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.
Haha, TSR, man, good old memories… Is there a famous TSR called sidekick? Chain of CD 09H… :)
So I’m not the only one who fried a monitor trying to get X11 working…
Really? I didn’t know it was possible. How’s that happened?
X11 used to require very cumbersome MANUAL configuration, where you would specify the exact parameters of your keyboard, mouse, monitor, and other peripherals. If you accidentally ended up overclocking your monitor it would melt. For at least a decade, it has been able to run with no configuration file at all, but in the 90s/early 2000s you had to produce a unique >75 line xorg.conf file for your specific hardware.
Thanks, that’s terrifying and I’m glad that I never had to do it
God that brings back memories
Oh no, for sure! I did it with Debian in '98-99.
That certainly makes me feel better for letting the Magic Smoke out.
Definitely a hardware issue, not a software one.
Oh man, I completely forgot this happening to me lol.
First distro I ever used. Downloaded it from a BBS onto about 40 floppies. Fun times.
Same, same, still remember the install process, and how hard it was to get x11 working, plus how you ended up with twm after.
And of course having to reboot to escape vim.
and how hard it was to get x11 working
Oh good God. If you really want to test someone’s resolve, sit them down at an old computer with a CRT and no Internet and have them configure X11 from scratch. Seeing that default X11 crosshatch background for the first time was practically orgasmic after the bullshit I went through to make it work.
That’s one of those traumatizing experiences I’d completely blocked from my memory until I read your comment.
Traumatizing experience #2 that just came back to me was getting a winmodem working and connected to my ISP via minicom.
Didn’t do winmodems, that would be a nightmare.
I can’t remember how long it was until xf86config made things slightly easier, yeah, getting modelines at first was basically impossible, I think it was trial and error for hours at least.
I don’t think it became easier at all until it was forked off into Xorg and they started making dramatic improvements.
I think it was trial and error for hours at least.
It certainly was until I discovered the monitor I hadn’t fried had the modelines printed on a sticker on the back…
You are so damn lucky. I just took the safe ones, and pushed them until it looked good but the monitor’s whine wasn’t too scary.
Fucking dark ages…
Xorg was a massive improvement, still bad, but less insane.
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.
I used to go into the Sun lab at my university to download floppy images to take home. Good times.
I remember copying the window manager config files from the Sun workstations and using it on my home computer ( still a 486 if I recall ). What a rush it was just to seeing the screen look the same as those super expensive machines.
Ahhh Sun labs. Are there Linux labs now?
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.
Sorry, Patrick!
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
Thanks for mentioning them, I didn’t know about this. Glad to know that the main focus is on the essentials
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).
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.
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!
A system with a CD drive in 1993 was a luxury. I remember I had to use floppies in 1994.
I had a single speed CD rom, but it was hooked up under a weird SCSI arrangement that Slackware wouldn’t recognize.
So I swapped it out for a 2X IDE drive with a 3CD caddy! Good times!
My first distro back in 1996. Tempus fugit.
“This looks cool and weird. I’ll try it!”
Way back in 1993
<img src=“private_ryan_old.gif” />🫡
Happy 30th! Now you can legally call the distro oldtimer in Germany.
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
Cool to see.
I am curious though, does Slackware do anything that other Distros can’t?
Is there a reason to choose it over say Debian or Fedora aside from it being around for so long and the nostalgia factor
More stable than Debian.
Useful for controlling your homemade nuclear reactor’s cooling system.
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.
I remember this from mastadon when i was searching slackware hashtag. Nice, congrats Slackware!
Still rocking Slackware today via Unraid! 😎
how does it hold up today?
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.
Edit: oh, and very stable
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) .
Current has mesa 23.1.3 and kernel 6.1.
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.xzfor example) cd /usr/src/andtar xvf the-downloaded-tarballrm 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 kernelcp linux-installed-kernel/.config linux/- copy the old config to the newcd linuxthenmake oldconfig- a lot of questions about all the new options, that should include the new arc drivers if they are not included into old onesmake menuconfigormake 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/vmlinuzto 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.
There is documentation on slackbook http://www.slackbook.org/html/system-configuration-kernel.html but it’s a bit outdated. You can always ask questions on the official forum https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/
For all other questions see this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt9MP70ODNw
Many thanks for this, ill be going through this thouroughly to see about getting this running. This is huge help thanks again.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=Qt9MP70ODNw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
- download from kernel.org into /usr/src/ (
Give the live os a spin-up https://slackware.nl/slackware-live/
They havnt been slacking for 30 years
I’m not that old of a linux user, I think Slack may have been the second distro that I tried in probably 2000 after starting on Mandrake
Same here. Mandrake 8.2 was a buggy mess, but I have fond memories of it.
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