Hi all,
I am an mechanical engineer. I need some stable distro for programming a horde of AI programs on gadgets like arduino/pic/etc.
I have heard a lot about this from E.S. Raymond and R.Stallmann @ their lectures.I wanted to know whether Slackware has support for lego mindstorms nxt 2.0 brick.

Does Slackware support applications made for old distros? (Like say, win95 /98 can still support most winXP programs). Can the same be said about slackware? Is slackware in a hurry to ffwd the releases? Can I still get support for old slackware 4?

And most important is there an irc channel for slackware?(with min no. of trolls? )

I can only answer some of your questions.

1. Salckware is one of the slowest distros to make new releases. They don't rush it.

2. Applications are upgraded by the application developers, not Slack. Slack releases application upgrades when the are made available. Or, you can get many from Slackbuilds.org

3. The latest stable Slack release is 13.1, I doubt you'll see support for such an old release as 4. Why not upgrade? it's free. http://www.slackware.com/

4. IRC = irc.freenode.net ##slackware

Have fun programming for Lego Mindstorms.

Not sure if this helps but a community member here Niels has some lego packages build for slackware if that is what you are looking for. His site is: http://www.nielshorn.net/

I already chatted with the OP on irc, but as a follow-up to future readers of this thread:

I never played with the Lego nxt brick on Slackware, as I don't have it.
There is some software for the older RIS brick for Linux, but it is quite old and I never tried to build it on Slackware. I might do it if / when I find some time

There are some active people working on combinations of Arduino and Lego, Just Google for the combination of these words and some sites will pop up.