Slackware Updates

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.

Comments

does this mean..

[kgasso]

the new release will become version 10? I mean, after all, this is a significant change, and slack needs the upper hand on the other distributions ;) (if you don't understand, go here.)
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Great!

[Megane]

This is great news for me, because I was just thinking the other day about those new cheap (but supposedly good) $25 Linksys 10/100 cards which require the latest (Tulip?) driver from 2.2.14! Now I can get one! And I've been upgrading for DSL, so I don't even have an uptime to lose!

While I don't think I'd ever consider using Slackware as a "desktop" OS, it's a great distro for command-line hacks like me who would rather stick the box in a corner and telnet in.

But the main thing that keeps me coming back to Slackware is that I can be sure the source tarballs I download will fscking compile. I've always had a bad time trying to compile source under less-than-full installs of RedHat (ever since the time I bought a release version of 5.2 and the kernel wouldn't recompile), then I go to Slackware and things compile with no problem. I'm sorry, but I don't want to bloat my hard drive with a full install of RedHat just to be sure I can compile something without being in RPM hell trying to find the right libraries!

As far as I'm concerned, Slackware is much easier for me to install, because there are fewer packages to keep track of, which means less chance of missing a "regular" library during install. But I think the "flat" nature of the Slackware install, compared with RPM's extensive hierarchial dependencies, is the real reason I find Slackware so much easier to install.

And as a bonus, it's a floppy-friendly install, too! When I first installed it, I didn't have a CD-ROM on an Intel box, and was downloading Slackware tarball disks and installing them from a directory on the hard drive (because I was getting too many disk errors from those el cheapo HD floppies I had lying around). The install disks make a good root-boot, too. The first time I tried Red Hat, I tried downloading just the 50 or so RPMs I tought I needed to a hard drive, and it bitched about every single RPM I didn't download being missing, whether I was installing it or not. Since Red Hat uses hundreds of RPMs, I had to press the enter key a lot.

Although sometimes I wish it used SysV init, I'm not installing many services, and I can do well enough just editing rc.local. SysV init just seems to be an excuse for distros like Red Hat to start up every service they can think of. And IMHO, most people DON'T need fscking sendmail running!

The thing that annoys me most about Slackware, though, is that it doesn't put the kernel into /boot like all the other modern distros. IMHO, /boot is the only way to go when you have an enormous hard drive. So I have to move the kernel and edit lilo.conf and go back into setup and "recycle" lilo to get my machine bootable.