In summer of 2003 I purchased the Slackware 9.0 set and Essentials manual and the two fat Linux reference books from the Slackware site. About the time I received them, an extreme manpower shortage developed at my place of employment. Consequently, I barely had time for sleep and the most urgent other things outside of work, work, work.

Now, things are slowing down due to new employees becoming trained etc. Now, I finally have spare time and 2 or 3 days off each week.

But now, Slackware 10.0 is out.

[God willing, Patrick will recover and modify his lifestyle to include, among other things, flossing every day as his dad probably told him to do when he was a child. . . . I pray that he does and am going to go ahead with Slackware, trusting that he will get well and Slackware will continue.]

So here are my questions, seeking consensus among the already experienced users of Slackware:

1. Should I first get Slackware 10.0 instead of installing Slackware 9.0?
2. Should I put Slackware 9.0 on the slower machines and 10.0 on the faster machines? (I notice that unlike 9.0, the 10.0 version doesn't include 386 cpu among supported hardware, so maybe 10.0 has more need of faster cpu??).
3. I'll turn that last one into another question: does Slack 10.0 need a faster cpu, more ram, etc to do the same things at the same speed that Slack 9.0 can do on it?

More information:
This is for a home installation, not a business. We have never gotten rid of a computer and they seem to be multiplying.

We have:
1 Pentium 3, 500mHz 256 meg ram machine,
1 pentium 3 400mHz 128 meg ram machine,
2 pentium II 200mHz 256meg ram machines,
1 pentium II 300mHz 64meg ram,
2 486 16 meg ram machines (currently only collecting dust),
and
1 386 16 meg ram machine (also currently collecting dust)

[And, I should also mention that my wife has the pregnant thought of getting a new, high-ram faster computer with XP for herself and installing dual-boot Xandros on it.}

All of the above existing machines currently running W98 [except the dust-collectors].

2 of the above (Pentium II and Pentium 3) are networked together and to a standard ethernet cable router that is connected to a DSL modem.

3 of the above (2 Pentium IIs and a Pentium 3) are networked together via an obsolete Intel Phoneline network hookup and they are also both connected to the router. But none of those 3 are able to access the internet via DSL - a problem to address later.

I'd like to do the migration process one computer at a time, getting Linux installed on one first, then making it secure, then getting it on the same DSL network that 2 computers are on, then finding software to replace what we currently use on W98 to do the same things on Linux, etc, etc.

So my main question for those of you experienced with Slackware and the upgrade process and both versions 9.0 and 10.0 is Question # 1 of the 3 questions above.

Pray for Patrick Volkerding

I have used both 9 and 10 on the same hardware (barton 2500 + 512 RAM) and have to say I haven't noticed any differences in performance. My sole reason for upgrading to 10 was the fact that it was kernel 2.6 ready and I wanted to try it out. For your slower machines there might be some appreciable differences between versions, so going with 10 on the fast machine and 9 on the others is probably a good idea particularly since one of the slower machines also has less RAM.

Since the 2.6 kernel is also apparently supposed to eat some performance, you should probably stick with the default 2.4.x series kernel in 10. The other thing that might eat performance will be choice of desktop if any.

For the 486 and 386, if you really want to get them up and running then you might even want to look at an even earlier version with a 2.2 kernel for those.

Thanks for the reply, pave_spectre.

Since you are somewhat experienced with Slackware, perhaps you can give this question a straightforward answer: Is it a fairly straightforward process to upgrade from one version of Slackware to the next? Or is is a major project with multiple headaches etc? (I've read that with much earlier versions of Slackware, the latter case was an understatement but what I've read in Slackware Essentials seems to say that it is nothing to be "afraid" of .]

What choice of desktop have you found to be the fastest?

There's no priority to doing anything with the 386 or the 2 486's, but unless I give them away I may eventually want to try to install linux on them for the fun of it and (also for the fun of it) try to get them on the home network.

There is so much that can be done with and learned about Linux that I scarcely know where to begin. Microsoft is a black hole in comparison, but it is a waste of time to spend it bashing MS.

John

I generally don't upgrade per se, but do clean installs, since my upgrading has always come in the middle of cleaning up my system, but from all the responses I've seen about the place from people who constantly upgrade their systems to -Current you shouldn't have too many problems going from 9 to 10, though it's always wise to keep backups of anything important.

One of the things to watch out for would be the change from XFree in 9 to Xorg in 10, which I believe may require the uninstallation of XFree first, before installing XOrg.


Never focused on speed when it came to desktops, and apart from KDE, have only tried fluxbox and one other whose name I can never remember.
Fluxbox and the other were noticably faster than KDE is about all I can tell you.

Thanks, this is all good information.

I'll probably start with whatever desktop Slackware includes with 10.0

Next step is to wade in, after getting better at the art of putting cable connectors on CAT 5 cable.


John

Regarding the upgrade from xfree to xorg, you dont need to remove anything, since xorg was made for overwriting, nothing bad will happend, I did this myself just a few months ago... good luck!