[2024-feb-29] Sad news: Eric Layton aka Nocturnal Slacker aka vtel57 passed away on Feb 26th, shortly after hospitalization. He was one of our Wiki's most prominent admins. He will be missed.

Welcome to the Slackware Documentation Project

What is Slackware Linux?

The Official Release of Slackware Linux by Patrick Volkerding is an advanced Linux operating system, designed with the twin goals of ease of use and stability as top priorities. Including the latest popular software while retaining a sense of tradition, providing simplicity and ease of use alongside flexibility and power, Slackware brings the best of all worlds to the table.

Originally developed by Linus Torvalds in 1991, the UNIX®-like Linux operating system now benefits from the contributions of millions of users and developers around the world. Slackware Linux provides new and experienced users alike with a fully-featured system, equipped to serve in any capacity from desktop workstation to machine-room server. Web, FTP, and Email servers are ready to go out of the box, as are a wide selection of popular desktop environments. A full range of development tools, editors, and current libraries is included for users who wish to develop or compile additional software.

The Slackware Philosophy

Since its first beta release in April of 1993, the Slackware Linux Project has aimed at producing the most “UNIX-like” Linux distribution out there. Slackware complies with the published Linux standards, such as the Linux File System Standard. The Slackware team have always considered simplicity and stability paramount, and as a result Slackware has become one of the most popular, stable, and friendly distributions available.

See also: The Slackware Way

Slackware Overview

Slackware Linux is a complete 32-bit and 64-bit multitasking “UNIX-like” system. It contains an easy to use installation program, extensive online documentation, and a menu-driven package system. A full installation gives you the X Window System, C/C++ development environments, Perl, Python, networking utilities among which mail, news, web and ftp servers, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, Mozilla Firefox, plus many more programs. Slackware Linux can run on 486 systems (older releases) all the way up to the latest x86 machines (but uses -mcpu=i686 optimization for best performance on i686-class machines like the P3, P4, Duron/Athlon, and the latest multi-core x86 CPUs) as well as on any AMD64-compatible machine.

References

 slackware:slackware ()