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11. Why Slackware?

11.1 Why Slackware ?

What is the best distribution? Why is Raven based around Slackware, not Red Hat or FT or debian ?

No reason at all. I just happened that way.

My first Linux was a SLS set of floppies, I loaded them, played with them, and did other more interesting things. Eventually I decided to upgrade my system to a CDROM, and see if any real apps made it worth double-geeking my life.

I dumped the diskettes on a friend and got a Yddgrasil CD, a CDROM, a modem and (err ...) a phone line and Internet account. I resigned.

The Yggdrasil came as a CDROM and a boot floppy, and they both worked, with ZERO installation. The hard disk wasn't even needed, until my 8M and X11 reminded me to create a swap disk. Everything ran from the CDROM. To get the extra apps I subscribed to InfoMagic's Linux Developers Resource, (it certainly has been), and saved a lot of time on the modem.

As a gesture to work, I demonstrated a triple boot trix, with Internet and ethernet. It had WIN311 in 150 M, SVR4 in 280 M and Linux on an 80M Syquest cartridge (I took out the system and handed it to them). It had all TCP apps working, but regrettably I only had the screen at 640x480 (512k Gas Plasma display). Whilst tooling up I got a second machine (raven), and stopped having hassles when cold building trix.

Eventually, the postage system got my resignation through to my boss, so I started on the Raven project in ernest. Then the house became un-inhabitable, rescheduling my sanity as well as Raven. A twisty turny path later, I'm still using Slackware (and still looking for somewhere to live).

The Slackware upgrade to ELF (long ago), was the simplest most natural step, and way ahead of the opposition. I was impressed (though I did a build from scratch).

InfoMagic don't produce distributions, they copy them to CDROM, and distribute them. The more recent upgrade from Kernel 1.2.13 to 2.0 (eg via 1.3) was not particularly well supported in any release on the Apr 96 snapshots, but when Linux 2.0 was announced, the others soon announced their new products.

Infomagic LDR doesn't come with support, but InfoMagic had already fixed the bug I sent them (seems fair, they sent it to me). And they sent that response quickly.

Other than that Slackware works.


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