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Slackware 13.0 Released
willy everlearn and several other readers let us know that Slackware 13.0 is out. "Wed Aug 26 10:00:38 CDT 2009: Slackware 13.0 x86_64 is released as stable! Thanks to everyone who helped make this release possible — see the RELEASE_NOTES for the credits. The ISOs are off to the replicator. This time it will be a 6 CD-ROM 32-bit set and a dual-sided 32-bit/64-bit x86/x86_64 DVD. We're taking pre-orders now at store.slackware.com. Please consider picking up a copy to help support the project. Once again, thanks to the entire Slackware community for all the help testing and fixing things and offering suggestions during this development cycle. As always, have fun and enjoy!"
Does Slackware have a real purpose? From the outside, it seems slackware is for people who don't like/understand deb/rpm packages for whatever reason. Are there any other advantages
Slackware doesn't have the advanced features of more modern distros (like Gentoo), but I still find uses for it. It's perfect for a media center or a MAME cabinet. It's good to see it's still going strong, especially with an official 64-bit version.
Happy New Year, it's 1984!
This time it will be a 6 CD-ROM 32-bit set and a dual-sided 32-bit/64-bit x86/x86_64 DVD.
Slack is great but overweight. I'd rather have a more minimal distribution, preferably something that fits on a a single CD. That said, it lives up to expectations -- everything plus the kitchen sink.
Facts have a liberal bias.
Or you could just use the torrent page.
But, if you want to download your operating system from a completely unknown and untrusted source, go right ahead.
Granted, TPB would probably link you to the same torrent, but why would you take the risk? Because you find searching, poring over a search list, and deciding on one that looks safe is a more efficient use of your time than just going to the source's torrents?
http://www.slackware.com/getslack/torrents.php
Since when did you need TPB for this kind of sharing. Ain't best place for torrent of sotware on its offical pages? Thou, http://www.legaltorrents.com/ really could use linux / opensource section.
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
This time it will be a 6 CD-ROM 32-bit set and a dual-sided 32-bit/64-bit x86/x86_64 DVD.
Slack is great but overweight. I'd rather have a more minimal distribution, preferably something that fits on a a single CD. That said, it lives up to expectations -- everything plus the kitchen sink.
In other words: Too large; didn't download. ;)
Hey awesome, I've been trying to get into Slackware lately but I just can't seem to get use to it. Are there any realb benifits to tranfering to it.
Right now I run Arch and I just came from Gentoo, and I like the speed aspects of both and the optimization ability. Would there be such option in Slackware, I haven't seen one but I could of missed it.
Well either way if I can figure out some reasons to switch then I just might.
Thanks
Docmur
This release is, IMHO, a real milestone for Slackware. A major version jump in the desktop, a new package format, a 64-bit version, ext4, 2.6.29/30 kernels with all their goodies...wow, it's come a long way. Thanks to Pat and all other Slack'ers for putting it all together. Waiting eagerly for my subscription to arrive (yes, I put my money where my mouth is and Slackware is well worth the support). :-)
TPB really helps me find my torrents. This kind of file sharing is exactly what BT is great for.
I've used DistroWatch since the first time someone told me to try out Debian in college and it turned out I needed a different distribution because Debian was for me to start out on. Very memorable learning experience.
Even today, the site does a really good job of keeping up to date. An example is Slackware 13.0 that was released today and there in one paragraph with all the links you could want and direct links to mirrors for torrents and the MD5s.
A lot of times when I want to know what a distro is up to, I click that pull down bar -- like say Fedora -- and get a convenient history of recent releases with a paragraph about the release. Hats off to the people who maintain that site.
My work here is dung.
It comes with lots of cool games.
When I first gave Linux a try back 1998, I tried slackware. It came with a game called "X Server". If you won, you got to see pretty colors and stuff. If you lost, that's to say, if you set the refresh rate above what you monitor could take, you got a smoking monitor.
