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We do have a new CMS ready for slackware.com (not Wordpress) but it still needs some programming work to get stuff in good order like the Security lists.
We chose to spend our time on finalizing Slackware 14 instead of working on website content & functionality. That is why the old web site code was updated to run on a modern host.
I hope that some of us will find the time to finalize the new slackware.com site after teh Slackware 14 release.
Once you Slack
You never go back....
The learning curve Pat spoke about is probably the main reason
slackers are so loyal.
I started on RedHat (friend had a disc) back in 98 because I needed to learn programming
properly on a system that had compilers and tools for it. RPM wasn't exactly to my liking.
Later I bought a PC magazine which had a Slackware7.1 disc taped on the backside.
Thought I'd try it out. It had much more of a UNIX-feel to it, somewhat resembling the
systems we had at the University. Anyway I got hooked, been a Slacker ever since,
and probably will be for as long as Slackware remains on the hardcore course.
I am actually a bit disappointed at the way hal, udev and messagebus have become
requirements for a large part of the system.
But that's just me...
Having seen the previous post, I decided to hang the translation that I made for the Serbian language. For all Serbian Slackware fans around the world - go ahead and enjoy
Location: Upstate New York (leatherstocking region)
Distribution: Slackware
Posts: 1
Rep:
Thanks for a very comprehensive and informative interview! Patrick doesn't normally get the air time that other Linux luminaries seem to get, so this is wonderful.
I've been using Slackware since 2.0 In 1994 I had a student account on Vanderbilt University's VAX machine with a 2 MB account limit, which was an enormously generous amount of disk space at that time. I had planned to install SLS, but ran across a USENET posting suggesting that Slackware was a more comprehensive distribution with a better installation process, so I figured I'd give Slackware a try. I FTP'd the disc images one by one to my VAX account, used kermit to transfer them to my PC at school, then copied them onto floppies. I installed them on an old 386-SX with 1 MB of RAM at home. Can't even recall what the video board was - probably some type of diamond I suppose. It took me 2+ weeks of blind groping to get X Window going. In the end, I stumbled across someone else's conf file that just happened to work. Complete dumb luck. I was totally enthralled.
Over the past nearly 20 years I've tried a lot of other distros on for size: RedHat, Fedora, SuSE, Debian, LFS, Ubuntu, and a few crazy little distros lost to the mists of time. Each of these have strengths and weaknesses as well as quirks that you either love or hate. In the end, I always seem to end up scrubbing the installation and reinstalling Slackware. Call it inertia or whatever, but I like the fact that it is one of the least intrusive distros out there - it "feels" like Unix. Package management is trivial, and compiling programs from source still rocks.
Anyway, kudos to P.V. for his amazing perseverance and dedication.
Awesome, awesome interview. Slackware will always be my favorite Linux distribution -- it's the distro that got me to love Linux back in the day (circa 1999/2000) -- and it's still on my machines today. Thanks for all the hard work, Pat, and I am really glad that the project is still going strong.
Back in 1995 I bought from a Chicago user group several versions of linux and free software. It included a big manual for setting hardware and debuggin problems. Not even once did my PC crashed with Slackware. Since I was working with a Unix data base on a what was then a 3 CPU Mainframe at my Job ( Puerto Rico Telephone Company ) on a data base with 1,500,000 + records I did some usefull work in it. Now I'm trying to find instructions on how to make bootable a 64GB USB Flash and a 32GB USB Flash.
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