So it’s that time of year and I spent last weekend at SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) 2024 in Charlotte, NC. This was my second year of attending and it absolutely lived up to the lofty expectations set by my first trip last year. This year was less about the sessions for me and more about the people. Which is interesting to say because if I’m being honest about my visit last year, it was also similar.
Let’s be up front: The highlight of this year was going to the “Retro Linux Ragchew” and meeting some of the maintainers of the classic distribution Slackware Linux. Fun fact: It was the second Linux distribution ever created and it was also the first one I ever installed on my own hardware as a teenager. In any event meeting Alan, Jeff and Fuzz (sorry, I never actually caught your name my man) and staying up until 3:30 am in the morning partying with them was an absolute blast.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I was having dinner at the hotel bar when I started chatting with another attendee at the bar, Chris from Ohio. He was a very cool guy, and mind you I’m not just saying that because he bought me a beer. In any event we spent a lot of time talking about Linux related things and then he suggested that we go hang out at the “Retro Linux Ragchew” after dinner and so we did. Easily the best decision I made over the entire weekend.
So I can hear you asking, “What the hell is a Retro Linux Ragchew?” Glad you asked. It’s a hilarious event where veteran Linux users try to install a very old version of Linux on some very old hardware. In this case we were attempting to install Redhat Linux 1.1 (Mother’s Day Release) on an old PC powered by 486 DX/4 120 processor. This version of Linux was released in August of 1995. That processor was also released in 1995. So all the components of this were at least 29 years old.
How did it go? Badly. Not a one of us had a clue. Thankfully Jeff was driving and he made far more progress than I would’ve. I happen to know this for a fact because I fired up 86box on my own ThinkPad and was attempting to accomplish this feat on my own PC pretending to be a 486. I couldn’t manage to get the bootloader, LILO, to display more than the first two letters during the initial floppy disc boot part of the process. That is literally the first step. Jeff to his credit actually made to trying to mount the CD disc containing all of the installation packages.
But nevertheless we had fun. Once we got tired of failing at installing a very old version of Linux on very old hardware, we started just talking, drinking and having a general good time. The crowd started to thin out a bit but a few of us hung on and kept the party going. At some point after a bottle of bourbon had been passed around and we all participated in a dramatic reading of the bullshit marketing prose printed on the label (something about it being aged in a barrel on a ship and a lot of lies about the “voyage” in question) we wandered into the main hall where Noah Chelliah of the venerable podcast, “Ask Noah Show” had been broadcasting live all weekend long.
Now those of you who know me personally won’t believe me when I say this but I hadn’t actually over-imbibed at this point (which I have a tendency to do). I had passed on actually taking shots of bourbon and had only had a few beers spread out over six hours, so I was still relatively sober. But those Slackware guys? Oh man. They had hit the bourbon hard and they were absolutely hilarious. So with this in mind they sat down in front of Noah’s broadcasting table and proceeded to be “interviewed”.
What followed was one of the most chaotic live streamed interviews I have ever seen. Jeff wanted to issue an edict to old Slackware maintainers to get together sometime in 2025 and remember the good ole days when Slackware was still in its prime. Alan wanted to prove he could hold his liquor better than anybody else (fun fact: he could). Fuzz wanted to make it clear that Slackware was never ever ever going to integrate systemd.
Those of us sitting to the side attempted to foment as much chaos as possible by interjecting and stirring the pot as much as possible and a great time was had by all. Eventually more and more of us decided to hang up our spurs and go to bed. I personally called it at 3:30 am. Alan, Fuzz and George were still going strong. Noah was struggling to stay awake.
There is nothing I like more than a great party and that one ranked pretty high on my list. The people were amazing and the booze was not in short supply (there was a huge extra stash of beer in the hospitality room that they informed me of and asked me to raid as I was able to reliably walk over and back).
As for the rest of the conference, there were a few things of note. First off, I got to see Carl Richell, the Founder and CEO of System76, give us a demo of their new Cosmic Desktop environment. It was cool getting to experience Carl as he is more soft spoken than I would’ve guessed and despite my initial skepticism of the project, I came away from the demo quite impressed. Secondly Jeff gave an awesome session on the “Science of Cooking”. It was mostly about how to cook meat properly and I learned a lot. Since he’s from Texas he’s obviously an expert! Thirdly I got the pleasure of seeing Eric S. Raymond again and he hosted a wonderful Q&A session on the topic of “How To Choose Your Next Programming Language” which basically turned into a vehicle of getting him to tell us the things he disliked about various languages (he’s a big fan of Go and wants to like Rust, but has to give it another chance). That was an absolute blast.
Finally one thing that kept coming up over the conference was the distrobox tool, which is basically an easy way to run other Linux distributions inside your current install. So fuddy duddy me finally decided to play with it some before and after lunch on Saturday afternoon and you know what? It’s cool as shit. I tried three different scenarios with it and one was a huge success (isolated git environment), one was a middling success (running Steam) and the last one (running Mullvad) was a bit of a fail boat. I learned a lot and I now have a new tool to make use of. In theory tools like this will help me to eventually transition to using an atomic desktop like Fedora Silverblue instead of the more traditional Fedora that I use now.
The real takeaway for me this year is that this all is way more about the people than the tech. For me as a nerd who has spent a large portion of their existence choosing to be isolated, SELF over the last couple of years has been a huge breath of fresh air. It’s great interacting with others who feel as passionately as I do about something esoteric. It was great walking into a room and seeing a bunch of laptops with System76 and Framework logos on them. There is no other place, other than a Linux conference, where I am likely to see such a sight. It was great sitting around in the lounge and just listening to other Penguins chatter on excitedly about some Linux tech or another. Hell it wasn’t just great, it was infectious.
That having all been said, I’m going to close with this: I hope you all are so lucky as to have the opportunity to drink from a well that refreshing from time to time.