Slackware Turns 30: Oldest Surviving Linux Distro!!

Key Takeaways

August 25th 1991 a young Linus 12 votes posted to the Minix Usenet group about a project he was working on that was just a hobby and won't be big and professional like gnu on this day he unveiled the Linux kernel to the world or at least to the handful of people in the minute to use net group and then a few short years later on July 16 1993 the legendary slackware was born I and many others have mistakenly called it the oldest Linux distro this is definitely not the case there is at least five distros and two other things which you could argue or maybe a distro that pre-dated it by at least a year all of those projects for a very long time now have been very very dead though but as of a couple of days ago slackware had another birthday this makes for another year the oldest surviving linuxistro turning 30 years old now in case you're curious the second oldest surviving distro is Debian only being beaten by a couple of months that project started on September 15 1993. so when that birthday rolls around expect a fairly similar video about Debian instead so I thought hey to commemorate the occasion let's look back at how it all started how was slackware made who made it and why was it made so slackware was created by Patrick volkading born on October 20th 1966. he was awarded his Bachelor of Science by the Minnesota State University Moorhead in the project he is informally known as the man and more officially known as slackware's bdfl the benevolent dictator for life and even until this day he is still running the project now maybe it's just me but the first thing I wondered is what's the deal with the name why slackware well initially the project wasn't intended to be taken seriously but over the years the name kind of just stuck so Patrick is a member of the Church of the sub genius and that is a whole topic unto itself and I'm sure there is plenty of YouTube videos on it but as a tldr it is a parody religion that satirizes better known belief systems one of its tenants is the pursuit of slack it is software pursuing slack it is slack wear slackware now the figurehead of this religion is a character known as J.R Bob Dobbs The Bob is very important it must always be in quotation marks and must always be in the name now you'll see this character referenced in the mascot for slackware being tucks smoking a pipe and there have been various other references placed in the distro over the years and to be honest that's probably a whole video unto itself but in this one I also want to talk about other things when I said there were distros that predated slackware I didn't just say that as a random offhand comment I said it because slackware was big based on one of them SLS or soft Landing Linux system created by Peter McDonald this contained a comprehensive software suite allowing for things like X11 support tcpip support you you see peace support it had gnu emacs it had the gnu user land it was a Linux distro now none of that sounds that impressive by today's standards but for back then this was a really big deal to have everything bundled together this Project's been dead for a very very long time but for that short period of time when it did live it was a really really popular Linux distro now keep in mind that in the context of really popular before slackware Debian red hat or anything that we know today exists it was popular amongst the very small handful of people that were using Linux at the time the reason it was so popular is how complete the software suite was and the soft Landing part of the name comes into that as well it was supposed to be a soft Landing from those migrating over from dos once again that kind of Ages the system as well the problem is whilst there was a lot of software the distro was considered to be fairly buggy and also not that well maintained so whilst there was a lot of software a lot of it got very quickly out of date and at the time Patrick was still a student at the Minnesota State University Moorhead and also a user of SLS now much of this origin of slackware is going to be taken from two interviews one from the Sydney Morning Herald in 2002 and another from linuxjournal.com in 1994. in case you're curious just how quickly slackware became popular this is how quickly at the time pat Patrick was in need of a lisp interpreter why exactly he needed it isn't entirely clear but judging by the rest of the story it was likely for one of his classes he discovered that c-list was available for use over on SLS he installed the system and it did the job clearly but as anyone would do as you're using a newly developing technology he was talking about it and a few weeks later his AI Professor was interested and asked Patrick how to set up Linux he was looking to do so on his home computers and a small portion of the University's computers because Unix was already massive at this time but this new Linux thing was gaining a bit of popularity and maybe it makes sense for the University to at least experiment with it so he did exactly that he helped out as Professor along with making a bunch of notes on how to get SLS in a good State updating software fixing bugs things like this the problem is there was so much wrong with SLS that do doing the fixes took basically as long as installing the distro now SLS didn't have a package manager which wouldn't matter because the packages would have been out of date anyway so what you would have to do if you wanted to update the software is download the source code and compile it yourself now because the professor had some level of respect for his time he asked hey is there any possibility to automate these