Heheh ... Yes, I'm well aware of the ancient adage, still true and possibly more than ever...


However my interest has grown from mere idle curiosity and I'm considering building a DAW specific system, separate from my Main, utilizing 14.0 (pulseaudio free) but I'd prefer to to start out with gcc-5.x, associated glibc, and 4.x kernel already in place instead of gcc-4.17, glibc-2.23 and 3.x kernel - less work and likely better results. So it is not an install I want to upgrade it is the Install Image (iso) itself, assuming I can make that work. It may well be a simple drop in but I intend to research thoroughly before I fire one up. I'm confidant I will learn something in the process, always a bonus.

I like my tightly temperature-controlled Convection Oven and for some things even my microwave, but for others I love my charcoal grill... or a campfire.

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One reason to upgrade frequently, at least for some software, is that small incremental upgrades are typically less painful than large ones, in terms of migrating existing configurations to the new version.

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Major UPDATE - It Works!!

It's still a bit too soon to mark this thread completely as "Solved" because I do have some minor issues with starting out with a newer gcc, which is a somewhat important part of what I'm wanting to accomplish. If I instead choose to just go with nouveau that issue just disappears, though it may turn out that I should do the gcc upgrade after the base install but here's what works and works great.

I used the 14.0-64 iso as a base and then substituted the following newer versions from the Current iso of 9/18/2018

1) The obvious from UPGRADE.TXT glibc-solibs from "/a" as well as all glibc files from "l"
2) The entire /kernels, /k, and /isolinux directories
3) From "/a" also all kernel files, findutils, lilo, pkgtools, tar and xz as well as kernel-headers from "/d"

What is still questionable, but didn't affect installation in the slightest, was that I also substituted "/d/gcc* hoping to be able to install the proprietary nvidia driver without any complaint of "this kernel was compiled with a different gcc" errors, but there are a few libraries that the newer gcc calls that the older version did not, so I still need to fix that.

The install was absolutely flawless and in fact I was a bit nervous because it seemed to go faster than I recalled and I worried that some file versions were hard specified and were being skipped but my concern was groundless. Everything of Full Recommended Install did install and works perfectly with both the Current 4.14.73 kernel as well as dropping in the 4.19.16 custom kernel I built for and on 14.2-64.

It has been exciting and fun as well as informative and I'm looking forward to playing with this more to see what ancillary slackbuilds for 14.2 will work out and which ones will have to be from 14.0. I may then try going back further to 13.37 or just for grins, 12.1.

In any case I will likely have one more update for resolution on the gcc issue and then this thread will be completely "Solved". For now proof of basic concept, having a fresh kernel, lilo, pkgtools, etc immediately upon initial install is a fait accompli.

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It seems some never nVidia drivers have a "Skip GCC Check" option and this solves either or both the nVidia and gcc issue, at least with the two kernels I've tried. I did need to reinstall while chasing this down since messing with gcc dependencies easily results in progressively (one thing leads to another, etc.) evolving out of 14.0 and becoming Current. I think I will try 13.37 next weekend.

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Come on man. Don't be a wimp. Try Slackware-8.0.

I,m planning move 14.2 system on Ryzen 3 2200G.
New grapihics stack:
Recompile new kernel 4.19 with proper options is piece of cake I always work on custom stripped one + libdrm + mesa.
30 minutes work.
You have experience with ryzen on 14.2 ???
Is Xorg need to be recompiled for new version?
I've heard "vega code" is "outside" Xorg and should run on 1.18.3 version.

I only have a Ryzen CPU, not APU (no GPU integrated with the CPU). Other than needing a newer kernel and updating my PCI database, it worked without any major issues on 14.2.

For APUs, I imagine you'll need at least a newer mesa (which will require a newer libdrm) and a newer xf86-video-amdgpu driver. I honestly don't know if that driver requires a newer Xorg, but looking at the configure.ac in the amdgpu driver's code looks like it requires xorg-server 1.13 as a minimum and 1.16 if you want to support OutputClass and xextproto at 7.0.99.1. So, if that is to be believed, 14.2's xorg-server 1.18.3 and xextproto 7.3.0 should allow it to build and run fine (once you upgrade libdrm, since that wants version 2.4.89 or higher (current includes 2.4.96, so if you grab that source and build/install it, you should meet that requirement)).

ROFLMAO - HaHaHaH My first Slackware install was v4 which only booted exactly once since that week v7 was released and the Changelog made it seem worthy of such a version number leap. I do recall v8 was a sweet upgrade but the first MONSTER release, at least in my memory, was v10. I stuck with 10.2 for a very long time, briefly played with the 11s and again stayed for years on 12.2. I still have an older machine with 12.2 on it and while I may be something of a Luddite, I'm not THAT much to go back to v8, so yeah... I admit it.. I've grown wimpy in my old age.

This is a very interesting thread, especially the "older hardware" part. My wife is a teacher who has been running old P4 boxes running Windows XP (that's what they came with) to let her elementary students access a couple of websites. www.razzkids.com and www.lexia.com, IIRC. A month ago or so, lexia required a newer browser than what XP can support and now she's stuck. I know I can mess with the browser string, but I wonder if they are actually using newer features and that will only work for a short time. So I suggested it's finally time to install Linux.

Any thoughts about installing 14.2 (release? current?) on P4 / 512 MB machines? I thought of 13.37 (probably my favorite / longest lived Slack install in my nearly 25 years of slacking), but the point about needing newish browsers seems to negate that possibility.

