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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:
"The first version was released on July 13th, 1993."
http://polishlinux.org/linux/
"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/
"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
"1993-07-18 Slackware Linux Distribution 1.00"
http://www.informatica.co.cr/linux-distributions/index.html
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)
WOW! This is a truely sophisticated (and tough) question. Very hard to decide. My modest input:
First step: What's more important, the very truth or a formalistic truth (i.e. official SW sources)? Official sources should prevail: The SW website and the slackbook. All other sources should only overrule official statements if it can be proven, that the official sources are wrong. As I cannot identify a criterion to decide which source is (materially) correct, only the official SW sources should remain relevant - for formal (yet striking) reasons.
Second step: Which official source is "more" official, the slackbook or the website? I would go with the website, because it is most authoritative - the announcement comes straight from the original creator of SW. In the days of SW's inception he must have perfectly known when the project was released. So the announcement in http://www.slackware.com/announce/1.0.php is the key. As it stems from SW's creator and is posted on the official website, it is official twicefold. And it is also most precise. So what more can one expect! Well, a bit more actually, so lets move further.
Third step: BUT a more than minor problem lies - as you already said - in the ambiguity of the two authoritative announcements. They differ in 4 (!) aspects: date, newsgroup (comp.os.linux vs. comp.os.linux.announce), email address (!) and approval (the header of the later announcement has an "approved" entry). Without knowing the technical details of the newsgroup and Volkerding's circumstances I would chose the first announcement, just because it seems to be highly unlikely that Volkerding mixed something up with the announcements. It must have been this way, that he posted another announcement later.
Fourth step: Your reasoning conc. the timezone: I am not familiar with US timezones at all. As far as I know, Pat Volkerding had been at Moorhead univ. at that time, so it should be as you said. I just wonder if the timestamp was given by him or by the newsgroup software. Anyway, I guess that we could settle on this last step as being the decisive one. Only this announcement is relevant. Further analysis should focus on this announcement and clarify the cirumstances.
Germanopratin ( talk) 10:54, 22 August 2012 (UTC)
Here are the original headers from the comp.os.linux post:
Path: gmd.de !newsserver.jvnc.net !howland.reston.ans.net !usenet.ins.cwru.edu !cleveland.Freenet.Edu !bf703 From: bf703@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Patrick J. Volkerding) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux Subject: ANNOUNCE: Slackware Linux 1.00 Date: 17 Jul 1993 00:16:36 GMT Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH (USA) Lines: 76 Message-ID: <227gd4$jtq@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu> Reply-To: bf703@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Patrick J. Volkerding) NNTP-Posting-Host: hela.ins.cwru.edu
Everything in the above except Path and NNTP-Posting-Host came from Patrick Volkerding's computer. USENET does not change headers except for those two. In particular, USENET is dateless -- the message may arrive at a node days later with the date unchanged from what the poster set it to. Please note that "Patrick Volkerding's computer" may very well have been a remote computer in another time zone he was logged in to.
And here they are as Google Groups displays them:
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux From: bf703@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Patrick J. Volkerding) Date: 17 Jul 1993 00:16:36 GMT Local: Sat, Jul 17 1993 12:16 am Subject: ANNOUNCE: Slackware Linux 1.00
Notice that Google Groups converts the date to GMT and tacks on a "local" that converts the GMT to my "local" time. (My computer clock is is set to UTC, so they are the same)
Also note that http://www.slackware.com/announce/1.0.php has been modified to show PST instead of GMT.
Here are the original headers from the comp.os.linux.announce post:
Path: gmd.de !rrz.uni-koeln.de !news.dfn.de!darwin.sura.net !math.ohio-state.edu !howland.reston.ans.net !spool.mu.edu !uwm.edu !rpi !batcomputer !bounce-bounce From: volkerdi@mhd1.moorhead.msus.edu (Patrick J. Volkerding) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce Subject: ANNOUNCE: Slackware Linux Distribution 1.00 Followup-To: comp.os.linux Date: 18 Jul 1993 20:13:55 -0400 Organization: None Lines: 80 Sender: mdw@TC.Cornell.EDU Approved: linux-announce@tc.cornell.edu (Matt Welsh) Message-ID: <22cp03$be5@theory.TC.Cornell.EDU> Reply-To: volkerdi@mhd1.moorhead.msus.edu (Patrick J. Volkerding) NNTP-Posting-Host: theory.tc.cornell.edu Keywords: Slackware, distribution
And here they are as Google Groups displays them:
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce Followup-To: comp.os.linux From: volkerdi@mhd1.moorhead.msus.edu (Patrick J. Volkerding) Date: 18 Jul 1993 20:13:55 -0400 Local: Mon, Jul 19 1993 12:13 am Subject: ANNOUNCE: Slackware Linux Distribution 1.00
Again, Google Groups converts the date to GMT and tacks on a "local" that converts the GMT to my "local" time (also GMT).
The approved and sender headers are simply telling you that comp.os.linux is an unmoderated newsgroup, while comp.os.linux.announce is a moderated newsgroup. Some of the headers may have been modified by the system that did the approving, but almost certainly not the date.
The two email addresses are the two Patrick lists at the bottom of each post.
My conclusion is that Slackware 1.0 was released on 17 Jul 1993 00:16:36 GMT, and the local time for Patrick Volkerding was 16 July, based upon the following:
Time zone claimed in comp.os.linux USENET post: GMT
Time zone where Patrick Volkerding was living: CDT
Central Standard Time (CST) = GMT-6
Central Daylight Time (CDT) = GMT-5
Time zone claimed by
http://www.slackware.com/announce/1.0.php :PST
Pacific Standard Time (PST) = GMT-8
Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) = GMT-7
(It appears that whoever posted that got the info from Google Groups but failed to tell GG to show the original headers, thus they got a version "corrected" for their local time zone (Slackware Inc. is in Brentwood, California -- PST/PDT.))
Time zone claimed in comp.os.linux.announce post: -0400
Eastern Standard Time (EST) = GMT-5
Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) = GMT-4
So the only question is whether we use GMT or local time. I say GMT. That's what was in the original announcement. http://www.slackware.com/announce/1.0.php has been modified to show PST instead of GMT, but Google Groups (formerly DejaNews) has the actual unmodified headers, which show GMT.
