Episode: 390
Title: HPR0390: Interview with Alan Hicks
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0390/hpr0390.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 19:36:48

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Presented by
I'm at the southeast Linux Fest and I'm actually a little bit honored to be
talking to Alan Hicks who is involved with the Flackware project, so hi Alan.
Well, hi, Collette. And you ain't got to feel honored. I'm just Rigdo Fale.
You're from what state again? I'm from La Zilla, Georgia.
From what state? Well, I'm from Georgia and I'm from the town of La Zilla in Georgia.
Right. Okay. Cool. And what do you think of the festival so far?
I think it's been a big success. I didn't think we was going to have this kind of turnout.
Yeah. For the first year and, you know, a new start-up, only a single day.
Yeah. And to have over 400 people present is, I think it's sounding success.
Yeah. I don't think, you know, like the whole Linux Fest happened about 150 there first year.
I don't think scale had many more than we have here their first year.
And you know, that's Los Angeles, a major metropolitan area. And, you know, a big,
I guess you would think bashed in for computers in California.
But I think it's been excellent. I think the people did a great job putting it on.
They got a good location for everything. And so far, everything's gone smoothly.
Everybody's getting along and it's just been great.
And now, how did you get broke into it? Like, what, how did you get involved or to what extent are you involved?
Well, I first heard about the Southeast Linux Fest. Probably a little less than a year ago.
Maybe August, September of 2008. And at this point, nobody was really sure exactly what it was going to be.
I was going to play out. And, you know, I agreed to help in some ways.
But I'm not a good organizer. So I certainly didn't want to have anything to do with actually having to organize and get everything together.
But I agreed to do a presentation on, you know, basically whatever they wanted.
And, you know, I've been in some of our sea chats, so I'm doing some of their meetings.
And, you know, tried to offer some helpful suggestions.
But, I mean, I'm certainly not a thank for putting on this great thing.
I didn't have all that much to do with it though. I've known about it.
And, you know, have been pseudo-involved. I guess you would say for a while.
But, you know, the real thanks goes to Dave and James and all these other people, you know, that, uh, Jeremy James.
That's J.B. Boy.
You don't have to add to that.
People do say that I'm just an ordinary fan.
But, you know, the credit really goes to guys like those who've spent, you know, almost a year and are all ready to get ready to plan the next one.
So how long have you been using, I guess, Linux and then how long have you been involved in Slackware?
Oh.
You can kind of answer those questions together because a start-up was Slackware.
Wow. That was my very first distribution in 2001, early 2001.
Okay.
When I got started, my first, I'll say my first up-to-date computers, my first real computer.
I didn't really buy that until late 2000.
And I'd heard about Linux just...
What's your background?
I mean, why would you have heard of Linux?
Oh.
That's a really tough question for me to answer.
Why did I hear that?
I have no idea where I first heard it.
I was working at a SAMS club selling electronics at the time.
That's probably where I heard of it.
Not the greatest job in the world, but thank God I had it at the time.
I needed a job.
I have a college education.
Still don't, but now I don't really need it.
And I installed it in 2001.
It was Slackware 7.1 that bought from Amazon because God knows I couldn't have downloaded it.
The cheapo dial-up connection I had.
And we started the Slack book project to rewrite the original first edition.
Probably in 03 maybe really early 04 war.
And it didn't really get published until several years later because things got started.
And then they kind of just slacked off a lot of interest died.
And I sort of officially joined the development team.
And I think it was January of 08 or maybe December of 07.
And I've been involved with them.
And I guess you would say officially since then.
When I started with Slackware, I was reading the Slack book.
And by turns I thought it was brilliant and the most aggravating, you know, worst written thing.
You're like this is brilliant.
This is brilliant.
Whoever did this, they're brilliant.
And then when it doesn't work for you, you blame it on the person who wrote this.
You're like, you're like, you're blaming me.
I'm not brilliant.
I'm just an average guy who works hard on some of this stuff.
And you know, I think if you're, if you got a data head on your shoulders and you're willing to work hard at learning, you can do that.
But yeah, certainly not flawless.
And you know, the Slack book was never written to cover everything.
It was right in it just to get the operating system installed.
Help you configure actually a little bit.
Give you basics of the I and EMAG.
Yeah.
You can edit your configuration files.
