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Chaxid writes "According to the latest Slackware ChangeLog, release candidate one of the next iteration of Slack is upon us. I asked Patrick Volkerding via e-mail if the 2.6 series of the Linux kernel would be included in this version, and this was his response: 'To have support for using the 2.6 kernel in the installer might not be a good idea quite yet, and it would delay the release a lot. I'm planning to wait on that for the next one'. It's worth noting the Slackware 10 RC1 is fully 2.6 compliant however." As TouchOfRed writes, though, "A test kernel 2.6.6 option is offered via the 'testing' tree. Slackware does not offer ISOs for the RCs (however there are some third party users that compile the RCs or the -Current tree regularly as ISOs), so if you are already running Slackware 9.1, you can use the excellent Swaret to upgrade to the latest packages (make sure you edit your /etc/swaret.conf prior of using swaret to allow for kernel upgrades and other options)." This release includes kernel 2.4.26 , Gnome 2.6.1+, KDE 3.2.3, GCC 3.4, XOrg 6.7 and more.

Chaxid writes "According to the latest Slackware ChangeLog, release candidate one of the next iteration of Slack is upon us. I asked Patrick Volkerding via e-mail if the 2.6 series of the Linux kernel would be included in this version, and this was his response: 'To have support for using the 2.6 kernel in the installer might not be a good idea quite yet, and it would delay the release a lot. I'm planning to wait on that for the next one'. It's worth noting the Slackware 10 RC1 is fully 2.6 compliant however." As TouchOfRed writes, though, "A test kernel 2.6.6 option is offered via the 'testing' tree. Slackware does not offer ISOs for the RCs (however there are some third party users that compile the RCs or the -Current tree regularly as ISOs), so if you are already running Slackware 9.1, you can use the excellent Swaret to upgrade to the latest packages (make sure you edit your /etc/swaret.conf prior of using swaret to allow for kernel upgrades and other options)." This release includes kernel 2.4.26 , Gnome 2.6.1+, KDE 3.2.3, GCC 3.4, XOrg 6.7 and more.

Chaxid writes "According to the latest Slackware ChangeLog, release candidate one of the next iteration of Slack is upon us. I asked Patrick Volkerding via e-mail if the 2.6 series of the Linux kernel would be included in this version, and this was his response: 'To have support for using the 2.6 kernel in the installer might not be a good idea quite yet, and it would delay the release a lot. I'm planning to wait on that for the next one'. It's worth noting the Slackware 10 RC1 is fully 2.6 compliant however." As TouchOfRed writes, though, "A test kernel 2.6.6 option is offered via the 'testing' tree. Slackware does not offer ISOs for the RCs (however there are some third party users that compile the RCs or the -Current tree regularly as ISOs), so if you are already running Slackware 9.1, you can use the excellent Swaret to upgrade to the latest packages (make sure you edit your /etc/swaret.conf prior of using swaret to allow for kernel upgrades and other options)." This release includes kernel 2.4.26 , Gnome 2.6.1+, KDE 3.2.3, GCC 3.4, XOrg 6.7 and more.

Ananamous Coward writes "Some big distros had already dumped XFree86 for X.org for license reasons, but now Slackware, one of the most classical and stable ones, has announced in its changelog for slackware-current that they are switching to X.org, mostly for compatibility reasons. Looks like X.org is now the future of X for Linux ..."

SilentBob4 writes "Adam Doxtater of Mad Penguin has published a preliminary layout for his proposed cross-distribution package manager capable of adding/removing software from any locale. He is suggesting the interface will basically allow for installation of several major package formats including RPM, DEB, TGZ, as well as source code with the ability to pass build time options. All of this will come at the price of standards of course, including naming, documentation, and package structuring. If this idea were to catch on, it would signify a major leap in desktop Linux usability. This might be a project that UserLinux might benefit from. Read the full column here (complete with GUI mockups)."

An anonymous reader asks: "I started using Linux years ago, with a Red Hat distribution. When Red Hat's custom configurations started getting in my way, I jumped ship to Slackware. I have never looked back except that I cannot stand the BSD style init scripts. I like having a full compliment of run-levels and control on the fly over which scripts will be running, and which ones will not. That is hard to achieve, when you put multiple configurations in the same file. I also liked having the scripts around to start, stop, and restart services. While I was rewriting my own startup scripts [based on Debian's scripts], I discovered that there is a third style, based on dependencies. AFAIK this is the style adopted by Gentoo. I don't want to start a distro war; but, I am curious about what kind of init scripts Slashdot readers prefer, and what they think are the benefits of each."

