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Slackware 9.1 Released
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."
Slackware is above all a very focussed distribution. It aims to give you a fairly complete, simple and stable operating system for 486+ computers, that can be easily customized by yourself. In the past, there were also Alpha and Sparc versions, but now I think only Intel is officially supported. Slackware does not attempt to include every open source software package under the sun. There is sendmail, but not postfix, qmail, exim etc. There is mysql but not postgre, firebird, etc. There are a few window managers, as opposed to dozens. It does include the usual development tools and the most common libraries. If you want something not provided in the default distribution, you are expected to download and compile/install it yourself. The result is that the complete distribution can more or less be managed by a single person. Of all the major distributions, Slackware has probably the smallest development team. If the Mandrake or Gentoo company (yes folks, Gentoo is not a non-profit org like Debian!) were to fold next month, it is not easy to continue the distributions, because they need a reasonable amount of supporting infrastructure and developers. If Patrick Volkerding quits next month, I can maintain my own Slackware tree reasonably well, because I have a reasonable overview of how the entire distribution works.