Slackware Linux - Less is more

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SLS was the earliest popular distribution of Linux, but had its problems. In the Debian Manifesto, Ian Murdock, the founder of Debian, was moved to say of SLS: "It is quite possibly the most bug-ridden and badly maintained Linux distribution available; unfortunately, it is also quite possibly the most popular."

SLS was a compilation of the latest software available, but wasn't always usable straight out of the box. Slackware went some way to addressing this problem, by ensuring that the packages included in a distribution were not just the latest and greatest, but the best available, and "adding a feature that installed important packages like the shared libraries and the kernel image automatically."

The first release of Volkerding's reworking of SLS was distributed on ftp and announced with a post entitled "Anyone want an SLS-like 0.99pl11A system?", and Slackware rapidly gained a reputation that has stayed with it, for stability and lack of bloat.

The good names were taken

Slackware owed its self-deprecating name to Volkerding's obsessions. The name wasn't chosen to win over the buyers and sellers of hardware systems. Volkerding was a fan of the satirical Church of the Subgenious and a Deadhead, a follower of the Grateful Dead, who had an ethos not unlike the hacker cultures of that gave rise to Linux and free software, allowed and encouraged their fans to record and share tapes of their concerts, and eschewed the trappings of commercial success.

Deadheads formed one of the earliest net communities around the bulletin boards of Stewart Brand's well.com in the 1980s.

John Perry Barlow, one of the Grateful Dead songwriters, went on to found the Electronic Frontier Foundation and wrote an essay called The Economy of Ideas, subtitled "a framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Age", which could be seen as an early manifesto for the culture of sharing ideas, software and music across the Web, a culture which the nascent Linux and hacker communities were fully plugged into.

Slackware took its name from the mythical J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, the charismatic leader and figurehead of the Church of the Subgenius, whose message to the peoples of America was to "Get Slack".

This was a time when Linux and free software was still the work of mainly young unpaid enthusiasts and volunteers, who were in it, in the phrase of Linus Torvalds, "just for fun". Whatever the serious ambitions of Linux and Slackware, Slackware was also meant to be fun, and so was Volkerding's choice of moniker. Linux developers weren't looking for commercial approval, but the approval of their peers.

"Yeah, okay, I'll admit that it was SubGenius inspired," Volkerding later conceded. "In fact, back in the 2.0 through 3.0 days we used to print a dobbshead on each CD... I've been trying to put an ease-of-use spin on it, but it doesn't quite work. I think I'll just start telling people all the good names were taken to get them off the subject."

The hegemony of Slack

At this time Linux was still the preserve of educated users, and an odd mix of rebellious youth, technofreaks, and frustrated hackers who were attracted by the ideals of free software and the opportunity to disassemble and learn from their computer systems - but was also attracting the attention of academics and sysadmins on the lookout for cheap Unix-like systems that could be run on commodity hardware.

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