What is RavenPC?
RavenPC as a concept business idea came to me around 1998 shortly after I learned how to build my first computer. My first custom computer was an Cyrix Chipset on an iWill motherboard supporting an old 3dfx voodoo2 pci card and an Matrox video. I wanted to build a gaming pc but I also wanted to build a pc to make video games on and learn on as I advanced my career.
Shortly after that I started to take in friends and family computers and repaired, removed viruses and so on and that passion grew from there. I was inspired by Ron with EaglePC at the time, and I didn’t just want to start up a pc repair company. I was also inspired to make Alienware pc (Before dell bought them out) for a much cheaper price.
Early 2000’s, I ended up spending late nights working for an ISP building over 100’s of pc’s per week, just standard windows-based workstations for people to work from. That lead me to start building and administrating window servers and built networks for that support and I have always wondered if we can do windows with active directory and fileshare, why can’t we do that in linux? ISP shot me down because they didn’t want to think out side of the box instead they just want an out of the box solution that worked especially since everyone else supported windows only.
For a while since I have left the ISP, I did do computer work on the side repaired and built custom computers for family and friends and I also moved to Central Oregon and partnered with Redmond Computers and Central Oregon Micro but a partnership that turned grim as the partnership fell apart due to the other parties greedy acts and toxic behavior. I moved back to Las Vegas and continued to focus only on custom pc building and refurbish computers on the side and put aside all computer repair services just to focus on new pc’s and cyber security.
Why Slackware?
I have used Slackware since 1999, it’s been my favorite distro since then. I tried every other flavor out there and I still do to this day but Slackware will always be my favorite distro and I feel like this distro isn’t getting the love it does deserve. I am a cancer survivor and I recall the creator of Slackware is also a cancer survivor.
At the time I wanted a Linux flavor that favored BSD, I liked OpenBSD a lot and learned how to configure and installed that but ended up being more of a server based / firewall base OS than the desktop. Linux was more supported with emulating windows products using wine, more open source was hitting especially with graphic cards and I wanted a distro that I could load that was technically a bit more secure than Redhat(now fedora / centos). Slackware won my heart with how well it uses a “bsd” style subsystem and it’s packaging management, get passed the windows 3.1 look at the install, It is all really simple. If you want a distro that is stable and follows the Keep it simple silly ruling, technically this one would be the underdog to what is Ubuntu is today.