SilentBob4 writes "On October 7th, the developers at Vector Linux released the latest version of their lightweight Linux distro, version 4. Vector has always been built upon the Slackware Linux framework and this time around it is based on Slack 9.0. The interesting thing here is that there was quite a delay between releases from the Vector camp, so as they were readying version 4, Pat Volkerding was releasing version 9.1 of his Slackware distro. This past Friday, the first review of Vector Linux was released (Distrowatch.com posted a link to it today). It was a pretty good review for the most part, but the interesting thing about it was that they actually benchmarked it against Slackware 9.1 and posted the results. I'll spoil the ending right now and tell you that Vector Linux won, but you should check out the findings. There are some pretty interesting numbers obtained from the two distros. The reviewer has published three PDF documents detailing the results. Everything was tested from the kernel to filesystem performance. It is interesting to say the least. Even if you don't have to time to read the whole article (it's two pages long), do check out the benchmark results. "

SilentBob4 writes "On October 7th, the developers at Vector Linux released the latest version of their lightweight Linux distro, version 4. Vector has always been built upon the Slackware Linux framework and this time around it is based on Slack 9.0. The interesting thing here is that there was quite a delay between releases from the Vector camp, so as they were readying version 4, Pat Volkerding was releasing version 9.1 of his Slackware distro. This past Friday, the first review of Vector Linux was released (Distrowatch.com posted a link to it today). It was a pretty good review for the most part, but the interesting thing about it was that they actually benchmarked it against Slackware 9.1 and posted the results. I'll spoil the ending right now and tell you that Vector Linux won, but you should check out the findings. There are some pretty interesting numbers obtained from the two distros. The reviewer has published three PDF documents detailing the results. Everything was tested from the kernel to filesystem performance. It is interesting to say the least. Even if you don't have to time to read the whole article (it's two pages long), do check out the benchmark results. "

ThatComputerGuy writes "Slackware 9.1 is now officially released. This is another great release, featuring GCC 3.2.3, GNOME 2.4.0, KDE 3.1.4, ALSA, and Kernel 2.4.22. Check the official announcement for the full feature list. Note that ftp.slackware.com will not allow ISO downloads starting with this release; instead, the first distribution of the ISOs will be via BitTorrent."

ThatComputerGuy writes "Slackware 9.1 is now officially released. This is another great release, featuring GCC 3.2.3, GNOME 2.4.0, KDE 3.1.4, ALSA, and Kernel 2.4.22. Check the official announcement for the full feature list. Note that ftp.slackware.com will not allow ISO downloads starting with this release; instead, the first distribution of the ISOs will be via BitTorrent."

Colin writes "The founder of Slackware, Patrick Volkerding, released version 9.1 RC-2 of the upcoming Slackware. Good ol' Slack comes with new versions of packages while the addition of the Swaret tool adds dependency checking on Slackware for the first time! Here is an enthusiastic preview of Slackware 9.1 with plenty of screenshots." And pacc points out that Mandrake 9.2 will soon be ready, but only for Mandrake Club members at first. "But it will soon come to a mirror near you(TM). Though by choosing to distribute it with BitTorrent, do they effectively limit the downloads for a limited release?"

Colin writes "The founder of Slackware, Patrick Volkerding, released version 9.1 RC-2 of the upcoming Slackware. Good ol' Slack comes with new versions of packages while the addition of the Swaret tool adds dependency checking on Slackware for the first time! Here is an enthusiastic preview of Slackware 9.1 with plenty of screenshots." And pacc points out that Mandrake 9.2 will soon be ready, but only for Mandrake Club members at first. "But it will soon come to a mirror near you(TM). Though by choosing to distribute it with BitTorrent, do they effectively limit the downloads for a limited release?"

Sir_Stinksalot writes "DistroWatch is reporting that Slackware is 10. 'Yes folks, it is exactly 10 years today since the release of Slackware Linux 1.0, complete with a brand new Linux kernel 0.99pl11 Alpha, XFree86 1.3 and even a PS/2 mouse support!' Let's all say happy birthday to Slackware."

kiltedtaco writes "Slackware Linux 9.0 is out! Based on gcc 3.2, and equipped with kernel 2.4.20 (ptrace-patched), XFree86 4.3, GNOME 2.2 and KDE 3.1. You can read the full announcement, or just go grab a copy for yourself at either the Slackware Store or these lovely mirrors." I know a lot of people who first cut their teeth on Slack when trying Linux. It's cool to see that it's still around.

kiltedtaco writes "Slackware Linux 9.0 is out! Based on gcc 3.2, and equipped with kernel 2.4.20 (ptrace-patched), XFree86 4.3, GNOME 2.2 and KDE 3.1. You can read the full announcement, or just go grab a copy for yourself at either the Slackware Store or these lovely mirrors." I know a lot of people who first cut their teeth on Slack when trying Linux. It's cool to see that it's still around.

