Menu Close

30 years of Slackware!

LoneStar 0 Comments
views

slackware30

Slackware Linux has officially turned 30!

Today July 17th is the anniversary of the release of version 1.0 which took place on July 17th 1993.

Ten years ago I wrote a post for the twentieth anniversary, in which I indicated some risks and problems that the development of Slackware could have faced in the following years, in particular the advent of systemd and wayland.

Now, after 10 years, the situation has seen some evolutions and confirmations. Most notably, Slackware has managed to still remain systemd-free. While by now there is an entire generation of system administrators and Linux users who only know systemd and have never interacted with anything else, sysvinit, rc scripts, resolv.conf and a whole series of traditional – but not less effective – commands and logics remain in Slackware. And we can only be happy about it. However, a minimum of compatibility needed with systemd and logind has been achieved with the use of elogind, and for the moment it seems to be sufficient to keep up with the times.

As far as Wayland is concerned, the use of elogind has made it possible to use it on Slackware in a relatively simple way and for some time now it has been possible to launch KDE Plasma in a wayland session without particular problems. Other desktops and WE using wayland also manage to work on Slackware.

In conclusion, the various threats that posed to a peaceful survival of Slackware over the years seem to have not yet caused irreparable damage after a decade and therefore we celebrate this anniversary with some optimism and good hopes for many more years of satisfaction and joy with the best Linux distribution. 😀

Reverse proxy and SSO

LoneStar 0 Comments
views

Nginx logoIn recent times I have made some technological changes to the LoneStar Network services, which are not directly visible but which have improved and made them safer. In particular, I proceeded to place all websites behind nginx reverse proxy. In this way, therefore, the various web servers that present the services are not directly exposed to the network but are located behind the barrier constituted by the reverse proxy.

This also added some flexibility in being able to add subservices presented as subfolders of the main sites.

I have also added a Single Sign On service, to allow access with a centralized account. Not all the services I use support it yet, but over time it should become the only login system.

Memories of FidoNet

LoneStar 0 Comments
views

Giorgio Rutigliano has recently made available a website dedicated to FidoNet Italia.

[wiki base=”Wikipedia EN”]FidoNet[/wiki] is the amateur telematic network that was born and spread worldwide between the 80s and the early 2000s, before the Internet was widely available and accessible. It was based on the use of analog modems connected to normal voice telephone lines and on asynchronous communications, that is, sending a message took hours / days to arrive at its destination and the same amount of time needed for replies to return to the sender.

I was part of FidoNet Italia, as a member node, from around 1989 until 1996/97. I came out not so much for the legal problems connected to Fidobust, but rather because the passion for real-time communications represented by chats, IRC, Videotel grew in me and I had less and less interest in leaving my PC dedicated to the BBS.

It must be said that the FidoNet worldwide network has never ceased to exist in all these years. Membership has decreased a lot but a certain number of nodes have always remained active, especially in countries where it has also become a vehicle for political activism.

Recently in Italy there has been a flashback for Fidonet and the BBS, even if limited to old users and Sysop who still have memories of the past, and some nodes are returning to be operational on the network using the internet as transport instead of the old lines telephone.

I have not yet seriously considered the idea of ​​being able to go back online, but maybe who knows …

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 .
%d