17 Facts About Slackware

Slackware is a Linux distribution created by Patrick Volkerding in 1993.

Originally based on Softlanding Linux System, Slackware has been the basis for many other Linux distributions, most notably the first versions of SUSE Linux distributions, and is the oldest distribution that is still maintained.

Slackware aims for design stability and simplicity and to be the most "Unix-like" Linux distribution.

In contrast to most modern Linux distributions, Slackware provides no graphical installation procedure and no automatic dependency resolution of software packages.

Slackware is available for the IA-32 and x86_64 architectures, with a port to the ARM architecture.

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Slackware refers to the "pursuit of Slack", a tenet of the Church of the SubGenius, a parody religion.

Slackware found CLISP was available for Linux and downloaded SLS to run it.

Size of Slackware quickly increased with the addition of included software, and by version 2.

Volkerding made the decision to bump the version 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.

Slackware chose 7, estimating that most other distributions would soon be at this release number.

In May 2009, Patrick Volkerding announced the public release of an official x86_64 variant, called Slackware64, maintained in parallel with the IA-32 distribution.

Slackware64 is a pure 64-bit distribution in that it does not support running or compiling 32-bit programs it was designed as "multilib-ready".

Design philosophy of Slackware is oriented toward simplicity, software purity, and a core design that emphasizes lack of change to upstream sources.

Many design choices in Slackware can be seen as a heritage of the simplicity of traditional Unix systems and as examples of the KISS principle.

For custom installations or 3rd-party packages, Slackware relies on the user to ensure that the system has all the supporting system libraries and programs required by the program.

Some repositories will include both SlackBuilds and the resulting Slackware packages, allowing users to either build their own or install a pre-built package.

In July 2016, the developer of Slackware ARM announced that the development and build tools had been enhanced to reduce the manual effort involved in maintaining the ARM port, and proceeded to announce that a 32-bit hardware floating port was in development.