History of Slackware

Slackware is a free operating system. It is one of the earliest Linux distributions and is the oldest currently being maintained.^[1] Slackware was created by Patrick Volkerding of Slackware Linux, Inc. in 1993. The current stable version is 12.2, released on December 10, 2008.

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.^[3]

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.^[5] The first Slackware release, 1.00, was on July 16, 1993.^[6] It was supplied as 3½” floppy disk images that were available by anonymous FTP.

In 1999, Slackware’s release numbers saw a large increment from 4 to 7. This was explained by Patrick Volkerding 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 (such as Red Hat releasing each revision of its distribution with an increment of 4.1 to 5.0 instead of 3.1 to 3.2 as Slackware did).^[7]

In 2005, the GNOME desktop environment was removed from the pending future release, and turned over to community support and distribution.^[8] 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.

Package management

Slackware mascot

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 gzipped tarballs with filenames ending with .tgz. 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.

Source : en.wikipedia.org