It was almost as scary as FEAR.
> I've been trying to get into Slackware lately but I just can't seem to get
> use to it. Are there any realb benifits to tranfering to it.
It may or may not be for you. That's the beauty of Linux. Use what you feel
comfortable with.
> Right now I run Arch and I just came from Gentoo, and I like the speed
> aspects of both and the optimization ability. Would there be such option in
> Slackware
You can recompile every package to your specifications. See the Slackbuilds.
Whether there's any actual benefit to doing so remains to be seen.
Ditto for actual source you download. Optimizations are a CFLAGS away.
It's been a while since I used it, but I liked Slack when I did. It didn't use the SysV init system used on almost all other Linux distros, but instead opted for BSD-style startup scripts. At the time I liked that - after getting very used to SysV these days though I think I'd be more or less indifferent on the issue.
Also, Slack was a bit more "raw" of a distro - it's package management included no real dependency handling, making it for the most part just an easy way to install binaries. Usually rather than relying on the package manager (as I often do in other distros now) it was just easier in Slack to download the source tarball and manually compile and install it. That was nice in that I pretty much always had the latest version of any program that I cared about, but the downside was that sometimes as older versions of libraries and such lagged, it would eventually hit a point when upgrading something like Gnome manually became a very, very long task of tracking down all the packages that needed to be upgraded, and sometimes fixing them (as sometimes they'd have libraries in non-standard places and such - not a common occurence, but it did happen).
Slack also didn't ship with any of it's own GUI tools. What you got was basically whatever Gnome or KDE shipped for you to use.
All in all, it was a fast and lean system that lended itself well to a person who wants to tweak things to keep them working exactly how they want. These days though, I've just found that Ubuntu on servers and Mint on the desktop is 90% as good of a system to use while being 20% of the effort to maintain, so I just use them instead.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
It's very true that the beauty of Linux is you can use what you feel comfortable with. Personally I love Gentoo but it's become a mess of a project, every one pulls it in a new direction and it ends up broken alot.
Well maybe I'll give it another try Slackware I mean.
Thanks
Docmur
I tend to use this source/tracker.
http://linuxtracker.org/
KDE 4.2 still isn't really ready for primetime rollout - you just need to fiddle with it too much to get some things to work and with slackware you'll be spending enough time fiddling with the core OS as it is. Why didn't patrick stick with 3.5 and leave 4.2 as an option?
Did Patrick ever get over his irrational hatred of PAM and HAL? Or are these still left as an exercise for the student?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I read the headline and thought it said slashcode 13 released. For a split second there was much rejoicing. Then I wondered if it would include images of Jason. Then I realized it said Slackware and I went back to staring at the wall.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
"To use a generic kernel you'll need to build an initrd to load your filesystem module and possibly your drive controller or other drivers needed at boot time"
Sorry guys , this is 2009. If the only options to get my devices running is some huge BLOB of a kernel or having to manually hack together an initrd I think I'll stick with other distributions. Installing a distribution is enough work as it is these days without having to worry about fundamentals such as getting the kernel to boot in the first place. This might have been fine in the days when all you wanted out of a setup was a working command prompt and maybe fvwm but these days its just too much work.
(And yes , I used to run slackware up to 11.0)
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Might I suggest slackware+pkgsrc?
There are no Distro Wars, only minor peasant skirmishes of no consequence to The King. ;-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Quite frankly, if you don't know what it is, then you're not ready for it, so it doesn't matter.
Slackware is a rock. It is highly configurable, extremely stable, very complete. Especially for a server install. My only concern is it's headed up by only one person. I know Pat has some help but...well what do I care..He is probably 25 years younger than me.
