Happy St. Patrick's day to you.

May the Guiness flow freely.

Thanks to St. Pat for releasing the updates to Slackware-current!

Oooh boy, that is a lot of changes. When I first saw the changelog I pretty much just assumed this was going to be a reinstall job, but the CHANGES_AND_HINTS doesn't actually look to bad. I suspect I will have to fight with X for awhile, and I will almost certainly forget to install some of the new packages that have been split, but it looks like it will be worth the effort.

I have sort of mixed feelings on some of the changes made. For instance it looks like floppy installs are not going to be supported anymore. USB booting is wonderful, but only one of my motherboards actually supports it. I have used the floppy installs a lot on older machines, and I will be sad to see it go. I'm not actually sure what I am going to do about that. Within the last month or so I installed Slackware on a machine with no CD-ROM or USB, just a floppy drive and a NIC. Now it looks like that won't be possible anymore. I might have to move machines like that over to BSD.

The splitting out packages is great from a modularity stand point, much better for keeping things updated, but it is also going to add more complication to the system. It was always comforting that you only needed a relatively small collection of packages to have a core system with full functionality. The larger packages also helped out a lot with the lack of dependency checking. I could easily memorize which packages were needed for what when there were so few. Now it seems like that is going to be much harder to do.

Floppies are a dead technology.

Slackware 11 will continue to be supported for some time. If you are administering such old machines, do you really need the latest & greatest software on them?

"Old" is highly subjective. I personally consider anything above 100 MHz a viable machine for almost any purpose.

My current full time laptop is only 266 MHz.

MS3FGX: But how are you going to run Windows Vista? It's the latest greatest operating system by the friendly software company Microsoft.If you don't have Vista then your simply not computing! Because of technological advancements the latest PC hardware is required, so run out now and get yourself a dell to run this awesome Operating System on!


.....For those that don't realise I was being sarcastic.

LOLLLL! xD

Yeah, that occurred to me about an hour after I made that big post.

you can always use old boot floppies from whereever. http://www.toms.net/rb/ seems to be a good starting point. afterall you just have to copy the data on the harddisk.

i agree. the recently split out tools however consume next to nothing of diskspace. so just install them. or do you mean x11? that's a change in upstream...

EDIT: -> http://www.bootdisk.com/linux.htm
EDIT: on a side note, gcc still seems to have some errors...

Well said.

The first machine I installed Slackware on was an older laptop with no USB and no CD-ROM drive. And: It has only 48 MB of RAM. It's impossible to install something like SuSE or Red Hat or Debian on such a lowspec machine (yeah, some derivatives may run on it, but not the fullspec distros).

Slackware was the only fullscale distro I was able to install on that laptop.

And now? All my machines got Slack, it's my main system now. Wouldn't have been possible if it had been "more modern"...

gargamel

That is exactly my concern. Slackware is essentially the only "full" distribution that is still acceptable on older hardware, machines that might not even have CD-ROM drives let alone USB. A lot of the younger users laugh at anything that isn't 1+ GHz, but those of us that don't have "BUY THE LATEST AND GREATEST THING YOU DON'T NEED!" drilled into our minds know better.

Even Debian is too heavy for the real old machines because going through the package repositories is painfully slow on lower end hardware in my experience.

While I have no doubts that floppy installs are not used very often anymore by the mainstream, there still definitely a lot of people out there that appreciate the fact Slackware is one of the last Linux systems to support it.

Maybe if we send some emails to Pat he can reconsider? I can't imagine it would be terribly difficult to keep the install floppies around, it isn't seem like the installer itself changes very often.

How did you get on? I'm still wondering whether to do a new install for this or maybe have a go at upgrading and see what occurs.

I started the upgrade today, but had to go to work before I could finish.

I got all the new packages installed, and everything upgraded well enough. But as of this morning X would not start due to a font error. I believe it was something like:

unable to open default font "fixed"

Not sure what that is about yet, but I assume I need to play around with the font paths. I also need to recompile my kernel to get the NVIDIA drivers installed, since now that I have upgraded GCC I need the kernel compiled with the same version of GCC as the module.

Oh, and KDE has moved from /opt/kde; so that has broken a lot of things for me since I compiled a number of KDE applications which were installed there, as well as using a lot of icons from it. I haven't even looked into that yet though, that is a relatively low concern at this point.

Make sure you have the font-misc-misc and font-alias packages installed. They were previously known as x11-fonts-misc. I'm almost 100% sure that this will solve your problem

The problem with 2.6 kernels is that they no longer fit on a floppy. That makes it impossible to boot it from a floppy. What you can do in that case, is to install the Smart Boot Manager image onto a floppy - you can find an install image in the isolinux/sbootmgr directory of the Slackware CDROM/DVD.
You would still need a CDROM drive and the Slackware CDROM inserted: then, you can boot from sbootmgr and that in turn can do a second-stage boot from the CDROM.

Furthermore, Pat's intention is to keep Slackware healthy for a long time as it is going to be the last Slackware to contain a 2.4 kernel. This, plus the floppy-boot, make it worthwhile to put more effort into that release in future. Older hardware can keep runing Slackware 11.0; newer versions of Slackware (or any Linux distro) will simply be too demanding of the hardware to consider putting it on old hardware anyway IMHO... I run Slackware 10.0 happily on my old P2 server box with 128 MB RAM.

Keeping track of bugfixes and patches of your commonly-used applications is the key - after all we're still all Slackers here, supposed to be able to do some independent thinking.

Eric