kiltedtaco writes "Slackware Linux 9.0 is out! Based on gcc 3.2, and equipped with kernel 2.4.20 (ptrace-patched), XFree86 4.3, GNOME 2.2 and KDE 3.1. You can read the full announcement, or just go grab a copy for yourself at either the Slackware Store or these lovely mirrors." I know a lot of people who first cut their teeth on Slack when trying Linux. It's cool to see that it's still around.

kiltedtaco writes "Slackware Linux 9.0 is out! Based on gcc 3.2, and equipped with kernel 2.4.20 (ptrace-patched), XFree86 4.3, GNOME 2.2 and KDE 3.1. You can read the full announcement, or just go grab a copy for yourself at either the Slackware Store or these lovely mirrors." I know a lot of people who first cut their teeth on Slack when trying Linux. It's cool to see that it's still around.

FrosGate writes "Slackware 9.0-rc1 is now available for public consumption over at www.slackware.com. From the site: 'Some of the main components included are the 2.4.20 Linux kernel, KDE 3.1, GNOME 2.2, and XFree86 4.3.0, as well as gcc-3.2.2 and the latest development libraries. Enjoy!' Enjoy is right!" And Scorchen writes "YOPER has released Version 1.0 of their increasingly popular distro. This is the their first stable release." Here's the announcment. The website claims "With Yoper it is possible to import packages from all the other major distros including rpm's, deb's, and tgz packages."

zdzichu writes "A friend of mine is building a personal server. He bought 17 of the cheapest IDE drives available and used Linux' LVM to get them together. The result? Almost two terabytes of disk space in regular x86 PC. The most juicy part - photos are here. For an operating system, he first tried the enterprise-ready PLD Linux Distribution, later he reinstalled Slackware Linux." Update: 03/01 20:24 GMT by T : I'm sure that should be "drives" and not "drivers" :)

HappySlacker writes "Looks like the forums from slackware.com that Patrick Volkerding (Slackware's daddy) had to take down because of massive trolling are fully active again after 2 years of hibernation as read-only at userlocal.com." Update: 01/21 19:23 GMT by T : Jeremy from LinuxQuestions.org points out the forums on that site, which is recommended on Slackware's links page.

HappySlacker writes "Looks like the forums from slackware.com that Patrick Volkerding (Slackware's daddy) had to take down because of massive trolling are fully active again after 2 years of hibernation as read-only at userlocal.com." Update: 01/21 19:23 GMT by T : Jeremy from LinuxQuestions.org points out the forums on that site, which is recommended on Slackware's links page.

MrSnivvel writes: "Slackware 8.1 has been released. 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 filesystems like ext3, ReiserFS, JFS, and XFS, and support for several new SCSI and ATA RAID controllers. Remember to buy your copies at http://store.slackware.com. List of download mirrors here. Public releases of Mozilla AND Slackware in the same month, I'm so happy I've soiled myself."

MrSnivvel writes: "Slackware 8.1 has been released. 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 filesystems like ext3, ReiserFS, JFS, and XFS, and support for several new SCSI and ATA RAID controllers. Remember to buy your copies at http://store.slackware.com. List of download mirrors here. Public releases of Mozilla AND Slackware in the same month, I'm so happy I've soiled myself."

Demerol writes with word that "about 12 hours ago, Patrick announced the that Slackware is now in Release Candidate stage in preparation for the long-awaited 8.1 release. Hundreds of updated to the current tree in the last few months have had all the slackers drooling, and now it is almost upon us. Now, I don't want to hear any more talk of Slackware being dead. Thanks. ;) Here is the ChangeLog and the Userlocal announcement"

A reader writes "I just read over on userlocal.com about how David Cantrell announced he is no longer actively developing protopkg and autoslack (these are 2 apps that could have brought slack out of the stoneage but still kept to slacks philosophy of K.I.S.S.). So is it almost "game over" for the first commercial linux distribution which used to be the heavyweight champ?"

More information below to update recent stories about MandrakeSoft's IPO, CDs designed to thwart the evil and insidious practices of convenient listening and fair use, and He-Man's favorite GNU/Linux distribution.

This has nothing to do with "slacking." Xpilot writes "The Slack people have decided to discontinue support for the SPARC architecture (boo hoo), read about it here."

In other words, they're putting their efforts elsewhere -- which is not to say that someone else can't build on the GPL'd SPARC codebase already assembled up to now. I've never heard a Slackware user complaining, so Patrick and company clearly know what they're about.