Conclusion: Slackware 1.0 was released on 17 Jul 1993 at 00:16:36 GMT. -- Guy Macon ( talk) 19:58, 22 August 2012 (UTC)
I concur with your conclusion: UTC. That seems rather sensible to me. If anybody objects, he has to come up with a stronger argument. Germanopratin ( talk) 09:53, 25 August 2012 (UTC)
I noticed this revision: http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Slackware&diff=500916156&oldid=499501214 . I want to remark that the Slackware ChangeLog.txt will usually pay attribution to contributions from non-coreteam members. But the core team members themselves (like Robby Workman, Stuart Winter, Eric Jan Tromp, myself etc) are usually only mentioned nowadays in case of large updates (KDE, XFCE, X.Org) or when we thought of something smart. We use a private communications channel to discuss the development of Slackware around the clock, so basically everybody in the team contributes, even if they are not explicitly mentioned in the ChangeLog.txt.
Eric Hameleers Sat Jul 28 21:07:21 UTC 2012 —Preceding undated comment added 21:10, 28 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for clarifications from the very inside of Slackware. This is a rather hairy subject. Maybe it makes no sense at all to sort of rank (or even find out about) the input of SW contributors. As you clarified, it is hardly possible to do so from the outside. And even if it were possible from the inside: It would remain delicate for many reasons...
After all, it's not important who contributes the most, but it remains relevant to determine who is really part of core. Being informal is part of the SW culture, which is a sympathetic SW "feature" anyway. So trying to find a SW "core team" is quite "non-slackish", yet it matters for this article.
I guess we ought to change the section then - taking your information into account. Can you tell when that Change.log policy changed (pun not intended)? Germanopratin ( talk) 16:37, 25 August 2012 (UTC)
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)
The source model is described as "Free and open source", which is incorrect. Here is the list of software packages in Slackware 14.0 which are non-free. In particular, the kernel distributed with Slackware contains firmware blobs which are neither free nor open source. I propose we change the source model to "Mostly free and open source, with some non-free components". melikamp ( talk) 21:38, 26 July 2013 (UTC)
I moved this section up because the section below eats up the next section's title. melikamp ( talk) 21:38, 26 July 2013 (UTC)
Consider the following sequence of talk page comments:
Melikamp: " Here is the list of software packages in Slackware 14.0 which are non-free." ... "I propose we change the source model to 'Mostly free and open source, with some non-free components'."
Guy: "Anyone who cares about FOSS vs. non-FOSS is likely to have no problem getting the list of non-FOSS components at freeslack.net and purging them."
Melikamp: "Slackware, on the other hand, is being shipped with non-free components, and has no option to remove them."
Guy: "I am not sure why you believe that Slackware has no option to remove non-free components. The link you yourself provided ( http://freeslack.net/ ) clearly says 'the purging procedure is relatively straightforward. Simply remove offending packages with removepkg, configure, compile, and install a linux-libre kernel, and finally remove the stock kernel packages (kernel, modules, firmware).' Anyone who cannot do that is unlikely to be happy with Slackware anyway, because that's the standard way of updating Slackware. [7]"
Melikamp: "Slackware itself offers no way, tool, or option to either install a fully free OS or make it free post-install. (Not that an option like that would make much of a difference.) The fact that one can deblob Slackware is irrelevant, since this page is about Slackware as released by PV and team."
At this point I am at a loss, because Melikamp keeps making a false claim ("no option to remove them", "no way, tool, or option to either install a fully free OS or make it free post-install."), I keep refuting the false claim by explaining exactly how one makes Slackware free post-install using nothing but the standard Slackware package tools and a list of which components to remove, and finally Melikamp says that the fact that there is a way to make Slackware free post install is "irrelevant". How is showing how to make Slackware free post-install not relevant when countering a claim that there is no way to make Slackware free post install? I do not see how we can move forward from here.
I am also a bit frustrated by the fact that Melikamp says "A good example of is Debian" when a comparison with Debian suits his purposes but tells me "Comparison with other distributions is also irrelevant" when I attempt to make a comparison with Debian.
At this point I do not see how any further replies from me on this topic will be productive, so I will finish with this: I oppose Melikamp's proposal for the reasons I have given in the thread above, and I am watching to see what the consensus is (in the discussion here or though an RfC), which of course I will follow whether I agree with it or not. I support there being a paragraph in FOSS that explains the difference between "out of the box" free, "select an option during install" free, "run a tool after install" free, "possible but a lot of hard work to strip out the non-free components" non-free and "nobody has ever successfully stripped out the non-free components" non-free. I think we should write that up, put it in the FOSS article, and link to it from here. - Guy Macon ( talk) 16:37, 11 August 2013 (UTC)
Unfortunately, I am in no way able to provide a solution to this argument. As for free software, I have always considered the RMS point of view too radical. If a software developper decides to make his software non-free, I am completely fine with that. He makes the bytes, he makes the rules. Making a program non-free is a 100% valid market or else personal decision. But I DO care about open source because it provides a possibility to track trojans or spyware or else harmful or unwanted software. But as I said, I am not familiar enough with these topics to throw something worthwhile into this discussion.
Thus, I can only provide some purely formal hints or arguments:
Yes, Melikamp is wrong in stating that there is no way to make Slack free post-install. He himself gives a pointer to such a way. A pointer by the way, that I haven't been aware of. Well, there is no dedicated tool for purging. But it is a major trait of Slackware that there is an abundant lack of dedicated tools. Getting away with a modest bundle of standard tools - compilation, silent levitation of beer bottles and usage of the *pkg* suite - is the (beloved) Slackware way. That's all. That's enough.
Still, there is a difference between Slackware's spartan style and the description of Slackware in a Wikipedia article. Slack's way of making it hard for people who need long descriptions in order to get things done doesn't imply that an article on Slackware be Slackish as well.
