Now here's another thing that I would like to try, although there's no hurry. Lenovo computers have a thing called One Key Recovery (OKR) which only works in Windows, obviously, but I think with a bit of work I could emulate it in Linux.

OKR comes in two forms: a program that works under Windows and is used to make snapshots of your system, and a program that can run on bare metal like a bootloader and gives one-key recovery of the latest snapshot when you can't get Windows to boot. This second program is on a second EFI system partition (sda3) which can be accessed by using an "emergency boot" procedure. Basically you boot with the F2 key down and you get OKR.

There are currently two ntfs partitions, sda6 and sda7, which are for restoring. sda6 gives you the Windows factory reinstall. sda7 is where OKR stores its snapshots, so that gives you a way of restoring to a recent functional state. Now suppose I make ext4 filesystems on both of these and install in sda6 a very basic Linux system. I am thinking kernel, glibc, shell, utilities, zip libraries and so on. Plus fsarchiver, the replacement for OKR and any additional libraries that it needs. No sysvinit. The init would be a simple bash script that ends in a sulogin. We make this bootable via the boot system in sda3 (either elilo or a self-booting kernel made with efistubs). Obviously the original okr.efi program gets scrapped.

sda7 would remain the backup partition where .fsa archives would be stored. So if you can't do a normal boot, you go into emergency boot and use fsarchiver in the emergency Linux system to recover from your last snapshot. Practicable?

Sounds complicated, when you could just plug in a live USB pendrive to use for recovery.

I don't even need a pendrive. I have a SystemRescue CD and I have fixed the normal boot so that it checks the CD drive first. That's how I got all the systems and data transferred to the new machine and elilo installed. This little project is just a jeu d'esprit. I think it would be fun to take advantage of this alternative boot facility since Lenovo have kindly provided it.

Today for the first time I did my system dumps to the laptop. I mount each system partition on another system and use tar to archive it and scp to copy it over. I was quite surprised at the rate of transfer. With the old machine, this rate varied constantly, often dropping to a few hundred kB/sec, and the whole dump took about an hour. With the new machine, the rate is constant at about 1.4 MB/sec and complete transfer takes 35 minutes. I had always assumed that the bottleneck was in the router or the laptop (which has only 1 GB RAM), but it seems it was the source machine.

i bought a new computer just a little less than a year ago (specs in screenshot) and when i first got it i thought cool, this beast will run Linux like a charm, so i grab my slackware USB stick and damn! no joy slackware wont even boot it, and since i just wiped windows 10 off of it there was no other operating system to put on it at the moment, so i get my laptop out and do some looking around on the internet what it says about the AMD Ryzen 7, and i find that the Ryzen 7 wont boot a linux kernel older than version 4.9.xx, so i put the new PC over in the corner out of the way, and have to use my laptop for a while, then i discover that debian will boot it, so i start over with debian, patiently waiting for Slackware Current to come around to a usable maturity, and a couple months ago i finally get a slackware current ISO to download and install and all is well again,

nothing like buying new hardware only to find out that almost nothing will support it yet and you got to wait for the software to catch up to it

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Hey Okie - Your issue is easily solved since Current has kernel 4.19.19. It's pretty easy to extract your install iso and replace the existing kernels with the ones from current and lo and behold Alien Bob's yer uncle.

I started a thread here https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ll-4175643012/ regarding updating older Slackware versions with fairly complete documentation. I installed versions as low as 13.37 with kernels from Current. 14.2 is ezpz. If you're interested all you need is an app like IsoMaster so you can insure your iso is still bootable after editing before re-packing back to iso. If you have any questions feel free to PM me.

Hey Enorbet, thanks but no thanks, Slackware64-Current is already installed and running nicely

I wouldn't worry about the system partition, I consider those disposable and easy enough to recreate from a script. But for the /home or data partitions you could use OpenZFS. It has very good snapshot capabilities and the snapshots can be sent to another machine or saved on a (large enough) removable drive for actual backup.

However, because the original ZFS project intentionally chose a license antagonistic to the GPL, the filesystem support has to be added manually. Ubuntu has it by ignoring the license and FreeBSD has it too and, as far as I can tell, also just ignores the license for the most part. Though most GNU/Linux distros can add it easily enough.