Even for you U.S. persons! From the announcement I posted on Mandrake's upcoming IPO on a French stock exchange (and from the announcement it pointed to), many people got the impression that Americans were legally excluded from buying shares in the offering. Actually, it's MandrakeSoft which is not allowed to advertise the offering outside of France.

As one correspondent points out, "Everybody can use an online broker that accepts orders for European markets from U.S. people ( for instance) or use their broker if they can take orders for 'Euronext Marche Libre.'" Your regular broker may be able to handle this.

This isn't investment advice, though. Buy (or do not) at your own risk and pleasure, and pay attention to the various complications and liabilities ;) Either way, you may be interested in an informative article at Freezer-Burn about the process.

Additionally, a semi-anonymous reader wrote with a few figures about the offering: "After the IPO there will be a total of 3 395 269 shares. Which will do a valuation (market capitalization) after IPO of 21 millions Euros (18,3 millions USD). Redhat is currently at 577 Millions USD - so it's 1/30th Redhat size, about 3% of Redhat."

Too bad Adobe isn't a music publisher. You read recently about the quiet introduction of rip-resistant CDs into U.S. stores; now fadden writes: "I've posted an update to the CD-Recordable FAQ that explains my understanding of how (and, more importantly, why) the Macrovision technology works, why it won't prevent you from playing CDs in your car or on your computer, why it will be effective at making it difficult to "rip" or copy CDs, and where hopes lie for defeating it."

lotion writes: "When the Slackware Linux project was cut loose from its parent company in April many devoted users wondered if the project would continue. Patrick Volkerding vowed it would. Despite the upheaval that accompanied what amounted to corporate abandonment, Volkerding and the team made good on that promise. On June 28, 2001, Slackware Linux Release 8.0 was made available. The full review is here at Maximumlinux.org."

cyberkreiger was among many to submit that Slackware 8.0, the distribution that just won't die, has just been released. I'm sure many people here started w/ Slackware back in the day and I'm glad to see it keep moving. You can read the Changelog or the Freshmeat project page. It'll probably be awhile before enough mirrors have caught up to settle demand, so please be patient. And congrats to Patrick and the rest. If it wasn't for your work back in the day, I may never have started using Linux.

cyberkreiger was among many to submit that Slackware 8.0, the distribution that just won't die, has just been released. I'm sure many people here started w/ Slackware back in the day and I'm glad to see it keep moving. You can read the Changelog or the Freshmeat project page. It'll probably be awhile before enough mirrors have caught up to settle demand, so please be patient. And congrats to Patrick and the rest. If it wasn't for your work back in the day, I may never have started using Linux.

jolan writes: "Patrick Volkerding posted an announcement saying that Wind River is not planning to keep Slackware after the merger." Patrick writes there: "This isn't going to take out Slackware, though. Development continues," and goes on to say "I'm working on setting up a company so we can handle the publishing ourselves. Unfortunately, I'm broke. I can get funding to publish and ship the release to all the subscribers (and anyone else who wants it), but have no money to pay my fellow friends (which sucks) until we make some." Since Slackware has perhaps the most loyal users of any product (just happens to include Linux distributions), and with a new release upcoming, certain reports of its demise have been greatly exaggerated. Maybe we're about to enter a whole new Slackware era.

keskoy points out that the top blurb on the Slackware site reads: "The Slackware Linux Project announces the public availability of the -current tree for the Alpha! This is a port of the developmental tree of Slackware Linux to Alpha-based machines. It is currently available at our ftp site (ftp.slackware.com) under the /pub/slackware/alpha directory. It may also be coming to a mirror near you." Further down the Slackware front page, there's also the welcome news that both "[OpenSSL and] OpenSSH, the free encrypted remote shell program, are available in Slackware-current."

Pete Blackley writes: "The best Linux distro out there has just released a new version; check out the README. And it comes with kernel... 2.2.18! Some things never change, and I am glad it works that way. Don't forget to check the autoslack package in the unsupported dir: it means the imminent death of all the "Slack lacks apt-get" arguments. PS: If you browse the ftp.slackware.com/pub tree, you'll see that Slack currently runs on vanilla x86, SGI VisualWorkstations and SunSparcs; I'm just waiting for the PowerPC port! PPS: All the crap about Slackware's death really is an exaggeration." That's what I like: a distro that isn't afraid to say that its death is an exaggeration. Update: 01/13 01:47 PM by michael : Slackware says - rudely - that 7.2 isn't released yet. This situation - confusion about what is released and what is not - is one that most software developers avoid by utilizing new-fangled conventions such as "beta".

gags bunny wrote to us with the official word from Slackware that Slack now runs on Sparc. If you've got a Sparc sitting around the download site is live - else just grab the mini-ISO image and work from there. We had a story on this recently as well.

gags bunny wrote to us with the official word from Slackware that Slack now runs on Sparc. If you've got a Sparc sitting around the download site is live - else just grab the mini-ISO image and work from there. We had a story on this recently as well.

gags bunny wrote to us with the official word from Slackware that Slack now runs on Sparc. If you've got a Sparc sitting around the download site is live - else just grab the mini-ISO image and work from there. We had a story on this recently as well.