What does "free and open source software" mean? Well, it means FOSS as defined by the respective Wikipedia article. The Slackware article points to the Wikipedia FOSS article. Therefore, it's not relevant what X or Y mean or Y thinks that Z means by using the term "FOSS" - it only is relevant what the WP FOSS article means. Thus, if Slackware is not free and open source in terms of the article it points to, the pointer could be considered "weak". Again, I can't judge if it actually is.
If we cannot find a convincing solution to that question, we should resort to other distro articles. This is not a 100% valid approach, because a statement does not become true only by complying to a majority of wrong statements. But if you can't decide on the truth of your statement, it is a plausible and common sense approach to go and check what others do.
How do other distro articles handle this? There is often a difference between the description in the text and the categorization in the info box. I will only go for the info boxes here:
Seems to be a bit messy. Plus: If you look at the info boxes on different Wikipedias (English, German, French, Spanish) - for the same entry you get different variants.
For instance UBUNTU: In the French Ubuntu page they simply omitted the "with proprietary components" clause. The Germans re-phrase it to just "open source". The Italians don't mess with FOSS and plainly state it is "GNU GPL". To the Dutch Ubuntu is "FOSS". In Denmark wikipedians describe the license as "GPL, GFDL".
Yes, RMS himself resp. his foundation, would consider none of the above listed OSes as free software distros, anyway. To be honest, I would appreciate it if the Slackware team could split its repositories in free and non-free etc. repos. But I am sure that they simply haven't got the time/man power or inclination to do so. Which is fine with me. Their task is huge already.
Conclusion: I have no idea what we ought to do. Maybe someone comes up with another perspective. After all, maybe it would be valuable to make a reference to the freeslack site. But I am not sure if the freeslack project is sufficiently complete to merit such a reference. As far as I can see, it only refers to Slackware 14.0 and seems to be work in progress. Anyway, this is a very valuable initiative. Perhaps though a pointer to it would not be justified, due to the project's incompleteness... Germanopratin ( talk) 13:08, 15 August 2013 (UTC)
@Melikamp
As I said above, your initiative "Freeslack" is a valuable project. But there is one aspect of your effort I would like to bring out, precisely because it correlates to this discussion:
You do not differentiate between free software and open source software. It would be a crucial info if package X is not open source or if X contains parts that are closed source. You only focus on the license but spare this open source aspect which is even more important as it is also a security issue.
Or is it that Slackware 14.0 - as shipped on DVD - is completely open source? Germanopratin ( talk) 17:52, 15 August 2013 (UTC)
This is just a matter of style, but it could improve the readability of the text. We are using different date formats in the article, e.g.: "17 July 1993" versus " June 18, 2002".
Wikipedia style rules state: (1) both of the formats above are allowed (2) within a text there should be consistent use of just *one* format
So, which one should we use? Germanopratin ( talk) 09:19, 11 August 2013 (UTC)
I think that there is not reason to put them in the table.
See:
====== ========== ======== 1.0.1 04/08/1993 0.99.12 1.0.2 05/09/1993 0.99pl12 1.0.3 15/09/1993 0.99pl12 1.0.4 01/10/1993 ? 1.1.1 12/12/1993 0.99.14 1.1.2 05/021994 0.99.15 1.2.0.1 01/04/1994 1.0 1.2.0.2 15/04/1994 1.0.8 1.2.0.3 21/04/1994 ? 2.0.1 18/09/1994 1.0.9 2.0.2 18/10/1994 1.1.54 8.1.01 19/06/2002 2.4.18
Hi folks. The logo that's currently displayed by the article says that it's rendered from the logo on the Slackware website, but I don't think that it could have been as it's not using the correct font. In any case, there's a better SVG version of the logo available from the site from this link: http://www.slackware.com/grfx/shared/Slackware_web_logo.svg
I'd like to see this replace the logo for this article. I'm a bit of a Wikipedia n00b otherwise I'd make the edit myself, but if anyone can take a look I'd appreciate it. Volkerdi ( talk) 04:31, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
(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)
This is to document the fact that I got the following email (Email and IP addresses removed; I can supply them if someone has a reason to see them.)
Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2013 23:13:38 -0600 From: "Patrick J. Volkerding" > From: Guy Macon [mailto:[deleted]@[deleted]] > > Hi! I am trying to confirm that the Wikipedia user at > /info/en/?search=User_talk:Volkerdi is Patrick J. Volkerding. > See discussion at > /info/en/?search=Talk:Slackware#Better_logo_from_the_official_Slackware_site Hey Guy! Yes, it's me. I'll try to get to some of your questions this weekend if I find a bit of time. Take care, Pat
The above email was sent to a new email address that I created just for this, and all of the headers indicate that it was sent from Slackware Inc. Identity confirmed; nobody else could have known what email address to send a spoof email to.
I am going to send a followup message asking Patrick if he could find time to:
-- Guy Macon ( talk) 14:59, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
Why is the DistroWatch page ranking even a thing? Who cares how many people visit a webpage about Slackware on some site? Why do I need to visit a page on a site about a distribution if I can just get the news about that distribution elsewhere, such as from the distribution itself? Sure, I could see reading the front page "latest news releases" to get information about a number of distros at once, but why would I go to the page about the specific distro? I say we should just remove the entire distrowatch section. It's meaningless. Centerone ( talk) 16:27, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
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)
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)
The history section doesn't really seem to chronicle the history of Slackware itself so much as just an almost-bullet-list of each version and the changes associated with it. I am thinking it would be beneficial to shorten this down to the major changes (Slackware 4-7 jump, removal of GNOME, switch from KDE 3.5 to 4.x, adding Slackware64) but in greater detail, rather than the notable changes from (almost) every release. With the way it currently is, it feels like you should have every release listed in there (it is missing several versions), but that seems like overkill. I also could not find any substantial reason for the separation of the History section to 1993-2003 and 2004-present. There didn't seem to be any major shift within Slackware to mark that separation and it looks like it was done just because of the large amount of items covered... which I think it more of a reason to minimize what is covered in there.
