Goodbye Linux Mint 8

Just wiped out my Mint 8 install this past weekend on my media center PC, it was on there for almost the full 18months. The thing had around 6~months of up time when I finally shut it down to replace the busted CD drive and install a new OS on it. Longest I'd ever kept something installed with all my distro hopping! It was solid though and never failed to play a media file I threw at it...

~Jeff

I've kept lots of distros/projects installed for long periods of time on machines I don't use every day on the desktop. Six months is the longest I'm able to keep my main desktop on one system.

Hmm. Slackware 12.2 seems to have been released on Dec. 15, 2008. I think I installed in in Feb. 2009. So this box has been running it for over 2 years now. I've got a newer computer with 13.1 on it, and I'm migrating to it as time permits.

I'm still on Gentoo 2006 (or was it a 2005 CD?), but I guess that doesn't count.

I just migrated away from a Slackware 12.1 installation on my server ... to a Slackware 11.0 installation. It's a long story, but the new server has an Intel Brookdale chipset, and the newer X11 releases have such pitiful support for it, that I went to an earlier version.

Does Slackware-current count? I mean, being a movable target and all...

Rolling distros absolutely count.

I got a Slack 11 install still running on a server machine have been meaning to upgrade it for ages but keep putting it off, i think sub-consciously im to scared to touch it since it still works great. Its currently running my subversion server, mangos(WoW) server and some some samba shares. Its not net facing so not too worried about any security issues it may have, maybe i'll just leave it well alone and try to quell my upgrade tendencies.

Edit: I just remembered why im scared to touch it. It was because of X's poor support for the sis630 chipset, slack 11 was one of the few distros that worked out of the box with this display chipset.

@Koriel, if nobody touched the configuration file, then X is using either the VESA driver or the fbdev driver. No acceleration to speak of, but being the "lowest common denominator" it's nearly guaranteed to work. The specific default may have changed since then, but the philosophy is still the same.

@gus3

No its using X's sis630 2d driver not vesa. Vesa was very slow on it, fbdev didnt work at all.

Apparently things are better with xorg it even has 3d support if your willing to tinker with it, so I might give the latest slack a try out on it.

If rolling distro's count, then I just noticed my "Gentoo install" today is celebrating it's fifth birthday! It was installed the days (it took multiple!) after I put together this PC. So if this PC were older, perhaps I could have kept it for longer. After five years, not much is left of the initial install.

Now it runs Lin-2.6.36 (most of the kernel configuration is also 5 years old!), BaseLayout2, KDE-4.6.1 (installed, not running), FF4.2a-pre1, Flash 10.2, OpenRC (think: Upstart before Ubuntu had it), at this moment compiling wine-1.3.17 and running WindowMaker 0.92.

OK, that last one obviously is a joke - because WM is 99% the same as 5 years ago.

I have been contemplating / trying to move to another distro for at least 7 years, but still I found nothing which suits me / boots and works on my hardware. Ubuntu Natty Narwhal is the latest failure...

Maybe I might add an interesting detail about the kernel config: It probably came from 2.6.16 for which it was made, and afterward it was 'updated' by running 'make oldconfig' and than pushing down the Enter-button continuously until all default-choices were "accepted". Sometimes more than 300 of them. I might want to post a vid of that process, it's fun!

RedHat Linux 6.2 was installed on demonhouse 20may02. It's still the LAN's qmail/apache server, crontab central (having one crontab driving other boxes with ssh commands makes scheduling resources like network bandwidth lots easier), and the workstation where I do most of my pure-text writing in a KDE1.1 environment. Not bad for a 35-watt K6/2-400.

Ah, low power computing; you were the first!

The current 2.6 kernel is supposed to be a power-miser compared to its predecessors. I think it'd be interesting to measure the init-3 and init-5 desktop-idle power-draw of, say, Debian Potato (offhand I think that was the last version with a 2.2 kernel) against the latest and greatest Debian. Power-miser compared to what, in other words. I have no idea which way that test would go, I just know that 2.2 stuff is a lot more tolerant of small DRAM setups than 2.6. For any machine which doesn't have Internet exposure (because the security updates have stopped), it's still a contender. RHL6.2 is old but it's stable -- demonhouse, with all of 327M DRAM, never falls over for anything less than a power outage. When the kids are hitting its CGI photo gallery or our downloaded webcomix from across the LAN, it just digs deeper into swap and keeps on chugging along, even when I'm pixel-editing in GIMP.