Linux Journal
Interview with Patrick Volkerding
Fetched from https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2750 on 2021-10-05

   by Phil Hughes
   on April 1, 1994

   Linux Journal: First I would like to find out a little about you. How
   old are you?

   Pat: I'm 27.

   Linux Journal: What you do for work, school, etc?

   Pat: For school, well.... I finally got my BS in computer science from
   Moorhead State University last Spring. On the 8 year plan, actually. I
   started out in computer engineering at Boston University in `85, did
   that for 2 years, and then took a year off before transferring into the
   CS program at MSU.

   I just recently got a job for a San Francisco-based company making
   medical archiving systems controlled by Linux boxes. It's been pretty
   interesting work.

   Linux Journal: I am looking for articles on the commercial use of
   Linux. I would be real interested in an article on what you are doing
   there.

   What you do for fun?

   Pat: I do all kinds of things for fun. Linux is my big fun project
   right now - gets pretty crazy sometimes trying to keep up with all of
   the development going on; for instance, last week the new C libraries,
   GCC, and kernel were all released within a couple days of each other.
   Luckily, I like keeping my machine current. Judging from the mail I get
   when things fall a bit behind, so does everyone else.

   Hmmmmm.... other things? Well, I like to brew my own beer. That was my
   big hobby until Linux began to demand more of my time. It's a fun
   process. My favorite part is firing up my 140K BTU burner and boiling
   it up for an hour or so. The aroma it releases when you throw the hops
   into the rolling boil is magnificent! The Homebrew Digest and
   rec.crafts.brewing were my big Internet hangouts before I came across
   Linux.

   I also love music, especially the Grateful Dead. I've gone to, oh... 75
   or so of their shows. The summers of `87 and `88 I followed the band
   all over the US in my `67 Firebird convertible. I've also got lots of
   portable recording equipment and tape the shows whenever I can. The
   Dead let their fans do this, which is pretty unique in the music world.

   I play guitar, too. I'm still waiting for Jerry [Garcia] to invite me
   up on stage. :^)

   Linux Journal: Another DeadHead? I've only gone to 30 or 40 shows. My
   first show was in 1974 and I have around 100 tapes from shows.

   Now, on to the real stuff.

   When did you first start working with computers?

   Pat: Way back in 1973 when I was just a kid, I went on a field trip
   with my class to the computer department at North Dakota State
   University. The room where they kept the machines totally amazed me -
   lots of big whirring machines with flashing lights all over the place
   and rows of those big drives with disk platters. One of the sysops
   showed me how to play Star Trek on a DecWriter teletype-style terminal.
   It was an instantaneous addiction.

   At the time, though, there was no way I could get a home computer. I
   don't even think such things existed, so I started getting interested
   in electronics, which was more accessible. I'd build logic gates out of
   relays and things like that. When the first personal computers like the
   TRS-80, Apple ][, and Atari 400/800 came out, I became a fixture in
   many of the stores that sold them. I couldn't afford one, but the store
   owners would let me hang out and use their machines. I taught myself
   BASIC and would write little store demo programs to ensure I'd stay
   welcome there.

   I got an Apple ][ Plus with a 300 baud AppleCat modem right around
   1980, when it was the hot machine. I used Apple as my only computer
   right up until 1990. I even had a C compiler and Unix-like operating
   system for it. It was nothing even resembling Linux, though.

   Linux Journal: When did you first start working with Linux? Pat: I
   first heard about Linux in late 1992 from a friend named Wes at a party
   in Fargo, North Dakota. I didn't download it right away, but when I
   needed to find a LISP interpreter for a project at school, I remembered
   seeing people mention clisp ran on Linux. So, I ended up downloading
   one of the versions of Peter MacDonald's SLS distribution. Linux
   Journal: Describe what Slackware is?

