hello all,

I just got an old laptop and was going to try and install my trusty redhat on it, but when I booted it up i found slackware-7.1. Anyways, i am reluctant to change the os (since it appears to be working just fine) so I thought that i would try my hand with slackware.

I was reading about slackware and it appears that package management *should* be easy.

A couple of issues though. There is some key missing software (ssh, gcc) and I looked for it at the slackware site in the 7.1 directory and i noticed that there is no ssh or gcc for 7.1. Is it safe to use packages from newer versions of slackware? i mean, can I try to use the ssh/gcc from, say, 8.1? is there any other way to get ssh/gcc? I tried to compile stuff from source, but there is no c compiler installed (hence my want for gcc).

thanks, amps

Hi, and welcome to LQ and the Slacker-Forum :}

Slack 7.1 is using egcs ... a modified gcc ...
have a look at the gcc project page at GNU.org ..

As for the newer packages - I've never tried
it, but there are most likely differences in the
glibc and some other libraries that would prevent
them from working. You can always give it a
try, though, and use removepkg if it fails.


Cheers,
Tink

i will try and install egcs. Thanks.

What about ssh? I couldn't find packages for that, maybe ssh wasn't around then (although i find that hard believe. Anyways, once i get a c compiler installed, I can try compiling ssh from source.

btw, does pkgtool etc warn about dependencies? that is, if you install something that has a dependency not installed will it warn you? also, if you remove a package will it warn you if you are breaking a dependency?

i was looking at distrowatch's package listing for the slackware versions, and 7.0 and 7.1 are the only ones that don't come with gcc. Does anyone know why that is?

thanks, amps

No, and no :)

Again, look at the gcc homepage ...

There's a whole lot of explanation given there
that I can't be bothered to copy and paste ;)

For a certain period of time egcs was the
RECOMMENDED compiler for building your
kernel because gcc was fscked :}


Cheers,
Tink