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Slackware 12.0 Released
Matt writes "Straight from our good friend and colleague in the fight for quality distributions, Mr. Patrick Volkerding, comes a brand-new and eagerly-awaited release of Slackware, version 12. HAL automount, KDE 3.5.7 and XFCE 4.4.1, Xorg 7.2, 2.6 kernels as far as the eye can see, oodles of updated applications and utilities, and hardware support for just about anything under the sun. Get it here. Enjoy! I know I will."
It is a bit hard to jump back into Slackware... The long hiatus a while back left me seeking other distros which I have stayed loyal to.
iphone?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Once you go Slack, you never go back!
Well that used to be my motto, at least for my servers. But I really just got tired of having to compile things that I could not get with slackpkg or slapt. I have switched to Debian for my servers I alleviated my headaches with compiling apps (those not included or available). Mind you if you needed something that WAS available with slackpkg or slapt then it was a great system. And even still a better system to have a locked down tight server. I would rank it up there with Gentoo in certain aspects (of course not installation).
Since I will probably quest to install Slack again someday, does anyone know if it comes with a GUI installer yet? I have not installed since Slack 10 so maybe my question is obviously dated, but it is a valid one at that!
-- Brought to you by Carl's JR
I have work to do tonight! Don't make me choose between that and upgrading to 12.0!
Slackware Package websites:
www.linuxpackages.net
www.slackware-current.net
(There are more, but these are easy to remember.)
They're very nice for any omissions and/or upgrades between release versions.
-Tom
www.slackware-current.net
is not a slackware package site it's a easyes one and that should be taken down already sicne it's a trademark violation
if it still lacks a ports or packaging system that allows easy to update packages and conflict resolution, it's not worth the time.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
$ sudo passwd root
Other than that, yeah Slackware is pretty fucking awesome. I gave Slack 12 (actually -current) a shot in the pre-RC stages and was pleasantly surprised. I might give this one a shot later on.
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
Cleaning out my garage a week or two ago I was going through an old box and ended up tossing a set of Slackware A floppies... That was such a refreshing change from downloading a boot disk and bootstrapping a system starting with compiling GCC.
I know its only peripherally related to the article, but man. V12 of Slackware? Time has flown, and things sure have changed.
Slapt-get install ... too hard for you?
Oh well.
Archives, you know we all can get at em'. You do understand there are tools to use your debby stuff elsewhere deb2targz being just one. What's a kernel structure and why just 2? We tend to roll our own kernels mostly.
Umm, yeah, Slackware is a lot, lot harder. That's the basic difference.
While it's got it's uses, if you're new enough to have to ask what the difference is (and there's no judgment in that; we were all new once), you probably shouldn't be using it. It won't help with the wifi drivers; they're all in the kernel and Slack uses a vanilla kernel.org kernel. Honestly, if Ubuntu doesn't support the hardware in question (it includes a few non-kosher drivers for stuff like Atheros), it probably won't run on Linux period.
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
What the heck!? Slackware makes it very easy to upgrade versions. I haven't had to do a fresh install on *any* computers once I put Slackware on them initially. There are a couple of docs included on the distro to help with upgrading. You should follow those and learn how to do it. You can also tar up Slack and move it to a different hard disk. No need to ever reinstall Slackware.
;-)
I highly recommend building confidence in the upgrade process. This way you will never have to worry about reconfiguring your systems or losing your data. There's no need to restore from backup and there's no need for your system to be down for more than a few minutes.
I don't know whether you do it or not but you should consider keeping a text log or a list or something of configuration changes in case you ever need to do it again. Mine is about 20 pages long but that's because I've customized or installed just about everything in creation at one time or another
Fresh horses and more whiskey for my men.
Back then, they touted Linux as having 50,000 users!
This is my sig.
Don't forget http://www.slackbuilds.org/ !
They provide tested scripts to roll your own packages. So you know what you're getting into and that it will work with your individual Slackware installation. They've worked very hard to prepare for Slackware 12. I think they were the first, in fact, to be ready for Slack 12.
-Drache Kubisuro
Yes, when it does not have what I want. Which is far too often.
