Old friends

[mlangdn]

I hadn't been frequenting forums (I'm only on two) much lately. Yesterday, BBF gave a connection was reset. Tried again today and the same thing. Then I remembered G's site, and a bunch are here now! I reckon Phil closed down BBF. Things change....

[Grogan]

Hey, mlangdn, I'm glad to see you're still with us. I haven't seen you in a long time. I had checked the slackware forum for you and didn't see any sign of you either.

Yeah, BBF went for a shit. It was down most of the time for a few months so we moved here.

Welcome Back!

[Zema Bus]

Welcome back mlangdn!

[mlangdn]

I've been busy with family. No problems thank goodness, just dad, papaw, and now great papaw stuff! I've been retired since June 2018. We do a lot of camping spring through fall. Still running Slackware current, so I still check LQ occasionally, but rarely post. My computer is getting old but still runs very well. I hate to get another and have to deal with efi stuff. I haven't looked to see if legacy boards are still a thing. I did see where Microsoft is now going to allow Win 11 on legacy boards with a ton of caveats. I haven't booted 10 in a year or so.

[Grogan]

So you're a great grandfather now! That's good to hear.

I'm thinking of going back to Slackware for my clean, serious (64 bit only), non-gaming setup. I'm getting sick of Gentoo, it's a cast iron bitch with USE flags and dependencies. Automated compiles of everything are nice, but they make it impossible to have things the way I want because of the house of cards built around their USE flags, to satisfy dependencies. At least with Arch and Slackware I can make the PKGBUILDs/.SlackBuilds do exactly what I want.

EFI isn't all that bad. I don't like that it uses a silly (fragile... but also pretty easy to fix if something happens to it) FAT32 filesystem but the way I have it set up it's pretty handy. I had trouble installing bootloaders using the NVRAM vars on my bios, so I just use the "default" path, that the bios just finds and boots from. It has no choice but to work. With grub, that's the --removable switch, which treats it how removable media boots.

Code: Select all

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot --removable

That puts EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI (the grub stage which then finds the kernel according to grub.cfg) on the EFI partition. I use a simple, hand edited grub.cfg instead of that grub-mkconfig garbage generator.

What I've come to like about it is, the EFI partition has both Grub and my kernel image (it doesn't have to though, with grub) and I can have a common kernel image for both my OSes and simply have to install the modules to both with INSTALL_MOD_PATH. So I only have to build the kernel once... both systems can have the same config.

You needn't fear UEFI. I was dreading it too but it turned out to be easy to work with.

[Zema Bus]

I'm using UEFI too, for many years now. I figured I might as well get used to it since legacy would eventually be phased out. Arch and Slackware are my two primary distros, I switched from Slackware 15 back to Current about a year ago.

[mlangdn]

I had read somewhere that Slackware would not install on a UEFI system. But I haven't done any research yet either. It is winter though, and we are not camping. Got lots of time to pull the trigger on this.

[Grogan]

You might have to set up grub manually (e.g. mount EFI at boot and use a grub-install command and grub-mkconfig). Other than that, it would be the same Slackware installer. Moreover, Slackware has elilo now, which is for UEFI.

I haven't seen Slackware Current's installer in years, but it's possible the "bypass the LILO installation" is old (I can't see lilo being the default anymore?). Either way, I think Slackware would set up elilo for you during the install.

Slackware setup supports UEFI installs. To get Slackware to boot on UEFI machines, bypass the LILO installation and select ELILO installation when prompted during the install.

https://docs.slackware.com/howtos:slack ... i_hardware

P.S. Just to illustrate how easy EFI is, it would be super easy for me because I already have Grub set up. I would just do a custom Slackware install, don't install any boot loader, don't mount the EFI partition* (/boot will be an empty directory) and simply cp -a my current modules tree to /lib on Slackware and it would boot. I'd want to change the title from Gentoo to Slackware but that would be it. I wouldn't even install the distro kernel. The only difficulty for me would be in trying to get a minimal system without installing a bunch of unnecessary packages (which is kind of what inhibits me from wanting Slackware). I would then recompile most of the system at leisure, as I'm a stickler for optimization.

* I don't mount the EFI partition in the OS anymore, only when installing a new kernel image, then unmount. Only grub needs to access it. I haven't had a filesystem inconsistency (been checking it with dosfsck) on my FAT32 EFI partition since I started doing that.

[Zema Bus]

Slackware is going to default to Grub with Slackware 15.1, I don't know if that's the case with new installs of Current yet. You may need to manually format your FAT32 partition before launching the installer, I had to do that with both 15 and Current because the installer failed to format it while formatting other partitions.

[mlangdn]

I've been running current since it became pure 64 bit. Still on lilo here. Yep - I'm a dinosaur. Also, I had done a fresh install of current about midsummer. It still asked if I wanted to setup lilo. I didn't because I simply copied lilo from the old installation to the new, and changed what needed to be changed.

[Grogan]

It wouldn't actually surprise me if it DID still default to lilo in current. Patrick is very, very old school. I'm sure it broke his heart to junk up Slackware for KDE Plasma. He had to do it though