[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

This is an old revision of the document!


Niki Kovacs (kikinovak)

I'm a 45-year old Austrian living in South France since 1991. I've started hacking away on computers as a kid, first on an 8080 monoprocessor board with 512 bytes (sic) of RAM, then on a Commodore VC-20 with 3,5 kilobytes RAM, which I programmed in Basic and in Assembler, both of which I seem to have completely forgotten.

Around the late eighties, after three frustrating semesters in Computer Science at the Technische Universität Wien, my passion for computers fell off me like a skin, and I discovered another passion, for books. In the early nineties, I moved to France, where I studied literature at the University Paul Valéry in Montpellier.

And then, I gradually rediscovered computers, first as a simple tool - no more than glorified typewriters. And slowly and gradually, my old “hacker self” came back. I discovered Slackware Linux in 2001, and since that date, I'm one hundred percent GNU/Linux and FOSS.

I started to work as a tech writer for some printed magazines in France:

  • Linux Pratique (2003 - 2008)
  • Planète Linux (2010 - )

In 2006 I was hired by my local town hall for a two-year job, which consisted in installing and networking eleven public libraries around Sommières, using only Linux and free software.

In 2009 I created Microlinux, a company specialized in Linux-based solutions for professionals. Among my clients, I have local town halls, public libraries, schools, small and bigger companies.

That same year I published two books (in French) about Linux. Linux aux petits oignons, a 530-page cookbook-style bible based on CentOS, and explaining all the basic *NIX principles to Joe User. And Ubuntu efficace, a 300-page book about the innards of Ubuntu.

Over the years I've been using quite many different distributions:

  • Debian;
  • Mandrake (before it became Mandriva);
  • Libranet (remember?);
  • CentOS;
  • Ubuntu;
  • Arch.

Over 2011 and 2012, I did some distro-hopping to find out which distribution would be “best” (for me) to use in production environments. So I installed some networks using a mix of Debian, CentOS, Ubuntu LTS and Slackware. In the end, I decided to adopt Slackware. Though the use of Slackware requires more research in the beginning, I like it for its flexibility and its rock-solid stability.

If you're curious, check out my daily work here:

$ svn co svn://svn.tuxfamily.org/svnroot/microlinux/slackware

My contributions so far:

 wiki:user:kikinovak ()