Slackware 11 is Coming

ejd3 writes "In the slackware-current changelog Pat has stated that 'Although there's still quite a bit in the TODO queue here I'm making my steps carefully as -current is very stable, and I think it should ship as a stable 11.0 soon so that we can get back to the business of breaking things in -current. :-)' How much longer will the slackers have to wait?"

Comments

Re:Marketshare?

[Erik Hensema]

It's been a niche distro for many years now. The only reason slack is mentioned on /. at all is because of its important place in Linux history.

Slack is for hobbyists. It's rarely used in production environments because where money counts, slack is almost always out of the question for being way too labour intensive. Even in the hobby market it's filling a niche. Only a few die hard nerds like to be exposed to the inner workings of their system as slack does. Most others will just use a more automated distro and custumize the parts of the system they're really interested in.

However, slack still serves a purpose. It's about as bare a distro as can be, and as such it's nice learning material when you like to explore the innards of a linux distro.

Health Issues

[maelstrom]

Was there ever a follow up about Pat's health issues? Is he ok now?

Re:64-bit official?

[Anonymous Coward]

I *have* been using slamd64 (from the beta versions onward) on a bunch of dual opteron (pizza ;-) ) boxen as number crunchers,
and it is indeed rocksolid. *All* of the slamd64 versions up to now.

I wish Pat would bless it as the official slack for AMD64.

Also, yes, stock slack runs on these well as well, only you lack 64bit stuff. Which comes in handy once in a while, if you develop your own machine learning algorithms, and test them on huge datasets. There are probably other applications where you don't miss 64bit ...

Re:No need to wait

[tsa]

I usually run the distribution I installed for years and years until I can't run new programs on it anymore, because of library issues and such. Then it's time to upgrade.

Re:No need to wait

[Skater]

One of my problems with Slackware is that -current isn't really what I want in many cases. I recently updated my laptop to Slackware 10.2, then searched for all of the security updates to install. I did those, but things broke, like apache (well, php, actually) because I didn't have the new-since-10.2 Cyrus-imap library, updated libpng library, etc. installed. Those weren't updated as a result of a security problem; they were updated for other reasons. I know this because I searched the changelog for "security update" and grabbed all of those packages that I use.

It's like we need a -stable-security that is security updates ONLY to a given release. I know that's a lot more work for Patrick but it's frustrating otherwise. (I've never gotten around to using a dependency management system under Slackware.)

Ideally, when a given package has a security issue, it would be compiled against what was in 10.2 AND -current. And yes I do subscribe to Slackware so I get the CDs automatically, so I feel I have some right to complain. :)

Re:No need to wait

[joedoc]

Heh, this reminds me of the web server I managed at my last job. When we finally went on line locally, I demanded that we not use Windows, but Linux, and specifically Slackware. I installed version 8.0 and ran it with literally no changes (expect for occasional security patches and application updates to Apache, PHP and MySQL) until this past January. I shifted to a new box due to some hardware issues and installed 10.1. That site has now closed. I often wonder how long I could have run that Slack 8 box if the hardware had held up.

Slackware: It just works

[spaceyhackerlady]

I too am a fan of Slackware, and am typing this on a Slackware 10.2 system with a 2.6.16.9 SMP kernel (built from the kernel source), to support one of those new dual-core Pentium 4 gizmos. In other words, it goes like stink...

Even though I can download the CD images, I always buy a copy of each new release.

It's not a crime for a Linux system to look like Unix, and if your hardware barfs over a text-based install, you really do have a problem. I like being able to download source (including kernels), build it and it just works. I still have nightmares about the time I tried to help somebody upgrade a kernel on a Fedora Core box. Shudder.

Slackware isn't a pre-packaged Linux system in a can: open the can and pour it out, ready to go. It's a construction set for building any kind of Linux system you want. And it's all the better for it.

Thanks, Patrick.

...laura

Re:Slackware: It just works

[glens]

When I started reading your post I couldn't remember having submitted it! Actually, I got the (that very?) Infomagic set for myself. I installed all three systems - I believe I still have them stored somewhere - and very quickly settled on Slackware as the best way to actually learn "Linux". The other two required way too much learning-the-cruft before I could get to what was ultimately happening. Slackware just let me get right down to it.

I heavily modified that installation through the years and still chroot to it on a fairly regular basis. The partition image has been on several hard drives and in several boxes. My Windows acquaintances can't fathom how that could be done...

I use Slackware for all primary OS purposes to this day. I've played with some of the others through the years but they all suck in comparison. Though I have been advocating and having great success with Ubuntu for non-tech-head conversions from Windows lately.

Re:Slackware makes sense.

[Skapare]

Why do you want a "soft-linked /etc/init.d"? Or better yet, why not just build one for yourself (and package it for others)? Slackware doesn't get in your way. I know because I actually rewrote the whole rc script system from scratch several years ago, and it's been working fine in several Slackware versions since then. My rc designs isn't based on symlinks, though.