I've been Slacking since version 10.0, it is my distro of choice. The only other distro I like is FreeBSD, but, I'm exclusively running Slackware now. I downloaded Slackware 13.0 last night and will install today. I'll be heading to the Slackware store later today to buy a DVD. Congratulations to Pat, Robby, Eric, and the entire Slackware team! hitest
As elitist as that sounds, its pretty accurate. Its not for casual linux users. If you want to know about it, there are plenty of other resources online. But you really shouldn't expect Ubuntu/fedora level ease of installation/configuration/upgrading, which has its pluses and minuses. Basically, the way I've always explained it to others is that slackware is for slackers. People who want to understand what and how they are doing before they actually do it. The kind of people that almost perversely enjoy getting errors, because it presents them with a problem to figure out.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
But now, we get a new release with potential new things to work through YAY!!!!
I say this with the best of meaning I've been following, loving, and/or using slack since 4.x releases
> Explain what slackware is
It's a Linux distribution. There are many other Linux distributions, but this one is Slackware! :-)
I was mostly being facicious. But!...what does the timing off a video card have to do with me setting the refresh rate too high and potentially damaging my monitor?
When I was setting up the X Server, it presented a warning telling me that if I set the refresh rate too high (for a given resolution) that I could permanently damage my monitor.
To someone who had just gotten into computers (and Windows at that), that was some scary stuff.
I did end up setting the refresh too high, but my monitor had a safety device that simply shut it off when I did that.
Quite frankly, if you don't know what it is, then you're not ready for it, so it doesn't matter.
I've got mod points again, but they never get spent, because I consider it to be a sign of greater integrity, to refute posts I disagree with, rather than simply down modding them.
Slackware was my first Linux distribution, during the mid 1990s. At the time, I'd only previously had exposure to UNIX at all via an ISP's FreeBSD shell account, and so I barely knew what it was at all.
A newcomer who is willing to learn is actually going to be far better off with Slack than with Ubuntu or Debian.
There is a much greater degree of simplicity within Slackware's overall design. Less complexity means less potential opportunities for things to break due to random, uncontrolled interactions of the various parts, and even more importantly, it also means that when something does break, it's a lot easier to find the source of the problem and fix it.
Using a system like Slackware is also going to give a user good mental habits as well, and teach them how to recognise a genuinely sound distribution design when they see one. Debian's greatest problem isn't so much that it's a terrible design, but more that the people who design and use it actually think that it's great.
What's this?? Details?
Finally!
I admit, I started with SLS Linux, out of which Slackware grew (what do you mean you need 93 3.5" Floppies!?!?!)...and although I try lots of different distros, I keep on coming back to Slackware. Thanks to Patrick and his crew for all the work over the years!
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Right now I run Arch and I just came from Gentoo, and I like the speed aspects of both and the optimization ability. Would there be such option in Slackware, I haven't seen one but I could of missed it.
From what I've seen, Arch is similar to Slack, but simply has a slightly greater degree of automation. Slackware is somewhat Amish. ;)
Hence, Arch is likely to be fine. Gentoo I'm not sure about, as I keep reading reports of its' death or fragmentation every few months, it seems. I think they're both similar to Slack though, but just as I said, not quite so bare metal.
Some years ago, I found Slackware as an elite lightweight hacker distro. But today Linux desktop has improved so much and Ubuntu just wraps everything together nicely, so I wouldn't bother. But it was great and Patrick seems like a cool guy.
Is there such a reason? Beyond simple inertia. Slackware was maybe the first Linux distro to be widely adopted. I imagine that most of its users keep using it simply because it's not worth their trouble to switch to a more modern distro.
It's a side project that wasn't meant to be a big deal, but now has lockin and is the main claim to fame of its inventor. Sort of like MS-DOS. (Ducks.)
Whooooosh?
I am currently using Arch as well and I am thinking about a switch back to slackware. I was using slackware from 98 on until I ended up using windows for various reasons most of the time. Then I tried out Vector and it just didn't feel like I was even using Linux so I abandoned it when the Linux Distribution Chooser suggested Arch. I reallly love Arch but I find it is way too much on the bleeding edge and sometimes I wouild like to go back to a more tried, tested and true sort of package selection with Slackware. Sometimes the updates to arch really do break things and I have to end up going around the updates for that package for awhile. Also, I don't like that they put in a new version of the kernel practically every week. Sometimes I would like to compile my own kernel but what is the point if I have to recompile it every week.