I propose to shrink the History section down to just a few major points of Slackware, and then add a column to the release table of "notable changes". It prevents duplicate information and consolidates the important parts. Here is a rough idea of the addition to the table (small section of copy/paste from the table I've been editing on my local machine):
Version | Release date | End-of-life date | Kernel version | Notable changes |
---|---|---|---|---|
12.2 | 2008-12-10 | 2013-12-09 [1] | 2.6.27.7 (patched to 2.6.27.31) [1] | |
13.0 | 2009-08-26 | No EOL announced | 2.6.29.6 | Introduced Slackware64, an official 64bit port, and switched from KDE 3.5 to 4.x |
13.1 | 2010-05-24 | No EOL announced | 2.6.33.4 | Added PolicyKit and ConsoleKit and switched to the libata subsystem |
13.37 | 2011-04-27 | No EOL announced | 2.6.37.6 | Added support for GPT and utilities for the Btrfs filesystem |
14.0 | 2012-09-28 | No EOL announced | 3.2.29 (patched to 3.2.45) [2] | Added NetworkManager. Removed HAL as its functionality was merged into udev |
14.1 | 2013-11-04 | No EOL announced | 3.10.17 (patched to 3.10.103) [3] | Added support for UEFI hardware |
14.2 | 2016-06-30 | No EOL announced | 4.4.14 (patched to 4.4.19) [4] | Added PulseAudio and VDPAU and switched from udev to eudev and ConsoleKit to ConsoleKit2 |
-current | rolling | — | 4.4.23 [5] | |
Legend: Old version Older version, still maintained Latest version Latest preview version |
References
I'll be working locally on revising the History section over the next few days (possibly longer, depending on how much time I can spare), as well as populating the "notable changes" section of the table (mainly from the History section, but I'll also dig into the announcements and changelogs to see if I can come up with something notable for the releases not mentioned in the current History. If I don't hear any complaints here, I'll probably make the change sometime next week (assuming the Hurricane Matthew doesn't affect us too bad in VA). I welcome any comments, criticism, or complaints! -- Bassmadrigal ( talk) 19:14, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
I've been tinkering on this page for quite some time and I was curious how accurate the following warning still was.
So, I did some work in the shell... First I grabbed the "source" of the page and put it in a text file so I had all the references in a single file. Then I used some fancy grep command I found to extract the base urls with a bunch of pipes to consolidate and count those, then some other greps to grab Slackware-based urls compared to the others and added them together. After checking everything, I found that there's 45 references to sites that do not have slackware in the name vs 29 that do.
Does anyone feel that there's still too many references to the primary source? Or is it time to remove that warning?
Here's the output if anyone wants to verify my work:
grep -Eo '(http|https)://[^/"]+' wiki-slack | sort | uniq -c | sort | grep -i slackware | awk '{print $1}' | paste -sd+ - | bc 29 grep -Eo '(http|https)://[^/"]+' wiki-slack | sort | uniq -c | sort | egrep -vi slackware | awk '{print $1}' | paste -sd+ - | bc 45
1 http://arm.slackware.com 1 http://connie.slackware.com 1 https://docs.slackware.com 2 http://arm.slackware.com 2 http://docs.slackware.com 2 http://mirrors.slackware.com 2 http://slackware.mirrors.tds.net 3 http://slackware.com 5 http://slackware.cs.utah.edu 10 http://www.slackware.com
1 http://distro.ibiblio.org 1 http://en.wikipedia.org 1 http://freeslack.net 1 http://ftp.df.lth.se 1 http://groups.google.com 1 http://isbndb.com 1 http://rlworkman.net 1 http://slackintosh.workaround.ch 1 http://www.bisdesign.ca 1 http://www.datamation.com 1 http://www.ibiblio.org 1 http://www.itpro.co.uk 1 http://www.linux-mag.com 1 http://www.linux.com 1 http://www.linux.org 1 http://www.linuxjournal.com 1 http://www.linuxquestions.org 1 http://www.pcworld.com 1 http://www.slackbook.org 1 http://www.techradar.com 1 http://www.trinitydesktop.org 1 https://books.google.com 1 https://github.com 1 https://lwn.net 1 https://slackbuilds.org 1 https://sourceforge.net 1 https://tech.slashdot.org 1 https://www.linuxquestions.org 2 http://ftp.nluug.nl 2 http://www.slackwiki.com 2 https://cinnamonslackbuilds.github.io 2 https://mateslackbuilds.github.io 9 http://distrowatch.com
Sorry for the wall of text -- Bassmadrigal ( talk) 01:36, 24 November 2016 (UTC)
grep -Eo '(http|https)://[^/"]+' old-wiki-slack | sort | uniq -c | sort | grep -i slackware | awk '{print $1}' | paste -sd+ - | bc 31 grep -Eo '(http|https)://[^/"]+' old-wiki-slack | sort | uniq -c | sort | egrep -vi slackware | awk '{print $1}' | paste -sd+ - | bc 22
Articles should never be using primary sources to reference statements. As far as I'm concerned, having roughly a quarter of all references be primary is most certainly not grounds for removal of a primary sources tag! This is one of the most common failings of tech articles on here: editors assumes that for some remarkable reason, a project's own documentation is the only source that's ever needed to cite something. Plainly it is not the case for nearly any other subject that we take its own output as the best reference.
To an extent, this is of course intertwined with another nearly-inevitable failing of tech articles, namely that trivia such as endless lists of release dates is somehow interesting or relevant to a general-purpose encyclopedia. If our biographies were written like this we'd list everyone's achievements by birthday (and source it solely to their own diaries or CVs).
What this article needs is a proper peer review, not people writing shell scripts to argue for the removal of the cleanup tags that are meant to help bring it up to scratch.
Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) ( talk) 13:54, 26 November 2016 (UTC)
References
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)
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)
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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)
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) KarlMag
Everytime I correct this page, some idiot(s) screw with this page;
Soo, I'm gonna say this once: Slackware has Plasma, Mate, Cinnamon, XFCE under live image, open your goddamn eyes!
Do not edit this page if you know nothing. Also atleast don't change back to image of to Slackware 14.1, Set good image of 14.2.