Am I just too far out of date here? The ONLY thing these machines would do is boot, start a browser, go to one of those two websites using flash, and that's it. It doesn't even have to be automated or anything. Just run reasonably once started. These are mostly stock Dell machines. I do have a few newer Athlon X2s and probably a couple of Core 2 setups I'm retiring soon, and I know those will run reasonably fast, but that's only maybe half the machines..

Would it be worth building / scripting a custom slack install to set up only the bare minimum of needed features for ~12 machines?

Any other threads I can look at? I'm not new to compiling kernels and messing with Slack, but most of that happened 10+ years ago when it was almost necessary. I'm not particularly good with the latest tools. They already have a firewall in place, so I doubt I'd need to worry about security updates much - plus, there's literally no sensitive data on these machines except for possibly student logins, which should not be saved.

It's the best option. Go with 14.2 install all updates & patches and you should be set.
Not at all, but since your needs are modest I'd probably give KDE a miss and use XFCE instead.

Windowmaker is even lighter, but P4s (though old now) are still quite capable. You'll get a big performance boost if you put SSDs in them... even cheap/low end ones.

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It was v7 for me. I recall something about PV being sick of people asking when he was going to catch up with RedHat (who were on v6)... so he bumped the number to 7.
Man, if I could get the 2.4 series kernel working on modern hardware, I'd go back to Slackware 11.0 in a heartbeat.

Proper device nodes,
Manual mounting,
OSS sound,
KDE 3,
Full install under 3 gigs.

Those were the days!

I guess you could call me a Luddite, but I prefer the term "Retrogrouch."

Slackware can be installed on practically everything. The site says that it can run on a 64MB RAM machine (though the requirements may have increased a little bit), now, the size of a distro does not depends on its base, at all (though still, Slackware has an extremely clean base that is highly portable) it depends on the DE/WM you're running.

If you run something highly bloated and heavy like GNOME3, the computer will obviously not work as well as you expected it to be. You'll want a lighter DE or WM, in general, you may want to use XFCE or LXDE. Alternatively, you can opt for a WM, I highly recommend fluxbox as it works in whatever you throw at and is really good, alternatively, there's also IceWM that you can try out too.

If you want to have other choices that are quicker to set-up, try AntiX or Slitaz, both are as good in that aspect as Slackware with the difference that those two are quicker to set-up and requires less hand-tuning to get where you need to be.

Another thing are applications. Even if you run one of the distros above mentioned, you still need to be careful with the browser that you're going to run with. In general, since you're using those two sites, you should be able to get Midori working just fine, as that is really lightweight. Another option is Pale Moon (though it seems like there was a bit of a discussion on that front), other browsers are available too like Netsurf which does a fine job, is up to you but try and not use something that will take all of your computer like Google Chrome.

If for some reason, you want to use YT on that computer (or older machines) just as a side-thought, you can run yt-viewer+MPlayer, that will work on about anything as well since you're just "downloading" an stream of the video and what you're seeing is something local within your computer.

Have fun!

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Thanks for the advice, rkelsen and DragoonJ.

It's been a LONG time since I used anything except KDE at home. But, at work, in some environments, we had to use icewm and I've also configured twm and cde in the distant past.

I've heard a lot about XFCE - is it not a WM? How is it different from fluxbox?

I was thinking about firefox, since I'm familiar with it, but I'll see how it goes..

slackerdude I think I have good news for you. I have Slackware 14.0 running on an ancient Sony Vaio laptop that has a P3 at 450 MHz with maxed out 512MB Ram. It takes a very long time to boot with a 7000rpm PATA hdd but once up, even KDE runs fine, especially when all I ask it to do is run a browser. At that point perceived speed is primarily due to graphics stack and internet bandwidth. On that machine I run KDE without "The Terrible Four" and only have the exact services loaded by default and it is as light as a moderate Xfce desktop and has what may be a serious advantage in your school case where they only know Windows, since KDE has a config option that mimics much of the look of either Mac or Windows as well as others.

That box can't use an SSD but if yours can, and if they are towers with even one available PCI slot, they can, and this would solve the excessive boot times.

Another possibility is that if I can get 13.37 installed with a newer kernel and tools, and I have no reason to think after this first project that I can't, the next week I will try 12.2 which, as you may recall used KDE 3.5 which is very much lighter than everything KDE after, though recently they have pared down quite a bit while still keeping a ton of new features. If 12.2 fails, and it conceivably could due to the larger differences to the 2.6.x kernel, it is still possible to run at least 14.0 and 14.2 shouldn't be a stretch, especially for those getting SSDs.

Oh and though you didn't directly ask me the answer to your Xfce question is that it is heavier than Fluxbox but visually a lot friendlier to pointy-clicky types. It is an extremely useful compromise as it has built-in support (slightly better than Fluxbox's) for both KDE and Gnome which can be loaded on-demand or toggled to load with desktop login. Firefox shouldn't be a problem on 14.0 IF you use the ESR and on 14.2 you can use whatever version you prefer. I have always been a Firefox guy, coming right from Netscape, and I have used Internet Exploder maybe a handful of times in my life, but lately I am growing very fond of Vivaldi and disenchanted with Firefox but that's only because of my eschewing pulseaudio, at least initially. In addition to working just fine on pure ALSA it is also faster and has the features I want and almost none I never use, unlike recent Firefox.

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I do recall that event and laughed right along with Patrick - A rose by any other name, right?

Will v11 not run on a 2.6 kernel? or is there some reason you prefer the 2.4.x series?