FreakSoft writes "The first devel release of Slackware for the Sun Sparc was released. It isn't guaranteed to run anything, but soon the bugs will be worked out. For the time being the release can be downloaded from their site, if it doesn't work post the bugs and don't complain. David Cantrell is awesome."

FreakSoft writes "The first devel release of Slackware for the Sun Sparc was released. It isn't guaranteed to run anything, but soon the bugs will be worked out. For the time being the release can be downloaded from their site, if it doesn't work post the bugs and don't complain. David Cantrell is awesome."

Mozilla's latest milestone, M17, arrived today(ish); early adopters, go thou and download. And while you're waiting, check out this summary of the state of the art of PNG written by Greg Roelofs. PNG is ready for prime time in its Mozilla incarnation (though there are a few outstanding issues). Imminent takeover of the net predicted. Film at 11. Update later by J: OK, so M17 isn't available yet. Mea culpa; Greg and I misread a planning page. Here are Greg's comments/corrections to clear up the matter.

PNG, MNG, JNG and Mozilla M17
26 June 2000
by Greg Roelofs

PNG support in Mozilla has improved greatly over the last few releases ("milestones"), and with each milestone comes a corresponding Slashdot posting and a lot of discussion. Unfortunately, not all of the discussion is entirely accurate, so here's a preemptive posting that attempts to update folks on the status of PNG support in Mozilla and other apps and to clear up some of the more common misconceptions. (This seems to be an annual event...)

Home Page

First of all, the PNG home page got booted off of cdrom.com in early March, and in early May it settled into what should be its absolutely final home:

• http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/
• ftp://ftp.libpng.org/pub/png/

This is currently hosted on freesoftware.com, Walnut Creek CD-ROM's new site for free software (quel surprise!), but if something should ever happen to Walnut Creek, libpng.org will be redirected appropriately. (On a related note, the new zlib URL is http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/zlib/, which is also currently hosted on freesoftware.com.)

PNG Features for the Web

Insofar as this is ostensibly a Mozilla posting, let's have a brief rundown of the PNG features that are most useful to Web designers:

• alpha transparency - This is geek jargon for partial or variable transparency, and it lets you do nice effects that are independent of the background color(s), such as antialiased (non-jaggy) text, drop shadows, gradient fades, and translucency. PNG not only supports a full 8-bit alpha channel in grayscale and RGB images but also what amounts to an "RGBA palette" in colormapped images. The latter lets you do nice transparency without a huge hit in file size. For example, all but one of the transparent images on my PNG alpha-transparency test page are 8-bit or less; the lone exception (one of the toucans) is a 32-bit RGBA image, virtually indistinguishable from its 8-bit cousins. Note that PNG supports only unassociated (non-premultiplied) alpha, since the alternative is not lossless.

• gamma correction - Gamma allows you to display the same image on different platforms without looking too dark on some and too light on others. For best results it does require that both the designer's display system and the user's be calibrated, but even educated guessing is better than nothing in a viewing program (which is what Mozilla does). Warning! Watch out for Adobe Photoshop; version 5.0 had a serious factor-of-two bug in its PNG gamma support, and 4.0 also had some problems. (Things seem to be fixed in 5.5, however.)

• color correction - Where gamma has to do with image "brightness," color correction has to do with rendering shades of color precisely. PNG supports it, but not many applications do; it's pretty tricky to get right. Note that Photoshop 5.5 writes incorrect PNG "iCCP" chunks, and this will crash applications based on libpng 1.0.6. (Older versions of libpng ignore the chunk, and the soon-to-be-released libpng 1.0.7 will work around it.) Also note that feeding a valid iCCP chunk to PS 5.5 will hang it.

• compression - A lot of people have some seriously crazy ideas about PNG's compression. Here's the straight dope:
  • PNGs tend to be 15% to 20% smaller than equivalent GIFs on average. There are some GIFs, particularly 32- or 64-color ones, that are smaller than the best PNGs, but usually by only a couple of percent. There are also many that are more than twice as large as the corresponding PNGs, but these tend to be tiny images. (One exception is this image, which is dimensionally rather large yet only 1/3 the file size of the GIF version.)

