Slackchat - Podcast
 

Hello everyone

I've been helping Exaga recently with SARPi and we got to talking about the wider project and Slackware community, and had this crazy idea that we should record our conversations and publish them as podcasts!

We have a list of key themes we'll get around to covering, and you could ask us questions for us to discuss by posting them here.

We have no sense as to whether anyone will find them interesting, but we've done two already.

Enjoy!

Listening to episode 1 now, very enjoyable so far. Also, never heard of acast before so thank you for that as well. ;)

I look forward to listening to it sometime next week; I'll add it to my podcatcher tonight. (Tomorrow's pretty booked.)

LOL @ 'recently'. Recently is actually +7 years! :thumbsup:

Episode 3 is up. We fix Phil's elilo problem on Slackware 64, which brings us to discuss dependencies in Slackware.
We discuss a little about 64bit ARM and more about the roots of the ARM port.

This definitely sounds better with headphones until the sound can be sorted out (which requires a little monetary investment on my side!)

This is really interesting stuff! I was searching for some Slackware related podcasts!

This is great!! Thank you for doing this.

Thanks for the feedback. We have a couple more topics to discuss, perhaps next week. I'm not sure what we'll talk about after that though!

Javascript required site. :(

Interview PV, Eric, Robby, Willy etc... :)

Wow, I really enjoyed those, thanks for putting them out! It made me realize that I am not alone in my passion for getting Slackware to run on ARM machines. Keep 'em coming!

For those that have JavaScript issues, I sypmathize. The simple workaround is to click on the RSS link (which was not what I expected it to be, how to I subscribe to this feed?), and you wind up on a page that has direct download links, no JS needed.

https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/slackchat

Thanks! I think for 2 guys with no script, talking about all things Slackware and whatever's on their minds, it comes across really well indeed. :D

Good tip. Nice one. :thumbsup:

Without JS you don't even get to see the rss link, and non of the buttons work on the main page, but thank you for providing that link, which does allow access to the content.

But the download links are working on that page, yes? :confused:

Yes. shelldweller's link works. Listening now. :)
In page media players work and you can download with "save-link-as". It's just the main page linked in post 1 that leaves you stranded.

Listened to the first episode last night, great work guys - or should I say, great conversation and thanks for posting it?
The bit about Slackware teaching you about computers reminds me of my early days with Linux, when the same thing was said about Linux as a whole - and it was certainly true of one "newbie-friendly" distro that couldn't decide which configuration front-end to use from one week to the next. :p

Episode 4 is up.

We'll do a few more podcasts so that any guest will know what they're getting into; but if we can do a 3-way Skype call (I think it supports that in the free version) we can do it (guest willing!).

Yes, please try to get some more guests if you have time. it's really interesting to follow the thinking process behind these minds

Finally got a chance to listen to episode one.

Nice job.

I completely agree with your comments about Slackware's being a darn fine teacher. I started with Slackware by accident (whatever I tried to install first didn't and Slackware did) and have always been glad I did, because Slackware taught me to understand Linux.

I used Redhat for +2 years running domain servers for a VISP before I was introduced to Slackware. In those +2 years using Redhat I learned how to use "the system" [pointy-clicky style] but absolutely nothing about Linux. It might as well have been Windows and/or just another GUI to fathom for me.

Slackware was my REAL baptism of fire into Linux, and I became positively scorched by it. Slackware 'setup', CLI, kernels, shells, packages, configs, PIDs, and BASH! [Oh how I --LOVE-- bash!!!] All of these elements were new to me with Slackware. If I had stuck with what I know then I certainly would not have been as receptive, or forced by the system, to learn new things.

There is no better tool than Slackware on which to learn Linux. By design it's the most unabridged, in-depth, and rewarding Linux OS in existence, and on that basis Slackware remains peerless. ;)

This needs to be on a very large t-shirt, or tagline etc... Well said!

PS: just added it to my signature. ;)

Haha... but it's true! :D :thumbsup:

I've sown the seeds within the Slackware team, so we'll see if anyone else wants to join in the conversation! :-)

Episode 5 is up, and we're talking about packages.

