Slackware 12, the latest version of what is the oldest existing commercial distribution, came out recently and for some reason or the other I decided to have a look. Maybe it's the fact that I now have a test machine that's got some grunt - hence having a look at software isn't all that painful a task.

Some of today's Linux users may not have heard of Slackware; the distribution was started by Patrick Volkerding in early 1993 to address what he perceived as shortcomings in Softlanding Linux System, the only commercial distribution available at that time.

Volkerding was finishing a bachelor's degree in Computer Science at Minnesota State University, Moorhead, at the time he started Slackware; he had been playing with Linux for a few months, and was using it for his LISP assignments in an Artificial Intelligence course.

An army of loyal fans has ensured that Slackware has stayed financially viable and Volkerding has kept the faith with them all these years, despite battling a mystery illness in 2004 and 2005. Though version 12 has remained by and large in the conservative mode for which the distribution is known, Volkerding has been a little adventurous this time.

Slackware 12 includes the latest kernel (2.6.21), the latest KDE (3.5.7), a new glibc (2.5) and gcc 4.1.2. It also includes a recent version of xorg which now provides the windowing system for Linux distributions.

The installation procedure is still an ncurses-based text routine and has the same phases as it did in version 7.1, the one I reviewed in the year 2000. You boot up, partition your disk, install operating system and applications, and then configure your windowing system. Slackware is the only distribution I've looked at recently which still uses LILO to manage the booting processs, rather than GRUB.

Hence, any new user who approaches the distribution should be armed with sufficient documentation. Else, you will be left waiting at a prompt, wondering what you have to do to get to the next step.

It took a while for me to recall the installation routine but after that it was relatively easy. Setting up X wasn't a piece of cake, though; even with the newer version of xorg, I took some time to get a decent resolution on my 22-inch LCD monitor.