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64-Bit Slackware Is Alive
t0mg writes with this news from the top of Slackware.org "from the Slackware64-current changelog: [tap tap tap]... Is this thing on? ;-) Ready or not, Slackware has now gone 64-bit with an official x86_64 port being maintained in-sync with the regular x86 -current branch. DVDs will be available for purchase from the Slackware store when Slackware 13.0 is released. Many thanks go out to the Slackware team for their help with this branch and a special thank you to Eric Hameleers who did the real heavy lifting re-compiling everything for this architecture, testing, re-testing, and staying in-sync with -current. We've been developing and testing Slackware64 for quite a while. Most of the team is already using Slackware64 on their personal machines, and things are working well enough that it is time to let the community check our work. We'd like to thank the unofficial 64 bit projects for taking up the slack for us for so long so that we could take our time getting everything just right. Without those alternatives, we would have been pressured to get things out before they were really ready."
I guess some folk like to stick with the first version of anything they ever try... kinda like the Amiga crowd?
I wonder if it's too much to ask that the DVD have both i386 and x86_64 on them. I also wonder if they'll support upgrading from i386 to x86_64. I wonder when 13 will be released.
I wonder a lot of things really.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
First distro I ever used. And I kept using it until 2002. It warped me for good on the BSD file layout. Now I can only use Gentoo because of that. :)
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
But it is great when you have servers up to your ears.
Slackware is a beautiful server distro, but I used to use it as my primary desktop distro until comparatively recently. The only reason why I stopped was because of a long hiatus in the maintenance of the Dropline Gnome distribution. I just don't have time to build all that stuff myself, and it used to be so good. (And no, Gentoo just does not fill that gap.) Now I am mostly using Arch Linux which is similar in the important ways to Slackware (sweet!) but with the advantage of more current package builds.
http://www.slackware.com/announce/1.0.php
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
I havn't used Slackware in years, but I owe my knowledge of the nitty-gritty workings on Linux to it. It's a great environment for learning how to compile your own kernel.
I'm not a Slackware user. It has been many years. I think 2004 was when my server finally stopped running Slack. It was a time thing. I wanted to have the same distro on my desktop and server so I only had to keep track of one way of doin things. That said, I really do like that Slackware is still around. Slackware is basically a story about one guy and his distro. And its nice to know something like that still exists in the Linux world. Its a statement of individualism and simplicity that is sometimes lost in a world of sophisticated integrated products.
And to be honest, the simplicity of Slackware has its definite payouts. It means the system you end up with has a simple and relatively easy to maintain architecture, without much fluff. If you want a machine to do one thing, and do it well... I think Slack is a very excellent choice and still worth considering. Congrats on going 64 bit!
That's just typical. Slackware, being my primary (and most often only) OS since I began using Linux, didn't fully support my new 64 bit machine.
So I switch to Gentoo (those extra cores had to have a reason..), and when I finally get
settled with Gentoo, Slackware goes 64 bit.
Also my first distro, ill never leave as long as its maintained! LONG LIVE BOB!
Most of the team is already using Slackware64 on their personal machines, and things are working well enough
From personal experience "well enough" for the Slackware folks is far beyond anything others consider "fabulous."
When did they stop using floppies?
retracting accidental pun: "*no body*" meant no message body (slashdot wouldn't let me submit with nothing in the message). it wasn't meant as an answer to the question in the subject. but it did answer it pretty accurately...
weinersmith
IIRC it is maintained by Fred Emmott. Why no credit/cooperation??? Lacking expanation, I'm unhappy.
It's getting hard to buy a new machine that ISN'T 64 bit, and Slackware's just now releasing for x86_64? Why does Debian get all the shit for slow release cycles?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I rememember my first distro, Slackware 3.0. The fustrations, the joys, ah, the memories. When 13 ships with 64-bit support, I'll have to take a look.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Well, he did credit the unofficial ports. If you're unhappy that it wasn't by name, uh, I dunno, deal with it?
As for why no co-operation, you'll have to ask Pat himself for that. He takes fixes all the time by e-mail, and x86-64 support has been in many of the build scripts since even before SLAMD64 started, so everybody who has followed Slackware should have known that this was coming.
AMD-only. No (ok, very little) Intel. Kthxbye
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
First distro for me too, and still using it.
