Slackware 10.0

Disclaimer: This page is work in progress, and may contain incorrect/unsafe instructions. Follow any instruction at your own risk.

Why am I still messing with Slackware 10.0, released in 2004? Because I'm running it on a 75MHz 486 machine with 24MB ram. Specifically, the ThinkPad 701c.

Root certificates and SSL

Tried accessing my gmail account with pine using IMAP over SSL, got the following error:

"unable to get local issuer certificate"

The same error message shows up if I try verifying the certificate manually: openssl s_client -connect imap.gmail.com:993

This is because Slackware 10.0 does not ship with any root CA certificates.

To install all the usual root CA certificates:

Simply download the ca-certificates package from a more recent Slackware release (say 14.0), extract the .tar file from the .txz archive, recompress it with gzip into a .tgz file, and install it using installpkg. Then, if you have perl, do a "c_rehash"; if not, cd into /etc/ssl/certs and (as root):

for f in (*.pem); do ln -s $f `openssl x509 -hash -noout -in $f`.0; done

Reboot. Now pine will happily connect to gmail's IMAP server over SSL. (It did run out of memory when I tried to view the All Mail folder, though.)

Using SlackBuild scripts for newer releases

First, read the official FAQ on the topic: http://www.slackbuilds.org/howto/versions/

For many SlackBuild scripts, these three modifications will make them work:

Change -mtune to -mcpu as instructed in the FAQ;
Change tar xvf to tar -xvzf for .tar.gz source packages, or pipe through bzip2 for .tar.bz2 source packages;
For some packages that depend on X, add -L/usr/X11R6/lib to LDFLAGS.