Why slackLab?

The name comes from Slackware Linux, the first distro I really got attached to as a young teenager.

This was before Linux had package management you could rely on. My first distribution was Red Hat 5.2, in 1998. SuSE Linux followed shortly after, and I bought both of them at the Chapters book store. I even helped fix an early nVidia driver package for the Riva TNT on SuSE.

RPM was still in its infancy. Exploring open source software as a teenager meant constantly chasing package dependencies. You install one thing, it needs three others, and each of those needs something else. People called it dependency hell.

Slackware made it easier. I could download an application's source tarball, extract it and compile it with relative ease. When dependencies did come up, I could work out what was missing and fix it myself.

Around the same time I found the Church of the SubGenius, a ridiculous fake church devoted to J.R. "Bob" Dobbs and the attainment of Slack. I loved Monty Python at that age, and the irreverence and ridiculousness stuck with me.

I even made a linocut of Bob as a teenager in art school.