I was honestly under the impression this was going to be a podcast. oh well. either way, greet interview and thanks jeremy and pat for making the time.

Thank you, Patrick. I may only be a recent convert to Slackware, but I'm permanently converted already in just a few months of use. The fastest and actually easiest to work with.

Thanks for all the hard work and to your team for theirs also. I'll be here as long as you and the team will and I'll do what I can to help out financially too.

Excelent review for an quite great distro. Which was the one got me interested in Linux. In 2003 I got for my birthday a Titanium PB G4, The local Apple autorized reseller was having an anniversary party the week of my birthday and they were giving pretty good offers. When I bought the laptop I got the machine maxed out on RAM, the largest capacity HDD they had (80GB) and they agreed to install free of charge any type of add-on that they carried. I chose an "intel-compatibility" card designed for Apple laptops (they had the version for desktops and a version for laptops that didn't become popular and was eventually pulled off the market). That same year When OSX 10.3 was released I went and bought a copy on DVD (because the DVD version included the developper tools), and on my way back home I was a computer magazine and bought it. It included a Slackware 9.0 CD (it was the CD 1 from the CD set that you would buy from the slackware mall). That day after backing everything up to CD's I installed OSX 10.3 leaving 7 GB (5GB / and 2GB swap) for slackware and then I placed the slackware CD in the drive and started the installation. It was simple enough that I went through it without any issue. And after it was installed and I selected slackware in the boot menu that the laptop's open firmware makes for dual boot's I was in front of a bare X11/twm environment, from there I went to try everything and was pleased to find that everything including the internal modem was working, I was soon browsing the internet from within Linux. I have tried all sorts of distros and OS's, but will always remember the one that got me into linux in the first place.

Thank you Pat for this great distro. It was my first distro way back in the late 90s, have strayed and distro-hopped but there's something in Slackware that makes one go back to it. :-)

Great Man, Grat Distro. Thanks to everyone involved ...

big guy, cool.
thx

Good interview. Patrick as always is a gentleman and seems like a great guy.

Thanks for the interview!!

Hmmm … Where’s The Video?!?
 

Hmmm … Where’s The Video?!? -- I do not wish to take the time to read a multipage interview! It would be much more convenient and productive for me to view the Patrick Volkerding interview. Let’s move it up a notch people. :-)

thanks Pat et al
 

Thanks for creating such an interesting and continuing ride. I'm paying it forward in a way as I've maintained a bandit network of slackware laptops (25) buried deep within my employers WAN for the exclusive use of my 11-14 yr old students for 10 years now. The IT guys in our "Win-only" environment let it continue because we don't cause them -or my employer- any problems. Some of these kids are doing some really advanced stuff and I never tire of watching them discover their ability to control their machines as tools, instead of just clicking and drooling. Many have converted their home machines and families to the goodness of slack. Praise Bob!

I agree. Thankyou.

Whoa...for a moment, it was like I was doing the interview! :-D

I first programmed computers in 1973 as a
summer job while studying undergraduate
Honors Physics and Russian at UVIC.
I programmed in Machine and Assembly
language for two Digital Equipment
computers (PDP-11/05 and PDP-11/40) in the
Basement of the Physics building, running
RSTS-11 (Resource Sharing/Time Sharing)
and subsequently the (inferior) RT-11

To interface more serial terminals to
the PDP-11s, a South-West Technical
Products 6800 microcomputer was inserted
as a serial port exchange. I wrote a
cross-assembler for the 6800 CPU
(similar instruction set to PDP-11)
in BASIC in order to write the software
for this project. At the time, serial
ports for the SWTPC were approximately
Ten Dollars, whereas serial ports for
the PDP-11s cost several Hundred Dollars.
To add more serial ports, it was necessary
to strap two of these SWTPC microcomputers
back-to-back - one machine had no CPU - it
was only used because more serial ports
could be added.

At the time, I had my own personal PDP-8/m
minicomputer, which I programmed in Assembler
running Disk Monitor System and OS/8, which
were loaded from paper tape on ASR-33 teletype
I then obtained the source code for TSS/8
(Time_Sharing/Resource_Sharing for PDP-8),
manually typed the WHOLE thing in on a noisy
ASR-33 teletype from this Listing using TeCo
editor, compiled it on a University PDP-8/e,
wrote the binary out on paper tape, which I
proceeded to load into my personal PDP-8/m.

***

In those days, computers had keys - I still
carry the key to my PDP-8/m on my keyring !

***

After moving to Vancouver in 1979, I programmed
at UBC/Triumf for PDP-11s in Machine and Assembler
and then VAX-11s in Assembler for the Nuclear
Physics community. I acquired some IBM-PCs
(all Clones, actually) and ran MS-DOS and then
Software Landing Systems (SLS) Linux. SLS Linux
was authored on Lodge Street, which was about
half way from where I lived on Saanich Road
on my trip to my Piano Teacher on Quadra Street
in Victoria, B.C.

I since moved to Slackware (forget the exact date)
and have continued with it ever since, even though
I have tried (and abandoned) distributions such as

Red Hat, SuSE, etc.

I am now using Slackware 13.37 (why drop Hebrew?)
is it anything to do with www.arabeyes.org see

/usr/share/X11/xkb/keymap/xfree86

- Яаков

***

My latest project involves adding multiple keyboards
so that toggling

left [Alt]+[Shift] causes sequences such as

English->עברית->Русский->العربية

***

As a suggestion, please remove the

Linux 4 keyboard layout limit (google)

which was fascistly imposed in recent
updates to the following xfree86 file

/usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base

in Slackware 13.37

so I don't have to drop these, my favorite
languages so I can sprinkle symbols such
as λ or θ useful for Science + Engineering.

***

I am concerned about apparent attempts from
somewhere to sabotage Linux in favor of
Microsoft Windows. These include...

o Future computers with UEFI bios may require Microsoft authorization to boot non-Windows.

o Certain routers, such as DLink DIR-601, won't work with Linux when setup as per manual...

o Adobe Acrobat module for Linux suddenly quit working - I found an accidental bug...

o Adobe FlashPlayer 11.2 module is the last Linux version to be supported...

etc.

OUTSTANDING!

A wonderful interview! Thanks to Jeremy, Pat, and the Inquisition (questioners) for making this happen. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this.

Regards,

V. T. Eric Layton, Nocturnal Slacker

That is an easy read.