Anyone old enough to remember using v1.0?
Off-topic, your hair looks like it’s charged by your touching the coffee cup.
Need the coffee to figure out my dependency tree after decades of manually installing things… ☕ (I kid, of course. That’s what the meth is for…)
I thought you were Richard Hammond for a moment
I never want to touch a Slackware box, but I respect the hell out of it, and I’m glad it exists
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3.something in the late 90’s for me. I remember thinking their version jump from 4.0 to 7.0 was the stupidest thing ever.
Slackware was my first distro I ever properly used.
That 4-7 thing was really kind of funny at the time. There were so many version number purists then … major.minor.patch is the rule, and don’t you dare do anything but! Slackware is sitting there looking at Redhat and Mandrake and going: “what if we release version 7 – maybe we can trick people into switching!” or something.
Well, the t-shirt above is also from an arbitrary version number. Slackware released 13.0, 13.1, 13.2, 13.37 cause it was funny.
Now with git and rolling releases, I think people would be less mad. Hell, even windows 7->8->10 happened.
This is a very fun chart: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg – slackware looks very impressive there – the longest lived old distro – and even Suse can (partially) trace its heritage to slackware. But, excluding Suse (and its derivatives), Slackware probably has less than 1% of the linux market share.
Actually, that chart probably explains the current redhat saga – look how many derivatives have spawned over the years! Imagine you could halt that process…
I too started with Slackware 3. Downloaded a billion disks from a BBS over a 14.4 modem. It was definitely an improvement over my previous experience of accidentally downloading Minix in Portuguese. That is a hard way to learn an OS or a language, let alone both simultaneously.
Minix! I actually went so far as to track down a copy of minix on Usenet and bought it, complete with floppy disks. But before I got around to installing it Linux became available, and I never got around to it. Can’t even imagine trying to install it in a foreign language. (It would be foreign for me anyway)
I installed 1.0… all 23 discs that I downloaded at 2400bps because I couldn’t afford a faster modem.
Does the math. 24 disks, 1.44 MB each. 34.5 MB total. That’s 34,500,000 bytes. 2400 bps is actually 300 bytes per second, assuming no bits wasted on error correction or something. So 115k seconds. Or about 32 hours. Assuming no errors, blips, kids pickup up the phone, etc. Probably at least three days if you can only use your modem during off-peak hours like most of us dial up users of the era.
Do you remember it fondly? Or do you shudder in pain? ;)
Not OP but, personally not having a modem at that time, I convinced a well-off friend that he should try it. Then I copied his disks.
Before CD distros? Ma Bell loved us lots … or at least our wallets.
Slackware was my first Linux distro
My first distro was a slackwear 1.x boot root floppy pair. To play around with on our brand new 60* megahertz Pentium system we got Christmas 93.
3.3 was my first love. Old enough to make me old, without being old enough to be cool.
Only thing I could find that’d easily let you install into 3meg of ram. It said you needed 4, but would let you use a second floppy drive instead of loading the first disk into ram.
Yeah I installed 1.0 from floppy disks. I was really glad to get it on CD-ROM a bit later. I probably still have those floppies around here somewhere… I wonder if they still boot? Still have my old 486 around here somewhere too, come to think of it, but I needed a custom kernel to support my SCSI card and I’m definitely not going through that pain again. (Yes I had to boot off floppy drives in order to build a kernel image to be able to install it on my hard drive.)
Probably time to get rid of it.
sigh yes I remember 1.0 taking up a lot of my 160mb hard disk.
Things I remember: changing the command line font was mindblowing. I managed to get xeyes to run, but not a window manager, so I just had massive eyes following the cursor around. I compiled a lot of my really shoddy C code but had no idea what I was doing. The number of disks that Emacs needed felt disproportionate at 5 when MS Word 2.0 fitted on 3, and Doom fitted on 3 and a half.
It was all very exciting, and felt like you were “sticking it to the man” by not using ms-dos :-)
These days I just use computers as a tool, and as such I have Linux Mint on my home machine.
I expected the mug to have slack on it as well :)
But yeah, it’s been quite a ride. I mean Linux in general has evolved so much over the years. My first test of Linux was from some floppy disk supplied by a magazine when I was a kid. These days I only use Linux since about 10 years back or so.
It’s literally the only way to get away from big tech today.
Now post one without the shirt to be distro-agnostic.
To celebrate Slackware turning 30, I took off my shirt. My girlfriend and six people on the internet were super impressed by my slackware tattoo.
