Talk:Slackware

message: 17 Jul 1993 at 00:16:36
Every so often, someone "corrects" the release date for Slackware. This is rather understandable, seeing as how various websites give various dates. For example: 
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"The first version was released on July 13th, 1993."
http://polishlinux.org/linux/
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"Initial release 16 July 1993"
-- Current infobox on Wikipedia. 
"it was released as "Slackware 1.0" on July 16th, 1993.":
http://connie.slackware.com/~alien/tdose2009/t-dose-slackware.tex
"First released on July 16, 1993, Slackware has come a long way..."
http://lwn.net/Articles/91467/
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"Slackware 1.0.0 was released 10 years ago today, on July 17th, 1993!"
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/slackware-turns-10-years-old-today-73560/
"Slackware, started by Patrick Volkerding in late 1992, and initially released to the world on July 17, 1993"
http://www.slackbook.org/html/introduction-slackware.html
"1993-07-17 [Version] 1.0":
http://www.slackdown.co.uk/history.html
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"1993-07-18   Slackware Linux Distribution 1.00"
http://www.informatica.co.cr/linux-distributions/index.html
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The above sources mean that we will keep getting people "correcting" the date, but the release date right from Patrick J. Volkerding's mouth, posted on the Slackware website is here:
http://www.slackware.com/announce/1.0.php
Another source of confusion is the second announcement two days later:
http://www.informatica.co.cr/linux-distributions/research/1993/0718.html
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.announce/msg/870d1a0ae6b3b504?dmode=source
Our reliable source ( http://www.slackware.com/announce/1.0.php ) gives us a date and time of:
1993-07-16 17:21:20 PST
Now for the interesting question...
If we assume that the above was set to Pacific Standard Time with Daylight Saving on, then the date and time was 17 July 1993 00:21:20 (UTC).
However, it says "PST" not "PDT", which signifies Pacific Standard Time with Daylight Saving off. With that assumption the date and time was 16 July 1993 23:21:20 (UTC).
But wasn't Patrick Volkerding a student at Minnesota State University Moorhead at the time?  His sig has a moorhead.msus.edu email address. Minnesota is in the Central Time Zone, not the Pacific Time Zone.
BTW, the slackbook.org site with the July 17 date listed above is the official guide to Slackware. Linux. See http://slackware.com/book/
So, my fellow Slackwaristas, what is the UTC time and date for the announcement?  And what date should we list? --Guy Macon (talk) 02:20, 10 August 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Note: All of the references to PST above appear to be an artifact caused by someone at Slackware cutting and pasting from Google Groups but failing to click on the "show original" link. That gave them times that Google "helpfully" converted to their local time. --Guy Macon (talk) 18:36, 30 August 2012 (UTC)

text: As a final note for anyone revisiting this in the future who may wonder why we are using GMT and UTC interchangeably, GMT used to be the world standard for time, but in 1986 we started using UTC (which is identical to GMT for our purposes) as the the world standard for time and GMT as the standard time zone for the Prime Meridian, (Zero Longitude). Back in 1993 there was still a lot of software using GMT, including most USENET newsreaders. --Guy Macon (talk) 12:43, 25 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  ANNOUNCE: Slackware Linux Distribution 1.00 

message: New screenshot for Slackware 14.0. I thought it would be nice to see some Slack-specific tool, so I included pkgtool. --Philip Lacroix (talk) 10:39, 24 May 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Very nice! That really improves the article. --Guy Macon (talk) 18:32, 24 May 2013 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thanks! --Philip Lacroix (talk) 08:30, 27 May 2013 (UTC)
replies: text:  I like it, too. The nice things is that the screenshot shows a modern desktop GUI and a console windows with a command line programm. This is a visual symbol of Slackware's typical mixed approach: old school core in a modern frame :-) -- Germanopratin (talk)  —Preceding undated comment added 13:11, 6 June 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Screenshot updated to Slackware 14.0 

message: (Regarding the above section) I sent an email to the usual Slackware info address. The subject line is "Wikipedia email from Guy Macon"
Patrick, I know that you are busy, but any help you could give us in getting the details right would be very much appreciated. This is the right place to do that. (There is a nice guide for how to suggest changes to a page about yourself or your company at Wikipedia:Plain and simple conflict of interest guide.)
For an example of where help would be appreciated, see Talk:Slackware#ANNOUNCE: Slackware Linux Distribution 1.00.
I went to a lot of trouble reconciling the fact that we have two reliable sources (slackware.com and your original 1993 posts to comp.os.linux and comp.os.linux.announce) that give us different release dates for Slackware 1.00. My conclusion was that slackware.com got wrong information from Google groups. It would be very helpful if you either could confirm that and post the correct information on slackware.com or tell me I am wrong, that the slackware.com date is correct, and that it is the USENET posts that have bad dates. 
Also helpful would be you taking a look at our Patrick Volkerding page, checking it for errors, and posting any suggested changes at Talk:Patrick Volkerding. 
Again, I don't want to add to your workload, but I would like Wikipedia to be as accurate as possible. --Guy Macon (talk) 16:10, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: No response so far. I am going to try again. --Guy Macon (talk) 12:41, 4 August 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: I wouldn't worry about the release announcement, it could be that he had re-posted the earlier announcement later in the year, and then when he went to look for a copy of it just grabbed that one for posting on the site.  The usenet messages are date stamped, so it's reliable and accurate. I would think it's not a big enough concern for him to bother with changing the text on slackware.com. He's probably less obsessed with accuracy of dating than some folks here.  As to the other things, the pages look pretty accurate.  As far as images go, what images do you think are needed?  Installed system images can be provided by anybody who can download and install slackware.  Centerone (talk) 15:40, 4 August 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: The usenet messages posted on slackware.com are date stamped with an incorrect, modified date and time.   :(   Call me "obsessed with accuracy" if you want. but I think that is worth  fixing. --Guy Macon (talk) 18:29, 4 August 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Help Needed From Patrick Volkerding 

message: Clarification bugs are posted in this section at "software purity" (where Slackware is promoting the idea of distributing softwear with as little modification as possible, "as close to the original programmers intent as they can," as they put it).
Also there is another bug where they discuss how it might be easier for UNIX users to feel familiar with. This refers to the Slackware philosophy to attempt to be "the most UNIX-like Linux distribution."
See the distribution README files.
Leeeoooooo (talk) 17:04, 31 August 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Design Philosophy clarification? 

