconfig has a search (F8)
make bzImage modules - to compile the kernel and modules (basically shared libs)
make modules_install - copies modules to /lib/modules/version (important as most drivers are modules)
cp arch/x86_64/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-version - copy the kernel core to /boot
edit /etc/lilo.conf - if you use grub then idk
go to bottom, copy the whole block including image = … , keep the original to have a bootable kernel
change /boot/vmlinuz to whatever i called mine
run lilo
reboot
reorder lilo boot order if i forgot to before, and lilo then reboot again to confirm
Not the official slackware way, but… actually slack is the slackware way. Have borked my system plenty of times and had to dig up the install cd/usb to fix it.
I love Slackware but it really is a relic of days gone past (not in a bad way but a nostalgic way).
Back when Slackware launched you didn’t just download an .iso file and gigabytes of updates/new software from repositories like you do now. The internet was far too slow and data caps too restrictive to download anything serious. This was a time where even RPM-based distributions didn’t have a package manager with proper dependency management. RPM hell was a thing and even Apt was ahead of its time when it came out. You also didn’t have the internet to find information as you know it now, you used HOWTO guides if you were lucky or you actually read the man pages and liked it.
Instead of repositories you downloaded from, you ordered a stack of floppies or CDs via snail mail and you just installed and used whatever software was on them. You would only download additional software if you absolutely needed it, usually on the universities network or from others at your LUG. You might have even gotten CDs on the cover of a magazine, that’s how I got a copy of Red Hat and tried that distro for the first time back in the day. If you were really lucky your ISP would have a quota-free FTP server you could slowly get stuff from but that only became a thing here post-2000.
A nice, curated stack of CDs like Slackware was the absolute bomb in these times and something you got if you were absolutely serious about running Linux on your PC. Having a set was practically a status symbol around other like-minded nerds and being lent them to make a copy was like being gifted their firstborn child. Ubuntu for one became popular partly because of their program to send CDs out to anybody anywhere in the world free of charge, usually with some free merch included to boot, that’s how much we all relied on physical CDs themselves.
Today however, I wouldn’t actively choose to run Slackware anymore. Like the internet itself and mailing physical media, distros have moved on to bigger, better things and unfortunately beyond nostalgia Slackware hasn’t kept up. These days distros like Arch Linux provide a similar nostalgia hit with more modern tools and functionality at your disposal.
As stable or user friendly fedora and debian are, their whole structure due to the way they setup their ecosystem including their package management differ in how to change things system wide as you dont want to go too heavy on it to avoid breaking, especially if you tinker things to where you conflict with its package manegment. Aka your configs vs apts/dnf package managers configs, at some point a conflict will occur to where you will need to fix it.
Slackware lack of package managers creates the initial issue of well now i got to manually take care of the dependencies. However in exchange, the packages are close to the way they were initially developed and your config system wide has significant less competition on what happens to your configs systemwide.
You can make your debian or fedora your system, however slackware gives you that initial power out of the box hence its superb stability + even if i make a mistake i find slackware to be more forgiving to fix the issue.
That was my first distro… in 1993! Because I bought a book with a CD in the back that had the whole thing instead of having to download a bunch of floppies!
I was just going to post the same thing. I actually split downloading duties with a friend of mine when we both had 1 (or maybe 2?) hr / day on our ISPs.
We even used coloured floppies to colour code the package sets.
Technically second distro I ever installed, but the first one I actually used. I purchased Mandrake when it was based on RedHat, but didn’t get very far with it. In college I inherited always on Internet in my dorm and ran a Slackware webserver, and later fileserver and BitTorrent machine. I tried running Slackware on my laptop but I couldn’t get the battery management to work, but I dual booted for a couple of years.
It is so nostalgic, although I struggle to see a good reason to use this as a daily driver other than if you need stability that might even exceed that of Debian Stable.
I need some tips on how the old-timers manage installation of packages without dependency management.
This is probably one the most Unix-like Linux-based operating systems ever. Gentoo probably comes next with Void being third in said list. If one didn’t want to run BSD but still wanted similarities with old Unix systems, this is probably it.
Thanks to the Slackware team for such a fantastic distribution.
I started with Linux using Slackware in the late 90s. I had to give up on it - first on the desktop around 2007, then on my server maybe 5 years ago. Dependency hell. For the server, the final straw was when I got some Ubiquiti equipment and needed to run the Unifi controller - I just did not want to deal with figuring out the dependencies and then worrying about them every time I updated.
The desktop and laptop run Kubuntu, and the server runs Debian. It’s so nice being able to update things without having to worry. And I haven’t noticed any effective difference in stability or anything like that. Just that much less time I spend maintaining things.
I wonder if the UnRaid team has figured out an easier method to take care of dependencies, considering they run a webserver with considerable assets on Slackware.
Slackware will always be a consideration for me since I do not like systemd (philosophical reasoning), but yes, managing dependencies manually is a pain and said pain grows with almost every package that one installs and then needs to upgrade. I wonder what was the motivation for the Slackware team to not include automatic dependency management to their distribution, which would likely have been my choice for lean and stable distribution over Debian if it had that feature.
If i remember right, it takes a lot of resources to maintain a package manager, and the focus on slackware is to be on the improving the distro overwall hence its superb stability. Community members have created sbopkg + sbotools to create a 3rd party package manager if you want to go that route on slackware. Sbotools would be the gui to take care of depenencies
From a server point of view, where it’s focused on a limited set of functions, with a limited group of packages, it’s not too bad. I can see it working fine for that purpose.
But a general purpose server that does several things in my house… It gets messy.
We don’t install packages without dependancy management, for the most part. We use one of the half-dozen or so pkgtools wrappers made by community members that interface with SBo and handles the dependencies for us (examples include slapt-get, slpkg, and sbotools). Also, Flatpak/Distrobox/Nix etc are all available and easy enough to install if slackbuilds.org doesn’t have what I need (rare tbh).
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