I don't know when I installed it, but my -current laptop hasn't even been rebooted in 167 days. If it ain't broke, it's probably fine to just plough on.

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About 2 years ago because of stupidity on my part, nothing to do with updates.

I hve been messing up new hard drives with -current since they came with a new computer. Luckily, and I don't know why, but after 7 days of yelling to the wall, I got stuff to work again. Big improvement over windows though; tended to lose my voice and it still wouldn't work.... ;-)

I'm using -current since december 2014, never reinstalled it. Mostly satisfacted, I really like it

Hmmm...let me check /var/log/removed_packages...
Since kernel-firmware-2.6.37.6 (about the time when 13.37 was coming out)

Long time stable user here, since 13.0. However longest I ran current for 3 months and then I drank the cool aid and installed Debian on the desktop PC. It ended up giving me a rescue prompt with a hell lot of cryptic systemd error messages only after 5 days of usage.

-Regards.

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I've also ran -current for about 5 years without reinstalling. I found Alien Bob's latest blog post about passwords interesting. Since Slackware 14.0 a stronger hash method (SHA-256) is used for storing passwords. Because I had never updated my passwords, they were still hashed with the less secure MD5-crypt method. So I quickly corrected this. If you want to move your user passwords from /etc/passwd to /etc/shadow, you can do that with the pwconv command.

Did you read this thread? Because that's not what I'm getting. I think the question was originally asked because of the "unstable" nature of Slackware-current (in that it is not officially stable), and the occasional botched update could require reinstalling.

But no, Linux does not need reinstalls every so often (at least Slackware doesn't). You can run the same version for years without any issue, and you can even do multiple OS upgrades without wiping the machine (in fact, if you want to upgrade from 13.0 to 14.1, which covers the span of 13.1, 13.37, and 14.0, you're able, as long as you upgrade to each version and follow the instructions in each UPGRADE.TXT). No wipe is needed, and your system will still run beautifully.

This is a major benefit of not having a registry.

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One from the beginning of slackware64 (I don't remember when it was)
One from May 2010 and another from October 2010.
But when I upgrade, I test only one first (the main one) for a few days.

I also recently drank the Debian cool aid and gave it a spin on one of my 5 PCs. I found that the box would intermittently hang when I would shut it down(systemd?). This never happens when I run Slack or OpenBSD. I'm presently maintaining 2 -current boxes, two stable boxes, and one OpenBSD box.

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Oh wait, I'm not alone? Hi5 mate..
I remember rebooting the PC and getting a rescue prompt with a known issue related to systemd(?) where "an active job is already running for device xxx" message will appear and I had to basically remove my /home mount point from fstab and then reboot to my system and then mount it again.
PS: I've been using RAID 1 with 2 HDDs on a cheap RAID card, however I didn't face that issue ever with Slack stable to current.

Thanks.

1 members found this post helpful.

That's a relevant blog entry for Slackers who've been incrementally updating their Slackware versions. I bet many still have weak
MD5-based password hashes.

A few inaccuracies worth correcting:

1. The blog should refer to "password hash" instead of "encrypted password hash"; Hashing and encrypting are different.
   
   
2. Perl can be used to hash passwords with the SHA-2 family assuming underlying libs are not ancient, e.g.:
   
   Code:

   $ perl -e 'print crypt("Christmas.2014", "\$5\$KdieS")."\n"'

I was also a bit surprised to find a verbatim copy of a 2013 post of mine in the blog without attribution. Should I ask for a % of donations?

--mancha

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I had written some notes for a possible blog article around the time of that LQ thread, including your comments, and fished it out of my TODO list last week. I had not written down the source of that quote unfortunately. I updated the article and have attributed that text to you now.

You know, you could just have contacted me and I would have been glad to give credit anyway. No need for all the drama.
Your way of public naming and shaming defines you. If you are so disturbed by not getting publicly credited in a sufficiently high frequency, then you should not be participating in public fora but selling your work to a Quote500 company.

Apology accepted.

--mancha

You're welcome. Thanks for the tip. Let's get this thread back on topic. I'm back to 100% Slackware. I do like to try out OSs, but, Slack is home. I'm going to keep three of my five Slack boxes on -current when 14.2 is released. Current is running like a champ.