Today I took my old machine to the dump, having removed the hard drive as a safety precaution. I was surprised at how heavy it was. The Lenovo weighs almost nothing.

I doubt if there are any components in there worth reusing. Maybe the network card. The optical drive was dicey as it didn't always open. A disc label got lost in there once and it never worked properly after that. The cpu and memory are probably obsolete, and the battery is shot but has welded itself to the motherboard so that it can't be removed. No, I think they will break it up and send it for extraction of its precious metal content.

RIP!

Alwyas pass optical drives on to railway modellers - lots of gears and things in them (useful as real gears and dummy "engineering loads" for wagons). Trivial reuse it may be, but it's something.

Today I started a new LFS build (8.4-rc1). You always start with binutils and the time taken to build that becomes your "Standard Build Unit". All the other builds are labelled as so many SBUs. With "make -j4" the build took 3 minutes, compared with 6 minutes 30 seconds on the previous dual-core machine. That's impressive! Pity I've been having these occasional freezes in Slackware. I plan to use mainly LFS over the next few weeks and see if I get any more of those. If I do, it's probably a memory error.

PS: gcc built in 22 minutes. It was supposed to be 14.3 SBU which would be twice that length. But the Book says that the given SBUs are quite unreliable when multiple processors are used.

Why not just install another distro like Arch, *buntu, or Fedora instead of letting your expensive new PC rot until Slackware gets around to supporting it? It should not surprise you that the distro whose primary "selling" point is extreme conservatism does not play well with new hardware.

hi Woolie Wool, the problem was solved, Slackware Current is running quite nicely on it, i been a Slackware user for a long long time, its my favorite distro, i went through a few distros a long time ago, and Slackware is the #1 distro for me

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Hello Woolie Wool

FWIW it takes very little time to replace the default kernel on a Slackware iso with ANY kernel image in any version of Slackware exactly because it is so Vanilla. Arch, 'buntu and Fedora are each far riskier if even possible with Vanilla source. Recently I "set sail" on a proof of concept project just for fun to see how far back I could go. I successfully altered and installed progressively older isos, substituting kernel 4.19.21 for the original, until I stopped at Slackware 13.37 which was officially released in early 2011. I only stopped there because it became obvious that browser choice was limited going back that far with only a kernel upgrade which was problematic for some websites.

Also FWIW and regarding Slackware's "extreme conservatism", I have a partition with Debian Buster (testing) on it and it runs kernel version 4.14.12. I also have another partition on the same machine with Arch installed and as of about 6 months ago (when I stopped updating it) it was running 4.15.14-1-ARCH. Slackware is not extremely conservative. It is conservative to a degree but only where it really matters.

Hi hazel
It's really hard to remember if there were ever any exceptions but in 20 years of using Slackware the only hard freezes I recall took place while running some games in Wine. I did for a hoot way back in Slackware v9 write a script with an endless launch loop to see how many processes that machine with that OpSys could handle before it froze. It took over 300 of those active processes to cause a freeze.

I know you are very smart with software but also constrained by your ISP plan's bandwidth restrictions, so you were forced to not do a Full Recommended Install, which may be a source of your freeze problem. It is also, as you said, entirely possible that your new PC has a defective memory stick. If you don't already have a bootable platform with MEMTEST on it you can download one that is less than 415KB that creates a bootable CD or USB stick with the testing app on it. There is also a larger version or UEFI but assuming you can set yours to Legacy briefly the BIOS version would chew up less bandwidth and still do a proper job testing your RAM. It's entirely intuitive, safe, and informative as well as something you should confirm.

Of far less concern but certainly worth checking is chipset temperatures since although your mobo has the advantage of being in a "wide open spaces" tower, it is still an embedded laptop platform and may be subjected to winter heating issues if it is anywhere near a heat source. Setting up lmsensors should quickly check that out and hopefully off the list. There is nothing inherent in Slackware 14.2 even if you were running KDE, which I understand you are not, that would create a freeze scenario. It is extremely robust. I currently have 14.2 running on 3 machines - a somewhat newer Z77-Extreme, an ancient AMD FX-57 and an old Thinkpad (Core 2 Duo) and as I said only running some windows games have presented any problems and those have been exceedingly rare.