In Pursuit of Slack (Slackware 15.0)

Today I will explaining and demonstrating the capabilities and performance of Slackware 15.0. One of my all time favorite linux distros.
Slackware was created in 1993 by Patrick Volkerding. Slackware was based on Softlanding Linux System. Slackware is the oldest surviving linux distros which has served as the baseline for many other linux distributions, including SUSE Linux (although it no longer is).
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"Brightly Fancy" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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#linux #slackware #slackware15

[@JD-im4wu]

Slackware is a work of art the home-brew of Linux. If there is 1 person's review I'de watch of Slack that would be DJ Ware!

[@jessehorstman]

It's refreshing to hear from someone who has some experience to share.

[@leediffusion]

Slackware was one of the my first distributions I started my Linux journey on in the late 90's. My actually first Linux distro was Red Hat 5.0 as it came free on a disc with a Samms "Teach Yourself Linux" book...which I did! IIRC (and my memory isn't playing tricks) I installed Slackware on floppies onto a 486 machine. LILO is very nostalgic!

[@perdonomai8060]

I grew up using Slack, missed it! I used to write 2-3 lines command to play a DVD with subtitles! Really sad they loose two guys of their team. Thanks for waking up those beautiful memories!

[@ordinaryk]

I first tried out Slackware in the mid-90s. I still remember installing it on a 486DX2-66 with a huge stack of floppy disks. Everything had to be hand-configured, so it was a great way to learn how the "guts" of Linux work. Still is!

[@wjack4728]

Slackware was my first Linux in 1994, and since I just got my first computer 6 months earlier I had a very hard time getting it setup on my computer. It's still my favorite Linux of all time.

[@emiliejade1910]

More Slackware love.

[@dezmondwhitney1208]

Watching this cast my mind back to my days of tinkering with , as a rank amateur , Mandrake Linux and Suse Linux when the distribution came on numerous Installation CDs and LILO was more widespread in its use. Many Thanks DJ.

[@rcdenis1]

Oh man, I've been waiting for this one for so long! I knew it was coming! Thank you DJ.

[@donaldmickunas8552]

Hey djware, I’ve been playing with Slackware 15 for the past few weeks. I’m running bspwm. So, I skipped installing the two DEs and emacs. I am having a blast with Slackware. If things keep going as they are, Slackware may become my daily driver. I’m currently running Debian 11 as my daily driver. Anyway, I enjoyed your video as always. I hope all goes well with you. Stay safe and healthy,

[@abobader]

I recall first used linux was slackware back in 1992, well done DJ!

[@jdebultra]

Thanks for the video, such a fantastic operating system. I've been using it since early 90's. I just sold my version 14 box to someone who wanted to build a DOS retro gaming PC. Moving forward, just finished building a new old stock system for my daily driver (Intel core 2 Quad, BCM mainboard, 8 GB ram, Quadro GPU, 120gb SSD, Silverstone matx case). Will be installing thls sometime this week. It's my first 64 bit system and glad I could repurpose some of my unused, new hardware. I even have an old new in the box Sony LCD monitor. I sold all of my CRT's as well and can't believe what people were willing to pay for them. Thanks again for the informative video.

[@ordinosaurs]

5:00 LILO has always been able to dual boot linux or windows on legacy IDE disks ; you just created a label "other" pointing to the windows partition (/dev/hda1 generally, in the old days), selected install to mbr and done - done at least until Microsoft ruined your day, that is. Dual booting was the "raison d'être" of LiLo instead of firing up fdisk to set the boot flag on the intended partition between sessions. Did this way back in 97 when I installed my first Linux, from a slackware 3.0 disk.

[@mattwilliams1844]

This was a great video, I've been strongly considering moving back to Slackware for a while. I never understood much about the way slackpkg worked, I did know that if you weren't careful you could easily bork your system. But the really attractive aspect of Slack is the old-school Unix way of doing things on Linux with out having to go to FreeBSD/OpenBSD. Great video, hope to see more of your knowledge on Slackware in future videos. Also if you do more bench tests, please include Arch :)

[@stevennathaniel6566]

the Slackware 15 Live ISO is more easy for a newbie to install it.

