Slackware

Slackware is a free and open source operating

system. It was one of the earliest operating
systems to be built on top of the Linux kernel and is
the oldest currently being maintained. Slackware
was created by Patrick Volkerding of Slackware
Linux, Inc. in 1993. The current stable version is
13.1, released on May 24, 2010.

Slackware aims for design stability and simplicity,

and to be the most "Unix-like" Linux distribution,
using plain text files for configuration and making
as few modifications to software packages as
possible from upstream.

Name
The name "Slackware" stems from the fact that the
distribution started as a private side project with
no intended commitment. To prevent it from being
taken too seriously at first, Volkerding gave it a
humorous name, which stuck even after Slackware
became a serious project.

The "slack" in Slackware is a reference to the term

"slack" as used by the Church of the SubGenius.

History
Slackware was originally descended from the
Softlanding Linux System, the most popular of the
original Linux distributions. SLS dominated the
market until the developers made a decision to
change the executable format from a.out to ELF.
This was not a popular decision among SLS's user base at the time. Patrick Volkerding released
a modified version of SLS, which he named Slackware. The first Slackware release, 1.00, was on
July 16, 1993. It was supplied as 3½" floppy disk images that were available via anonymous FTP.
In 1999, Slackware's release number jumped from 4 to 7. Patrick Volkerding explained this as a
marketing effort to show that Slackware was as up-to-date as other Linux distributions, many of
which had release numbers of 6 at the time.

In 2005, the GNOME desktop environment was removed from the pending future release
(starting with 10.2), and turned over to community support and distribution. The removal of
GNOME was seen by some in the Linux community as significant because the desktop
environment is found in many Linux distributions. In lieu of this, several community-based
projects began offering complete GNOME distributions for Slackware.

Design philosophy
Many design choices in Slackware can be seen as examples
of the KISS principle. In this context, "simple" refers to the
viewpoint of system design, rather than ease of use. Most
software in Slackware uses the configuration mechanisms
supplied by the software's original authors; there are few
distribution-specific mechanisms. This is the reason there are
so few GUI tools to configure the system. As a result, users
with less knowledge of command line interfaces may
experience a steeper learning curve, when using Slackware.

The 64-bit Slackware distribution does not ship with 32-bit

compatibility libraries. This is in marked contrast with other
common distributions. On the "downside", this means that
some applications will have larger memory footprints than
on other systems. On the "upside", the lack of compatibility
libraries and 32-bit applications reduces the complexity of the overall system.

Package management
Slackware's package management system can install, upgrade, and remove packages from local
sources, but makes no attempt to track or manage dependencies, relying on the user to ensure
that the system has all the supporting system libraries and programs required by the new
package. If any of these are missing, there may be no indication until one attempts to use the
newly installed software.

Slackware packages are tarballs. Prior to version 13.0, the compression method was gzip with
filenames ending in .tgz. Beginning with version 13.0, the compression method for packages
was changed from gzip to LZMA. With the change in compression method, the filename
extension was changed to .txz so there would be no confusion between the two package
formats. The updated package manager maintains support for the older package format.
The package contains the files that form part of the software being installed, as well as
additional files for the benefit of the Slackware package manager. The files that form part of the
software being installed are organized such that, when extracted into the root directory, their
files are placed in their installed locations. The other files are those placed under the install/
directory inside the package.

Two files are commonly found in the install/ directory, which are the slack-desc and doinst.sh
files. These are not placed directly into the filesystem in the same manner as the other files in
the package. The slack-desc file is a simple text file which contains a description of the package
being installed. This is used when viewing packages using the package manager. The doinst.sh
file is a shell script which is usually intended to run commands or make changes which could
not be best made by changing the contents of the package. This script is run at the end of the
installation of a package.

Dependency resolution
While Slackware itself does not incorporate tools to resolve dependencies for the user by
automatically downloading and installing them, some community supported software tools do
provide this function, similar to the way APT does for Debian and its derivatives.

Swaret and slackpkg were included as extra packages in the Slackware 9.1 CD #2, but were not
installed by default. Swaret was removed from the distribution as of Slackware 10.0 but is still
available as a community supported package. As of Slackware 12.2, slackpkg has been added as
the official remote package manager.

SlackIns is a complete and simple Qt-based graphical user interface for installing packages.

slapt-get is a command line utility that functions in a similar way to APT. While slapt-get does
provide a framework for dependency resolution, it does not provide dependency resolution for
packages included within the Slackware distribution. However, several community package
sources and Slackware based distributions take advantage of this functionality. Gslapt is a
graphical interface to slapt-get.

NetBSD's pkgsrc provides support for Slackware, among other Unix-like operating systems.
pkgsrc provides dependency resolution for both binary and source packages. pkgsrc-on-slack
The goal of this project is to promote the use of pkgsrc on Linux, and expand Slackware (and
derivative distributions) with additional packages.

Tukaani pkgtools replaces the Slackware pkgtools (installpkg, upgradepkg, etc.) with enhanced
versions that provide network downloading capabilities and an early version of the alternative
compression support now found in Slackware pkgtools.
Emerde is an adaptation of the Gentoo portage system that can co-exist with the native
Slackware system.

Releases
Slackware's latest stable i486 and x86_64 releases are at version 13.1 (as of 2010-05-24), which
include support for ALSA, GCC 4.4.4, Linux 2.6.33.4, KDE 4.4.3 and Xfce 4.6.1.

There is also a testing / developmental version of Slackware called '-current'kl898 that can be
used for a more bleeding edge configuration.

Hardware architectures
Slackware has traditionally concentrated solely on 32-bit architecture and previous releases
were available as 32-bit only. Users wanting 64-bit were required to use unofficial ports such as
slamd64. As of Slackware 13.0, a 64-bit variant is available and officially supported in
symmetrical development with the 32-bit platform.

Slackware is also available for the ARM architecture in the form of ARMedslack which has been
declared "official" by Patrick Volkerding.

Slackware for the IBM S/390 architecture is also still actively developed and maintained in both
-current and -stable forms.

An unofficial 'Slackintosh' project offers Slackware for PPC Macintosh hardware with a New
World ROM.

Community-supported software
Repositories of community maintained and supported binary Slackware packages are provided
by linuxpackages.net and slacky.eu. These projects may include more recent versions of
software or software not provided by Slackware Linux.

SlackBuilds.org is a community-supported project for acquiring SlackBuild script of extra

software not included within Slackware. A SlackBuild build script contains the build instructions
and a source download link for building a particular package for your system. This is identical to
the way Slackware's official packages are built and is meant to address possible
incompatibilities with community created binary packages while sacrificing the portability of
typical binary distribution.

SlackFind is a package search service for Slackware.

Since GNOME was dropped from Slackware Linux, several community projects now provide
GNOME binary packages and Slackbuilds for Slackware Linux. These include Dropline
GNOME[19], GSB: GNOME SlackBuild, GWARE, Gnome-Slacky, and SlackBot.