Slackware 8.0 Released

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.

Comments

Re:The Neverending wave of criticism of slackware.

[Rob Kaper]

Slackware is a sourcefriendly distrobution that is rock solid from the bottom up.

Amen. Could not have said it better myself.

I also like Pat Volkerding's attitude. He gives "it works and it works damn good" a higher priority than "everyone else is doing it, so should we".

While each distribution has its own flavour, Slackware is really another category of food all by itself.

And indeed, source friendly. Truly amazing how many open source zealots critizise Slackware because the preferred way of doing things is compiling source instead of copying binaries. :-)

Re:Fast Mirror wanted

[MentlFlos]

I'm work'n on grabb'n the isos

then I'll mount the isos so people can pick thru them and grab individual files

ftp over to hedwig.meatbarn.com (anonymous)

I just threw a quick dir structure in there so as I add files it won't get too ugly.

The only thing is I'm still downloading myself, so when the file size gets to 670138368 bytes, I'm done.

I will then test and make an md5. I wonder if I can be an official slack mirror... hmmm :)

-paul
-------------------------------------
The art of flying is throwing yourself at the ground...

Re:MCC anyone?

[astrashe]

I've wondered that myself. That's certainly a big name from the past. I used to install it from floppies on a 386sx with a 20MB hard disk. I'm pretty sure it was from Manchester, in the UK, and that a prof rolled his own distro to roll out machines for a class he was teaching.

I started with MCC, went to SLS, because all the docs seemed to assume you were running SLS. When SLS died I moved to Slackware. I think I cut over to RedHat around version 4, and jumped to Debian when RH broke the compiler. Somewhere in the middle of that I played with SuSE a little.

I think it was more fun in those days. There was something cool about having to roll a new kernel just to get your ethernet card working. Although there wasn't anything cool about having to do X configuration by hand.

Re:Slackware position

[mihalis]

If that's what you like, then you'll love Slackware 8.0, however it sounds like you'll never know since you're acting as if it hadn't changed in six years.

Really this time?

[Restil]

Ok... was it REALLY released this time or is this just another overreaction to a directory name on an ftp server? :)

-Restil

Since when is Slackware old?

[be-fan]

Apparently nobody has looked at the latest packages listings. Slackware used to stay behind the curve before 4.0, but ever since then, its kept right up. 8.0 even includes GCC 3.0!

Re:Slackware is the best Linux distribution. Perio

[Eil]

Once you save your tagfiles, it's an unintended install

An unintended install? Whoops, I didn't mean to installed Slackware 8.0, it just happened! Honest!

But.. hmmm... hey, this operating system ain't so bad....

SlackWare ROCKS!

[goingware]

I've been using SlackWare continuously for years. Unlike many people who started out with it and moved on, I started with Yggdrasil and moved to slackware at the recommendation of a friend, using it since 3.2 or so on a 33 Mhz 386.

Now I use it on my laptop and on my desktop PC.

I tried out Debian PPC on my Macintosh, and while it was nice to be able to run an install over the Internet, Debian was much harder to install than SlackWare. One thing that turned me off of debian was that after installing the full X11 package, debian enabled XDM - but this was before X actually was gotten to work on my system (the ADB mouse was frozen) so doing an apt-get made it impossible for me to actually log in to my computer. It really sucked undoing the damage that Debian's X11 maintainer did to my PPC system.

If you're running Slack 7.1 or earlier, a real good reason to update is that 7.1 comes with GCC 2.91.66. This version of GCC has a bug in the C++ parser that makes it emit an error for a certain piece of legitimate C++ code a friend wrote. I was able to FTP several packages off of ftp.slackware.com out of SlackWare-current and get gcc 2.95.3, which fixed the bug.

As for Slack not having package management, I don't know what you're talking about, I use pkgtool, installpkg and removepkg all the time to manage packages on my systems. If you have a bug, you can always try getting the pre-release packages for later versions of the software from slackware-current.

One nice thing you can do is download the source to a package off of the Slackware FTP site (or get it off the source CD), then get a later version of the source from the project's home FTP or CVS server, and use the scripts provided by Patrick to make a slackware package of some hot-off-the-presses code.

One project I have in mind is to build my own Slackware distribution, using the sources provided on a CD, except that I'd select Pentium III optimization in all the GCC command lines. If you do this with everything but the static libs that go into the distribution library directories, your system should run faster.

Note that I'm not a complete Slackware zealot. I can run through a Slackware install or upgrade pretty quickly, but it took me a while to figure out how to do it right. Recently when a colleague said he wanted to try Linux, I recommended he use Mandrake, but encouraged him to use Slackware for production systems.