[@wizdude]

I’m an old time slack head - all the way back from the sub 1.0 releases and installed from floppy :-). I’m so happy that Slackware 15 has eventually come to a stable release. Can I ask please - what is the virtualisation manager that I can see running behind the viewer when you were installing Slackware? Many thanks. Cheers :-)

[@aris6927]

I believe DJ Ware uses promox.

[@MrWarneet]

A similar experience to FreeBSD.

[@charliekim2939]

Whenever I, a 70-some tech retiree, feel like trying a new linux distribution, the first thing I do, after installation, is to compile 'nedit' (or, 'xnedit' these days) without which I feel powerless. Although some (most?) repositories have nedit binaries, the editor is very special to me and I always want to make my own binary. In most (if not all) distributions it takes several 'make' runs due to missing headers. Sometimes it is more difficult than being minor annoyance. Then, I am done with the distribution. Slackware is probably the only distribution which includes (all?) header files along with binaries - including 'motif.' I've been using Slackware since 93 (or 94?) Although 'nedit' is not included in the release packages, I never had any problem compiling it on slackware. I know I am out of touch but I still pine for good old days when computing was fun and I could write/build some software myself. Long live Slackware!

[@conradtwonine9414]

Slackware was indeed my first Linux package, would love to see a video on custom kernel compile process, I remember doing that in 1997, just wondering if its still possible these days with the newest version...great video!

[@folksurvival]

Thanks.

[@CyberGizmo]

welcome Folk

[@daervis1954]

Praise "Bob".

[@CyberGizmo]

LOL

[@horacegentleman3296]

Blessed be the Antivirgin

[@joshmcdzz6925]

after much waiting ... it's finally here... hope this version has a package manager now or a software hub like ubuntu ( flat hub etc )...

[@DenisNSmith]

If you have a Windows partition, it will detect it, and allow you to add that to either LILO or eLILO.

[@TheTruthOfAI]

Yah, slackware... grsec ... that bring backs some very old memories hah. Slackware was the real arena to be forged as unix engineer.

[@scottdrake5159]

It was always like disk 23... after you'd drank all the coffee your body could handle. After a failed disk install, it was "try again tomorrow", lol.

[@hopelessdecoy]

And now it takes only a few wrong clicks to brick several PCs in one day! Only kidding but it is crazy how simple it is to install even Debian in comparison today.

[@DenisNSmith]

One of the things you missed is that it is not cutting-edge. It relies on stability. You won't get the latest versions, but you will have tried, tested, and stable versions.

[@chrystals.4376]

Interesting, anyone knows how well that distro works with OpenZFS in comparison to say, Ubuntu?

[@JD-im4wu]

Anyone in here use Nano as their main editor/ide and skip over both vim and emacs or am I the only 1? I rarely come across devs that do everything in nano lol... Simplicity Simplicity Simplicity reminds me of Slackware. Got used to Nano so can't teach an old dog new tricks and it works well enough for me when using other cli tools on the side.

[@worldhello1234]

They succeeded. They slacked for 6 years. Now, they are a little less ancient. 😘

[@MagicGladiatorMandrake]

Hi, I would like to try Slackware 15 may I know VM System Requirement for it. Tnx.

[@CyberGizmo]

32 or 64bit single core processor. 64MB RAM (1GB+ suggested) About 5GB+ of hard disk space for a full install. and of course the iso Additional CPU, RAM, Disk Space and 1024x768 resolution if you want to run X-Windows

[@whs4754]

Lilo did support dual boot. I dont know about elilo but the original lilo supported dual boot. I dual booted virtually ever windows system through XP with some linux version.