I'm truly disappointed from management way of wikipedia, I'd not contribute to such pathetic platform ever again. 5.115.150.102 ( talk) 09:58, 25 November 2021 (UTC)
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)
I removed the recent addition of the reasons for 32bit. Is not true that:
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)
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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:
"The first version was released on July 13th, 1993."
http://polishlinux.org/linux/
"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/
"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
"1993-07-18 Slackware Linux Distribution 1.00"
http://www.informatica.co.cr/linux-distributions/index.html
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)
WOW! This is a truely sophisticated (and tough) question. Very hard to decide. My modest input:
First step: What's more important, the very truth or a formalistic truth (i.e. official SW sources)? Official sources should prevail: The SW website and the slackbook. All other sources should only overrule official statements if it can be proven, that the official sources are wrong. As I cannot identify a criterion to decide which source is (materially) correct, only the official SW sources should remain relevant - for formal (yet striking) reasons.
Second step: Which official source is "more" official, the slackbook or the website? I would go with the website, because it is most authoritative - the announcement comes straight from the original creator of SW. In the days of SW's inception he must have perfectly known when the project was released. So the announcement in http://www.slackware.com/announce/1.0.php is the key. As it stems from SW's creator and is posted on the official website, it is official twicefold. And it is also most precise. So what more can one expect! Well, a bit more actually, so lets move further.
Third step: BUT a more than minor problem lies - as you already said - in the ambiguity of the two authoritative announcements. They differ in 4 (!) aspects: date, newsgroup (comp.os.linux vs. comp.os.linux.announce), email address (!) and approval (the header of the later announcement has an "approved" entry). Without knowing the technical details of the newsgroup and Volkerding's circumstances I would chose the first announcement, just because it seems to be highly unlikely that Volkerding mixed something up with the announcements. It must have been this way, that he posted another announcement later.
Fourth step: Your reasoning conc. the timezone: I am not familiar with US timezones at all. As far as I know, Pat Volkerding had been at Moorhead univ. at that time, so it should be as you said. I just wonder if the timestamp was given by him or by the newsgroup software. Anyway, I guess that we could settle on this last step as being the decisive one. Only this announcement is relevant. Further analysis should focus on this announcement and clarify the cirumstances.
Germanopratin ( talk) 10:54, 22 August 2012 (UTC)
Here are the original headers from the comp.os.linux post:
Path: gmd.de !newsserver.jvnc.net !howland.reston.ans.net !usenet.ins.cwru.edu !cleveland.Freenet.Edu !bf703 From: bf703@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Patrick J. Volkerding) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux Subject: ANNOUNCE: Slackware Linux 1.00 Date: 17 Jul 1993 00:16:36 GMT Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH (USA) Lines: 76 Message-ID: <227gd4$jtq@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu> Reply-To: bf703@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Patrick J. Volkerding) NNTP-Posting-Host: hela.ins.cwru.edu
Everything in the above except Path and NNTP-Posting-Host came from Patrick Volkerding's computer. USENET does not change headers except for those two. In particular, USENET is dateless -- the message may arrive at a node days later with the date unchanged from what the poster set it to. Please note that "Patrick Volkerding's computer" may very well have been a remote computer in another time zone he was logged in to.
And here they are as Google Groups displays them:
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux From: bf703@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Patrick J. Volkerding) Date: 17 Jul 1993 00:16:36 GMT Local: Sat, Jul 17 1993 12:16 am Subject: ANNOUNCE: Slackware Linux 1.00
Notice that Google Groups converts the date to GMT and tacks on a "local" that converts the GMT to my "local" time. (My computer clock is is set to UTC, so they are the same)
Also note that http://www.slackware.com/announce/1.0.php has been modified to show PST instead of GMT.
Here are the original headers from the comp.os.linux.announce post:
Path: gmd.de !rrz.uni-koeln.de !news.dfn.de!darwin.sura.net !math.ohio-state.edu !howland.reston.ans.net !spool.mu.edu !uwm.edu !rpi !batcomputer !bounce-bounce From: volkerdi@mhd1.moorhead.msus.edu (Patrick J. Volkerding) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce Subject: ANNOUNCE: Slackware Linux Distribution 1.00 Followup-To: comp.os.linux Date: 18 Jul 1993 20:13:55 -0400 Organization: None Lines: 80 Sender: mdw@TC.Cornell.EDU Approved: linux-announce@tc.cornell.edu (Matt Welsh) Message-ID: <22cp03$be5@theory.TC.Cornell.EDU> Reply-To: volkerdi@mhd1.moorhead.msus.edu (Patrick J. Volkerding) NNTP-Posting-Host: theory.tc.cornell.edu Keywords: Slackware, distribution
And here they are as Google Groups displays them:
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce Followup-To: comp.os.linux From: volkerdi@mhd1.moorhead.msus.edu (Patrick J. Volkerding) Date: 18 Jul 1993 20:13:55 -0400 Local: Mon, Jul 19 1993 12:13 am Subject: ANNOUNCE: Slackware Linux Distribution 1.00
Again, Google Groups converts the date to GMT and tacks on a "local" that converts the GMT to my "local" time (also GMT).
The approved and sender headers are simply telling you that comp.os.linux is an unmoderated newsgroup, while comp.os.linux.announce is a moderated newsgroup. Some of the headers may have been modified by the system that did the approving, but almost certainly not the date.
The two email addresses are the two Patrick lists at the bottom of each post.
My conclusion is that Slackware 1.0 was released on 17 Jul 1993 00:16:36 GMT, and the local time for Patrick Volkerding was 16 July, based upon the following:
Time zone claimed in comp.os.linux USENET post: GMT
Time zone where Patrick Volkerding was living: CDT
Central Standard Time (CST) = GMT-6
Central Daylight Time (CDT) = GMT-5
Time zone claimed by
http://www.slackware.com/announce/1.0.php :PST
Pacific Standard Time (PST) = GMT-8
Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) = GMT-7
(It appears that whoever posted that got the info from Google Groups but failed to tell GG to show the original headers, thus they got a version "corrected" for their local time zone (Slackware Inc. is in Brentwood, California -- PST/PDT.))
Time zone claimed in comp.os.linux.announce post: -0400
Eastern Standard Time (EST) = GMT-5
Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) = GMT-4
So the only question is whether we use GMT or local time. I say GMT. That's what was in the original announcement. http://www.slackware.com/announce/1.0.php has been modified to show PST instead of GMT, but Google Groups (formerly DejaNews) has the actual unmodified headers, which show GMT.