Mike

2.4.5 and reiserfs

[frknfrk]

the thing i have been loving about slackware-current is the nice 2.4.5 kernels with reiserfs already built in. this means i could install a 2.4.5 kernel and all reiserfs-only on my machine and go from there. way to go pat! where's my 'order this CD' button? oh yeah, it's at store.slackware.com.

that's not package management

[small_dick]

...anymore than cp and tar are 'package management tools'.

whether anyone 'likes it' or not, the foremost package manager out there is debian's 'apt' and deb packaging system. it just plain works, keeping track of interdependencies and not leaving your system in a corrupt, useless state.

next in line is rpm, but as everyone knows, redhat has done a horrific job managing the s/w (rpm versions of package and rpm itself) that has really degraded the quality of the system. even worse, the 'rpm drift' between mandrake and redhat at rpmfind.net has made looking for anything but official packages useless. of course, deb doesn't really have alternate distros, so i assume it would have a similar drift problem were it in the same circumstance.

people need update capability that don't kill their machine. your 'package management system' does not meet that criteria, so I can only conclude that slack is a 3rd tier distro, unless you simply hold it stable between releases.

i've seen apt and rpm blow up and leave a system unable to launch X. nothing is perfect. but this is due to a fault of the pacakges or the code, not the user (unless they are 'forcing' installs).

with the setup or installpkg, the error domain goes right back out to root space. you better know what you are doing, and with thousands of packages available, it is unthinkable and ridiculous to expect an admin to know all the interdependencies of the libs/scripts/bins.




Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.

Re:Slackware

[BetaJim]

I use slackware and compile most things from source. I have found a very helpful tool which will manage versioning of programs compiled from source: encap

To use it create a directory, say /usr/local/encap/, and when you run ./configure set the prefix to /usr/local/encap/packagename-1.2.3. After running make install go to /usr/local/encap/ and run epkg to install sym-links under /usr/local to your program.

Check it out, it is a very good system. It becomes very easy to uninstall a package and also see what packages are installed. I highly recommend it!

Re:New?

[afinlay]

Here's the list of new features:

ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-8. 0/ANNOUNCE.txt

Those are the release notes, easier to read then the ChangeLog.

Slackware's package management

[squiggleslash]

To the best of my knowledge, Slackware has always (since I've used it, my first installation being either 2 or 3, I can't remember) had a package management system. You could use the setup program to install packages, or use installpkg, and the system takes care of things like shared files automatically.

It's very simple, maintaining one file per package in /var/adm/packages, and using tar files. Installpkg untars the file at / (you can override that, and it's actually slightly more complicated to cater for library management and stuff), optionally running a post install script, and placing a list of the files in a text file in /var/adm/packages. Removepkg makes a list of the files in the package you wants to remove, strikes from the list those that are shared with other packages still installed, and then deletes the files left on the list.

Slack supplies a "rpm2tgz" script that will turn a .rpm into a tgz, so you can install an RPM - and manage it - by converting it and then using installpkg in the usual way.

So could someone explain why most posters, even those who profess to like Slackware, think it doesn't have a packaging system? If the complaint is that it's not an advanced packaging system like RPM, I'd agree. It lacks (built in) dependency checking - the ability exists to include it in the post install scripts - and a few other nice features, but arguing that it's not advanced therefore not a packaging system seems excessive. And the way I'm reading it, most of posters are of the opinion it doesn't have one at all.

I'm not saying it's perfect, it'd be nice if the post install scripts could report dependencies for example, but it generally works well and its simplicity makes it easy to maintain, especially when you're having to work with a variety of packages from different sources and platforms. I can happily get an RPM to work with a subsystem I compiled from source without feeling like the packaging system is getting in the way.

Slackware has package management. It's not as "do everything" as RPM or DEB. But it's still pretty useful. You can remove an application you installed with a single command (or do it by dropping into the setup menu.) I personally prefer it to RPM, but YMMV.
--

Order your copy. Now !

[fredlwm]

http://store.slackware.com/ and support the Slackware project.

Back in the day?

[astrashe]

Taco's comments make it seem as if Slackware is a kind of museum piece, relevant only as a historical artifact.

But in my opinion if you want a distro to run a specific kind of server (like a name server, or even a data driven web server), and you want to build your own software and not depend on someone else's packages, Slackware is still hard to beat.

Let's say you're running Potato, and you need SSL and Apache. The latest Apache needs a certain version of the SSL module. The SSL module needs the latest Perl to compile. But you can't upgrade your Perl because it's tied into everything Potato in your distro. Sure, you can install debs with Apache/SSL, but what if you need other stuff too?

Package management is a wonderful thing, but it does have some drawbacks. It's not the best way to go in every circumstance. Luckily, we have Slackware for those times.

Re:Back in the day?

[MSG]

But you can't upgrade your Perl because it's tied into everything Potato in your distro.

Comments like this display a serious lack of understanding about package management.

Perl isn't a good example for this one, because the only thing that's *really* going to depend on a specific version of Perl is Perl modules, but we know where you're going with this.

Lets say instead that you needed to upgrade to a newer version of OpenSSL, because... oh, I dunno, maybe mod_ssl complains that yours is buggy. With a package manager, you would get the packages for apache, mod_ssl, and the newer OpenSSL, and tell it to update everything. If anything depended on that specific version of OpenSSL, the package manager would tell you so that you could update those packages as well, and avoid breaking your sytem. If your system lacks package management, then you would probably go right ahead and compile and update apache, mod_ssl, and OpenSSL. But, guess what?