   Pat: Well, I guess I can assume we all know what Linux is. :^)
   Slackware consists of a basic Linux system (the kernel, shared
   libraries, and basic utilities), and a number of optional software
   packages such as the GNU C and C++ compilers, networking and mail
   handling software, and the X window system.

   Linux Journal: Why did you decide to do a distribution?

   Pat: That's a good one. I never really did decide to do a distribution.
   What happened was that my AI professor wanted me to show him how to
   install Linux so that he could use it on his machine at home, and share
   it with some graduate students who were also doing a lot of work in
   LISP. So, we went into the PC lab and installed the SLS version of
   Linux.

   Having dealt with Linux for a few weeks, I'd put together a pile of
   notes describing all the little things that needed to be fixed after
   the main installation was complete. After spending nearly as much time
   going through the list and reconfiguring whatever needed it as we had
   putting the software on the machine in the first place, my professor
   looked at me and said, "Is there some way we can fix the install disks
   so that new machines will have these fixes right away?". That was the
   start of the project. I changed parts of the original SLS installation
   scripts, fixing some bugs and adding a feature that installed important
   packages like the shared libraries and the kernel image automatically.

   I also edited the description files on the installation disks to make
   them more informative. Most importantly, I went through the software
   packages, fixing any problems I found. Most of the packages worked
   perfectly well, but some needed help. The mail, networking, and uucp
   software had a number of incorrect file permissions that prevented it
   from functioning out of the box. Some applications would coredump
   without any explanation—for those I'd go out looking for source code on
   the net. SLS only came with source code for a small amount of the
   distribution, but often there would be new versions out anyway, so I'd
   grab the source for those and port them over. When I started on the
   task, I think the Linux kernel was at around 0.98pl4 (someone else may
   remember that better than I do...), and I put together improved SLS
   releases for my professor through version 0.99pl9. By this time I'd
   gotten ahead of SLS on maybe half of the packages in the distribution,
   and had done some reconfiguration on most of the remaining half. I'd
   done some coding myself to fix long-standing problems like a finger bug
   that would say users had `Never logged in' whenever they weren't
   online. The difference between SLS and Slackware was starting to be
   more than just cosmetic.

   In May, or maybe as late as June of `93, I'd brought my own
   distribution up to the 4.4.1 C libraries and Linux kernel 0.99pl11A.
   This brought significant improvements to the networking and really
   seemed to stabilize the system. My friends at MSU thought it was great
   and urged me to put it up for FTP. I thought for sure SLS would be
   putting out a new version that included these things soon enough, so I
   held off for a few weeks. During this time I saw a lot of people asking
   on the net when there would be a release that included some of these
   new things, so I made a post entitled "Anyone want an SLS-like
   0.99pl11A system?" I got a tremendous response to the post.

   After talking with the local sysadmin at MSU, I got permission to open
   an anonymous FTP server on one of the machines - an old 3b2. I made an
   announcement and watched with horror as multitudes of FTP connections
   crashed the 3b2 over, and over, and over. Those who did get copies of
   the 1.00 Slackware release did say some nice things about it on the
   net. My archive space problems didn't last long, either. Some people
   associated with Walnut Creek CDROM (and ironically enough, members of
   the 386BSD core group) offered me the current archive space on
   ftp.cdrom.com.

   Linux Journal: Why did you call it Slackware?

   Pat: My friend J.R. "Bob" Dobbs suggested it. ;^) Although I've seen
   people say that it carries negative connotations, I've grown to like
   the name. It's what I started calling it back when it was really just a
   hacked version of SLS and I had no intention of putting it up for
   public retrieval. When I finally did put it up for FTP, I kept the
   name. I think I named it "Slackware" because I didn't want people to
   take it all that seriously at first.

   It's a big responsibility setting up software for possibly thousands of
   people to use (and find bugs in). Besides, I think it sounds better
   than "Microsoft", don't you?

   Linux Journal: Some of the people out here in Seattle call them
   MicroSquish. :-) I admit that I initially avoided going from SLS to
   Slackware because I didn't take the name seriously. But the feedback I
   heard on the Internet pointed out why I should take it seriously. What
   did you expect to happen with the distribution?

