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Slackware 9.1RC 2 Out, Mandrake 9.2 Soon
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?"
swaret --update
swaret --upgrade
Lots of options, you can even specify default 'yes' for all upgrades. Resolves dependencies too.
Swaret's dependency checking is actually pretty neat. For some dependencies, it is able to get a list of package relations from an external site maintained by the swaret project. For other dependencies, does something like an ldd on the binaries in a package to determine which libraries are missing. Sometimes, it can then deduce which packages need to be installed from this information. If not, at least you have some clue as to what is missing.
As for building software on Slack, usually 'configure' catches any missing dependencies before compiling begins. One nice thing about Slackware is there are no '-dev' packages. Just install the compiler, and all of the necessary include files are already there from the other packages.
Hello fellow Slackware users and newcomers, just a few comments to help clarify a few things.
Slackware 9.1 comes in two CDs and it's Installation is text-based.
I would personally describe this as a menu based installation. ie: use arrow keys to select packages/options.
The only snag might be that the user will need to use the command line and not extremely user-friendly fdisk application to create partitions for Slackware.
cfdisk is also available which is menu based.