  • PNGs tend to be much larger than standard JPEGs. JPEGs are lossy, while PNGs are lossless; for natural (photographic) material, no lossless format can compete with JPEG--PNGs will typically be 5 or 10 times as large. On the other hand, for simple graphics or text-filled images with relatively few colors and sharp edges, JPEG is much worse, both in quality and in file size. (This means you, Slackware guys!) Use the proper tool for the job--no single image format is best in all cases.

  • PNG is roughly comparable to JPEG-LS, the new lossless JPEG standard. On the Waterloo BragZone test suite, JPEG-LS beat PNG by 5% to 10% on natural images, but PNG beat JPEG-LS by 35% to 270% on "artistic" images. YMMV.

  • PNG's compression method can be implemented in such a way that it is completely free of all known patents, but it can also be implemented in such a way that it infringes on patents held by PKWARE, Stac and others. You can guess which way zlib was written. Folks who are neither rich nor expert in patent law should probably stick to zlib- and libpng-based implementations.

  • Unlike (LZW-based) GIF, in which the compression is basically deterministic--that is, you end up with pretty much the same data regardless of who does the compression--PNG's scheme leaves a lot of room for optimization. Some programs do a good job, some don't. The GIMP happens to be one of the good ones, as is pngcrush. Photoshop traditionally has been one of the not-so-good ones, although version 5.5 includes a "Save for Web" option that presumably invokes ImageReady. ImageReady 1.0 was mediocre and reportedly isn't much better in its current release (i.e., pngcrush beats it by 15% to 25%), but it is better than Photoshop's normal "Save as" option.

  • The compression engine can't help clueless users who perform apples-and-oranges comparisons. If you start with a truecolor image and save it as both GIF and PNG, chances are the PNG will be 24-bit while the GIF will be 8-bit. Guess what? It's pretty tough to overcome that initial 3:1 deficit, no matter how good your compression engine is. (If you're not sure what kind of PNGs you have, check!) Also don't add a lot of text annotations to the PNG--unless you do the same to the GIF--and especially don't add a useless alpha channel to opaque images! (That last is directed at the Burn All GIFs folks...) Recompressing an image after it's been through JPEG compression is also a bad idea; JPEG leaves a lot of nasty little artifacts (often invisible to the naked eye) that screw up non-JPEG compressors.

• interlacing - PNG's interlacing scheme is two-dimensional, much like progressive JPEG, but unlike GIF--which uses a one-dimensional, line-based scheme. The upshot is that an interlaced PNG with text in it will be readable roughly twice as soon as the corresponding interlaced GIF.

• animation - Nope. But see MNG, below.

• MIME type - image/png. If PNG images on your server show up as broken images within Web pages and as gobbledygook text when referenced directly (i.e., as standalone URLs), you probably don't have the MIME type set up correctly. On the other hand, if they show up correctly for MSIE and some versions of Netscape but not others, you're probably running Microsoft's IIS server. Technically it's a bug in older versions of Netscape (versions 4.04 through 4.5), but consider switching to Apache anyway...

• browser compatibility - We'll get to that in a moment.

PNG Extensions and the Future

PNG is extensible. PNG is lossless. PNG is a single-image, raster (bitmap) format. One of its overriding design goals was backward compatibility. As a result, don't expect to see any sort of lossy compression methods (JPEG is doing a fine job of that, with the exception of transparency--but see JNG, below). Also don't expect to see any vector-based extensions--SVG with gzip content-encoding has that covered. Indeed, don't expect to see any new, incompatible compression methods for quite a while. Until there are lossless methods that can, on average, halve the size of PNG images, the cost in software compatibility is far too great. (Keep in mind that there still browsers that don't support progressive JPEG, and that was a relatively trivial change! And let's not even talk about JPEG 2000...)

PNG is also not going to become an animated format. Leaving multiple-image support out of PNG was a conscious design decision by the PNG development group, and it's still the right decision. Overloading a still image format with animation or video features merely confuses users and Web browsers, which have no way to distinguish still images from animations without prying into the data streams (which usually means downloading them first). Developers who prefer to program monolithically can always program for MNG instead; it's architecturally identical to PNG, and PNG is a pure subset of MNG.

Related Formats

MNG: As the previous paragraph suggests, the animated version of PNG is called MNG, for Multiple-image Network Graphics. It supports looping (including nested loops), clipping, deltas, and other features, plus everything PNG supports--including alpha transparency, of course. The home page is here:

• http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/
• ftp://ftp.libpng.org/pub/mng/

Since this spring, a free reference library, libmng, has been under development by Gerard Juyn; its home page is at:

• http://www.libmng.com/

Note that the MIME type is video/x-mng; it has not yet been registered with the IETF. Undoubtedly there will be many misconfigured Web servers in coming years...

