Slackware - History

History

Slackware was originally derived from the Softlanding Linux System (SLS), the most popular of the original Linux distributions and the first to offer a comprehensive software collection that comprised more than just the kernel and basic utilities.

Being a student at that time, Patrick Volkerding was asked by his artificial intelligence professor at the Minnesota State University Moorhead (MSUM) to make SLS installations for the computer lab. First Volkerding made notes on bug fixes and modifications of the system's configuration, to be applied after the installation was complete. Later he incorporated the changes directly into the SLS install disks "so that new machines would have these fixes right away". He changed parts of the original SLS installation scripts and added a mechanism that installed important packages like the shared libraries and the kernel image automatically.

Volkerding had no intentions to provide his modified SLS version for the public, assuming that "SLS would be putting out a new version that included these things soon enough". However, seeing that this was not the case and that many SLS users were asking on the Internet for a new SLS release, he made a post titled "Anyone want an SLS-like 0.99pl11A system?", to which he received a lot of responses. As also his friends at MSUM urged him to put his SLS modifications onto an FTP server, he made them publicly available on one of the university's anonymous FTP servers. This first Slackware release, version 1.00, was distributed on July 17, 1993 at 00:16:36 (UTC), being supplied as 24 3½" floppy disk images.

Version 2.1, released in October 1994, already consisted of 73 floppy disks, showing the rapid growth of the distribution.

With version 3.0, released in November 1995, Slackware made the transition to the Executable and Linkable Format (ELF). It was also the first release offering a CD-ROM based installation.

Slackware 3.1, released in July 1996, shipped with Linux kernel 2.0.0 and was called "Slackware 96" in allusion to Windows 95.

In 1999, Slackware's release number jumped from 4 to 7. Patrick Volkerding explained this 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, and Volkerding expected them to reach version 7 by the time of the jump.

With version 10.0, released in June 2004, Slackware saw a major change in its implementation of the X Window System, making the transition from XFree86 to the X.org Server. Volkerding explained his motives in the version's change log: "Seems the community has spoken, because the opinions were more than 4 to 1 in favor of using the X.Org release as the default version of X. It's primarily (as is usual around here) a technical decision."

In 2005, the GNOME desktop environment was removed from the pending future release (starting with 10.2), and turned over to community support and distribution. 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 such as Ximian and LinuxSalute.

Slackware 12.0, released in July 2007, was the first version that included a Linux kernel 2.6 by default. This version also had support for the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), for the first time.

In May 2009 the development team announced the public (testing) release of an x86 64 variant called Slackware64. As of Slackware 13.0 (released in August 2009), a stable 64-bit version has been available and officially supported.

Version 13.1, released in May 2010, introduced PolicyKit and ConsoleKit in the desktop framework. Furthermore, Slackware made a switchover from the IDE to the libata subsystem, changing the nomenclature of device nodes for almost all types of disk drives.

Version 13.37 was released in April 2011. Among the new features are support for the GUID Partition Table hard disc partitioning scheme which could replace the MBR system, as well as utilities for the btrfs filesystem.

Version 14.0 was released in September 2012. It ships with a 3.x kernel for the first time and adds support for NetworkManager. HAL was dropped again as its functionality was merged into udev.