YOUR SYSTEM, THOUGH LACKING A PACKAGE MANAGER, STILL HAS DEPENDENCIES!!!

That's right. The system with a package manager warned you what you were going to break to stop you from breaking them. The system without the package manager let you break them without any warning, and now all of the same packages that you would have been warned about are totally FUCKED. The lack of a package manager hasn't saved you any work. You STILL have to update every one of them. The difference is that you won't *know* that you need to update them until you see them break. That can be a serious problem. How do you fix a server in a remote location when you just upgraded openssl and SCREWED ssh?

There may be times when package management seems like a pain in the ass, but the alternative is *so* much worse.

The Neverending wave of criticism of slackware....

[blacktyde]

If there is one thing I do not understand, is the neverending wave of criticism often dealt out to slackware linux. Either it is attacked for its lack of a package management system, or it is attacked for not being a modern OS, or whathave you.

First and foremost, Slackware linux was never intended to be a 'modern' operating system. It was not intended to follow the broken precident that Microsoft established for operating systems, which is that of bleeding edge dysfunctionality due to attempts at convenience. It was intended to follow the UNIX model of an operating system, more specifically the BSD model. Slackware was originally created because Patrick Volkerding couldn't get 386BSD working on his computer. So he took the time and created the basis of a truely UNIX based linux distrobution. It's a damn shame no one else seems to have followed his lead.

Also, another point: does anyone remember the early glibc nightmares, when redhat would break half the time? I never had that problem on my personal box, because the people at slackware waited until a more stable release came out. I have yet to use a more stable release of linux, having used a good 5 different distros since I have started my linux career back in 94. I never, and repeat -never- have had to deal with any eath shattering flaw out of a stable release of slackware. And it is considerably more secure out of the box than most other distrobutions I have useds.

To address the issue of packages; there is a package tool in development. And development is taking its time, to make sure a stable product is publicly released to the masses. And when it comes down to it, there is still no easier way to deal with source code than the tarbal. It is the one step short of having a CVS tree. Since source is the fundamental element of the GNU revolution,
it must be payed attention to, and Slackware certainly does. Sources are apart of every distrobution. And do you know something? Slackware tarballs are still cross platform compatable to other unixes, or windows. Or at least far more than RPMs or DEBs.

Slackware is a sourcefriendly distrobution that is rock solid from the bottom up. It is not a wonder that it doesn't die, It is only a wonder that people don't take the time to think about seriously using it.

Slackware is the best Linux distribution. Period.

[aussersterne]

I used Slackware for the first time around '93 because it was the simplest to download and install at the time (using a whole stack of floppies). Red Hat hadn't happened yet and X was very cool just being X, no need for integrated API's like KDE and Gnome.

I left Slackware around 4.0 because I wanted the new "glibc" goodness and I couldn't figure out why Patrick wasn't including it. Unfortunately, I soon found out as I fought Red Hat 5.0 for several months. Since then on my personal box I've used Red Hat 5.1, OpenLinux 1.3 (gave up on "glibc" for a while thanks to Red Hat), Debian 2.0, OpenLinux 2.4, Debian 2.2 and Red Hat 7.1. Last night I downloaded Slack 8.0 (the hard way, ISOs weren't out yet) and re-installed it again to replace Red Hat 7.1.

Slackware is as great as EVER! Very stable, nice BSD-like setup with lovely non-spaghetti init scripts, a *working* KDE 2.1.x/Gnome 1.4 setup, X 4.1.0 without having to kludge it in by hand (what's with Red Hat mixing 4.x with the 3.x servers in the same installation?!), and all of the great stuff that nobody else seems to bother to include (Netatalk! XView! fortune!)

And it doesn't try to configure EVERY LAST DAMN THING during the install process. Red Hat 7.1 takes six years to install because it tries to configure things in "anaconda" -- but it's wasted time because you just have to go back and "fix" all of those automatic configs anyway to get them like you like them. Slackware installs it and then leaves it alone so that you can get it right the first time. For example I get to run "X -configure" or "xf86config" myself rather than having to fight some default setup that didn't really work anyway.

And even the installer itself is sheer heaven -- same simple stuff. Boot in, run fdisk then setup, where you make your own tagfiles to select on a package-by-package basis what goes in and what doesn't. Then, you start it off and it runs, no graphics, no having to click-click-click... In short, no shit. Once you save your tagfiles, it's an unintended install, and on as many machines as you want, even on machines without XFree86 or VGA-compatible graphics hardware.

Way to go, Patrick! Slackware still is and will always be the Linux for Unix users. No showstoppers, packages without the strictness of .rpm or .deb, "technical" purity and simplicity! I don't know why I ever left, and I won't leave again as long as it's available. I'm going to go and buy the CD now to support the effort.

Slackware: old school feel, new school gear.