JNG: JNG is short for JPEG Network Graphics and is a proper subset of MNG, just as PNG is, but it's worth a separate mention. The idea is to combine the best of both worlds: JPEG's excellent compression and PNG's incredibly spiffy alpha transparency and color correction. JNG is almost identical to PNG, but in addition to standard IDAT chunks (which in JNG contain the alpha channel), there are also JDAT chunks that contain a standard JPEG/JFIF stream (suitable for handing off to libjpeg). From a developer's standpoint, if you've got support for both PNG alpha and ordinary JPEG/JFIF, adding JNG is a breeze. Of course, JNG is also supported by recent libmng betas. Its MIME type is image/x-jng.

Browser Status

Most browsers have supported PNG since at least late 1997 (when Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer finally did), but almost without exception, their support for alpha transparency has been abominable. Amazingly enough, it seems that 2000 may be the year that browsers finally support it, more or less ubiquitously. In April alone there were three newcomers, with another in May; so far this year, the total has more than doubled. Here's the current list of browsers that at least attempt to do alpha transparency correctly, with their supported platforms indicated in italics. If screen shots of the PNG alpha-transparency test page are available, they're linked to the browser name:

• Arena (Unix/X) - this was the first browser with good alpha support (at least for Unix, and I think anywhere). It died in 1998, however, and the final release tends to core-dump on PNG images. It always used its own "sandy" background pattern rather than that specified in the HTML. (Very old screen shot.)
• Browse (RISC OS) - Acorn's browser was the first to fully support PNG transparency and gamma correction, including background images, but it died along with Acorn itself in June 1999. The browser may or may not eventually show up in Pace Micro's digital set-top boxes. (Very old screen shot.)
• iCab (Macintosh) - this was the first Macintosh browser to support alpha transparency (since the 1.8 beta), but it doesn't do gamma correction yet.
• ICE Browser (Java) - ICEsoft's commercial browser for Java reportedly has full alpha support, but I haven't verified that.
• Internet Explorer (Macintosh) - version 5.0 added superb PNG support, including alpha, gamma and color correction. This is probably the best PNG-supporting browser available today. Unfortunately, the Windows and Unix versions seem to be a completely separate code base, so there's no telling when (or if) they'll have equally good support. (See the browsers page for details.)
• Konqueror (Unix/KDE) - I just heard that KDE's file-manager-cum-browser has full alpha support, but I haven't had a chance to check it myself. I'll try to get some screen shots added soon, however.
• Mozilla (Macintosh, Unix/X, Windows) - alpha was enabled in April, though there are a few gotchas: the Windows code is currently broken (bug 36694 and 19283, to be fixed by beta3), and the X code is a slightly nasty hack--it looks beautiful on 24-bit displays, but it's slow when scrolling, and the quality for users of 8- and 16-bit displays will be relatively poor. Nevertheless, it's a vast improvement over the previous code, and it's basically the only game in town for Unix users. Note that the infamous PNG interlacing bug (3195) was fixed in May, and Tim Rowley checked in initial MNG and JNG support on 12June.
• NetPositive (BeOS) - version 2.2, released in April, added support for alpha transparency; but like iCab, it doesn't yet do gamma correction. (It also doesn't display interlaced PNGs progressively.)
• Netscape - see Mozilla (which is basically what Navigator 6.0 will be).
• Sega Dreamcast Web Browser (Dreamcast) - version 2.0 of Planetweb's browser for the Sega Dreamcast game console, released in May, fully supports alpha transparency, but I don't have any screen shots yet.
• Webster XL (RISC OS) - R-Comp's RISC OS browser is claimed to have full alpha support, but I don't have verification, and it doesn't appear to be under development anymore.
• WebTV (WebTV) - surprisingly enough, WebTV has decent support for 32-bit RGBA PNGs, but its support for palette transparency is broken. In principle it should be easy to fix, but then again, it's a strange platform. (Note that the fonts look considerably better on a television screen.)

Honorable Mention goes to Siegel & Gale's PNG Live plug-in for Netscape, which was the only plug-in ever to manage alpha transparency (in Windows only). It died before ever getting out of beta, though, and plug-ins in general are useless for PNG. So is the HTML 4.0 OBJECT tag, but don't get me started...

Other Apps, Libs, etc.