[@CyberGizmo]

As I recall LILO wrote the location of the kernel or the location of any other OS to the MBR, the reason I said that it was always discouraged to try and dual boot with it, it was aways risky the way LILO managed the MBR, because sooner or later it would blow up and leave you with no boot at all

[@whs4754]

@@CyberGizmo I dont recall it ever being unreliable unless it was a problem of user error. I dont recall anyone ever saying that one shouldnt dual boot with it, as long as it was installed correctly, and it wasnt that hard to install it correctly, it was extremely reliable. Not only was it reliable, if a windows install or upgrade happened to blow it away, it was easy to reinstall with whatever install media you used originally. In point of fact, i think the reason that slackware stuck with lilo for so long was its reliability. Lilo had an easily editable text file config and i can remember having as many as 3 linux kernels and one windows version as boot options in my lilo.cfg without any problem. I am less familiar with grub and elilo, but if they are included in a slackware distro, i have no doubt that they are rock solid too.

[@Mach7RadioIntercepts]

It is troll city in here, mofoezz with nothing better to do than ask, "Why is Slackware still alive?" FTW I'm putting Alacritty & DWM on this, with my favorite Anaconda goodies; happily.

[@levskilevov4888]

And most imoprtant is who is still used and when, and why?

[@DenisNSmith]

Completely POSIX-compliant isn't UNIX-like.

[@MsDuketown]

Diversified Inclusion

[@levskilevov4888]

For me is interesting who used Slackware 2022 year? If you need Enterprise stable release with 10 years support there is RHEL, Oracle Linux. If you need community Rocky, Alma... There is also other company distro with good support if you need -Suse -SLES, and free Suse Leap, Canonical with Ubuntu is still here... If you need good community stable Linux distribution - Debian... Also if you need security, ZFS,jails, faster TCP/IP network stack -FreeBSD/OpenBSD is still here... And Slackware is here... who is still used? Development is still on one forum linuxquestion, no mail list, one changelog, and that's it. By the way slackbuild for 15 release is still missing!

[@slackware14.25]

slackbuilds.org "Submissions are closed while we are working to prepare for Slackware 15.0. Please be patient... '

[@slackware14.25]

RSS news today: Tue Mar 1 05:05:48 UTC 2022 patches/packages/libxml2-2.9.13-x86_64-1_slack14.2.txz: Upgraded. This update fixes bugs and the following security issues: Use-after-free of ID and IDREF attributes (Thanks to Shinji Sato for the report) Use-after-free in xmlXIncludeCopyRange (David Kilzer) Fix Null-deref-in-xmlSchemaGetComponentTargetNs (huangduirong) Fix memory leak in xmlXPathCompNodeTest Fix null pointer deref in xmlStringGetNodeList Fix several memory leaks found by Coverity (David King) For more information, see: cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2022-23308 (* Security fix *) patches/packages/libxslt-1.1.35-x86_64-1_slack14.2.txz: Upgraded. This update fixes bugs and the following security issues: Fix use-after-free in xsltApplyTemplates Fix memory leak in xsltDocumentElem (David King) Fix memory leak in xsltCompileIdKeyPattern (David King) Fix double-free with stylesheets containing entity nodes For more information, see: cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2021-30560 (* Security fix *)

[@levskilevov4888]

@@slackware14.25 And this is still from first alfa release of Slackware 15 May 2021... So after 8-9 months after finally Slackware 15 still on progress... This is not serious.

[@slackware14.25]

@@levskilevov4888 it's the first LTS distro with python 3.9.10 and it's the mother of all linux distros, repect this mother Levski ;-)

[@levskilevov4888]

@@slackware14.25 And all advantages are this :-). Slackware was popular from beginning to 2007-2008 year. After that, small group of people are used -most of them old linux veterans and that's it. For serious professional work people use RHEL/CentOS/Ubuntu/Debian/SuSE, and new one Rocky/Alma. Slackware these days is more retro/legacy linux distribution then distribution for serious work.