   Pat: I never planned for it to last as long as it has. I thought Peter
   MacDonald (of SLS) would take a look at what I was doing and would fix
   the problems with SLS. Instead, he claimed distribution rights on the
   Slackware install scripts since they were derived from ones included in
   SLS. I was allowed to keep what I had up for FTP, but told Peter I
   wouldn't make other changes to Slackware until I'd written new
   installation scripts to replace the ones that came from SLS. I wrote
   the new scripts, and after putting that much work into things I wasn't
   going to give up. I did everything I could to make Slackware the
   distribution of choice, integrating new software and upgrades into the
   release as fast as they came out. It's a lot of work, and sometimes I
   wonder how long I can go on for.

   Linux Journal: What sort of help have you received?

   Pat: Most recently, Savio Lam wrote the dialog program used to create
   the color installation menus on the latest release of Slackware
   (1.1.2). Ian Kluft put the smail package together for me. Vince
   Shakan's newspak collection of configuration scripts were very useful
   for compiling applications like elm and Taylor UUCP. Louis LaBash just
   contributed a kit to compile a version of perl with working IPC. Early
   on, Allen Gwinn sent me the lpd package. All the users that send me bug
   reports helped a lot, too. I especially like when they don't flame me
   too severely in the process.

   Other than a few key packages from development teams that I trust, like
   GNU GCC from H.J. Lu, or the XFree86 2.0 package, I compile nearly all
   of the software myself. There are still a few remaining bits of SLS in
   the package - you can spot them by looking for files with 1992 time
   stamps.

   Linux Journal: Do you have any idea of the number of copies of
   Slackware that might be in use today?

   Pat: Thousands, but it would be hard to estimate an exact count. I have
   no idea how many CDs have been pressed with Slackware on them, but I
   can think of four companies that have produced them. Harald T.
   Alvestrand, who is attempting to count Linux users, posted this
   estimate: I don't claim that these numbers are in any way unbiased.
   They are just the 240 machine descriptions that have arrived at the
   counter. Obviously, they give a slight bias towards net-oriented
   releases.

   See table

   Of the seven "unknown" ones, two were misspellings of slackware. There
   are biases in the summing too; one who listed "slackware, sls" got only
   the "slackware" part counted. At least, it is a datum.

   (Now for some wild speculation: If this is average, and 8000 LGX CDs
   have been sold, and 9 of them turn up here, that would mean that I have
   a return rate of 0.11 percent on LGX users. A similar return rate on
   the others would mean 218,000 machines in the Linux installed base. My
   statistics professor would flunk me for extrapolation.....)

   Linux Journal: Does Slackware have a future?

   Pat: I would like to think so. I really enjoy working with Linux, and
   have had a blast making a complete package like Slackware available and
   easy enough for beginners to install. Ian Murdock (of the Debian
   distribution) and I have tossed around the idea of a merger since last
   fall. It's possible that this could eventually happen.

   At this point, I've got some nice scripts that create packages,
   including the installation scripts that create the symbolic links.
   Other than answering my mail, it's not that hard to keep Slackware up
   to date. If I'm going to bother to keep my own machine current, I might
   as well be updating the packages on the FTP site at the same time.

   Linux Journal: Do you want/expect any commercial benefit from
   Slackware?

   Pat: I haven't accepted any so far. It would be nice to make money as a
   result of it, but not from selling the actual package. I'm not
   interested in going into the mail-order CD-ROM business or anything
   like that, but my experience with Linux has taught me a lot of valuable
   skills. It looks like the project has saved me from a life of COBOL.
   What more could I ask for than that?

   Linux Journal: Thanks for doing this. I think the readers are going to
   be real interested in this monthly interview column and I really want
   to get people from all walks of the Linux world interviewed.

   Pat: Sure!
.