Sometimes I have a hard time answering - such a popular in Linux circles question - which distribution I am running. How, it is not The Only True Debian? Not the Greatest and Latest Red Hat? Not the Best and Coolest Mandrake? Not the elegant SuSE? Not The Bullet-Proof Caldera? Damn, man, what the conspiracy bloody distro you are running?!

Well, the formal answer is somewhat simple and shocking - it is Slackware 2.something installed circa 1995. It was Slackware for a simple reason that this was the first PC-based Unix I was laid my hands on (oh these lovely twenty or so diskettes!). Not upgraded (in the formal meaning of that word) since then.

But:

Since then, it was transferred countless number of time from machine to machine, survived a few complete and semi-complete restorings from backup disk to the live running systems (oh yes, I like such dirty things!),

Since then, probably no single file remain untouched. Everything was upgraded - no binaries, everything to compile (a matter of honor, you know).

Since then, it passed manual upgrades from a.out to elf, and from libc5 to glibc2 (and manual means manual - with building cross compilers and such), and now it has a smoking mixture of glibc2.1, glibc2.0 and libc5.

Since then, startup scripts mutated to something which resembles half BSD, half System V.

Since then, it passed countless kernel recompilations.

Since then, I broke things countless number of times, and the same number of times (and maybe even more) restored them.

It currently runs a bunch of windows managers, apache, samba, a half dozen of various versions of gcc, and all other stuff a cool Linux machine should run. I am really proud of it.

Maybe I am ready to make the world happy with Yet Another Ultimate Distribution (TM)?