Beni Grind ~HB9HNT

Sun, 29 Oct 2023 14:48:01 +0100

navigium@grindcore.ch

Ok, I think I'll give up trying to wrap my head around #nixos. I still think it's an great idea to have a fully declarative OS where you set up everything in code. However, the non-default file structure make it hard to run software that assumes a POSIX filesystem. Also I never really got a proper grasp of the Nix language and documentation is sparse.

So, I'm ready to try something new. Currently #Fedora Sericea, Fedora Silverblue, #OpenSUSE MicroOS or #EndlessOS are on my distrohopping candidates list as I want to try what the immutable OS buzz is all about....

Any suggestions where to start?

show all 19 Comments

Sun, 29 Oct 2023 23:17:18 +0100

Beni Grind ~HB9HNT

navigium@grindcore.ch

@C.B.Leslie as I said, I don't think the problem is NixOS. I'm sure it's me, but if I spent half a year with a OS and language, read most of the doku available online, wrote some simple derivations and still don't feel like I understand how it works, it's not for me. I might eventually come back and try again. For now I don't have the dedication to continue learning Nix. I'm not even at the point where I how the canonical way to manage secrets works.

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 03:07:39 +0100

C.B.Leslie

cbleslie@hachyderm.io

@navigium Kay. Good luck, have fun!

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 23:50:01 +0100

NullSpaceOddity

nsoddity@hubz.secretlair.me

I have a Silver blue install on a flash drive. I use it at work because I'm too impatient to wait for the shared Windows machine to log me in. :)

Overall, it's pretty neat. Just make sure you dedicate a decent amount of space to it. After several updates it grows if you don't actively prune the rollback layers

Tue, 24 Jul 2018 16:43:00 +0200

Beni Grind ~HB9HNT

navigium@grindcore.ch

!slackware nostalgics This got to be the most important post on the #Slackware forums for ages. That's why I'll quote the whole post by Pat Volkerding:

I told [the Slackware Store] to take [the donation link] down or I'd suspend the DNS for the store.

I've been mulling over exactly how to tell you all this, and I guess this is as good a place as any. The store has been ripping me off horribly, and I'm very nearly broke. I have no evidence that they've ever done anything with donations besides line their own pockets. I've not been paid any money by them in two years. That was upon the 14.2 release (and followed another long period of time with no income). The 14.2 release generated nearly $100K in revenue. The store gave me $15K, and later said that I was "overpaid".

When I agreed to set up the store, it was structured as a company where they owned 60%, and my wife and I owned 40%. I had not yet escaped California and would have quickly gone broke there with a house underwater had I not taken the deal. And 60% seemed fair, since the idea was that the company would be providing health insurance, paying for the production of the goods, and handling shipping and related customer service. And when my daughter was born and needed surgery and continuing medical attention I could hardly jeopardize our insurance in the days before the ACA. I was between a rock and a hard place like many residents of the US. Since then, the store has ceased to provide any benefits, and shouldn't even be getting a 50/50 split in my opinion, much less looting the coffers for 81+% (anything they want to spend money on is an expense, apparently, while any expenses I have to support the actual project come out of the peanuts they toss me). I only found out about how bad it really was last year when I finally managed to get some numbers out of them. I thought the sales were just that bad, and was really rather depressed about it. Another side note - the ownership of the 60% portion of the store changed hands behind my back. Nobody thought they needed to tell me about this. At that point I'd say things got considerably worse for me.

Still not sure how to move forward, but I have some hope that the community might think that my work is and has been worth supporting. If at all possible I'd like to get away from replicating physical media which seems to be a lost cause. T-shirts? Well, maybe, but I don't see that providing a reasonable income either. I'm wondering how Patreon would do. It would at least be better than nothing, which is where I am now.

Through all of this I have continued to work hard towards getting Slackware 15.0 released because I believe it will be by far the best release we've ever had, and because I'm dedicated to my work and the community that uses it. I've never really been in this for the money. At any given juncture (including now) I've had numerous opportunities that would support me and my family far better and would provide us with the things that we need rather desperately. I mean, I'm sitting here in a house with a giant hole in the roof, a broken door sealed with duct tape, and a failed air conditioning condenser that I can't afford to fix, my wife has been driving on a spare tire for weeks, my teeth need serious attention again, and I only just got a machine here with UEFI for the first time (bought a used machine... really out of my budget but it had to be done).

