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Katherine Johnson’s mathematical calculations helped guide some of America’s most important early space missions while she confronted the racial and gender barriers faced by Black women in twentieth-century America.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
Patrick Volkerding | |
|---|---|
 Patrick Volkerding at Linuxworld 2000 NYC | |
| Born | Patrick John Volkerding[1] October 20, 1966 |
| Education | Minnesota State University Moorhead (BSc) |
| Occupation | Software engineer |
| Known for | Slackware |
| Spouse |
Andrea (m. 2001) |
| Children | Briah Cecilia Volkerding (b. 2005)[2][8][6] |
| Parent(s) | Dr. John Volkerding & Molly Jane Mullen[5][1] |
Patrick Volkerding (born October 20, 1966) is the founder and maintainer of the Slackware Linux distribution. Volkerding is Slackware's "Benevolent Dictator for Life" (BDFL), and is also known informally as "The Man".[9]
Volkerding earned a Bachelor of Science in computer science from Minnesota State University Moorhead in 1993.[10] Volkerding is a Deadhead, and by April 1994 had already attended 75 Grateful Dead concerts.[11]
Volkerding is a Church of the SubGenius affiliate/member. The use of the word slack in "Slackware" is an homage to J. R. "Bob" Dobbs. About the SubGenius influence on Slackware, Volkerding has stated: "I'll admit that it was SubGenius inspired. In fact, back in the 2.0 through 3.0 days we used to print a dobbshead on each CD."[12]
Volkerding is an avid homebrewer and beer lover.[11] Early versions of Slackware would entreat users to send him a bottle of local beer in appreciation for his work.
Volkerding has been married since 2001 to Andrea and has a daughter named Briah Cecilia Volkerding who was born in 2005.[2][3][8]
In 2004, Volkerding announced via mailing list post that he was suffering from actinomycosis,[13] a serious illness requiring multiple rounds of antibiotics and with an uncertain prognosis. This announcement caused a number of tech news outlets to wonder about the future of the Slackware project.[14] As of 2012, both Volkerding and the Slackware project were reported to be in a healthy state again.[15]
Michael Johnston of Morse Telecommunications paid Volkerding $1 per copy sold. After that six-month contract, Robert Bruce of Walnut Creek CDROM began publishing Slackware as a CD-ROM set. Robert Bruce later became Volkerding's partner in Slackware Linux, Inc. with Volkerding owning a non-controlling, minority, 40% share.[16] Due to underpayment, Patrick Volkerding, "told them to take it down or I'd suspend the DNS for the Slackware store".[17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]
Walnut Creek CDROM,[25][26][27] 60% owner of Slackware Linux, Inc., was sold to BSDi[28][29] and later to Wind River Systems.[20][16]
Chris Lumens and others worked for Slackware, but due to underpayment, these people lost their jobs.[30][31][32][20][18][23]
From 1993 to present day Volkerding has managed Slackware with the help of many volunteers and testers.
In 2014, Volkerding received the O'Reilly Open Source Award.[33]
Slackware started in early 1993, but it wasn't until the middle of 1994 that I was contacted by Michael Johnston of Morse Telecommunications and asked if I was interested in having them publish Slackware commercially...Since then, Slackware has always made enough money through publishing arrangements to be my full time job. I didn't stay with Morse long because they were only giving me $US1 per copy sold. When the initial six-month agreement expired, I moved on to Walnut Creek CDROM since they were better established and were willing to give Slackware a fair share of the profits. Their founder, Robert Bruce, is my current partner in Slackware Linux, Inc.
Patrick Volkerding, who is the founder and benevolent dictator for life of the Slackware Linux distribution, posted a note at LinuxQuestions.org detailing some financial problems. It appears they mostly stem from a deal that he made with the Slackware Store that has gone badly awry....Note that there is at least one person out there soliciting Bitcoin who is not affiliated with Volkerding, in what looks like a scam of some sort; it is particularly sad because that is similar to what he alleges has happened with Slackware Store as well.
