Slackware: Secure all the way back to 8.1
Slackware provides security updates all the way back to version 8.1 along with 9.0, 9.1, 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 11.0 and 12.0, so if there is a reason you're using an older version of Slack, it is still being supported by the distro's creator, Patrick Volkerding and his team. If you didn't follow the link, you won't know (until now, anyway) that the box running Slackware.com is a 600 MHz Pentium II with 512 MB of RAM. That's plenty old for such a busy server.
A great way to explore the history of Slackware is one of my very favorite sites, Distrowatch. Start here and scroll down for news, reviews and more about Slackware. As I explored, I learned that Slackware 8.1 was released in June 2002. The item appeared June 19, with the announcement that CDs would be available for shipment beginning June 28, 2002 (not everybody had broadband in those days, and downloading a 689 MB ISO over dialup was a prescription for frustration).
Here is part of the Slack 8.1 announcement, as it appears in Distrowatch:
"Highlights of this release include KDE 3.0.1, GNOME 1.4.1 (with new additions like Evolution), the long-awaited Mozilla 1.0 browser, support for many new file systems like ext3, ReiserFS, JFS, and XFS, and support for several new SCSI and ATA RAID controllers.
Another interesting fact: A Distrowatch story from April 28, 2002, reported that at the time, only 16 percent of visitors to the site were using Linux (it was 2002 -- give us all a break!!). Of those, here is the breakdown:
The complete list of the top 10: Slackware 33%, Gentoo 31%, Red Hat 28%, Beehive 24%, Debian 24%, Sorcerer 24%, Lycoris 23%, SuSE 22%, Mandrake 17%, Lindows 16%.
So Slackware was No. 1.
But back to my point: Slackware is still supporting version 8.1 a full five years after its release. That's the kind of commitment I like to see for a distribution. If you want to install it, you won't be left out in the cold if you want to stay with an older version that does what you want it to do. That five years of support (and I don't see any signs of Slack dropping updates for 8.1) is equal to what Ubuntu is doing with the server version of its LTS product, and it compares to what Red Hat offers on its enterprise offering (is that five or seven years?)
One thing I'm learning: Sometimes old hardware runs better with old software.
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Re: older software, I recently posted (DSL forums) about that very subject in relation to a question someone asked about why recent Linux distro releases run so much worse on his hardware than older versions of the same distros. Those earlier releases are contemporaneous to older hardware -- the equivalent of someone installing a bleeding edge distro on bleeding edge hardware today. In the interim between early releases and more recent ones, most distros totally drop support for things or they simply pre-configure settings with the presumption that their users aren't retaining older hardware set ups -- basically the same as Microsoft does with newer versions of Windows.
Users frequently make the mistake of thinking they need the latest, greatest thing even if they're using older hardware. It's human nature to be like that. Newer's not always better, and older is often a lot better. I agree that Slackware is exceptional for still supporting earlier releases (in fairness, though, MS supports their software at least as long as that -- longer if you count the continued availability of SPs beyond product support life cycle). I commended Slackware and DSL this past week for continuing to support vintage hardware. The BSDs also do a pretty good job of that.