Slackware is 30 years old
=========================
This week is the celebration of the 30th birthday of
Slackware.
Version 1.0 of Slackware was announced on the July 16, 1993.
When I started using Linux, in 1996. it was Slackware.
Looking at the timeline with the releases on Wikipedia, it was
probably Slackware 3.0.
At that time, it was quite normal that the first thing to do
after an install was to compile a new kernel, in order to have
your hardware supported.
Next steps
----------
I used Slackware for about a year, and then moved to RedHat,
which was still a great open source organization at the time,
and didn't have that awful word 'Enterprise' in its name.
The big lure of RedHat was the use of rpm to install packages,
which resolved the dependencies problems.
I stayed with RedHat until the year 2000, when it released
RedHat 7.0. Compared to the previous release, this was a very
bloated release, reason for me to move on.
After trying a few different distro's, I went to Debian, which
I have been using for many years, playing with BSD on the
side.
Slackware in User Mode Linux
----------------------------
At some point, Debian suddenly dropped all support for the GIF
image format, because of some dispute regarding a compression
method. This was a big problem for me, because at a regular
interval I had to transfer a lot of LaTeX fragments into HTML.
I did this for a statistical institute.
Most fragments has some formula in it, and the C program I
used for the conversion created a GIF image for every element
in the formula.
I was toying with User Mode Linux (UML) at the time, this is I
think the first kind of virtual machine on Linux.
Because I had a short deadline for the LaTeX to HTML
conversion, I quickly set up a User Mode Linux environment
based on Slackware and migrated my scripts to it.
From that moment on, I have kept the User Mode Linux
environment for the conversions, until the institute ended the
consignment, a few years later.
Switch to BSD
-------------
The adoption of systemd by Debian was my cue, and I migrated
most of my systems to FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
I still have fond memories of Slackware.
Patrick Volkerding has been creating this distribution from
the very first day until now. We all owe respect and gratitude
for that!
