Slackware is a Linux distribution created by Patrick Volkerding of Slackware Linux, Inc. Slackware was one of the earliest distributions, and is the oldest currently being maintained. Slackware aims for design stability and simplicity, and to be the most Unix-like Linux distribution.

Name

The name "Slackware" stems from the fact that the distribution started as a private side project with no intended commitment. To prevent it from being taken too seriously at first, Volkerding gave it a humorous name, which stuck even after Slackware became a serious project. The "Slack" in Slackware is a reference to the term "Slack" as used by the Church of the SubGenius.

History

Slackware was originally descended from the Softlanding Linux System, the most popular of the original Linux distributions. SLS dominated the market until the developers made a decision to change the executable format from a.out to ELF. This was not a popular decision amongst SLS's user base at the time. Patrick Volkerding released a modified version of SLS, which he named Slackware. The first Slackware release, 1.00, was on 16 July 1993. It was supplied as 3½" floppy disk images that were available by anonymous FTP. Slackware quickly replaced SLS as the dominant Linux distribution at the time.

In 1999, Slackware's release numbers saw a large increment from 4 to 7. This was explained by Patrick Volkerding 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 (such as Red Hat releasing each revision of its distribution with an increment of 4.1 to 5.0 instead of 3.1 to 3.2 as Slackware did). Slackware did have some Beta releases in the 6.x range, but these are not counted as official releases.

In 2005, the GNOME desktop environment was removed from the pending future release, 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.