Maybe I will head back to slackware. I tried an install on a vm yesterday and it really wasn't painful at all. Most everything was working perfectly right away. The only problem that I had when 12.2 came out was that dropline gnome hadn't yet caught up with slackware so there wasn't a useable gnome desktop for the system. Is this still a problem with the new one?
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Heh, maybe I'm being dense (perhaps that's excusable after the last few weeks), but I'm not convinced that you're disagreeing with me. Anyone who is familiar with unix/linux at all, or is looking to switch to unix/linux, will immediately recognize Slackware as a linux-based operating system. Perhaps I wasn't clear about it, but my main point was "If grandma doesn't recognize Slackware as being a unix-like OS, then grandma doesn't need to know."
Gee, who gives a rat's ass. If popularity was worth a tinker's damn, then we'd all just use Windows.
If you want a distribution who enjoys being the Keeper of the Toilet Paper, then fine - use it - but leave the rest of us alone.
What's this here, then http://thepiratebay.org/ ?
Slackware can be useful if you want to illustrate how a linux system works independently of any local policies that may be in effect. You know you're not getting fancy process supervisors or security policies, or chains of symlinks diverting to "alternatives" or build systems for contributed packages that distribute among multiple installed versions and whatnot
Me, I like all the "fancy crap" distributions add, it's why I use the distribution in the first place. But there's certainly a use case for having a distribution that's so old and conservative that it's a predictable known quantity.
I also find FreeBSD to have the same straightforwardness, but someone's gotta do it on the Linux side of things.
openssl md5 filename and you know if you've got the right file, no matter if it comes from Gnutella, eDonkey, BiTorrent or Mars.
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I have the same problem with the lawn mower
Are there any realb benifits to tranfering to it.
Nostalgia. That was my first distro, back around in 94 or so.
Post your password here and it won't matter for very long . . .
Now everyone knows you only have to rebuild the carburetor when you change the oil.
At one point, I was considering giving a new distro a go, one with more tech knowledge necessary, mainly in the hopes of finishing up with a much lower memory foot print. I was thinking through slackware and gentoo when I saw an article on howtoforge called "Debian from Scratch". I think it was meant to be a parody of LFS, I didn't read it, but it gave me an idea. I fired up the Ubuntu Alternate CD and installed a base system with no extras (think kernel + bash + apt). I just started building it up from there.
Added X11, the fluxbox, alsa and pulseaudio. Added mplayer and audacious, after a couple of days of tinkering I had up and running with everything I actually use and nothing I don't. The memory footprint on this little Dell laptop was under 40mb (compare to my desktop multimedia editing machine running full ubuntu+gnome+compiz with all the usual trimmings which idles at 300Mb of RAM in use, lol).
At the end of this process, I had the lightweight system I wanted and I still had all the benefits of ubuntu's packaging system (because truly, I like not having to think about dependencies at all). And to be perfectly honest, I still learned a lot about the components that actually make up a linux desktop system (albeit at a much less intense level than I might have with slackware). I highly recommend this path to anyone trying to go lightweight and custom but who doesn't want to spend a week in config files to get there.
Censorship is the opposite of education. If neo-darwinism were defensible, people would not need to try and censor ID.
I'd suspect only suits really give that much of a damn.
The postmortem:
Failure to adapt. Hal took Patrick overcoming his fear of change and obsessive compulsiveness to add.
In another 5 years you'll get PAM because there will be even more use of it to the point he will have no choice.
Proof?
Where's AbiWord? Why did it disappear after 10.2 slackware.
http://www.cleardefinition.com/oss/abi/blog/index.php?s=willysr
Nobody runs slackware anymore other than in a virtual machine.