Have you been keeping up with the change log? He is credited 5 times. ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-current/ChangeLog.txt
Are you talking about Microsoft BOB? That was my first distro too. I wonder when MS will be coming out with a 64-bit version. :)
He doesn't get credited at www.slackware.com.
Slamd64 provided us with a good Slackware port to AMD64 while Pat was busy with IBM/390 ports.
Stick Men
I'm in the ChangeLog/copyright notices where appropriate. All my published work on Slamd64 is free software; I don't care what's done as long as the licenses are followed.
This is probably a good time to say why I made slamd64 again:
I wanted a 64-bit Slackware. I didn't want to be a distro lead, or anything like that. I like Slackware, and I needed a 64-bit distro. I made it for my own use, and uploaded it in case anyone else wanted to use it. Now there's a 64-bit Slackware, that reason's gone.
Slamd64 will be continued in some form for the foreseeable future, but possibly as something slightly different.
A true Slackware64 is better for you too:
I wasn't particularly clear, but these were cases where the ebuild wasn't checking for USE flags before enabling an optional feature at configure time. Inkscape and numpy was one example, one where I began building inkscape manually. Yeah, I'm stubborn but I did things this way for years when I was a slackware user. Speaking of which, when I first started using gentoo it was perfectly simple to set up a system without PAM, it became so much jumping through hoops that I eventually gave in. Long live choice eh?
That's the idea isn't it, that the user can prevent optional stuff from being fetched and built? If ebuilds are not going to let me keep dependency bloat to a minimum, why then would I continue to use gentoo? There's little to gain from compiler flags on my first generation AMD64 boxes; Possibly on my newer intel machines but it's not going to make a huge difference. The Arch ports style tree (abs) is perfectly usable, PKGBUILD's are much easier to write than ebuilds and (although I initially found it difficult after using emerge for so long) pacman is a pleasure to use. That was my point ;)
Slackware was a great distro and retains it's place in heart if not on my machines, I strongly considered going back to Slackware before I found Arch. Gentoo: mask or unmask this, unmerge that to resolve a packaging conflict, run revdep-rebuild, no USE flags to disable stuff I don't want or need, perform a dance with a rubber chicken while you recompile half your system, eselect this, eselect that... I'm not missing Gentoo at all although it'd still be my personal preference over debian and RH based distros.
Best news! This made my day! I cannot wait to upgrade my machines to this! posting on slack 12.2~!
The real question is, what's the target audience of Slackware? People who have no active social life and prefer computers to chicks?
Doesn't it apply to Linux in general?
Hey, doesn't it apply to unix in general?
Package system? Which package system? .tar.bz2?
Slackware doesn't exist to hold your hand. Get over yourself.
As for the target audience, it's Pat Volkerding. Slackware exists for him. Anyone else who wants it can have it, but it exists to meet his criteria, not yours.
Five years ago I ran Slackware with Grub, automatic updates, a wireless card, and still got laid. More than I do now in fact. Now I'm using a MacBook.
Volkerding makes Slackware to fit two criteria: 1) Stability. A Slackware system should be able to run for 10 years without rebooting. Fantastic server system. 2) Security. A Slackware system should have an absolute minimum of bugs and/or holes.
There are no other criteria for a Slackware release.
If it is not for you, then fine. Don't use it. And while you're at it go be petulant twerp somewhere else.
Last time I used (five years ago) Slackware it had no dependencies tracking, no automatic updates or update manager, it lacked any utilities to automatically set up network interfaces and used LILO. Is it better now? ;)
If you want updates, I recommend the optional slackpkg package (in the extras directory). Edit /etc/slackpkg/mirrors and uncomment your favorite mirror, then run slackpkg update to retrieve the latest package database, and finally run slackpkg upgrade-all to be presented with a list of all available updates. After installation, you'll be asked what to do about configuration files that have changed.
Subscribe to the slackware-security mailing list, and you'll get an e-mail whenever a patch is released. It's safest to wait a day or so before applying them, in case any problems are found.
It still doesn't track dependencies, but as long as you install everything in the L series, you'll probably be fine.
The real question is, what's the target audience of Slackware? People who have no active social life and prefer computers to chicks?