Volkerding said he had discovered how bad things were in 2017 when he managed to get some numbers out of the people running the store. "I thought the sales were just that bad, and was really rather depressed about it. Another side note – the ownership of the 60% portion of the store changed hands behind my back. Nobody thought they needed to tell me about this. At that point I'd say things got considerably worse for me." The commercialisation of Slackware was initially undertaken with Michael Johnston of Morse Telecommunications in 1994. After that, Volkerding moved to a venture with the founder of Walnut Creek CDROM, Robert Bruce. Later, Volkerding teamed up with Bruce to set up a Slackware company. iTWire has written to the Slackware store, seeking comment on Volkerding's claims.
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
Patrick Volkerding (born October 20, 1966) is the founder and maintainer of the Slackware Linux distribution. Volkerding is Slackware's "Benevolent Dictator for Life" (BDFL), and is also known informally as "The Man".
Slackware is a Linux distribution created by Patrick Volkerding in 1993. Originally based on Softlanding Linux System (SLS), Slackware has been the basis for many other Linux distributions, most notably the first versions of SUSE Linux distributions, and is the oldest distribution that is still maintained. Slackware aims for design stability and simplicity and to be the most "Unix-like" Linux distribution. It makes as few modifications as possible to software packages from upstream and tries not to anticipate use cases or preclude user decisions. In contrast to most modern Linux distributions, Slackware provides no graphical installation procedure and no automatic dependency resolution of software packages. It uses plain text files and only a small set of shell scripts for configuration and administration. Without further modification, it boots into a command-line interface environment. Because of its many conservative and simplistic features, Slackware is often considered to be most suitable for advanced and technically inclined Linux users. Slackware is available for the IA-32 and x86_64 architectures, with a port to the ARM architecture. While Slackware is mostly free and open-source software, it does not have a formal bug-tracking facility or public code repository, with releases periodically announced by Volkerding. No formal membership procedure exists for developers, and Volkerding is the primary contributor to releases.
A Linux distribution, often abbreviated as distro, is an operating system that includes the Linux kernel for its kernel functions. Although the term does not imply product distribution per se, a distro, if distributed on its own, is often obtained via a website intended specifically for the purpose. Distros have been designed for a wide variety of systems ranging from personal computers (for example, Linux Mint) to servers (for example, Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and from embedded devices (for example, OpenWrt) to supercomputers (for example, Rocks Cluster Distribution). A distro typically includes a Linux kernel and many other components. Commonly, it includes a package manager, an init system (such as systemd, OpenRC, SysVinit, or runit), GNU tools and libraries, documentation, Internet Protocol (IP) network configuration utility software (utilities), the getty TTY setup program, and many more. Programs used to provide a desktop experience (most commonly the Mesa userspace graphics drivers), a display server (the most common being the X.org Server, or, more recently, a Wayland compositor such as Sway, KDE's KWin, or GNOME's Mutter), a desktop environment (most commonly GNOME, KDE Plasma, Cinnamon or Xfce), a sound server (usually either PulseAudio or more recently PipeWire), and other related programs may be included or installed by the user. Typically, most of the included software is free and open-source software – made available both as binary for convenience and as source code to allow for modifying it. A distro may also include proprietary software that is not available in source code form, such as a device driver binary. A distro may be described as a specific assortment of application and utility software (various GNU tools and libraries, for example), packaged with the Linux kernel in such a way that its capabilities meet users' needs. The software is usually adapted to the distribution and then combined into software packages by the distribution's maintainers. The software packages are available online in repositories, which are storage locations usually distributed around the world. Beside "glue" components, such as the distribution installers (for example, Debian-Installer and Anaconda) and the package management systems, very few packages are actually written by a distribution's maintainers. Distributions have been designed for a wide range of computing environments, including desktops, servers, laptops, netbooks, mobile devices (phones and tablets), and embedded systems. There are commercially backed distributions, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (Red Hat), openSUSE (SUSE) and Ubuntu (Canonical), and entirely community-driven distributions, such as Debian, Slackware, Gentoo and Arch Linux. Most distributions come ready-to-use and prebuilt for a specific instruction set, while some (such as Gentoo) are distributed mostly in source code form and must be built before installation.
Sebeka ( sə-BEE-kə) is a city in Wadena County, Minnesota, United States. As of the 2020 census, Sebeka had a population of 741. The name comes from an Ojibwe word meaning "town by the water". U.S. Highway 71, State Highway 227, and the historic Jefferson Highway (now Jefferson Avenue), are three of the main routes in the city.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Joe Louis.