You know, give you an idea of how to manage the file system, users, groups, permission, things along that nature.
And we're currently revising it.
I'm currently revising it.
It's not really even a revision.
It's a complete rewrite from the ground up.
Yeah.
And we'll have a doc book.
So we're excited and available that we'll actually work this time.
Cool.
And you know, well, I was hoping to get it out mid summer this year.
But work has been crazy.
Are you in the IT industry now?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I work for a place called CTS Making.
Okay.
Uh, we work out of making Georgia.
And we do, we do a little bit of everything.
Everything from asterisk to somba to a FTP to web posting and email posting to VPNs.
But basically, we do anything that a small business needs their IT to do for an hourly rate.
And, uh, it really works out for most of our clients.
Because even if they pay, you know, our hourly rate of $95 an hour, they might only spend $20,000 a year with us.
And if they hired someone and had to do that, they'd be spending $40,000 to $60,000 plus benefits.
Right, right.
Okay.
That's cool.
Um, it's really cool that you get to do that all day.
Well, uh, it is.
But then you also had to figure, you know, a lot of times you're just repairing windows, workstations,
or setting up printers and stuff.
Yeah.
It's not always...
Not as glamorous.
And you don't get to do everything you would like to do all the time.
But on the flip side, you know, when work does slow down, I do have a lot of leeway to figure out, you know, what new technologies are coming down.
But, you know, things we can put together for our clients that, you know, can bring in some new business.
And then basically I get to play with some new technology.
That's how we got started with Astros.
Uh, we were looking at, you know, new businesses.
When a new business opens, they need two things.
Uh, predominantly as far as IT goes.
They need computer networks, and they need a final system.
Right.
We were, you know, set up entirely to handle the computer system.
And that was fine.
But why can't we do their computer system and do the final system as well?
You know, just get a bigger piece of the pie for starting up a business, essentially.
Yeah.
And that's, you know, kind of what went for that.
Cool.
What's your take, I guess, personally on Slackware?
I mean, I don't suppose anyone's going to say that any distribution is for everyone.
But who is Slackware for?
I think Slackware is for a lot of different people.
One is for anyone older than you to Linux who wants to learn.
With Slackware, well, let me preface this by saying, you know,
with other distributions, not to not, you know, Fedora or Ubuntu or Zeus,
they often have their own, I don't want to say proprietary,
but specific to them, ways of configuring files.
Right.
Like if you look, you know, just through the Etsy directory and all these distributions,
you'll see warnings that say, do not hand-ed at this file.
Yeah.
And if you do, it'll get overwritten.
Yeah.
Slackware isn't like that.
So the things you learn in Slackware can translate not just to other Linux distributions,
but they'll transfer to the BSDs.
They'll transfer in many ways to Solaris or AIX.
I've admined some of those boxes based almost exclusively on my Slackware now.
That's cool.
And even to OSX, some of your underlying is the BSD based.
Yeah.
And a lot of those skills are able to translate.
And it's not always, you don't always get that same level of feeling
from other Linux distributions or operating systems.
And in addition, I think any power user would really appreciate Slackware.
You do have to go through a little bit more work.
We don't ship all the libraries and odd programs and stuff.
Yeah.
But all the basics are there.
And with the SlackBills.org project, most everything you desire is easily compiled, packaged, and installed.
Yeah.
It's almost a no-brainer on Slack nodes.
I mean, like if you use that.
Yeah.
And we're going through a growing process right now.
As we try to support 64-bit Slackware.
Right.
And we also want to be able to support multiple download links.
If you're not familiar with SlackBills, every application, I guess you would say, has its own directory.
So if we're talking about PostFix, there's a PostFix directory.
And then there's a readme file telling you what you need.
There's a PostFix.slack build file that you run to create it.
And there's a PostFix.info file, in addition to some other things, like RC scripts and the like.
And that info file has the download link for PostFix.
It has MD5 songs for the download.
It has, you know, who to contact if this doesn't work.
And previously, we've only had like one download link and one MD5 song link.
And some things require you to download multiple source archives.
And we want to be able to, we want to be able to better support that.
Yeah.
So we're looking at some ways of doing that.
In addition to having different download links, depending on your architecture, especially when you deal with something like open office,
which we repackage from their binary distribution range.
We need one download link for 486 based systems.
