Poll: What sort of hardware do you run Slackware on?
SlackwareThis Forum is for the discussion of Slackware Linux.
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View Poll Results: What hardware do you run Slackware on?
Laptop
140
74.07%
Desktop
140
74.07%
Headless
60
31.75%
SBC (e.g. Raspberry Pi)
33
17.46%
Mainframe
3
1.59%
other
25
13.23%
Multiple Choice Poll. Voters: 189. You may not vote on this poll
Not strictly on-topic, but here's a novel sense in which I "run" Slackware. Turns out it can be possible to install or use some of its packages into other distributions. Professionally, I was tasked with adding Ada support back to Red Hat since they carelessly dropped it. GNAT can be rather hard to compile because:
it's written in Ada and is used to compile itself,
it compiles itself using a special option that turns on all warnings and treats warnings as errors,
the set of warnings is a rapidly moving target due to fickle style warnings such as comment indenting,
it depends on gnatlib, and
for some reason, while building itself, it tries to link to the system gnatlib rather than the bundled gnatlib.
All this together means that once you stop supporting Ada, it becomes increasingly expensive to get back into the game again. You basically have to go back and bootstrap GNAT one version at a time, since big jumps are incompatible with each other. Or, bootstrap using someone else's GNAT binary.
At first I went through a time-consuming, open-ended process of backporting the new GNAT sources such that they can build with the last version of GNAT that Red Hat put out, but that dragged on with no end in sight, so I had to change course.
My solution was to leverage Slackware's diligent and ongoing support for Ada. I grabbed the Slackware Ada package closest to the version I needed to add back to Red Hat, installed it on top of Red Hat (hooray for Slackware's simple package system!), then used it to build a GNAT RPM. Beautiful! Naturally, there were many complications to overcome, for example overriding the vendor-supplied gcc built-in spec file to reenable GNAT, but Slackware was the simplest and most reliable part of the whole process, and it was the cornerstone of my solution.
(No, I don't work for Red Hat. Our customers force us to use it for the systems we develop, and that includes substantial Ada code. We were not happy when Red Hat pulled the rug out from under us. But the community could say the same regarding CentOS.)
Bottom line is that I managed to squeeze Slackware into Red Hat, and it performed admirably!
Special thanks to tadgy for maintaining the cumulative Slackware archive! It's a real lifesaver. This task likely wouldn't have succeeded without it, since Slackware64-14.2 GNAT is too old and the Slackware64-current GNAT is too new to build the specific version of GNAT I needed to target.
Right now, Slackware 14.2 is only on one 2009-vintage 32-bit netbook and 64-bit 14.2 in a VirtualBox VM on a 2012-vintage Mac. It works well on both.
I have three 2017-and-later machines that will not boot a 4.x kernel, so 14.2 is out. I won't run 15.0 until it's released and there are Slackbuilds available for the software I need (mostly ham radio related). I've tried a couple of currents over the last year, and they were all wanting as far as stability was concerned.
I have -current on a 2013-ish ThinkCentre M92p Tiny which is a small-form desktop running as a headless home server, and on my early 2015 MacBook Pro. Works great on both, I am on 5.11 on the MBP and 5.4 on the server. I re-did the CPU thermal paste on both recently - Apple hardware always seems to run hot but my MBP would regularly exceed 100degC with the fan on 3500RPM when compiling software, so I really thought it could do better. Now it doesn't much exceed 80degC with the fan on 1500RPM when doing the same tasks, which is great. My server never seemed to run hot but I thought I would do the same on that since I have thermal paste to spare.
I will let both machines settle into 15.0 when it comes out and probably run it until they are each retired.
Thinkpad X61s Core Duo 2 with 4Gb RAM, one running 14.2 on a 100Gb ssd using xfce4. 32bit install because it seemed a good idea at the time.
The twin X61 with 4Gb can run a full install of current with plasma as the DE. No speed demon but very usable for my modest requirements (supplied applications + OpenOffice, inkscape and very recently TeXmacs).
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