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).
This brings back so many memories! My first distro some 25 years ago now! Something to tell my kids about. I remember it took me a couple of days to get audio to work on my first install! And I still loved it. So much water has passed under the bridge. Now 100% of the production envirnoment at work is Linux-based and so are the devices at the other end of the wire/airlink. And so are our phones, home servers and on and on. Linux skills have had the highest return
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.
Ah Slackware, the first time that I learned software could damage hardware. It has the option to also configure hsync on your CRT monitor, and if said monitor didn’t correctly validate the range it would permanently fuck it up.
I learned that lesson as a 12 year old in the early 90’s on an original IBM PC 5150 with a 5151 monochrome monitor, fucking with TSR’s in DOS 3.1. It must’ve made the graphics card change timing modes and the monitor immediately blew a fuse. My dad then soldered in a fuseholder so the fuse in the monitor can be replaces as needed.
Out of fear of doing further damage, I did stay away from the particular TSRs that had any relation to changing video timing modes and it didn’t happen again.
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.
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