And a separate one for X86 underscore 64 system.
Yeah.
So, you know, we're going through a growing phase with that.
But I think we've got a hand on it.
And, you know, we'll just see what the consensus comes to in the next couple months.
The next step for Slack for the next big release is going to be 13, right?
It's not that long.
Almost certainly going to be 13.0.
Yeah, okay.
They're horrible.
They've switched to four, you know, KDE four.
You know.
And everyone seems to be pretty pleased for that.
I mean, for them to switch to it, obviously, I guess the...
Well, you know, there's still some controversy, you know.
People like KDE three-steel.
It's rock stable, but there's really not a whole lot of development work right all being done there.
And we've included KDE three, you know, for the past few releases after KDE four was available.
And we may find that, you know, KDE three is available through some third parties.
Right.
There's been talk about doing that.
KDE four though has...
While it's not a stable, what's KDE three was, it has a lot of nice new features.
Yeah.
The whole compositing window manager, the ability to do 3D effects.
Yeah.
And while there are some things that aren't quite as nice anymore,
there are a lot of additional features that I think a lot of people would like.
Yeah.
You know, they try.
So while there's still, you know, some...
I guess you would say some fighting against going to KDE four,
the decision's been made.
It's not going to be bad.
Right.
And, you know, we're just going to have to see how, you know, 4.2, 4.3,
and I'm going down the line and go.
Because I mean, if you look at this, compared to, say, the non-2.0 release,
I don't know if you were around for that time.
But, and I'm almost on the other side of the fence here,
because I hated non-2.
I hated non-2.
I loved non-1.x because they're so easy to configure.
Non-2 took away a whole lot of that and changed a whole lot,
and people weren't as comfortable with it.
But, you know, going down the line, people began to set that it became better and better,
and I think the same thing's going to happen with KDE four here.
Yeah.
I mean, I've seen, I was with KDE four from 4.0.
I mean, from that release event that you were probably at as well, right?
Yeah, so I was there.
I was there.
I didn't talk to anyone.
Really?
Yeah.
I missed out meeting chess, Griffin, 88, you Patrick himself.
Oh, yeah.
Basically, you know, I mean, I was just like, wow, I really wish I was sociable.
Well, the great thing about being around gigs, if you're not sociable,
nobody's going to hold on to games.
Right.
Exactly.
Any of you are sociable and screw up, nobody's going to hold on to games.
We're not any fans.
Exactly.
I know.
That's why it's fun to be around at a festival like this,
because there is a certain amount of ease of just like,
I can go talk to that person because they probably feel as awkward as I do right now.
But yeah, so I mean, I've seen huge changes from 4.0,
just 4.2.2 or whatever we're at now.
I mean, there's been a lot of changes.
Yeah.
The office has improved a lot.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't think it was even available on 4.0.
It wasn't.
Yeah.
So, you know, there's still a lot of growing pains.
There's still a lot of stability where it needs to be done.
But overall, I think it's an improvement.
And it's one of those things that we kind of had to put in,
because that's where all the development work is going to.
And if we don't throw it in, you know,
at some point, you had to make the decision that
this is what we're going to have,
and this is what we're going to go forward with.
And, you know, where the right place to make that decision is,
that can be debated.
But, you know, we decided or pat decided,
you know, now is the time just to get rid of KD3.
We're going to strengthen KD4.
Yeah.
And I think it's going to work out fine for us.
Yeah.
I think it was a good choice, like you say.
It's kind of inevitable at some point anyway.
I mean, at least some of the other districts hit, you know,
most of the bugs before we did.
Right.
Exactly.
Well, I mean, that's kind of the slackware method, you know.
I mean, let other people find the problems, you know?
I mean, slackware is, you can put it on your system,
and you can rest assured that it's going to work for you.
Yeah.
Which is, at least a stable branch.
Right.
Yeah.
If you run current, yeah.
The current branch, you know, no guarantees can be made.
Really, we don't make any guarantees for the stable branch either,
but I don't think anybody does.
Yeah.
But, you know, even our current branch is almost like, you know,
Debbie and unstable, you know, Debbie and unstable is,
and he's different from Debbie and testing.
Right.
It's almost as rough as anything else.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Especially now, we'll see.
I say it's rough, stable, but, you know, like just this past week,
30% of the operating system was replaced in a single commit, you know?
