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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?"
damn, editors, if 9.2 is is so soon, why bother postin the RC2 as a "news" story?
How many users would actually have gone and downloaded this anyways?
Slashdot: more and more useless everyday.
wow, look, it's more badly coded crapware thrown together by pot-smoking U.S.-hating Germans in their parent's basement. YIPEE!!!
What people don't want to realize is that *Slackware is dying. Why, just look at the tripe I have to support my stupid conclusion:
- blah blah blah
- I made this up
- this is garbage too
See? So *Slackware joins the ranks of *BSD and they're both dying together, because I'm a stupid fucking *Linux fanboy with nothing better to do than masturbate to the RedHat webpage. All hail *Linus, creator of my inferior playtoy.
There's an overhaul of Slackware being done to use a portage-like system and also use .deb files. This is done with use of checkinstall. As I also understand. the Slackware project is being turned over to the maintainers of Debian because there's just not enough interest, otherwise, to keep the distribution afload. There's a lot of history with Slackware, so nobody wants to see it die. Unfortunately, the pending merger with another distro is probably the only way to keep it afloat. It's kind of sad that this may be the last or second-to-late release of this distro. I don't see Debain maintaining it well. They're insanely out of date. But we can hope, right?
Slackware is a commonly misunderstood linux distribution. Many feel it's communist. It's not at all. Is Linux and the open source community more "left leaning" yes but SlackWare people definetely are not. Below is a brief fact based historical overview of the leftist movement and how it relates to open source software : Torvold Linus Torvold, a soft headed finish lad first decided to write linux after reading about soviet farmers not being able to afford Windows operating system software. Some call him a traitor including Anne Coulter, personally I call him an enemy non-combatant. The Revolution After corrupting many many perfectly patriotic programmers into believing that software should be free and we should all share, Linus started really pouring on the heat. HE formed the aptly named Red Hat Software company to "spread the message". The truth is redhat has been investigated many times by the CIA and Microsoft for subversive activity. Nothing was ever proved but that was before 9/11. Now no real evidence is needed we only need to suspect subversion in order to act. The Rise of the SubCulture The subculture surronding this communist open source community reached a boiling point when crackpots from San Fransisco started making millions selling pea brain ideas to Wall Street. This was known as the dotcom boom (or bust?). Swanky communist headquarters started sprouting in every major city and propeller hat wearing storm troopers started taking over. Luckily market forces prevailed as they always do and now most of these treachorous baffoons are now unemployed. The future of the greatest nation has been restored.
A release candidate and a soon-to-be-release. WTF?
And I'm not even religious
Sunny Dubey
Um, the dependency checking tool is called 'ldd'. Slack has had it for a long time.
Want automatic dependency checking? Run the program, and if it is missing something, it will tell you what it is.
Maybe automatic dependency solving is what slackware is missing. But slack has a file that comes with it called MANIFEST.bz2. I just 'bzcat MANIFEST.bz2 | less' and type / and the shared library name. Find the associated package name and installpkg. Works every time. Well, maybe not for third party tgz's, but it's the same for third party rpms too-- you make your own trouble by doing this. Now the way to avoid problems with programs not included in slack is to compile it yourself.
All swaret does is combine all those steps into one tool. Same old stuff, different approach.
Now what does BSD have over this?
Sucks to be addicted to small, shiney objects, don't it? :)
KFG
I'm looking at the screenshots; the backdrop is over-compressed and too low resolution, the KDE (or is it gnome) taskbar-wannabe still looks plain and bland, as if they've somehow tried to round the 3d appearance of the buttons (and it looks like ass), The fonts are badly hinted and waaay too thin, and just generally not visually appealing, the underlining of the letters in the menu looks like something from Windows 3.1...actually, it's mostly just the fonts (and whatever engine draws and renders the glyphs), and the ugly 3d elements.
The Media Player winamp thingy looks great, beautiful clean interface with nice fonts. The rest of the OS? Not so good. It reminds me of the harsh appearance intuition on the Amiga had.
The shades which make the GUI elements look 3d need to be waaay more subtle. And just stupid things like in the panel at the top of the screen, the icons are just rammed across the top of the screen, with not so much as a 2 pixel border to make them look nice (look at the XMMS icon). And those two buttons near the xchat icon stick out like zits on a teenager. The speaker icon looks like it was drawn by an 8 year old.
Compare to the simple elegance of this. Ignore the one pixel cut off on the left side of the toolbar buttons (beta software glitch...)
Maybe it's just what you're used to, but most people seem to agree the UI in linux is it's worse attribute, and that it's one of OS X's best. Please, PLEASE, steal some ideas, or concepts. Go read Apple's UI guide, or even Microsoft's if they have one.
--- THIS IS NOT A TROLL, THIS IS CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM --