Slackware 12.2 remix - a project

Gullible Jones · 2010-07-30 18:04:43

Okay... Right now I am pretty dissatisfied with the distributions available for old computers. They ones available seem to be either too limited, too difficult for novices, or unmaintained.

So I'm planning on creating... Well, not quite a distro. More like a Fedora-style "spin" I guess. But yeah. I want to take everything necessary for a Slackware 12.2 environment with KDE3, and put it on a single CD. Sort of like Slax, only not live, and with multiuser support and normal Slackware package management.

Why Slackware?

- It's more "Windows-like" than other distros. Most dependencies are preinstalled, so you can grab binaries off the net and install them. Not that that's always a good idea (again, as with Windows), but you can.

- Version 12.2 has KDE3 and is still maintained (thank you very much Patrick Volkerding and company). KDE3 is basically the ideal desktop environment for old computers; it will run with 256 MB of RAM and do everything most users need.

- It's simpler and more dependable than Debian Lenny.

But anyway. I want to take all the stuff needed for KDE3, plus typical dependencies needed for compiling stuff, and put it on one CD. Maybe have the internationalization stuff for KDE on a second CD. If this is actually possible, does anyone know how I might go about doing it? e.g. how I would create the install CD, put the necessary packages in their places, make sure it didn't try to install stuff that wasn't on it?

karol · 2010-07-30 18:11:11

How much those old computers have you (your clients) got? Hundreds? You can get a P4 w/ 512MB RAM for $50 from e-bay-like places.

But good luck to you, brave Sir :-)

Gullible Jones · 2010-07-30 18:30:38

Thanks.

Originally I was mostly thinking e-waste more than poverty, actually. People are caught in a cycle of upgrades, which eventually results in them chucking their old computers because they're too slow. Linux COULD help put a dent in that, but generally doesn't, due to the trend of increasingly pretty and increasingly resource-hungry interfaces. Distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenSuSE are (IMO) inferior to Windows XP and even Windows 7 in terms of performance. Whereas distros like Arch and Debian are much faster and less resource hungry than even XP... if you have the know-how to set them up. Which a lot of people don't.

Slackware with KDE3 is IMO somewhere in between. If you can install Windows, you can probably install Slackware; and once KDE is up and running, further system maintenance is pretty easy. Even package installation (installpkg and removepkg) is simple.

(Updates with slackpkg are a bit trickier unfortunately. Maybe gslapt or somesuch would be helpful there.)

But getting back to my point - the idea is that, if there were a way to easily get a simple to use, versatile, AND lightweight distro on an old computer, it might result it fewer computers going to waste, and less of the generally ugly things assocated with that waste.

karol · 2010-07-30 18:38:43

At some point buying a new computer will save you money because the new one will replace two old ones and will use a fraction of the electricity the old ones required.

IMHO getting a couple 256 MB sticks would save you a lot of time - 256 v 512 is a hell of a difference. If you don't mind hitting the swap from time to time (e.g. when using Amarok) you might just install KDE 4.x on a 512 MB box.
https://users.archlinux.de/~pierre/tmp/ram-usage.png

Gullible Jones · 2010-07-30 18:59:00

No no no... I'm not talking about just me.

(Re KDE4 RAM usage - wow, I've never seen it use that little. But even then, it seems to use a lot of CPU power when launching apps. Suffice to say it performed like a turtle on my laptop and like a wounded slug on my netbook, and I cannot imagine how badly it would perform on e.g. a Pentium II with 384 MB of RAM.)

orasis · 2010-07-30 21:46:03

What you are looking for is 'CUSS' cooking up some slack, it's a nice place to start if you plan on creating a distro based on Slackware.

72linus · 2010-07-30 21:46:11

Just a couple questions sir:

1) Why Slackware vs ARCH?

2) Why Slackware 12.2 vs 13.1/current?

3) Why KDE vs lite Window Manager or even xfce4/lxde?

4) Why not a persistent livecd/usb ala' Slax?

I installed my own nFluxOS ARCH edition to my old lappy

Toshiba 7000CT Portege 266mhz PentiumII 160MB RAM with 4GB HDD
and it's running ARCH 2010.07 Testing at sub 100MB RAM
http://multidistro.proboards.com/index. … &thread=38

Also, I have a KDE-3.5.10 module for my nFluxOS Slackware Current Edition
and it comes with Fluxbox, TWM, and Sawfish in the iso
http://multidistro.com/

see my site stuff as I also have live kernels, etc too and the ARCH nFluxOS edition....

If you do want to make a 12.2 edition, maybe use the ZEN kernel source at my site
and compile it on 12.2 system, etc

I would enjoy helping you whatever your decisions....
thx

orasis · 2010-07-30 21:52:49

Gullible Jones wrote:

Okay... Right now I am pretty dissatisfied with the distributions available for old computers. They ones available seem to be either too limited, too difficult for novices, or unmaintained.
So I'm planning on creating... Well, not quite a distro. More like a Fedora-style "spin" I guess. But yeah. I want to take everything necessary for a Slackware 12.2 environment with KDE3, and put it on a single CD. Sort of like Slax, only not live, and with multiuser support and normal Slackware package management.
Why Slackware?
- It's more "Windows-like" than other distros. Most dependencies are preinstalled, so you can grab binaries off the net and install them. Not that that's always a good idea (again, as with Windows), but you can.
- Version 12.2 has KDE3 and is still maintained (thank you very much Patrick Volkerding and company). KDE3 is basically the ideal desktop environment for old computers; it will run with 256 MB of RAM and do everything most users need.
- It's simpler and more dependable than Debian Lenny.
But anyway. I want to take all the stuff needed for KDE3, plus typical dependencies needed for compiling stuff, and put it on one CD. Maybe have the internationalization stuff for KDE on a second CD. If this is actually possible, does anyone know how I might go about doing it? e.g. how I would create the install CD, put the necessary packages in their places, make sure it didn't try to install stuff that wasn't on it?

To be honest, you're better off basing this whole thing on PC-LINUX-OS.

Package management is much better than compilation on old machines, especially old machines with limited memory and hard disk space. Not only that but PC-LINUX-OS is already somewhat 'modified' for speed as a desktop machine whereas Slackware is really vanilla everything with absolutely no optimizations which could be beneficial for your project.

For example PCLINUXOS is using the BFS patch, could it provide a bit of extra 'speed' possibly, but it's better than nothing at all, no?

And all of this stuff has already been done for you so you don't have to mess around and tweak slackware for months testing and re-testing the speed... you'll spend a lot less time in PCLINUXOS getting to end of your goal.

Why do I recommend PCLINUXOS? - I had it running on a PIII 650MHZ, 256MB RAM and it FLEW it was faster than even XP on the machine, I was very impressed.

Gullible Jones · 2010-07-30 23:00:37

orasis wrote:

What you are looking for is 'CUSS' cooking up some slack, it's a nice place to start if you plan on creating a distro based on Slackware.

Thank you very much! I'll read that.

72linus wrote:

Just a couple questions sir:
1) Why Slackware vs ARCH?

KDE3's GUI config tools don't work with Arch.

2) Why Slackware 12.2 vs 13.1/current?

12.2 has KDE3 and is still maintained.

3) Why KDE vs lite Window Manager or even xfce4/lxde?

GUI tools. KDE3 has configuration tools for all kinds of stuff, while still being pretty light. (Last I checked it was about on par with XFCE 4.6 for memory consumption.)

4) Why not a persistent livecd/usb ala' Slax?

I actually considered that, and might still do it that way. I don't like the idea of a Linux newbie running as root all the time, but that might be changeable. I think.

I installed my own nFluxOS ARCH edition to my old lappy
<snip>
I would enjoy helping you whatever your decisions....
thx

Thanks. I think I'll be sticking with KDE for the desktop though, due to the aforementioned preponderance of GUI tools and the interface's similarity to Windows.

Last edited by Gullible Jones (2010-07-30 23:10:00)

Gullible Jones · 2010-07-30 23:09:19

orasis wrote:

To be honest, you're better off basing this whole thing on PC-LINUX-OS.
Package management is much better than compilation on old machines, especially old machines with limited memory and hard disk space. Not only that but PC-LINUX-OS is already somewhat 'modified' for speed as a desktop machine whereas Slackware is really vanilla everything with absolutely no optimizations which could be beneficial for your project.

I've always found Slack to be faster than PCLOS, with light desktops anyway, maybe because of less rubbish running in the background by default? Also, I'm not sure these optimizations would work so well on older machines.

(I will say that Slack 13 with KDE4 is slow as hell though.)

Re package management, I guess Slackware's lack thereof may be a hazard. I mean, it's not like you can't grab binary packages off of websites. On the other hand dependency resolution could be a problem for bigger packages, I just figured most users would never run into it.

For example PCLINUXOS is using the BFS patch, could it provide a bit of extra 'speed' possibly, but it's better than nothing at all, no?
And all of this stuff has already been done for you so you don't have to mess around and tweak slackware for months testing and re-testing the speed... you'll spend a lot less time in PCLINUXOS getting to end of your goal.

Maybe... As I said I have doubts that these fancy new schedulers and optimizations will do anything on an old machine. Might be worth trying though.

Why do I recommend PCLINUXOS? - I had it running on a PIII 650MHZ, 256MB RAM and it FLEW it was faster than even XP on the machine, I was very impressed.

I found PCLOS XFCE and LXDE to be workable on my netbook, but not exceptionally fast. And their package manager, apt-rpm, was very slow; as was the network applet. Guess it might make a good base though, especially seeing as the control center removes the need for KDE3 utilities.

Also, I have rather grave doubts about PCLOS' future, because it seems to take no measures whatsoever to avoid patent violation. Yes, I think software patents are bloody stupid, but if you're hosted in the US you have to deal with them.

faelar · 2010-07-31 22:41:50

K. Mandla's blog can interests you, there are a lot of posts, some about light softwares (often CLI nowadays), some about distributions and how to run them on old hardware.

Last edited by faelar (2010-07-31 22:42:42)

gazj · 2010-07-31 22:52:41

But, why not use Slackware 12.2?

karol · 2010-07-31 22:55:57

faelar wrote:

K. Mandla's blog can interests you, there are a lot of posts, some about light softwares (often CLI nowadays), some about distributions and how to run them on old hardware.

But the focus of his blog was on CLI, nod KDE - that's the main reason for Gullible Jones' effort: to give a nice DE to people with old computers. Those people are not literate with CLI, they 're most likely very WIMP-dependent.

faelar · 2010-07-31 23:05:45

Sure but there are things about GUI applications, there's also a guide to put ubuntu on a small config. Maybe he won't find exactly what he's seeking, but there's worthy information here.

I just mentioned CLI to say that recent posts will probably appears to be unrelated to the topic, but older ones can prove to be usefull.

karol · 2010-07-31 23:14:57

faelar wrote:

Sure but there are things about GUI applications, there's also a guide to put ubuntu on a small config. Maybe he won't find exactly what he's seeking, but there's worthy information here.
I just mentioned CLI to say that recent posts will probably appears to be unrelated to the topic, but older ones can prove to be usefull.

IIRC K. Mandla is an Ubuntu mod again so maybe the blog will start reflecting a bit more modern approach :-)

72linus · 2010-08-01 00:16:55

Also;
You could take Slax 6.1.2 KDE3.5 (slackware 12.2) and install it to hdd
I have a tutorial on that here for Fathom's SlaxRemix05-07
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions … -a-802853/

Arch Linux

#1 2010-07-30 18:04:43

Slackware 12.2 remix - a project

#2 2010-07-30 18:11:11

Re: Slackware 12.2 remix - a project

#3 2010-07-30 18:30:38

Re: Slackware 12.2 remix - a project

#4 2010-07-30 18:38:43

Re: Slackware 12.2 remix - a project

#5 2010-07-30 18:59:00

Re: Slackware 12.2 remix - a project

#6 2010-07-30 21:46:03

Re: Slackware 12.2 remix - a project

#7 2010-07-30 21:46:11

Re: Slackware 12.2 remix - a project

#8 2010-07-30 21:52:49

Re: Slackware 12.2 remix - a project

#9 2010-07-30 23:00:37

Re: Slackware 12.2 remix - a project

#10 2010-07-30 23:09:19

Re: Slackware 12.2 remix - a project

#11 2010-07-31 22:41:50

Re: Slackware 12.2 remix - a project

#12 2010-07-31 22:52:41

Re: Slackware 12.2 remix - a project

#13 2010-07-31 22:55:57

Re: Slackware 12.2 remix - a project

#14 2010-07-31 23:05:45

Re: Slackware 12.2 remix - a project

#15 2010-07-31 23:14:57

Re: Slackware 12.2 remix - a project

#16 2010-08-01 00:16:55

Re: Slackware 12.2 remix - a project

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