Back around 2007 or so, I discovered BasicLinux (https://distro.ibiblio.org/baslinux/), a stripped down version of Slackware for old PCs, compatible with Slackware 4.0 packages. It installed from a couple of floppies onto my ancient ThinkPad 365X.
BasicLinux had a great community and introduced me to mailing lists. I learned a lot about how Linux works, tracking down dependencies with ldd and modifying config and init scripts. After a year or so of playing with BasicLinux, I moved on to Slackware, but continued to use the mailing list for help.
So happy 30th to Slackware and cheers to anyone who provided assistance on the BasicLinux mailing list!
That's great, thank you. In the mid-90s I was running all sorts of large public Internet nodes off 386s with 4Mb of RAM on Slackware. Great to see you can still find Linux to run on these.
Great story and thanks for sharing! As someone newer to mailing lists, how did (or do) you use them without flooding your inbox? Lots of rules/filters and directories? Using mutt, alpine or gnus? I appreciate the USENET newsgroups perspective of having a separate directory (other than your inbox) to read and respond to posts but it seems not many projects use NNTP these days.
Thanks! The mailing list was never that busy, so it wasn't really a problem. I'd probably automatically redirect to a folder if I needed to do that.
Funny that you mention USENET. I'm subscribed to about 20 newsgroups, using Claws-mail. It is quite nice that they're separate from my other mail accounts.
BasicLinux had a great community and introduced me to mailing lists. I learned a lot about how Linux works, tracking down dependencies with ldd and modifying config and init scripts. After a year or so of playing with BasicLinux, I moved on to Slackware, but continued to use the mailing list for help.
So happy 30th to Slackware and cheers to anyone who provided assistance on the BasicLinux mailing list!