Excellent.
Recompile.
Yeah.
Everything that depended on actuals recompile.
Yeah.
And, you know, a lot of major changes went in with power and things.
So, you know, current, while it stays fairly stable on your systems,
it's guaranteed to change in any time until it gets that, you know,
a magic penguin thing.
I guess you say, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right.
But, comes release.
I hadn't heard that before.
The 64-bit, you told me, when I saw you yesterday,
that you guys, a lot of the people doing Slackware stuff,
are running it now.
And, has been running it for six months or more on all about everything?
Wow.
Oh.
Feeling pretty confident on it.
Yeah.
Feeling really confident.
Eric Kameler's, he's the guy, really, to think, as far as doing,
getting Slackware 64 and pushing it,
he mirrored the non-public current tree,
and basically rebuilt everything on his own.
You know, we've looked at, and worked together,
merged into the Slack build 64 files,
and the regular 32-bit Slack builds into one,
so that they're much easier to maintain upstream.
Basically, we want to have just one source repo,
you know, kind of like dabbing in some of the others doing
support multiple distributions,
even out of a single, you know, build script.
You can just run this build script with a specific architecture,
there are R equals A, 486, or X8664,
and it'll build a package dependent on that.
Very cool.
What is, I mean, give me an idea of, like,
and this is probably specific to you,
but just in general, the people developing,
you know, and working on Slackware,
you guys, you know, you come home, you sit down,
and go straight to the computer,
and just work all night on it, or, you know,
regular meetings, or, I mean,
I just work.
It depends, and everyone's a little bit different.
Eric is the kind of guy who comes home from work,
after working on computers,
and he can slam on Slackware all night long.
I'm not.
You know, I have to have some lie down.
And afternoons are often busy with me,
doing other things.
You know, I have, well, I'm not married,
and I don't have any kids.
I do spend a lot of time with my family,
my sisters, their kids, and my folks.
A good bit of my early time is taking up,
and then I have, you know, my own work projects and things.
So, generally, when I'm able to help Slackware,
it's almost during my work hours, you know,
if it's a slow work week, yeah.
Because we use Slackware almost all our servers.
All our Linux boxes are Slackware.
My place of business.
So, you know, a lot of my development work is done there.
When I have time, when, you know,
we're not absolutely busy,
and I love to hire someone else that, you know,
would work for peanuts.
So, I could do more with that, really.
But so far, you know, that hasn't,
that hasn't really worked out with, you know,
economy, the way it is.
We'll just say, you know, when we're able to do that.
Trying to think if I would be willing to speak to my car and get paid
a little bit of a wage for the opportunity
to contribute to Slackware.
Oh, no, no, no.
No way.
We'd say, yeah, quarter an hour hasn't been well.
Okay.
Could be worth it, hopefully.
Yeah, I'll think about that.
I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, the best way to contribute to Slackware
is the same way that everyone on the development team
got there.
They earned their spot, you know,
off of it by communicating with Pat by email,
making real meaningful suggestions.
Right.
Working in current, downloading updates,
you know, building their own updates,
and testing, seeing what works, what doesn't.
And, you know, contributing that information to Pat
and some of the others.
You can always email, you know,
anyone on the development team.
Yeah.
Especially Robin and Eric,
Robbie Workman and Eric Hamler's
and Peter Pong, they're really the most,
I guess you would say hardcore,
the most active of anyone on the development team
with the exception of Pat.
Yeah.
But you can email, you know,
any of that does.
Well, you know, if you don't want to send it direct to Pat
and we'll pack on it a little bit ourselves,
figure out, you know, if you're right,
you'll forward it on.
You'll absolutely get credit.
And that doesn't get forgotten in the Slackware community.
Pat and really is really good about giving credit
where it's due.
And, you know, remember people who have them out.
Yeah, I mean, it's cool to read to the change blogs,
sometimes, to see who's done certain things, you know.
Yeah.
It's kind of, you see names that you don't,
I thought Chess Griffin's name in there once.
Yeah.
It's just like, oh, wow, it's cool.
Yeah.
Cool.
Well, Slackware is a great OS
and Slackbook was a fantastic read.
Well, I hope to make it even better.
Yeah, yeah, totally.
