Patrick Volkerding or mr. Slackware

It all started in 1973. An ordinary child named Patrick and his class went on an excursion to the computer department of North Dakota State University.

“The room where they kept the cars totally amazed me - a lot of big noisy cars with flickering lights everywhere. And rows of large disk drive drives. One of the system operators showed me how to play StarTrek on Dec Writer, a teletype-like terminal. It was an instant addiction. ”

Patrick Volkerding, interview with linuxjournal.com


Addiction is addiction, and in 1973 the computers were large and the Internet was slow and neither the student nor his parents could afford to buy a computer. This is what made Patrick interested in electronics - it was more accessible and no less interesting.

After the publication and sale of the first personal computers, such as the TRS-80 , Apple II and Atari 400/800, the shops involved in the sale became Patrick's permanent habitat. The owners allowed him to hang around and use the cars here, and in return received small programs with store advertising or something similar, resulting from the study of BASIC by Patrick.

At the age of 14, Patrick still got a personal PC. It was the Apple II Plus with a 300 baud modem AppleCat . A unix-like OS was installed on it, not even reminiscent of Linux. At that time, these were just very popular models. This machine served him faithfully until 1990.

Education

Patrick joined computer engineering in 85 at Boston University. After two years of study, 1 year he was released in connection with the transfer to MSU. In total, over 8 years, in 1993, Patrick received a bachelor's degree in computer science from Minnesota State University Moorhead.

Entertainment

The main entertainment for Patrick is his work - Linux. He just likes to do it. This is typical of professionals. Keeping up with technology and time, perfecting your large entertainment project is one of the greatest pleasures.

But the world is not limited to computer technology alone. Before Linux took up most of the time, the main network sites for Patrick were Homebrew Digest and rec.crafts.brewing . He loves to make his own beer. In the early versions of the distribution, you could even find records with requests, if you liked the distribution, send Volkerding a bottle of local beer.

Patrick plays the guitar and fans from The Grateful Dead. In the summer of 87 and 88 years. he drove a group across the states on his 67 Firebird Convertible. He had a lot of portable filming equipment in order to shoot a group as much as possible. He was at more than 75 of their concerts.

“I'm still waiting for Jerry Garcia to invite me on stage: ^)”

Patrick Volkerding, interview with linuxjournal.com

How Slackware Tempered

Patrick first heard about Linux, around the end of 1992, from a friend named Wes, at a party in Fargo, North Dakota. He remembered Linux only when he needed to find a LISP interpreter for the project. So one of the versions of Peter MacDonald's distribution kit SLS was downloaded .

“In fact, I never intended to create my distribution. My professor of artificial intelligence wanted me to show him how to install Linux in such a way that he could use it on a home machine and share it with some graduate students who did a great job at LISP. So we went to the lab and installed the SLS version of Linux »
Patrick Volkerding, interview with linuxjournal.com


In a few weeks, everything that was necessary was fixed in the installed OS and the professor had a completely logical desire to make sure that with subsequent Linux installations on machines, the OS had the same fixes that it has now. This started the project. Patrick fixed the original SLS installation scripts, fixed bugs, added the automatic installation of shared libraries and the kernel image. I edited the description files, making them more informative and generally went through all the software packages, eliminating all the bugs seen, porting new versions of the software packages that came out. At the start of work, the future distribution, then still just a hack version of SLS, had a core of 0.98pl4, and upon completion of work and passing it to a professor, it was already 0.99pl9. By then, Patrick in his SLS assembly overtook the original distribution in half the packages, and made many corrections in the second half. The differences between SLS and Slackware are more than cosmetic.

In May - June 1993, after the C 4.4.1 libraries and the 0.99pl11A kernel were added to the distribution kit, the system became significantly more stable and network operation improved. Friends from Minnesota State University persuaded Patrick to post the distribution on FTP, but thinking that a new version of SLS would be released, Patrick waited. Over the course of several weeks, a lot of people on the net have been asking for a new patch release of SLS. Then a letter was sent to the network with the subject “Does someone want an SLS-like 0.99plA system?”. And there were a lot of answers.

Patrick was allowed to create anonymous FTP on the old 3b2 , which was bent very soon after the announcementabout the laid out archive. Those who managed to download Slackware 1.0 left good reviews on the network and the distribution's reputation did not take long. Patrick was offered disk space at ftp.cdrom.com.

And once the time came when Peter McDonald woke up and demanded distribution rights to installation scripts taken from SLS, instead of looking at the example of Slackware to fix SLS, as Volkerding wanted it to. Patrick completely rewrote the installation scripts for Slackware and after this amount of work done, he realized that he was not going to give up.

Title

The name Slackware was suggested by a friend of Patrick JR "Bob" Dobbs . Slack - means lazy, negligent, sloppy, relaxed, lethargic, and also idle. Many said that the name carries a negative connotation, but Patrick liked the name. What he called Slackware was really a hack version of SLS. He was not going to unveil the distribution. But when I posted it on FTP, I left the name. At first, he didn’t want people to take the distribution kit so seriously.

“Anyway, in my opinion it sounds better than Microsoft, isn't it? : - ^) »

Patrick Volkerding, interview with linuxjournal.com


To this day, Slackware distributions come out stably once a year. True, once stability almost broke ...

Last post?

On Thursday, November 16, 2004, a letter was sent to the network with the heading “Last Post?” In which Patrick said that he was seriously ill and the doctors found it difficult to make a diagnosis. The letter described in detail the symptoms, the history of the disease, and a request for help with the diagnosis. Volkerding had every chance not to release version 10.1, the development of which he so dreamed of starting. But fortunately and with general joy, on December 20 a letter was published “Slackware Changelog Notice !!” In which Patrick said that upon returning to California he began to feel much better.

Now Patrick Volkerding lives in California with his wife Andrea Volkerding and daughter Brian Cecilia Volkerding (born November 22, 2005).
He is the author of the books Linux Configuration and installation, Linux system commands, linux in Plain English, Linux Programming and just a good person who has made a huge contribution to the world of OpenSource and continues to do it. Thanks to him.