V.T. Eric Layton Posted July 2, 2021 Share Posted July 2, 2021 I posted this on Diaspora yesterday... Greelings and Hallucinations, my fine friends… I’m going to be absent from the Internets for a couple daze. I’m upgrading my Slackware64 GNU/Linux OS from v14.2 to Current. I’m downloading Alien Bob’s (Eric Hameleers) Slackware64-Current ISO as I’m typing this. Once I have it burned, I’ll be installing it. Afterwards, for a day or so, I’ll be installing my fav apps and customizing to my tastes. I’ll be back online shortly thereafter. If, for some reason, you do now see me for a while, it’s because I’ve trashed my system and thrown it down on the floor and danced an Irish jig on top of it. Since it’s my ONLY system currently, I may be absent for a very long time. Please don’t miss me too much. I was a bit of a pain in your arse at times, anyway. Toodles for now… ~Eric Well, it's the next day, and after d-loading, burning, installing, setting up, customizing, tweaking, etc., I'm done. All is working now. Yippee! - Slackware64 - Current (soon to be 15) running the 5.12.14 kernel Everyone have a nice weekend. Looks like I may be dodging a hurricane or tropical storm by Sunday evening. YAY! FUN! /sarcasm 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hedon James Posted July 2, 2021 Share Posted July 2, 2021 running current doesn't sound very slackerish. might hafta change your tagline from nocturnal slacker to nocturnal go-getter! LOL! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wa4chq Posted July 2, 2021 Share Posted July 2, 2021 Way to go, Eric. Glad everything went smoothly for you. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted July 2, 2021 Share Posted July 2, 2021 Good luck to you. Make sure to backup your /etc directory along with your other configs. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted July 2, 2021 Author Share Posted July 2, 2021 I did NOT format my /home partition, so most of my interface and app settings were still there with the new installation. I also don't worry too much about /etc because I tweak my rc.d manually, and only need to copy my fstab and lilo.conf from my mirror to complete /etc. Oh, I did also have to copy over my fonts from my mirror, too. MY GAWD what awful fonts come with Slackware! Sadly, a few of my old SlackBuild apps would not build on the new system and they haven't been updated in eons, so I just dumped 'em. KDE had equivalents. I did the Full Monty Slack install; includes everything and the kitchen sink (15 Gigs' worth). Also sadly, a couple of my fav extensions for Thunderbird would not work in the new version. Oh, well... I'll live. Anyway, as to your comment, @Hedon James, I did this now because Pat's getting ready to lock the development stage... Slack 15 will be out shortly. All I have to do at that point is change my package mirror from "current" to "15"... and I'll be back in standard release again. This may be my last version of Slackware (15) and Windows (10) because once this hardware fails, I'll probably be leaving computering and the Internets permanently. It'll be time to go live some life then. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted July 2, 2021 Share Posted July 2, 2021 There will always be a version of linux that you could get running on hardware. **** a $35 raspberry pi could keep you online. I'll get you a machine when that time comes. 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted July 2, 2021 Author Share Posted July 2, 2021 12 minutes ago, securitybreach said: I'll get you a machine when that time comes. Hmm... seems I may not be able to escape this H3LL. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amenditman Posted July 2, 2021 Share Posted July 2, 2021 I've got a couple 5 -7 year old machines just wasting away in the workshop. Let me know when you want one and it's yours. 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted July 2, 2021 Share Posted July 2, 2021 Yeah, I have a few extra laptops as well. 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amenditman Posted July 3, 2021 Share Posted July 3, 2021 1 hour ago, securitybreach said: Yeah, I have a few extra laptops as well. How is it we end up with all this computer stuff? I didn't buy it. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted July 3, 2021 Author Share Posted July 3, 2021 Hey, Bob... I may be interested in some of those graveyard 'puters. I need a PSU and some other odds and ends for my shop system. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amenditman Posted July 3, 2021 Share Posted July 3, 2021 K, I've got PSUs. How about a system with and AMD FX 8350 CPU, 16GB Ram, mobo Only thing I don't have is a graphics card. No one is giving me any old ones. You'd think they were hard to get or something!? /s 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hedon James Posted July 3, 2021 Share Posted July 3, 2021 7 hours ago, amenditman said: K, I've got PSUs. How about a system with and AMD FX 8350 CPU, 16GB Ram, mobo Only thing I don't have is a graphics card. No one is giving me any old ones. You'd think they were hard to get or something!? /s That thing is a WORKHORSE! Dated maybe, but still powerful. I've got a system with AMD FX6200 and 16GB Ram....almost 10 years old now, but still going strong and hardly ever breaks a sweat. And FWIW, my FX6200 CPU is actually an APU with onboard Radeon graphics. I'll bet the FX8350 is also an APU; an 8-core CPU with onboard graphics. That's a beast for you VT! EDIT: Yep, CPU specs are what I thought, but apparently no onboard GPU, FWIW: https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/fx-8350 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wa4chq Posted July 3, 2021 Share Posted July 3, 2021 See if someone will throw in a comfy chair! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted July 3, 2021 Share Posted July 3, 2021 My theory on how we get so much aging hardware (aside from being packrats:) CPUs and mobos last a lot longer. The motherboard makers have learned their lessons about bad capacitors, and CPUs from 2008 - assuming they are 64 bit - can still be useful. It doesn't take 8 cores and 16 threads to surf the Web and play a YouTube video. Even "failed" technology like a Bulldozer CPU is perfectly fine. SSDs have made a huge difference in perceived speed and snappiness. Even laptops can benefit. When your old machine won't run Windows 10 and get updates, just install Linux. Broadband gets better and better and download speed makes an old machine look faster. Wifi is better too with things like mesh routers. 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amenditman Posted July 4, 2021 Share Posted July 4, 2021 Mine come from folks needing help with their new Win 10 devices, which they can't figure out. "Where is the 'My Computer'? I need that to get to my files." After I school them in the evils of MS and Win they always say, "I have my old junk computer, do you know how to recycle it in an environmentally responsible way?" Somehow I always answer, "Yes". That's how I get all my "old junk". 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted July 4, 2021 Share Posted July 4, 2021 Back in the days when desktops dominated, I used to get a lot of obsolete XP and Vista machines which were capable Linux candidates. But around 2014 or so most people in the hood went to laptops. Now all I see are cheap bad slow notebooks. These are hard to upgrade and not really worth my time. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wa4chq Posted July 4, 2021 Share Posted July 4, 2021 Eric, you remember the days when installing Slack was a chore. To configure x.....geeze. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted July 4, 2021 Author Share Posted July 4, 2021 Well, when I first started with Slackware, Bruno was still around. He made it a lot more easier for me than it could have been. :) 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wa4chq Posted July 5, 2021 Share Posted July 5, 2021 1 hour ago, V.T. Eric Layton said: Well, when I first started with Slackware, Bruno was still around. He made it a lot more easier for me than it could have been. No doubt, he was an amazing person. They say the good die young. I hope his family are doing well. 1 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted July 5, 2021 Share Posted July 5, 2021 Yeah, Bruno was an amazing person with great patience that will be forever missed. 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wa4chq Posted July 5, 2021 Share Posted July 5, 2021 I never knew him. I think when I got involved with the group here, he had already passed away. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted July 5, 2021 Author Share Posted July 5, 2021 Yup. He died in 2009. You signed up here in '10. 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted July 8, 2021 Author Share Posted July 8, 2021 Well... Current had a kernel upgrade today. I got it all taken care of, but something weird is going on with my /dev/sda1 partition (Slackware main). I could not get Porteus to mount the /dev/sda1 partition to make an rsync backup before upgrading the kernel. I had to mirror using Clonezilla, instead. Everything looks fine, but I get a warning when I ran LILO that /dev/sda1 is "not active". What does that mean, pray tell? I ended up having to put LILO on the MBR instead of the 1st partition. I also had to do this a week ago when I installed Slack Current. Weird. Changing the boot flag (w/ fdisk) seems to have no effect, either. Other than that, all seems to be working fine. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted July 8, 2021 Share Posted July 8, 2021 Has Slackware switched to UUID identifiers yet? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted July 8, 2021 Author Share Posted July 8, 2021 No. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted July 8, 2021 Author Share Posted July 8, 2021 Oh, and here's a discussion about this going on at LinuxQuestions.org -> https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/dev-sda1-is-not-active-4175697448/#post6265016 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted July 9, 2021 Share Posted July 9, 2021 Well one of the benefits of using UUIDs is that the number never changes so you do not have to worry about the order of your drives/partitions. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted July 9, 2021 Author Share Posted July 9, 2021 Oh, I'm familiar with UUID. I hate it like the metric system, though. ;) 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted July 9, 2021 Author Share Posted July 9, 2021 Update that I just posted on the thread at LQ.org: UPDATE since last night... After running removing the boot flag from the Windows partition and adding a boot flag to the /dev/sda, I ran #lilo (standard w/ no options) this placed LILO on my /dev/sda1 partition. There were no errors. This morning, though, I got a "lilo checksum error" when I initiated the machine. I had to use the ISO to chroot into the installation and run #lilo -b /dev/sda again. This allowed normal boot again. When I first installed Slack -Current from the ISO, it would not boot initially because the installer could not run lilo. At this time, I booted the new installation with the boot stick that I had created. Once in, I ran #lilo -b /dev/sda placing a LILO on the MBR. I think this is when all the troubles started. I believe that having LILO on the MBR and also on the /dev/sda1 partition simultaneously is causing this checksum error. I'm wondering, if I remove LILO from the MBR (using dd, possibly), this may clear up the entire issue. Thoughts on this, folks? I'd like a little feedback before I use dd for anything. It's a dangerous command. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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