Au contraire - the target audience is people who want to set up their server, configure it the way they like, and then pretty much just leave it alone for three years so they can go out and have a social life without worrying that the server might break.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Thank Kali for Slackware. It was the first Linux distribution I ever used, and also has the distinction of being the Linux distro that bears the most resemblance to BSD.
I pray that Slack is able to survive for a long time to come, yet; it is the sole Linux distribution in existence that I consider genuinely well designed. The single main thing which bothers me so much about Debian in particular is not simply the fact that Debian is so horrible, but that its' developers and fanboys are also so adamant in their insistence that it is actually something wonderful.
Although I do not know the man personally, I vicariously consider Mr. Volkerding a second father. In terms of his distribution, at least, he has done more for me than my real father has for many years, now.
Ah, an old-timer who still keeps up with us; I like that three-digit id. ;-)
Just FYI, slackpkg is now in the main tree (AP series).
-Robby
http://slackware.com/~rworkman/
Oh, sweet, good to know, thanks. Looks like that's as of 12.2, which I haven't installed yet so I wasn't aware of the change. About damn time. :-)
By the way, is there an official policy regarding how long a release is supported in terms of security patches, and a list of which versions are currently maintained? Some of us like to keep old systems running for a long time (because if it's not broke, why fix it?) but after awhile one notices that no new patches are available...
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Great news for me, I'll be able to continue using my favorite distribution even in the 64 bit environment. After a brief initial experience with SuSe,
I went with Slack and never looked back.
I've been using SlamD64 for about 2 years now, since I got my AMD Turion X2 laptop; I've been using Slackware since the mid-90's. I use Slackware on my older non-64 bit machines and SlamD64 on newer stuff. Other than dealing with non-64 bit software, there's very little difference, and I've always considered SlamD64 to be the de facto Slackware 64--and Fred has said as much (that he tries to follow Pat's releases as much as possible while changing what needs to be changed for the 64 bit environment).
OTOH, while Fred has been mentioned in the changelog for his contributions (as mentioned above), if Pat shafted Fred for not maintaining this 64 bit Slackware--even though it is non-official--I for one will be very pissed about it. Fred has gone far and beyond the call of duty, being in college and maintaining this, mostly on his own.
Mike
I switch back and forth from Slackware to Gentoo. Sometimes, I get a whim and switch from Slack to Gentoo, I use it for a while, 6 months tops, and then I grow unhappy and realize that I loved Slackware and switch back again and am truly happy, until a year later when I rinse and repeat with Gentoo.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
The official 64 bit Slackware comes just in time because the 32 bit OS will die in 2008. reference: http://catb.org/esr/writings/world-domination/world-domination-201.html
zenray
Nah, there's not really a policy, and I'm not sure I can even put the decision making process into words :-) Let's just say "a long time" and leave it at that -- last I checked, Pat was still pushing occasional patches for 8.1.
8.1 was supported for a long time, but I don't think it still is.
The most recent OpenSSL patch was announced on April 8th, with patches available for Slackware 11.0 through -current. It's possible that the version of OpenSSL that shipped with Slackware 10.2 and previous isn't vulnerable so no patch is needed, and indeed CVE-2009-0591 says it only affects 0.9.8h-0.9.8j, but it would be nice to know definitively whether my 10.1 machine is vulnerable or not. (OpenSSL is just an example, of course.)
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
http://slackware.osuosl.org/slackware-8.1/ChangeLog.txt -- last update was 20 February 2009 :-)
This isn't definitive, but lots of "patches" aren't patches -- they're upgrades to later releases due to upstream not providing actual patches. Sometimes that's not a problem (the new release actually is ABI-stable with the older one, or the fix is easy to backport), but in other cases, the choice is either to "fix" the security problem (which often isn't *much* of a problem anyway) or to *break* the application/library (or something else that uses it).
Generally speaking, if a security issue is serious *and* it affects a network-facing service *and* it's feasible to fix, then it's fixed in $release/patches/
-RW
Glad to here.
I'd hope so, because as you know: no matter where you go, there you are.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Last time I used (five years ago) Slackware it had no dependencies tracking, no automatic updates or update manager, it lacked any utilities to automatically set up network interfaces and used LILO. Is it better now? ;)
No, nope, negative, never had a problem, what's wrong with LILO?
The real question is, what's the target audience of Slackware? People who have no active social life and prefer computers to chicks?
Dude, you're on Slashdot...