Such an interesting episode! @drmozes, where can I find the package pdf you mention in the podcast?

http://www.slackware.com/~mozes/docs...esentation.pdf

[EDIT] I am so grateful to MoZes for making this Slackware package .PDF available. It is, and has been, THE seminal document in pkg creation for me. Hint: Slackdocs would benefit from this! :cool: THANK YOU STU! <3

http://www.slackware.com/~mozes/ also has the package building check list, plus the talk track for that presentation.

The Star office version is also there. OpenOffice probably reads these, so it should be reasonably easy to update should anyone wish to do so.

Episode 6 is up, and we're talking about how we use our ARM devices and how they're a useful entry point into using Linux and Slackware.

Episode 7 is up. We cut ourselves some slack and talk about almost nothing whatsoever to do with Slackware!

:cool: :D

great looking podcast!

as always, a good talk! :)

Thanks!
Episode 8 is up now.

Episode 9 is up now. This time we're speaking to Angel Montanez about his experiences with Slackware and Linux at the USA's National Weather Service.

This is part 1 of 2 - episode 10 will be uploaded soon!

Part 2 is up now.

Episode 11 is up. Phil's been looking at Slackware ARM in docker.

The package naming convention is here.

Episode 12 is up.

We're discussing the use cases for Slackware ARM on docker, and how to distribute it.

Slackchat - Podcast
 

Did this podcast die?

Covid-19 changed schedules and priorities. We've been talking about doing the next episode for weeks but haven't yet.
I'm also unsure what people are interested in hearing about. Phil and I can talk about anything, since we usually just make it up as we go along and I edit out most of the insanity. Ideas for topics are always welcome :-)

If you're missing my dulcent tones you can always listen to my other podcast, Master Engagement Strategies. Nothing to with Slackware though! ;-)

We're going another episode of slackchat this week.

I've just published a conversation with an Infrastructure Architect on my other podcast, which people might find interesting (not Slackware or Linux related though).

Latest episode is up. This is a recording of a mini hackathon with Brent Earl, where we're fixing the qemu support. I don't know how well it'll turn out since we're looking at a screen, but just close your eyes and imagine a terminal with text on it and you'll be right with us :-)

If i can get Slackware interest going in Ghana then i might try and record something

Thanks for having me. I had a lot of fun. :)

long time listener, first time caller.....
 

This was a fun episode, thanks for putting it out. I just wanted to chime in as a regular listener and say that I am also in the group of Slackware users that made the switch mostly because of the systemd thing, as your guest mentioned. Not only that, but it was systemd on ARM that started it all.

Back in 2013 I was into mining bitcoin, and I made the mistake of buying a Butterfly Labs mining ASIC, which needed an external controller. I chose a PogoPlug v2 (Marvell Kirkwood board), and the default OS at the time was Arch Linux ARM, and I was using Arch on my main tower at the time too.

I wanted to automatically start the miner when booted, to minimize downtime. I was not new to Linux, but new enough to not know much at all about startup scripts. I spent untold hours trying to get the miner to autostart on boot reliably. Sometimes it would work, sometimes it would not. Eventually I figured out that I was basically having systemd problems. No matter what I would set for variables in the service files, I would have to put in weird hacks like long sleep delays just to get a daemon to start on boot without crashing. I had this problem with several services/daemons, but the miner was mission-critical and drove me to near insanity, if I recall correctly.

That lead me to start exploring distros that had not included systemd yet. I tried everything I could get my hands on, Slackware included. There was something special about Slackware that stood out. Looking back, I think it was the perfect balance of being challenging enough to be fun but not so challenging that it was frustrating. That feeling has continued to this day. I continue to learn new stuff (like the Ctl-r in BASH that Stewart mentioned a few shows back, that has changed my life entirely...), and Slackware keeps it just challenging enough to keep it fun without making me want to throw in the towel and wipe my hard drive.

These days, I am more or less indifferent about systemd (although I do not miss it and still find that it gets in the way on other systems when I run into it). I have said to myself before, in regards to Slackware, that I came to get away from systemd, but I stayed because of the SlackBuild system. I really like how packages can be maintained as SlackBuilds. I know that other distros have their own equivalent build-from-source systems, but something about the simplicity of SlackBuilds helped me to finally wrap my head around source-based packages, something I had always been intimidated by before that. And that is the first thing I miss when I am on another distro. I just do not want to spend time learning another build system at this point. Maybe I am just lazy in that sense.

