I'm open to suggestions at this point - P.V.
 

In the donation thread, Pat shared he is open to suggestions. Presumably he meant with respect to the project as well as business and personal needs.

Many suggestions were offered in the donation thread. I thought a separate thread might help to consolidate suggestion information. Please post project and business suggestions here.

To all thread participants, Pat asked for suggestions. Please limit postings in this thread to suggestions. Do not counter-argue or post opinions or arguments if you disagree with suggestions. Refrain from spitting contests. The goal here is to help. Leave your egos at the door. Thank you. :)

I'll start with summary of other suggestions along with a few of my own.

* Check your trademark protections. Generally they are protected only for 10 years.

* Sometimes people should be offered a second chance. Let us know if the store owners reconcile with you. Many Slackers are interested in Slackware merchandise. If the store owners do not reconcile then consider keeping the door open to other ways of selling merchandise.

* A nice brief article about open source business models.

* A business model related to support contracts is building a team of affiliate Slackware consultants (example). Affiliated consultants pay a "franchise" fee to sustain the Slackware project.

* There have been many suggestions about receiving financial support. Overall, consider maintaining both project and personal contribution outlets. For project contributions, consider full disclosure by posting a simple balance sheet and posting project contributors and sponsors (example). Keep private any information about personal donations and gifts.

* Consider sponsors (example).

* Consider leasing a P.O. box. More than a few people cannot donate online for one reason or another. If you concerned about privacy, the box need not be located in your home town.

* Post a project wish list, including hardware needs. Several people have offered to help and pay the shipping and handling. Perhaps you already plan to do this with a public account.

* Web site overhaul. Let some volunteers help with the design. That does not mean relinquishing final control of the site.

* On the web site consider a "team and contributor" page (example). Photos and given names are welcomed but not required. Online aliases are sufficient when desired by team members.

* Slackware releases are, more or less, treated as long term support (LTS) releases. To help with overall project management, perhaps consider an explicit support policy. Most distros with an LTS policy hover at about three to five years with Red Hat and Suse being exceptions. A three to five year support policy is admirable and sufficient. Thereafter, consider announcing the EOL of any release.

* 14.2 was released only two years ago (June 30, 2016). Releasing 15.0 within the next year is well within the any reasonable LTS period. IOW, 15.0 does not have to be released tomorrow. Get back on your feet, exhale, drink some home brew. :)

Good points.

I subscribe to most of them although I don't see a need to tamper with the website as it is now (outwardly speaking; inwardly it might be a mess in dire need of sorting out).

I would add two suggestions:

* Add Plasma5 as a full Slackware citizen.

* Perhaps it's time to switch to GRUB as an official boot manager, since now most computers boot from UEFI rather than old-school BIOS. Right now grub-mkconfig is able to detect and automatically add a Windows partition. Of course, other options such as REFIND or similar ones would be great. Just make it sane and reasonable to configure them.

* Be happy. With Slackware you gave much happiness to the world and spared us millions of headaches. You deserve happiness in spades.

Thanks for Slackware!

Why rehash whats been discussed thoroughly in the donation thread, also discussed in the what do you want to see in current thread and elsewhere?

I would like to see a slackware-development mailing list. Instead of having this in a forum.

- Make a donation link on the front page on the web site
- Give access to two people who can update the web site weekly
- Link to other slackware blog sites on the web site
- Links to more slackware vendors on the web site
- Link to other slackware products like t-shirts from the web site
- Link to books like these from the web site:
- Update the rescue disk with more information on rescue and include these two tools which can fix most things:

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

- Make a server version of slackware with mostly tools dedicated to server, maintenance, network and cloud
- Post more slackware benefits and advantages on the web site
- Add some more maintainers for slackware that can be a part of testing, updates and verifying new software and more
- Add grub as a possible option for boot when installing
- Make the keyboard selection more intuitive in the installation
- Add slackpkg+ as a standard in slackware

Historically, Slackware support is based on a full installation. Through the years some Slackers have offered the idea of a a "task based" installation. While a full install probably is the least amount of work, perhaps the setup scripts could be tuned to help with specific task purposes. For example,

Minimal install
Desktop workstation
Laptop
Web server
Print server
DNS server
File server
Mail server
Database server
SSH server

That is, the setup scripts would be fine-tuned to enable/disable rc.d scripts, modify config files as necessary, etc.

+1

Does grub handle software raid and lvm?

Package dependency resolution has always been a contentious topic among Slackers. Rather than retool native Slackware package management tools, perhaps a nice gesture is to offer slapt-get and gslapt in /extra. The Salix folks have done much work in that area and possibly they would be willing to help backport their work into /extra. That way users can have tools supporting dependency checking without affecting the default installation.

Xfce is missing a handful of apps to create a "full" desktop experience. Some examples mentioned in this forum are mousepad/leafpad, Xarchiver, and Xfburn.

Yes. For example, the defaults in Red Hat/CentOS is to install with both.

It might be an idea as well to head or tail 5 or 10 lines of the changelog(s). Some people still visit the web page and this forum with the impression not much is going on in Slackware. While the links are there in the sidebar to the changelogs it's 50/50 whether or not these people visit them. A ticker or something similar on the home page would disabuse them of the notion quite quickly. You could add other links in the ticker as well - links to Eric's updates, Willy's updates, and so on. Yes, I do realize this would involve some sort of dynamic element in a page most of us want to remain static.

I read once that grub installs to the MBR only of the first disk in a RAID-1 array, which would complicate matters significantly if /dev/sda dropped. I do know lilo installs to both disks.

XFCE XKB plugin package is also missing.

Link to the Slackware Documentation Project site on the web site instead of the old book from some years back:

Actually I think, if Pat can get a person or two keep working on the web site then would be really good to have ti well integrated with all stuff like
docs, changelogs, development, third party scripts, donations, store and such things.

I also see that a lot of slackware information is very scattered around the internet, slackbuilds is just mentioned few times on the Changelogs, and who is
not integrated with the comunity or LQ at all doesnt know if its officially supported or not. I think this is a bit confusing.

Same is for the development, I personally took a long time to understand that a lot of development going on with slackware its done here in a forum.
Which is nothing wrong with, but if somebody doesnt know it, then it have no idea on how to submit his contributions.

I think this all should be more integrated in one place. This would also unload the load on Patrick.

I think this also would be useful.