changes during the install process this became the prequel the origin the Catalyst whatever term you want to use of slackware but at this point it's generally not considered the start date of the project it was still a private thing between Patrick and this professor going forward he continued upgrading packages fixing bugs fixing permission issues upgrading the kernel upgrading shared libraries and all of this other stuff to make the system actually good by the time he was was done he had upgraded half the entire software on the system even with that clearly showing that SLS was not in a good seat at the time he had absolutely no intention to initially release it because he felt like he didn't need to saying at the time s less would be putting out a new version that included these things soon enough luckily though he had friends that urged him to change his mind so at least go and make a post and ask the community about it he made a post titled anyone want an SLS like 0.99 pl11a system which is a really long way of saying do you want me to Fork this system and maintain it myself and his surprise he got a lot of positivity the problem is it was 1993 and unlike today a refinished server you can just go to any random VPS company give them five dollars and you have a server in the next 30 sec back at this time it required a little bit more work luckily he was a university student so he went to the local admin at his university and asked for permission to upload slackware to the FTP server and that admin agreed on that day slackware 1.0 was released to the public as 24 three and a half inch floppy images and it also killed the FTP server because he didn't expect it would be so popular so quickly because people really wanted an updated version of SLS but luckily it wasn't down for good Patrick was offered support by Walnut Creek CD-ROM and later in the story they are going to be very important moving into the mid 90s we saw the continued growth of Linux and we also saw the rise of some of the early commercial Linux distros things like Caldera red hat and it existed slightly before slackware egged Brazil by today's standards their profit was absolutely tiny but two or three years prior there was no commercial Linux all of a sudden this new industry was just spawning out of nowhere and Linux was getting more and more popular and Patrick was paying attention to this during this period Patrick was approached by Michael Johnston of Moore's telecommunications who wanted to sell copies of slackware now prior to this point slackware was a completely non-commercial venture but seeing the success of these commercial distros and it becoming kind of clear that maybe some level of funding would be a good idea he said okay let's do it the contract they had was for six months and wasn't exactly a great one he was being offered one USD per copy sold now plenty of copies did sell but one USD per copy you have to sell a lot of slackware to make a reasonable amount of money from that afterwards he moved to another vendor Walnut Creek CD-ROM this was a Company formed by Bob Bruce which honestly is a great name and for any of you guys who've been around for a really long time you probably recognize the thing they ran the biggest FTP site at the time ftp.cd-rom.com this was famous for Distributing FreeBSD ID games and other things like that alongside slackware they were a master distributor of freeware and shareware also becoming one of the first companies to sell free software one of those things being slackware for a short period this was a relatively successful Endeavor the problem is something that Patrick had no ability to stop the end of the 90s when the.com Bubble Burst and when that happened a lot of tech companies went with it one of those companies being Walnut Creek they ended up merging with bsdi and eventually being acquired by Wind River now Wind River is still around today and does do a lot of stuff with Linux but at the time they were a lot more interested in BSD and didn't really care to distribute slackware this left slackware without a publisher once again right before a release was going to happen but Patrick was on really good terms with Bob and from my understanding is still today so they teamed up to form slackware Inc to self-publish slackware and from then on the rest is pretty much history even since the rise of Debian and red hat but especially since the rise of Ubuntu Fedora and all of these other distros slackware has generally fallen out of favor and it's not entire entirely due to these other distros just being better over the years the developers had various health concerns and there has been this General lack of support during certain periods there have been a few instances where it seemed like the project was just completely dead and nothing was going to happen every single time though Patrick has come back and the project has slowly moved forward again whilst is still moving fairly slowly today it is still very much alive with the latest release being February 2022 so congratulations to slackware for surviving 30 years I hope 30 years later the project is still going so let me know your thoughts in the comment section down below are you a slackware user maybe a modern slackway used or maybe a classic slackware user that wants to tell your story I would love to know let me know in the comment section down below and if you liked the video do like the video and if you really like the video and you want to be comma one over these amazing people over here check out the patreon scribes liberope Linked In the description down below that's gonna be it for me and pursue Slack [Music] then I don't accept [Music] [Music]