Slackware 15.0 Takes Another Step Closer To Release

[linuxgeex]

Slackware was indeed my first Linux. One thing I always found a bit weird coming from other operating systems (of the time) was that there was no base install. There was no minimal system in which to build from. You either had to go with the recommended "install everything" which I didn't like (or have room for) or during install, piece by piece install the packages you might need.

That said, I never minded the lack of dependency management (actually I quite liked that because it worked well offline) but the lack of a "base" felt a bit messy to me.

Slackware came with package sets, ie you could install 'base' and then install 'x'. The problem wasn't that there wasn't a base package set. It was that the base package set was too thin, and the 'x' package set was too fat lol. So then you had to install the base, then pick and choose everything else, from the libraries to the window manager to the dock to the widgets and applications. I went with olvwm and xterm to start with and ran mostly console apps on the desktop, because back then the console apps were generally more highly featured than the X apps. Even when browsers started to become a thing, lynx had better features than Mosaic.

Actually I ran a lot of DOS programs under Linux come to think of it, and for GUI apps I was using OS/2 Warp when I had no other choice... and Windows apps under OS/2. Oh and on my Amiga, where I'd been doing most of my development work up 'til that point with AmigaE and Lattice C. To this day no compiler remotely touches the compilation speed of AmigaE. Not even Bellard's TCC.

[cbxbiker61]

What is the name of your distro?

Xilka. Quite a while ago I made it available for some Imx6 boards. More recently though, I just install it on family member's computers which I maintain. I build it for x86_64, i686, aarch64 and armv7l.

BTW, on the www.xilka.com site I maintain current kernels for a variety of SBCs, most notably the Raspberry Pis and RockPro64s, but going back to the SheevaPlug and CuBox. Quite often the SBCs don't get much love with mainline kernels, so I just help by putting out newer kernels.

[crash]

I cut my teeth on early versions of Slackware, which is one of the best distros for teaching you the nuts and bolts of a Linux distro. About 10 years ago, maybe longer I grew tired of slow pace of development and started building my own distro. My distro still has some of the "features" of Slackware such as text grep-able/viewable package lists in /var/log/packages which is one of the simplest most effective ways of figuring out which packages have what. I installed Slackware from floppy a couple of time, but as soon as I could get Slackware from Walnut Creek the install process got a whole lot easier.

What is the name of your distro?

[swagg_boi]

That said, I never minded the lack of dependency management (actually I quite liked that because it worked well offline) but the lack of a "base" felt a bit messy to me.

I think the idea is that you won't miss the dependency management if you basically already have "everything" installed. IIRC a fresh Slackware 14.2 install with everything on it weighs in at 13 gigs

[aweiohf]

Also still proudly building packages and kernels for 32-bit Intel systems both with (hugesmp.s) and without (huge.s) PAE

[aweiohf]

I'd be surprised if there were all that many people using it.

Still a sizable community over at LinuxQuestions Plus its one of the few distros like Devuan without systemd at all (though it has elogind in lieu of consolekit2 and similar https://nosystemd.org/)

[autopr3z]

I'd be surprised if there were all that many people using it.

There are some folks out there still using it! Klaatu of the GNU World Order Podcast is going through a series where he discusses every single package in Slackware.

[GingerDog]

I remember using Slackware for years (up until about v11?) but then switched to Debian.

It's nice to see that it's still releasing updates - but I'd be surprised if there were all that many people using it.

[cbxbiker61]

That said, I never minded the lack of dependency management (actually I quite liked that because it worked well offline) but the lack of a "base" felt a bit messy to me.

Yep, In my distro I don't enforce dependencies on "install" of package, but I do enforce it during package build time.

As far as resolving dependencies...a little scripting goes a long way.

for f in $(find /usr/lib64 -name *.so*); do
ldd -r $f | grep found && echo "***************** $f"
done

[kpedersen]

Slackware was indeed my first Linux. One thing I always found a bit weird coming from other operating systems (of the time) was that there was no base install. There was no minimal system in which to build from. You either had to go with the recommended "install everything" which I didn't like (or have room for) or during install, piece by piece install the packages you might need.

That said, I never minded the lack of dependency management (actually I quite liked that because it worked well offline) but the lack of a "base" felt a bit messy to me.