Best of luck, Niki! This sounds like a sane approach to me; a great way to reduce stress and make it easier to maintain your client systems.

To that I agree. Best to you!

I too will be leaving the Linux/Slackware community after almost 2 years. The only reason I came to Slackware was MLED. Since its gone, I don't have a reason to continue my endeavor. Some people think having to do everything manually is the way to go. The way technology is evolving, its minimizing the procedures/steps to get a system updating and running. People are always saying how unique Linux is as a server. But, the same server has hundreds of millions Windows/Macs connecting to it and not hundred of millions Linux desktops/laptops connecting to it. The same people who feel that way, don't assemble their cars, microwaves, build their houses from the ground-up etc.... Most Linux users do have a one-direction attitude. Its bigger than Linux, Microsoft and Macs. I will be testing Neverware/Cloudready for a week or so and I'm back to Windows until Linux catch up. I enjoyed it while it lasted. Thanks for the little knowledge you guys gave. Best wishes.

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@kikinovak has provided help to many people here over the years.

I wish him well.

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Take care man! I have a question though what exactly are the critical components that you require and feel are difficult to get working and updated? I toyed with a small home server before, but I pretty much use my computer as a workstation and desktop.

Thank you for the little help that you gave the other people here.

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Feel free to fork the project. Frankly, I'd be glad if someone took care of it, and technically you seem up to the task.

$ git clone https://github.com/kikinovak/microlinux

Cheers,

Niki

IMO that's what went wrong with MLED. No use of scalable tools.

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Let me use a cooking metaphor to elaborate a bit. A friend of mine works as a chef at our local school. Which, by the way, has the best food I have ever seen in a canteen. A few years ago she gave me cooking lessons in exchange for computer lessons. For the most part, the vegetables she uses either come homegrown from the schools' garden, or from the local organic farmer. But for some ingredients like spinach, she does make an exception and uses deep-frozen spinach, not spinach leaves. She explained to me that cooking spinach starting from the leaves, cleaning them, cutting them, cooking them etc. is much work, so she uses deep-frozen spinach, as this is much less work, with an almost identical end result.

Moving to CentOS means accepting to use some ingredients that are much easier and faster to cook, but I still know how to do things by hand. I get rid of NetworkManager and edit scripts in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts by hand, much as I would do with /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf. Similarly, I uninstall firewalld and use my own iptables script instead. I know how to build my own RPM packages, but so far, this skill wasn't needed, since I always found some well-tendered third-party repository. I know how to build a mail server from scratch, with Postfix, Dovecot and Postgrey built from source, but now I just prefer doing 'yum install postfix dovecot postgrey' and being up and running in no time, without the hassle of rebuilding components whenever there's a security fix but simple doing 'yum update'. Also, knowing that my two main servers are officially supported with low-risk security updates until June 2024 is great.

Niki

kikinovak --

Thank you for all your contributions to the Slackware LQ forum ( not to mention MLED and your contributions to SBo ).

Curious ... are you going with CentOS 7 ( including systemd ) or will you stay with CentOS 6 and wish for a marketing miracle ?

I agree with your assessment of running CentOS as a server -- disable NetworkManager and edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* 'by hand ; stay with rpm binary installs whenever possible.

Maybe Slackware needs yet another package management tool, maybe called slum which works much like yum on CentOS to install prebuilt packages and dependencies ?

I wish you well and thanks again !

-- kjh

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I'm going with CentOS 7. I simply learnt how to work with systemd, and it works, without drama, like everything in CentOS.

If I won the lottery and became a billionaire overnight, I guess I would happily put together a team to compile and maintain my "perfect" Linux distribution, a blend of Slackware and RHEL. RPM-based with a dependency resolver, BSD init, newbie-friendly like Ubuntu but with Slackware's clean configuration scripts under the hood instead of Ubuntu's mess. I'd call this Yatahongaga Linux, "Yatahongaga" being an ancient pataphysician word meaning nothing in particular.

But then, I don't even play the lottery.

Niki

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hi Niki,

reading this post is like a deja vu. Didn't you announce something similar couple of years ago?

I think I get it: using Slackware as a base is too much effort. So it boils down to the amount of work you need to put. This is a perfectly understandable and reasonable decision. Sometimes I actually consider switching to Debian, when the amount of SlackBuilds I maintain begins to feel as too much work. However, it seems to me that if everyone thought this way, projects like SlackBuilds.org would not exist

Please, do not interpret my words as any sort of criticism against you. I have always had a good opinion of you and your work. I wish you all the best.

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I don't want to be pushy, but slackrepo exists exactly for that kind of setup, and then there's a huge amount of tools like Slackware Live and takeover.sh and packer and vagrant and ansible and salt etc etc for managing fleets of servers.

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No need for drama. Lots of us use multiple operating systems. Move on. The people I feel sorry for are those attached to MLED. But business is business and time is money.

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they will be back, someday.

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