- This topic has 0 replies, 1 voice, and was last updated Oct 3-11:27 pm by Brian Masinick.
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Brian Masinick
If anyone REALLY wants to get into Linux in a “reasonable way” – by that, I mean a way in which you truly can learn a lot about the overall system by installing and using a distribution that won’t cuddle and coddle you, so it’s not the easiest distribution to install or use, and yet it IS reasonable for anyone who will take the time to read, review, perhaps even study, then try, perhaps try again a few times, and ultimately learn a lot!
It’s called Slackware, and for the older users in the group, many of us may have tried it before.
This was the very first distribution I tried. I bought a computer in the Fall of 1995, and along with it, I purchased a book about Slackware. From that book, I installed the system. It was quite nimble, pretty basic, had low end graphics, but was pretty much a console first, graphical environment second, kind of a system. I liked it and learned Linux well from it. For me, it wasn’t a big stretch because I tried my first UNIX system in 1982 and by 1983 I had completed vendor supported courses in UNIX at AT&T in New Jersey and a couple of classes at a later time offered from NCR at a facility just north of Dayton, Ohio.
What was so great about Slackware for me is that it reminded me what the earliest microcomputers and personal computers were like for me in the late 1970s and very early 1980s – not very “user friendly”, necessarily, but quite simple, fast, and efficient, WAY more fun and interesting than the relatively boring mainframe computers that were available in those days.
Mind you, TODAY those “mainframe computers” are the absolute example of rock solid reliability, stability, and for the most part, are quite secure too. The default security on the old, big mainframe computers was NO ACCESS unless authenticated; that is a sensible approach. Anyway these early personal computers had very little “security”, but there was not much networking going on, and those who did use networks were professionals, rarely interested in STEALING – on the contrary, most everyone was interested in OPENLY SHARING – what a concept!
From that humble beginnings was a similar way in which Slackware began; it was not the very first distribution, but it was one of the first well debugged, well designed systems, in fact it was created to spare the early Linux users from many of the defects found in SLS Linux – Soft Landing Systems.
Anyway, I don’t want to rewrite the book; you can read the entire Slackware Linux Essentials at https://www.slackbook.org/html/book.html if you are interested.
Happy Reading!
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Brian Masinick
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