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.
this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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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... :)
Definitely a hardware issue, not a software one.
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.
Oh man, I completely forgot this happening to me lol.
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!
Way back in 1993
<img src=“private_ryan_old.gif” />
My first distro back in 1996. Tempus fugit.
“This looks cool and weird. I’ll try it!”
🫡
Happy 30th! Now you can legally call the distro oldtimer in Germany.
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
My first distro. Installed it on my Win3.1 i386sx system (with 4MB RAM) in 1994.
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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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
Still rocking Slackware today via Unraid! 😎
First distro for me as well.
The best way to get Linux in the era was to get a box of floppies from a guy at the 2600 meeting. Got Slackware in 93 and a goofy little video game made by some guys up i45 in mesquite called Wolfenstein. Wonder what happened to them.
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.
My first distro was Redhat back in like 96? Then I moved to Slackware and never looked back and still use it today.
Praise "Bob" and Slack off!
They havnt been slacking for 30 years
Great to see
Closest I got to running it though was Zenwalk for about 6 months in 2009
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.
Oh man, I completely forgot this happening to me lol.
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.
Happy birthday, you always will be my first love <3
impressive
great distro.
Happy Birthday Slackware, congrats! Started on Redhat personally, then Mandrake, and finally settled on Gentoo for years. Setting that up for the first time was… interesting.
You typed Slackware, but I was thinking "Slack" and thinking there is no fucking way Slack has been around for 30 years already.
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