I'm open to suggestions at this point. As far as Slackware 15.0 goes, I've been testing PAM and Kerberos here and have given quite some thought to trying to get them merged (or at least in /testing) so that we can have proper support for Active Directory and NFS. Plasma 5 has been a consideration as well, although frankly it's grown much larger than GNOME was back when I decided that should be spun off for third party maintenance. If that's going in, we really need to analyze which dependencies would not be used outside of Plasma and stick all of those in the KDE series. I'm as tired of the pollution of the L series as the rest of you are.

"I did this 'cause Linux gives me a woody. It doesn't generate revenue."
-- Dave '-ddt->` Taylor, announcing DOOM for Linux

Source: #^https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/donating-to-slackware-4175634729/#post5882751

Tue, 07 Nov 2017 12:24:45 +0100

Beni Grind ~HB9HNT

navigium@grindcore.ch

I just upgraded #cwm on my #Slackware box to the version from OpenBSD 6.2. Sadly they changed how tiling works. Now there isn't a way to tile two windows differently than splitting the screen in exactly two halves. Additionally they changed pretty much every keyword in the config file.

Tue, 07 Nov 2017 13:25:26 +0100

Beni Grind ~HB9HNT

navigium@grindcore.ch

@Andrew Manning I lost the harddrive of one machine and lost my private key. That's why I had to set up a new identity. I only installed it on my new machine recently. It still feels very clunky and power hungry.

Thu, 01 Sep 2016 19:33:17 +0200

Beni Grind ~HB9HNT

navigium@grindcore.ch

I'm trying out the #Lumina desktop on #Slackware.... Looks ok-ish but I don't think I want to go through the whole configuration until it looks and feels like my current #fvwm configuration.

Fri, 02 Sep 2016 18:53:06 +0200

Beni Grind ~HB9HNT

navigium@grindcore.ch

@Rebeka Catalina Lumina is a DE based on Fluxbox developed by the PC-BSD folks and it's now its official desktop environment.Sadly I realised once more that I don't need a full DE.

Mon, 05 Sep 2016 20:26:03 +0200

Awesome-WM has done it for me for a long time now.

Mon, 05 Sep 2016 20:49:24 +0200

Beni Grind ~HB9HNT

navigium@grindcore.ch

I keep switching. Often I end up using i3. At the moment my project is to use a wm that's included in #Slackware. Right now I'm using a FVWM configuration which is almost behaving like a tiling wm. As a plus FVWM is also the default #OpenBSD wm. (However, I used cwm on my last OpenBSD desktop install...)

Sat, 16 Apr 2016 14:08:15 +0200 last edited: Sat, 16 Apr 2016 14:08:26 +0200

Beni Grind ~HB9HNT

navigium@grindcore.ch

#Slackware 14.2 RC2 is out....

Fri Apr 15 20:37:37 UTC 2016
Finally got some fixes we were waiting for in this new kernel.
It's been almost a month since 14.2rc1 so we'll call this Slackware
14.2 release candidate 2. Almost there. Get in any last-minute
bug reports quickly.

Tue, 05 Apr 2016 18:32:42 +0200

Beni Grind ~HB9HNT

navigium@grindcore.ch

Building #ghc on #Slackware in hopes to be able to install #pandoc. We'll see how this works out...

Sun, 27 Mar 2016 15:33:04 +0200

Beni Grind ~HB9HNT

navigium@grindcore.ch

I'm considering installing #Slackware on my Libreboot X200. I don't really use it at the moment because I don't like Trisquel. But I'm too lazy for Free Slack and I'm still a bit reluctant to install any not fully free distro on a Libreboot machine. But then, if I don't use it, it won't help either.

Tue, 15 Mar 2016 18:43:29 +0100

Beni Grind ~HB9HNT

navigium@grindcore.ch

Today I read in the #Slackware log that we'll finally get a proper version of sudo:

ap/sudo-1.8.15-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
       New options: --with-insults --with-all-insults --with-pc-insults.
       Sorry about this, I know it's a bit silly. ;-)