So I go into my campus lab the other day and start mucking around with
getting Java and such installed on ye old Dell (my Slack box), which I
finally had a reason to fire up after a couple months (although let's not
talk about the fact the reason involves Java). While I was muttering at
the slow download speeds from Sun, one of the RedHat users in the lab
started up his own muttering. The topic of his rant? That he couldn't find
an RPM for the current version of OpenSSH now that RedHat has stopped
supporting his particular version. My first thought as a Slack user was
"so? compile from source". I then voiced a silently more polite form of
that thought (as I have to work with this particular person for the
foreseeable future, let's also not talk more on this subject).

A puzzled look appeared over his face at the thought of compiling from
source and not only that but making his own RPM by using one of the
packaging tools. The look only increased as I tried to explain how easy it
is in Slackware with a Slack build script... "you see, you download the
source, pop it over into a temp directory, edit the script for the right
version number, execute the script and voila, a package is made"... It was
like I was telling him pigs could fly and people walked on water. After
trying a few more minutes to convince him how easy the process was, I left
him to his Google searching for an RPM, while I turned around and realized
"hey, I need to update OpenSSH too". So, I downloaded the tarball,
verified the md5sum, plopped it over into my openssh-source directory,
updated the version number in the build script, ran the script, did an
upgradepkg, verified ssh still worked.... all in about 10 minutes. I
turned around and the poor RedHat guy was still searching for his RPM.
God, it gave me such a chuckle.

On the plus side, the power of Slack is growing in my research group, it
just hasn't reached this guy yet. While in the lab on Friday, I went to
the room across the hall (my group spreads over several rooms) to find the
new guy installing Slack 9.1. One of the regulars from that lab said most
of the lab runs Slack now. And on the whiteboard I noticed someone had
crossed out the "Debian rules" (which had been there for years) and
replaced it with "Slack". I guess I'm just in the wrong room as my room
has mostly RedHat and Windows users.