Where Debian (and Ubuntu) "win" on the desktop is not because they have the best package manager tools, its because they have the most packages. I originally switched to Ubuntu back in 2004 because it was the only Linux distro (besides Debian unstable of course) that had a program I really wanted (bit tornado) in its package repository. Thanks to this huge repository and Ubuntu, I have gotten EVERY linux program I have wanted over the past three years without touching a complier. Heck, I haven't even had a compiler installed in the last year.
I know that ruins the effect of Linux for some, but compiling programs and chasing dependencies is the worst part of the OS for me (and other like minded desktop users). Each to their own...
Open Source Sushi
Dude. You know it's trivial to set a password on the root account so that you can login as root if you want, right? If you prefer slack, that's fine (I use Debian myself), but there's absolutely nothing stopping you from making Ubuntu work the way you're used to. However, your comments make me wonder: What do you use on slack if not sudo? su? Or do you just log in and run everything as root all the time? If so, that's a bad habit and you should break it.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
If you learn Ubuntu, you know Ubuntu. If you learn Slackware, you know Linux.
I think, therefore you are.
Really, it was great. I even submitted the Slackware 11 release story. I got turned to it right when 10 came out because I wanted to try Linux. The problem was, I got tired of spending hours configuring everything. For example, getting everything ACPI-related on my laptop was possible, but getting something like the lid to work was a real pain because I had to A) figure out what was wrong (which would entail finding people with similar problems usually with DISsimilar distros), B) find the necessary software to make it work, if applicable, and C) configure it, sometimes with trial and error, so that it did work. So, really getting nice, modern features working was sometimes unbearable. This is why I switched over to CentOS, at least for the time being: it's 100% RedHat compatible, and I get the ease of using a distro that's more or less popular. If something doesn't work, I get the benefit of help from either CentOS or RedHat (not to mention I can use RedHat and maybe Fedora packages, which can help for some obscure tools and proprietary packages like fglrx).
Slackware has a plus side, though: it's easy to diagnose problems manually. If there was a bad driver, for example, it would usually dump to dmesg or some other log, without any filtering. There also were next to no distro-specific software and settings to get in the way of problem solving. If you had a problem, it was solvable with generic instructions (e.g. RedHat does it this way and Gentoo that way, etc).
Now that 12's out with Xorg 11 7.1, I might pick it up for a bit again.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
What this guy is trying to say is that with Slack, you're going to have to use a terminal. Start with slack, get used to the terminal. You'll learn. You'll thank that random guy on /. that said 'Get used to the terminal'. Ubuntu is all GUI tools. When those fail (and they do), you have to go to the terminal anyway.
Yes, I meant to say 'terminal' several times in this post. Do you see a theme here? Welcome to Linux. (If this is your first Linux distro, try Slack, *then* try the others. You'll be back.)
Well, definitely not up to you to decide. The site is mine. I already told Patrick about this. I do respect the man, and therefore if he asks me to remove it - I will. So far his reply was something like that he doesn't have time for such things right now, and later he will contact me. Besides this, what bothers YOU personally? You're holding the trademark, or what?
I'll assume you're right about the raid cards, as I have no raid experience, but this:
>Another gripe about Slackware is the lack of large file support. Unbelievable as it may sound, Slackware does not yet fully support
>large (>2GB) files.
What do you mean, "doesn't support"? I'm running slackware 12.0rc2 (installed just a few days ago, it figures) and any out-of-the-box application handles any size file I throw at it. What's the context for your claim?
Hmmm so this 8 gig HD .ts I got here is an illusion. Interesting, mplayer plays it and the big TV says it's real. Oh well back to fantasy land.
$ cd
/home.
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=8G bs=1048576 count=8192
I dare you to tell me that command failed on your system, with space remaining on your partition containing
Or very educational, depending on just how stubborn you are. *wink*
One of the defining points of Slackware is the small set of official packages it features. On top of that, the native package management tools don't track depencencies and don't have the notion of remote repositories. All together, this doesn't adapt very well to users who want to try new software all the time and spend their days installing and removing packages. Doing that is hard with a vanilla Slackware, so people have created tools like swaret or slapt-get to simplify the process and be able to use remote repositories like the one at linuxpackages.net and similar, where they can download many unofficial packages that sometimes include dependency information slapt-get can use. I don't think that's "right". Let me explain. It's cool that Slackware is flexible enough to let you do that, but your system ends up in a very chaotic state after some time, in my experience (specially if you use slackware-current instead of slackware-stable). You can manage your system that way if you want, and maybe you're careful enough to do it, but it's very hard. That type of users would probably be happier with Arch, Gentoo or even Debian (I never understood the rivalry between Slackware and Debian; I've used both and both are great in their styles).