Conclusion: Slackware 1.0 was released on 17 Jul 1993 at 00:16:36 GMT. -- Guy Macon ( talk) 19:58, 22 August 2012 (UTC)
I concur with your conclusion: UTC. That seems rather sensible to me. If anybody objects, he has to come up with a stronger argument. Germanopratin ( talk) 09:53, 25 August 2012 (UTC)
I noticed this revision: http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Slackware&diff=500916156&oldid=499501214 . I want to remark that the Slackware ChangeLog.txt will usually pay attribution to contributions from non-coreteam members. But the core team members themselves (like Robby Workman, Stuart Winter, Eric Jan Tromp, myself etc) are usually only mentioned nowadays in case of large updates (KDE, XFCE, X.Org) or when we thought of something smart. We use a private communications channel to discuss the development of Slackware around the clock, so basically everybody in the team contributes, even if they are not explicitly mentioned in the ChangeLog.txt.
Eric Hameleers Sat Jul 28 21:07:21 UTC 2012 —Preceding undated comment added 21:10, 28 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for clarifications from the very inside of Slackware. This is a rather hairy subject. Maybe it makes no sense at all to sort of rank (or even find out about) the input of SW contributors. As you clarified, it is hardly possible to do so from the outside. And even if it were possible from the inside: It would remain delicate for many reasons...
After all, it's not important who contributes the most, but it remains relevant to determine who is really part of core. Being informal is part of the SW culture, which is a sympathetic SW "feature" anyway. So trying to find a SW "core team" is quite "non-slackish", yet it matters for this article.
I guess we ought to change the section then - taking your information into account. Can you tell when that Change.log policy changed (pun not intended)? Germanopratin ( talk) 16:37, 25 August 2012 (UTC)
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)
The source model is described as "Free and open source", which is incorrect. Here is the list of software packages in Slackware 14.0 which are non-free. In particular, the kernel distributed with Slackware contains firmware blobs which are neither free nor open source. I propose we change the source model to "Mostly free and open source, with some non-free components". melikamp ( talk) 21:38, 26 July 2013 (UTC)
I moved this section up because the section below eats up the next section's title. melikamp ( talk) 21:38, 26 July 2013 (UTC)
Consider the following sequence of talk page comments:
Melikamp: " Here is the list of software packages in Slackware 14.0 which are non-free." ... "I propose we change the source model to 'Mostly free and open source, with some non-free components'."
Guy: "Anyone who cares about FOSS vs. non-FOSS is likely to have no problem getting the list of non-FOSS components at freeslack.net and purging them."
Melikamp: "Slackware, on the other hand, is being shipped with non-free components, and has no option to remove them."
Guy: "I am not sure why you believe that Slackware has no option to remove non-free components. The link you yourself provided ( http://freeslack.net/ ) clearly says 'the purging procedure is relatively straightforward. Simply remove offending packages with removepkg, configure, compile, and install a linux-libre kernel, and finally remove the stock kernel packages (kernel, modules, firmware).' Anyone who cannot do that is unlikely to be happy with Slackware anyway, because that's the standard way of updating Slackware. [7]"
Melikamp: "Slackware itself offers no way, tool, or option to either install a fully free OS or make it free post-install. (Not that an option like that would make much of a difference.) The fact that one can deblob Slackware is irrelevant, since this page is about Slackware as released by PV and team."
At this point I am at a loss, because Melikamp keeps making a false claim ("no option to remove them", "no way, tool, or option to either install a fully free OS or make it free post-install."), I keep refuting the false claim by explaining exactly how one makes Slackware free post-install using nothing but the standard Slackware package tools and a list of which components to remove, and finally Melikamp says that the fact that there is a way to make Slackware free post install is "irrelevant". How is showing how to make Slackware free post-install not relevant when countering a claim that there is no way to make Slackware free post install? I do not see how we can move forward from here.
I am also a bit frustrated by the fact that Melikamp says "A good example of is Debian" when a comparison with Debian suits his purposes but tells me "Comparison with other distributions is also irrelevant" when I attempt to make a comparison with Debian.
At this point I do not see how any further replies from me on this topic will be productive, so I will finish with this: I oppose Melikamp's proposal for the reasons I have given in the thread above, and I am watching to see what the consensus is (in the discussion here or though an RfC), which of course I will follow whether I agree with it or not. I support there being a paragraph in FOSS that explains the difference between "out of the box" free, "select an option during install" free, "run a tool after install" free, "possible but a lot of hard work to strip out the non-free components" non-free and "nobody has ever successfully stripped out the non-free components" non-free. I think we should write that up, put it in the FOSS article, and link to it from here. - Guy Macon ( talk) 16:37, 11 August 2013 (UTC)
Unfortunately, I am in no way able to provide a solution to this argument. As for free software, I have always considered the RMS point of view too radical. If a software developper decides to make his software non-free, I am completely fine with that. He makes the bytes, he makes the rules. Making a program non-free is a 100% valid market or else personal decision. But I DO care about open source because it provides a possibility to track trojans or spyware or else harmful or unwanted software. But as I said, I am not familiar enough with these topics to throw something worthwhile into this discussion.
Thus, I can only provide some purely formal hints or arguments:
Yes, Melikamp is wrong in stating that there is no way to make Slack free post-install. He himself gives a pointer to such a way. A pointer by the way, that I haven't been aware of. Well, there is no dedicated tool for purging. But it is a major trait of Slackware that there is an abundant lack of dedicated tools. Getting away with a modest bundle of standard tools - compilation, silent levitation of beer bottles and usage of the *pkg* suite - is the (beloved) Slackware way. That's all. That's enough.
Still, there is a difference between Slackware's spartan style and the description of Slackware in a Wikipedia article. Slack's way of making it hard for people who need long descriptions in order to get things done doesn't imply that an article on Slackware be Slackish as well.
What does "free and open source software" mean? Well, it means FOSS as defined by the respective Wikipedia article. The Slackware article points to the Wikipedia FOSS article. Therefore, it's not relevant what X or Y mean or Y thinks that Z means by using the term "FOSS" - it only is relevant what the WP FOSS article means. Thus, if Slackware is not free and open source in terms of the article it points to, the pointer could be considered "weak". Again, I can't judge if it actually is.
If we cannot find a convincing solution to that question, we should resort to other distro articles. This is not a 100% valid approach, because a statement does not become true only by complying to a majority of wrong statements. But if you can't decide on the truth of your statement, it is a plausible and common sense approach to go and check what others do.
How do other distro articles handle this? There is often a difference between the description in the text and the categorization in the info box. I will only go for the info boxes here:
Seems to be a bit messy. Plus: If you look at the info boxes on different Wikipedias (English, German, French, Spanish) - for the same entry you get different variants.
For instance UBUNTU: In the French Ubuntu page they simply omitted the "with proprietary components" clause. The Germans re-phrase it to just "open source". The Italians don't mess with FOSS and plainly state it is "GNU GPL". To the Dutch Ubuntu is "FOSS". In Denmark wikipedians describe the license as "GPL, GFDL".
Yes, RMS himself resp. his foundation, would consider none of the above listed OSes as free software distros, anyway. To be honest, I would appreciate it if the Slackware team could split its repositories in free and non-free etc. repos. But I am sure that they simply haven't got the time/man power or inclination to do so. Which is fine with me. Their task is huge already.
Conclusion: I have no idea what we ought to do. Maybe someone comes up with another perspective. After all, maybe it would be valuable to make a reference to the freeslack site. But I am not sure if the freeslack project is sufficiently complete to merit such a reference. As far as I can see, it only refers to Slackware 14.0 and seems to be work in progress. Anyway, this is a very valuable initiative. Perhaps though a pointer to it would not be justified, due to the project's incompleteness... Germanopratin ( talk) 13:08, 15 August 2013 (UTC)
@Melikamp
As I said above, your initiative "Freeslack" is a valuable project. But there is one aspect of your effort I would like to bring out, precisely because it correlates to this discussion:
You do not differentiate between free software and open source software. It would be a crucial info if package X is not open source or if X contains parts that are closed source. You only focus on the license but spare this open source aspect which is even more important as it is also a security issue.
Or is it that Slackware 14.0 - as shipped on DVD - is completely open source? Germanopratin ( talk) 17:52, 15 August 2013 (UTC)
This is just a matter of style, but it could improve the readability of the text. We are using different date formats in the article, e.g.: "17 July 1993" versus " June 18, 2002".
Wikipedia style rules state: (1) both of the formats above are allowed (2) within a text there should be consistent use of just *one* format
So, which one should we use? Germanopratin ( talk) 09:19, 11 August 2013 (UTC)
I think that there is not reason to put them in the table.
See:
====== ========== ======== 1.0.1 04/08/1993 0.99.12 1.0.2 05/09/1993 0.99pl12 1.0.3 15/09/1993 0.99pl12 1.0.4 01/10/1993 ? 1.1.1 12/12/1993 0.99.14 1.1.2 05/021994 0.99.15 1.2.0.1 01/04/1994 1.0 1.2.0.2 15/04/1994 1.0.8 1.2.0.3 21/04/1994 ? 2.0.1 18/09/1994 1.0.9 2.0.2 18/10/1994 1.1.54 8.1.01 19/06/2002 2.4.18
Hi folks. The logo that's currently displayed by the article says that it's rendered from the logo on the Slackware website, but I don't think that it could have been as it's not using the correct font. In any case, there's a better SVG version of the logo available from the site from this link: http://www.slackware.com/grfx/shared/Slackware_web_logo.svg
I'd like to see this replace the logo for this article. I'm a bit of a Wikipedia n00b otherwise I'd make the edit myself, but if anyone can take a look I'd appreciate it. Volkerdi ( talk) 04:31, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
(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)
This is to document the fact that I got the following email (Email and IP addresses removed; I can supply them if someone has a reason to see them.)
Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2013 23:13:38 -0600 From: "Patrick J. Volkerding" > From: Guy Macon [mailto:[deleted]@[deleted]] > > Hi! I am trying to confirm that the Wikipedia user at > /info/en/?search=User_talk:Volkerdi is Patrick J. Volkerding. > See discussion at > /info/en/?search=Talk:Slackware#Better_logo_from_the_official_Slackware_site Hey Guy! Yes, it's me. I'll try to get to some of your questions this weekend if I find a bit of time. Take care, Pat
The above email was sent to a new email address that I created just for this, and all of the headers indicate that it was sent from Slackware Inc. Identity confirmed; nobody else could have known what email address to send a spoof email to.
I am going to send a followup message asking Patrick if he could find time to:
-- Guy Macon ( talk) 14:59, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
Why is the DistroWatch page ranking even a thing? Who cares how many people visit a webpage about Slackware on some site? Why do I need to visit a page on a site about a distribution if I can just get the news about that distribution elsewhere, such as from the distribution itself? Sure, I could see reading the front page "latest news releases" to get information about a number of distros at once, but why would I go to the page about the specific distro? I say we should just remove the entire distrowatch section. It's meaningless. Centerone ( talk) 16:27, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
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)
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)
The history section doesn't really seem to chronicle the history of Slackware itself so much as just an almost-bullet-list of each version and the changes associated with it. I am thinking it would be beneficial to shorten this down to the major changes (Slackware 4-7 jump, removal of GNOME, switch from KDE 3.5 to 4.x, adding Slackware64) but in greater detail, rather than the notable changes from (almost) every release. With the way it currently is, it feels like you should have every release listed in there (it is missing several versions), but that seems like overkill. I also could not find any substantial reason for the separation of the History section to 1993-2003 and 2004-present. There didn't seem to be any major shift within Slackware to mark that separation and it looks like it was done just because of the large amount of items covered... which I think it more of a reason to minimize what is covered in there.