message: unofficial support for Slackware is available in the 'Slackware' forum om the LinuxQuestions web site. Many of the dev team drop in there rather regularly...
Leeeoooooo (talk) 18:11, 31 August 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: The section titled "Support" discusses the question, how long a release is actively maintained in terms of security fixes. This should be stated more clearly. User support as addressed above is not offically offered. --Boobarkee (talk) 09:56, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Support 

message: Look at Ubuntu (operating system)#Releases and Ubuntu version history. Should we do something similar with Slackware? --Guy Macon (talk) 12:34, 27 November 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: There used to be one (), but it was removed in April 2016 due to it being "not notable for separate article" and was redirected back to Slackware. However, the previous "article" (I use that term loosely) basically mimicked DistroWatch, but with a lot less info. I imagine if someone were to take the time to build one like Ubuntu's it would be notable enough, but I was finding it to be hard enough getting enough info for some of the "Notable changes" on the version table that I added. Maybe it was just because I didn't want to dig through changelogs and compare the newer changelogs with the older ones. But if someone were to undertake it, I'd try to contribute.--Bassmadrigal (talk) 19:07, 27 November 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Separate version history article?

message: I've spent the past few weeks on and off (especially with the holidays) working on the repositories section. However, I ended up deviating quite far from the original version, so I wanted to get some thoughts on it before I switched it in the article itself. I currently have it as a subpage in my sandbox. Feel free to check it out and let me know what you think. I'm open to any comments, suggestions, or criticism. Thanks for your time! --Bassmadrigal (talk) 20:00, 4 January 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Since there were no comments or complaints, I updated the repositories section today. --Bassmadrigal (talk) 03:57, 15 January 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Repositories Section Overhaul 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 7 external links on Slackware. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20121027210858/http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/distributions/slackware-1.1.2/a3/install.end to http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/distributions/slackware-1.1.2/a3/install.end
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20111009004917/http://ftp.df.lth.se/pub/slackware/slackware-2.1/README.210 to http://ftp.df.lth.se/pub/slackware/slackware-2.1/README.210
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20150626150828/http://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-10.0/ChangeLog.txt to ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-10.0/ChangeLog.txt
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20141017000736/http://ftp.slackware-brasil.com.br/historic/slackware-3.1/ChangeLog.txt to ftp://ftp.slackware-brasil.com.br/historic/slackware-3.1/ChangeLog.txt
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20160814204937/http://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-9.0/ChangeLog.txt to ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-9.0/ChangeLog.txt
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20130306154020/http://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-14.0/ChangeLog.txt to ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-14.0/ChangeLog.txt
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20141019044828/http://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-14.1/ChangeLog.txt to ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-14.1/ChangeLog.txt
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 18:32, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I replaced all links to mirrors with mirrors.slackware.com for uniformity. I also switched Slackware Arm's reference from ftp to http, which should fix the issue. This fixes all dead links for mirrors (and all known dead links except for the ibiblio.org one). --Bassmadrigal (talk) 23:59, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: As the subject says, based on this edit, mirror.slackware.com links are marked as dead. However, they work fine on my system. Is this because of the "mirror brain" (or whatever it's called) that's used, which automatically routes connections to a local mirror? I went through and redid all the links to changelogs to point to that domain, and if it's going to cause deadlinks to appear, we should adjust them to a different site (but one that is used uniformly, because we were using all sorts of different mirror addresses before I updated it). Thanks for any insight on this! --Bassmadrigal (talk) 00:54, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Anyone know why mirror.slackware.com links are showing up dead? 

message: For those old Slackware releases that doesn't have an EOL specified (or maybe even all of them), how about having a separate table entry with the date of "Last ChangeLog update" or some such? For those still actively updated one should probably put e.g "Still active" instead of date, so people doesn't have to update the wiki page for every update. Just some loose thoughts coming up a late night. Maybe others have thoughts about it too?  193.71.28.50 (talk) 00:57, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Thoughts about "No EOL specified" 

message: Hi
In this section we have "There are no official repositories for Slackware."
Then what is this:!
https://packages.slackware.com/
All official software packages(pre-compiled + source) are there. http://yousha.blog.ir/ (talk) 13:39, 22 August 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Slackware's official repository 

message: I removed the recent addition of the reasons for 32bit. Is not true that:
* 32bit hardware was inhibiting development (building packages could be slower than x86, but it does not inhibit the development)
* Hardware limitations block the adoption of the latest technologies (all packages were built in the unofficial 32bit ARM hard-float porting: https://bonslack.org/bonslack_armv7hl-current/ )
* Most of the other mainstream distributions ceased support for 32bit ARM (Arch Linux ARM, Debian, armbian, Fedora ARM still supports 32bit ARM; only Ubuntu has dropped ARM 32 bit support)
The main reason of ceasing the 32bit ARM support is the lack of time/resources (recently, also due to the increase of the cost of electricity in Europe: https://arm.slackware.com/ ). Lucabon (talk) 20:57, 23 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  ARM 32 bit official porting ceasing reasons