I currently list some 500 distinct PNG-supporting packages (more if you break things like Microsoft Office into their constituent parts) in 8 categories (soon to be 9 or 10), not to mention a dozen pieces of hardware. PNG has now reached the point where even freeware authors generally don't bother to tell me when they've added support; it's largely taken for granted. (I do occasional Freshmeat sweeps, but I usually don't have time, and many entries don't mention PNG even if it's supported.) Quite a number of the apps include full source code, by the way--which is the way it should be, of course. ;-)

Within the libraries-and-toolkits category, there are a surprising number of independent PNG implementations (either encoders or decoders or both), including ones in C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Pascal, and even Ada95. PNG is now a standard part of Java 2 SE 1.3 and Tcl/Tk, and it is the main image format in the popular gd library and all of its Perl-based derivatives. In turn, this has led to its online use in areas as diverse as server statistics, chemical diagrams, computer-generated mazes, and weather maps.

Even better, PNG is the native, internal image format for a number of major applications (including Macromedia Fireworks and Microsoft Office), and it's becoming a popular icon format for advanced GUIs. It also ships as a standard part of BeOS, via the Translation Kit, and it's supported natively in the Windows Me shell (and possibly in Windows 2000 Professional).

Conclusion?

Ordinarily I'd mumble something about how PNG has finally achieved massive studliness and will soon be taking over the world, but what the hell--it has, it is, and if it's not obvious from what I've already written, another couple of lines won't make any difference. Go forth, visit the web site, write code, make lots of PNGs, etc., etc.

And Microsoft, pleeeeease get on the ball with Internet Explorer for Windows and Unix...

tiny69 noted that Slackware has announced 7.1 is out of beta and now officially the Real Deal. Here's the ChangeLog and a mirror. 2.2.16 Kernel, Gnome 1.2, and others. Remember back when everyone ran Slack 'cuz thats all there really was?

tiny69 noted that Slackware has announced 7.1 is out of beta and now officially the Real Deal. Here's the ChangeLog and a mirror. 2.2.16 Kernel, Gnome 1.2, and others. Remember back when everyone ran Slack 'cuz thats all there really was?

tiny69 noted that Slackware has announced 7.1 is out of beta and now officially the Real Deal. Here's the ChangeLog and a mirror. 2.2.16 Kernel, Gnome 1.2, and others. Remember back when everyone ran Slack 'cuz thats all there really was?

tiny69 writes: " Slackware is now in beta. The announcement is on Slackware's Homepage. You can pick it up here. The ChangeLog is here. "

tiny69 writes: " Slackware is now in beta. The announcement is on Slackware's Homepage. You can pick it up here. The ChangeLog is here. "

tiny69 writes: " Slackware is now in beta. The announcement is on Slackware's Homepage. You can pick it up here. The ChangeLog is here. "

Ask him what? About the Walnut Creek/BSDI merger? Sure. About what's happening with Slackware in general? Go ahead! Boxers or briefs? The moderators probably aren't going to let that one through, but almost anything else is fair game. Questions will be selected (as usual) slightly after 12 noon EST Tuesday; Patricks's answers are scheduled to appear Friday.

gaj writes, "The answer to "What about Slack?" given the WCCDROM/BSDi merger has been answered. Patrick & Co. (literally now!) are spinning off into a new company called (oddly enough) Slackware Linux, Inc. They've confirmed this on the Slackware site. " BTW, Patrick will be next week's Interviewee - so start thinking of questions.

Joey Lawrance wrote to us with an updated announcement from the fine folks from Slackware with the news that the wait is over: slackware-current has been updated with the 2.2.14 kernel, XFree86 3.3.6, and a few minor fixes.' Kudos to Patrick Volkerding ^[?] and the Slackware team.

Anonymous Coward writes "Check the current tree changelog and you'll notice that Slackware 7.0.0-pre1 beta is out. Seems it won't be too long before the next major release; now completely based on glibc2."

cyan writes "It appears that Slackware is finally going to be glibc based. This was revealed today via an announcement which was sent to the slackware-announce mailing list. A directory called "slackware-current has appeared on cdrom.com, so people may take a look at what's in store if they wish. Note that this should in no way be considered "stable", it's more for testing purposes. Check out the ChangeLog.txt for details; looks promising for all us Slackware freaks ;) " It seems the Slackware folks have been quite busy recently...

cyan writes "It appears that Slackware is finally going to be glibc based. This was revealed today via an announcement which was sent to the slackware-announce mailing list. A directory called "slackware-current has appeared on cdrom.com, so people may take a look at what's in store if they wish. Note that this should in no way be considered "stable", it's more for testing purposes. Check out the ChangeLog.txt for details; looks promising for all us Slackware freaks ;) " It seems the Slackware folks have been quite busy recently...