Patrick Volkerding probably thinks that way too, because he doesn't include those tools in Slackware. If I recall correctly, swaret was included for some time but in the end it was removed. He includes, however, a tool called slackpkg, which is clearly targetted at more "classic" Slackware users, because it lets you use one official mirror and manage systems composed of official packages for the most part, and includes some mechanisms to let you have some custom packages without being a headache (maybe downloaded from linuxpakages.net or slacky.eu or built with your own slackbuild scripts that you can also download from sites like slackbuilds.org). The problem is that slackpkg is slow (it's a big shell script), and doesn't let you track many corner events that happen frequently in slackware-current, so that's the starting point of slackroll.
Think of it like slackpkg on steroids. I specifically designed it to detect situations which are frequent in slackware-current, but it can also be used for slackware-stable without any problems. By design, it can:
And more stuff. Like I said, slackpkg on steroids. It's much faster, uses less bandwidth, detects more events and it's probably more flexible. I'm pretty satisfied with the result, so I wanted to invite people to read the program's webpage and try it if you think you fall into the target audience. It would be fine if I was the only user, but more eyes mean less bugs and I think it's always a shame when you create a tool which you are proud of and SourceForge only shows 20 downloads because people do not actually know it exists. Its main problem is that the initial setup may be more complex than usual and you need to read a bit more to know how it works. Howev
Yeah, *Gutsy* humour is the way to go now; -Feisty-, at the very least.
upgradepkg --install-new humour-post-1979*.tgz
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
I'd say the "n00b" here is the one who chooses his OS on pure ideology. I use Ubuntu because it suits me better than Debian. Simple as that.
You're free to use Debian all you want, just don't EVER go around telling everyone else what they should use.
Blog -
I'm working for a company that had Slackware as its primary server OS. Until I showed how much time it took to operate and maintain.
Slackware is great for many things - single-purpose machines, getting that old P1 running, etc. It has a few major flaws that make it unusable in businessland:
1: too #$%) hard for a new admin. It requires a lot of arcane skills to get set up properly - skills that don't come cheap, and are hard to find in the marketplace.
2: No dependency management. Debian- and RH-based distros have had dependency tracking for ages, and the capabilities of up2date, yum, and apt-get are far in advance of what you can do with any slackware package management system. Plus, there is literally nothing in Slackware that matches RHN.
3: Proprietary software. Although with enough hacking, you can get a lot of it to run on Slack, the provider will not give you any support. And without that, you're hosed. We've ended up using RHEL on a Websense box because they would not recognize a bug that showed up in CentOS. You know what? The bug went away on RHEL.
Given all that, I still like Slackware as a Swiss Army knife-type distro that I can use for things where I don't have to maintain it too much. It runs on just about anything, and can be slimmed down far further than any other distro. I just can't justify businesswise the amount of labor it takes to maintain, when we are short on skilled *nix admins anyway.
Why can't I mod "-1 Idiot"?
(no sarcasm intended but) i imagine the same as it runs on pretty much any other new intel-based gear, apart from the EFI stuff, of course.
i found a link to a howto the other day: http://macbook.mared.com/linux/ and it looks like it didn't need too much tweaking.
i inherited a G4 the other day and tried to install slackintosh on it but it wasn't having it. not sure why yet.
Now is it just me, or does reliance on a package manager defeat one of the Biggest strengths of open source, which is customization. When I run Linux, it is a heavily modified slack machine. The reason for this is that I get a nice, tight base system in very little time, but I then have the freedom to compile my own programs from source at will, without having to worry about non-standard directory structures or breaking the system if I create an actual root account. If there is a package for it great, if not, I am not locked in, and I have yet to find a Linux app I want that does not have source.
You say you want a revolution....