I propose to shrink the History section down to just a few major points of Slackware, and then add a column to the release table of "notable changes". It prevents duplicate information and consolidates the important parts. Here is a rough idea of the addition to the table (small section of copy/paste from the table I've been editing on my local machine):
Version | Release date | End-of-life date | Kernel version | Notable changes |
---|---|---|---|---|
12.2 | 2008-12-10 | 2013-12-09 [1] | 2.6.27.7 (patched to 2.6.27.31) [1] | |
13.0 | 2009-08-26 | No EOL announced | 2.6.29.6 | Introduced Slackware64, an official 64bit port, and switched from KDE 3.5 to 4.x |
13.1 | 2010-05-24 | No EOL announced | 2.6.33.4 | Added PolicyKit and ConsoleKit and switched to the libata subsystem |
13.37 | 2011-04-27 | No EOL announced | 2.6.37.6 | Added support for GPT and utilities for the Btrfs filesystem |
14.0 | 2012-09-28 | No EOL announced | 3.2.29 (patched to 3.2.45) [2] | Added NetworkManager. Removed HAL as its functionality was merged into udev |
14.1 | 2013-11-04 | No EOL announced | 3.10.17 (patched to 3.10.103) [3] | Added support for UEFI hardware |
14.2 | 2016-06-30 | No EOL announced | 4.4.14 (patched to 4.4.19) [4] | Added PulseAudio and VDPAU and switched from udev to eudev and ConsoleKit to ConsoleKit2 |
-current | rolling | — | 4.4.23 [5] | |
Legend: Old version Older version, still maintained Latest version Latest preview version |
References
I'll be working locally on revising the History section over the next few days (possibly longer, depending on how much time I can spare), as well as populating the "notable changes" section of the table (mainly from the History section, but I'll also dig into the announcements and changelogs to see if I can come up with something notable for the releases not mentioned in the current History. If I don't hear any complaints here, I'll probably make the change sometime next week (assuming the Hurricane Matthew doesn't affect us too bad in VA). I welcome any comments, criticism, or complaints! -- Bassmadrigal ( talk) 19:14, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
I've been tinkering on this page for quite some time and I was curious how accurate the following warning still was.
So, I did some work in the shell... First I grabbed the "source" of the page and put it in a text file so I had all the references in a single file. Then I used some fancy grep command I found to extract the base urls with a bunch of pipes to consolidate and count those, then some other greps to grab Slackware-based urls compared to the others and added them together. After checking everything, I found that there's 45 references to sites that do not have slackware in the name vs 29 that do.
Does anyone feel that there's still too many references to the primary source? Or is it time to remove that warning?
Here's the output if anyone wants to verify my work:
grep -Eo '(http|https)://[^/"]+' wiki-slack | sort | uniq -c | sort | grep -i slackware | awk '{print $1}' | paste -sd+ - | bc 29 grep -Eo '(http|https)://[^/"]+' wiki-slack | sort | uniq -c | sort | egrep -vi slackware | awk '{print $1}' | paste -sd+ - | bc 45
1 http://arm.slackware.com 1 http://connie.slackware.com 1 https://docs.slackware.com 2 http://arm.slackware.com 2 http://docs.slackware.com 2 http://mirrors.slackware.com 2 http://slackware.mirrors.tds.net 3 http://slackware.com 5 http://slackware.cs.utah.edu 10 http://www.slackware.com
1 http://distro.ibiblio.org 1 http://en.wikipedia.org 1 http://freeslack.net 1 http://ftp.df.lth.se 1 http://groups.google.com 1 http://isbndb.com 1 http://rlworkman.net 1 http://slackintosh.workaround.ch 1 http://www.bisdesign.ca 1 http://www.datamation.com 1 http://www.ibiblio.org 1 http://www.itpro.co.uk 1 http://www.linux-mag.com 1 http://www.linux.com 1 http://www.linux.org 1 http://www.linuxjournal.com 1 http://www.linuxquestions.org 1 http://www.pcworld.com 1 http://www.slackbook.org 1 http://www.techradar.com 1 http://www.trinitydesktop.org 1 https://books.google.com 1 https://github.com 1 https://lwn.net 1 https://slackbuilds.org 1 https://sourceforge.net 1 https://tech.slashdot.org 1 https://www.linuxquestions.org 2 http://ftp.nluug.nl 2 http://www.slackwiki.com 2 https://cinnamonslackbuilds.github.io 2 https://mateslackbuilds.github.io 9 http://distrowatch.com
Sorry for the wall of text -- Bassmadrigal ( talk) 01:36, 24 November 2016 (UTC)
grep -Eo '(http|https)://[^/"]+' old-wiki-slack | sort | uniq -c | sort | grep -i slackware | awk '{print $1}' | paste -sd+ - | bc 31 grep -Eo '(http|https)://[^/"]+' old-wiki-slack | sort | uniq -c | sort | egrep -vi slackware | awk '{print $1}' | paste -sd+ - | bc 22
Articles should never be using primary sources to reference statements. As far as I'm concerned, having roughly a quarter of all references be primary is most certainly not grounds for removal of a primary sources tag! This is one of the most common failings of tech articles on here: editors assumes that for some remarkable reason, a project's own documentation is the only source that's ever needed to cite something. Plainly it is not the case for nearly any other subject that we take its own output as the best reference.
To an extent, this is of course intertwined with another nearly-inevitable failing of tech articles, namely that trivia such as endless lists of release dates is somehow interesting or relevant to a general-purpose encyclopedia. If our biographies were written like this we'd list everyone's achievements by birthday (and source it solely to their own diaries or CVs).
What this article needs is a proper peer review, not people writing shell scripts to argue for the removal of the cleanup tags that are meant to help bring it up to scratch.
Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) ( talk) 13:54, 26 November 2016 (UTC)
References
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)
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)
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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)
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) KarlMag
Everytime I correct this page, some idiot(s) screw with this page;
Soo, I'm gonna say this once: Slackware has Plasma, Mate, Cinnamon, XFCE under live image, open your goddamn eyes!
Do not edit this page if you know nothing. Also atleast don't change back to image of to Slackware 14.1, Set good image of 14.2.
I'm truly disappointed from management way of wikipedia, I'd not contribute to such pathetic platform ever again. 5.115.150.102 ( talk) 09:58, 25 November 2021 (UTC)
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)
I removed the recent addition of the reasons for 32bit. Is not true that:
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)