Slackware 8 and FTP mirrors

Well I woke up on Saturday and discovered Slackware 8 was out. I proceeded to try and download it through my flaky 56k modem (that keeps wanting to be a 9600 thanks to BT’s wonderful phonelines in our area - UNIX may be 30 years old, but that doesn’t mean I want to emulate a net connection from that time!). ftp.slackware.com was OK for the first 6 hours, I managed to get about 70MB, but then the Americans woke up and tried doing the same thing.

My local mirror (http://mirror.ac.uk) doesn’t have it all yet (there’s parts of the ’slakware’ dir, but nothing in the ISO images directory yet), so I’m waiting for it to be available on http://www.linuxemporium.co.uk.

Technically this machine could download things, it is on a 2Mbit link, however we pay for our bandwidth and transferring 3 CD images would put us way over the limit (plus it’d still be on the wrong side of my modem - and the wrong side of Birmingham too!).

I can now ride one way up the big hill between here and my house in my bike’s top gear I’ll try the other side today (the other side is steeper). The weather is still warm and there’s sun up there somewhere. I like it, makes a change from rain. Makes my herb garden grow too (the mint is taking over and it’s only been in there a week!). Had fun putting salt on the slugs that tried eating the corriander. Slugs and salt don’t mix, they go all… runny…

Back to writing this Windows program for work. It’s quite interesting really, I’m doing the entire thing on my own and it’s actually working! I have to demo it tomorrow (aaargh!)

Tags: Cycling, Linux, Programming, Work