I do not think I ever got any other ARM distro to work on that PogoPlug. I believe my first SlackwareARM device was an unsupported FriendlyARM NanoPi NeoCore 2. I did the method where you use another image and rip out everything except the kernel and modules (I think I even removed the modules actually), and build up from the rootfs. Now I am hooked, several devices later. My main device is a Pinebook running Slarm64 and I am very satisfied, after all these years. I also have a Rock64 running as a torrent-box that runs Slarm64. And no, I do not mess around with cryptocurrency anymore, that was just a phase. I was more interested in the hardware than anything, I think.

Thanks for giving me a space to type. And keep the shows coming, I always find something useful in each one. Much respect.

I was thinking to myself how it could be that someone would jump ship just because of the init system, and I struggled getting it until I realised that I only use and manage Slackware now, so I don't deal with these kind of dramatic events.
Welcome to the calm :-)

Not that I want to defend system d, but I have found many times that when developers ship binaries for an array of OSs, it's often not packaged in the best way (I have seen this for Slackware ARM too (Phil is still coming to terms with the horror)), and so even with the more BSD-style init of Slackware, and the SystemV init of Red Hat - many of these types of packages often needed wrappers around their complex web of init scripts.
So if its init system is anything more than a couple of scripts, it may fall into that category.

Good to hear! I stopped using Red Hat Linux even before I started working there, because it got in my way of learning, and would edit my hand-crafted config files. In fact, managing and fixing Red Hat's servers (when it goes off the rails and has no tool to solve it), was done with my Slackware knowledge.

I look at a lot of the other distributions' build systems, and Slackware is the most simple and immediately obvious to anyone who is well-versed in Unix or Linux. However, the build system as is has limitations, *but* for (I'd say) the general populous, it fits the bill perfectly.

Hello.

The latest episode is available, and this time we're discussing security and trust within the OSS ecosystem. Why do you use software written and distributed by people you don't know?

I stopped using Red Hat some time before I started learning Linux.

Blind [and ignorant] faith in the software and those responsible for creating it. Similar to when you get on a bus that says "City Centre" on the front of it (i.e. you don't question where the bus is going and/or you'd think the driver was delusional if he wasn't ultimately driving this bus to the city centre) much is the same attitude with software. You download it, you install it, and you expect it to do exactly what the documentation states it's designed to do and nothing more. End-users often become annoyed or hostile and belligerent when it doesn't. :D

Predominantly, in the open source community (and certainly with regards to Slackware), developers have only the best intentions with any software that's built and maintained. That's something we can be thankful for, at least.

While I didn't work for Red Hat (thank goodness), I did work for a company that created software to help manage and facilitate car dealerships. (E-mail advertisements, financial transactions, quotes, etc, etc.) My employer thought it best to migrate from the Microsoft platform to CentOS servers for dealer clients and Fedora Core for employee workstations. I was hired into the support staff department to write documentation and answer any questions about Linux for the tech support and customer support call center departments. I rarely dealt with car dealership clients directly. Employees were only familiar with Microsoft products. :doh:

The biggest issues every day was fixing failed database migrations/imports/exports, E-mail campaigns at the dealerships crashing the on site mailer daemon, and most of all: failed system upgrades on CentOS. At that time CentOS 5 was the latest release and it was actually quite common to see dependency hell and failed batches of monthly updates. My employer supported between 5 and 6 thousand dealerships.

Every once in a while I go check out how CentOS has progressed, as well as Fedora. After the nostalgia ends, I kick myself in the head, realize I am not flexible enough anymore to reach my head, and go home to Slackware.

So... While it is true I became a Slackware user due to my outrage with SystemD, I was convinced to switch to Slackware because of the design and stability. K.I.S.S. :hattip:

The latest episode is available, and we're talking about developing stuff, workarounds and things of that germane.

The latest episode is available, and Phil's talking about the SARPi build system.