And one thing that I've talked about,
and I don't know if this is going to be the way
that it comes out, you know, the Slackbook is kind of geared
mainly towards newbies, not just newbies to Slackware,
but newbies to Linux.
I started with Slackware.
Right.
Cold.
I mean, cold.
No idea what Linux was or anything.
Yeah.
Well, today I think that's probably the best way to start with.
Yeah.
And Slackware.
You know, the book really helped me out.
I didn't know how to run VR or do any of these things.
And it was, you know, really helpful to me in that sense.
And I'd like to keep that for new, for people
who are new to Linux entirely in one of you Slackware,
I'd like to keep that for them.
But I'm also thinking about, you know,
after we do, we finish this first one,
to publish a second one that's geared towards intermeasers.
Yeah.
We focus more on, more on a proper firewall,
and proper networks and, you know,
advanced forms of demonstrating users and groups,
email and HTTP.
And, you know,
then looking towards building your own applications,
not necessarily even from SlackWields.
That's a fantastic idea because,
as someone trying to learn more about programming and stuff,
it's impossible to find a book or a book series
that takes you from one place to another place.
They always just kind of talk about one thing.
Yeah.
And a lot of documentation assumes you know some certain...
Yeah.
And I run across this,
and still running across it,
with Asterisk.
A lot of stuff with Asterisk assumes you know a lot of this
telephony stuff.
Right, right.
And a lot of people don't.
Yeah.
So, you know, there's not necessarily a book
that can teach you the basics as to, you know,
what sort of digital telephony service circuits there are.
Yeah.
And, you know, then taking into how to configure it with Asterisk,
you know, a lot of times they expect that.
Yeah.
And programming books are often like that as well.
Yeah.
They don't necessarily...
They expect you to either know all the theory...
Right.
And then don't actually get into any hard coding.
Right.
Yeah.
So, but yeah, we're not guaranteed to do this.
Sure.
But I'm definitely considering doing it into the future
after the Slackbook 3.0.
I guess you say it gets released.
Right.
I'd say we're about halfway along as far as all the content
and stuff goes and it needs to be edited.
But a lot of the, a lot of the hard chapters behind this.
Right.
A lot of the other stuff, you know, the AI max
I can almost be replicated verbatim.
Right.
I know.
You know, we're doing a rewrite.
So, I'm not even looking at the original for those.
You know, that stuff's fairly easy.
Yeah.
One of the reasons we haven't released so far
is because so much recently has changed.
You know, we've added an architecture,
build scripts have changed.
The installer is changing slightly.
And so it's difficult for me to write what the installer is
going to be when it hasn't been 100% finalized.
Yeah.
We've got, you know, MKNRD.
And I really want to push people to use the generic kernel.
I'm not even certain there's going to be a huge kernel.
Oh, really?
When 13.0 goes out.
Because we also have to struggle against a bit below.
You know, we have to keep everything on a single DVD.
Right.
And, you know, that's applications.
I mean, the binaries, the packages, that's the source code.
Yeah.
That's the kernels.
That's everything.
So, sometimes space has to be trimmed somewhere on the line.
Yeah.
And we've always recommended that people use the generic kernels
instead of the huge ones.
So, you know, it just depends.
We're not entirely certain.
Or I'm not entirely certain.
There won't be just a generic kernel.
Right.
But, you know, I'm not aware that that decision has been made.
And it might be made differently.
Right.
So, it's difficult for me to say, you know, to write those sections
of the Slackbook when they haven't been completely decided yet.
Yeah.
It's almost like you have to wait for 13.0 to be released before you can write those.
Well, either way, it's going to be exciting.
Especially the 64-bit version.
I think that's really great.
Yeah.
I mean, I've been using it for a long time.
You know, we used it for quite a while before it was, you know, public knowledge.
Yeah.
And it was kind of a little hard to keep a lid on sometimes,
because we had to, you know, consult with Mozilla so we could rebuild Firefox
and keep it looking the same as our 32-bit Firefox.
Okay.
Which is just a repagging.
Otherwise, we'd have had to name it on each of these orders.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, because they don't make a 64-bit blob, I guess you would say,
that we could just repackage and distribute the servers.
Okay.
I did not know that.
Yeah.
Cool.
I mean, it's been very informative.
Thanks a lot for talking to me.
Well, thanks for having me.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you for listening to Hacker Public Radio.
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