Hello Ottavio, On 19.04.19 22:39, Ottavio Caruso wrote: > I fiddled with pkgsrc on Linux a couple of years ago, but I had to > give up because I didn't have much time and I wanted an usable system > to start using right away. > > That "usable system" was Linux Mint Debian Edition v2 (Mate) which now > is almost obsolete. I have a few packages that I'd like to install but > they are not being maintained for Debian Jessie. > > Rather than making a new clean install with a new distro that might or > might not work with my old-ish Thinkpad, I was thinking of giving > pkgsrc another go. > > I was only wondering: at one point I will have obsolete libraries, > kernel modules, firmware, etc. Would that give any trouble to the > pkgsrc subsystem on my installation? > I'm using pkgsrc to keep old Linux (and MacOS X) installations running with modern binaries. These are Linux systems that have a customized kernel for the hardware where it is very hard or impossible to get a modern distro running. Most, but not all pkgsrc packages will compile on an old Linux. At some point you might need to compile a new libc yourself. On a Thinkpad, it should not be a big issue to run a modern Distro. I have Slackware running on a Thinkpad T20, Void-Linux on an Thinkpad X41 and Debian 10 (unstable) on an Thinkpad X40. On an Thinkpad, it not before from before 2000, I would recommend installing a Distro that still supports the i386 architecture (Slackware, Void and Debian do, as do others). Alternatives are OpenBSD and NetBSD. I have OpenBSD 6.5 running on an Thinkpad 600. Greetings Carsten
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