If you run it fine then prove it!
All these posts about it being used in enterprise etc. Where are the company names?
Your basement don't count.
I've used it off and on for years. I've fixed it. I've cussed it. I finally went to the book store looking a new distribution.
Big Orange book.. UBUNTU 6.04.
Changed my life.
So quit suggesting this old POS
It's dead Jim!
People say that it's a hard distro to get up and running, but it's not. It's not a quick install like Windows or Ubuntu, I found. But once I got it up and running it is my system of choice. It has not failed me like SUSE did when I couldn't figure out what was causing the system to go sluggish when I left over the weekend. And it didn't feel like Linux lite,like Ubuntu. All in all, I love me some Slack and I plan on running 13 as my main desktop as soon as possible.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Um...the fifth link down in the site's navigation menu - General Info just so happens to contain sections titled "What is Slackware", "The Slackware Philosophy", and "Slackware Overview".
If it is easy enough for you to find the about page and the FAQ page then there is no reason for you not to find the information page that conveniently lies between the very pages you mention. May we suggest you look closer next time.
Who deals with RPM hell these days? Package management software has pretty much eliminated this for the end user. I've been using Fedora and Ubuntu for three years and never had issues with yum and apt installing programs (Never had to figure out dependencies either).
It is not necessarily lack of willingness to learn. In my case it is lack of time.
I did two Linux Mint KDE (Kubuntu derivative) installs in the last week. They were fast. How much time would I have lost installing Slackware instead? What would I have taken time off from? Playing with my children, dinner with my friends, getting actual work donw?
Even worse, once installed, software installation becomes more time consuming as well. Rather than startup Synaptic, tick a box and click "apply" (or apt-get install in a terminal) and get on with something else, I would have to manually install every dependency.
There are third party solutions to this (e.g. slapt-get) but they all seem to have limitations (e.g. do not update packages that are part of the distribution),.
Yes, he is disagreeing with you. A Newbie quite possibly won't know what Slackware is, but if they are the type take likes to tinker with the internals of the distro and wants to learn Linux in-depth rather than just the superficial aspects of using a "user-friendly" distro like Mandriva or Ubuntu, then Slackware could well be the distro for them, but if they don't have an explanation of what Slackware is about, then how will they know?
I myself used Slackware as my second distro after throughly breaking Mandrake and getting fed up of it's complexity. It was certainly more of a learning experience than Mandrake was. Nowadays, perhaps Arch Linux is a better choice than Slackware, because it has most of the simplicity and control you get from Slackware with a decent package management system, but I can't test that myself because I can't go back and learn my distros in a different order.
Nice to see you here, Gunnery Sergeant.
How is the parent offtopic? She's talking about games that come with Slackware (the subject of TFA) in response to another comment (modded +5) about games that come with Slackware.
This is mod abuse pure and simple.
people still use that OS ?!
Perhaps I wasn't clear about it, but my main point was "If grandma doesn't recognize Slackware as being a unix-like OS, then grandma doesn't need to know."
No, I do understand that that is what you were saying.
My perspective is that what I'd say to Grandma is, "Slackware is a Linux distribution, which more closely resembles the older UNIX (from which it is descended) than other Linux distributions do. You probably didn't need to know that, but I'm telling you that on the off-chance that if you do need or want to know about it, you have the option to learn."
For those who would protest that Grandma's eyes would most likely glaze over after the third word of that explanation, that's fine. You're possibly right, and if that's true, then no harm, no foul. She can still have the user friendly option, and never need know that the dreaded command line exists at all. ;)
I like giving people the choice, is all. Isn't that supposed to be one of the things which Linux is all about?
Wine. Virtualization. Separate computers. Dual-booting. There are a legion of definitions of success. With any of the above four options, you can have your library of business apps AND enjoy what Linux has to offer. Why make a holy war out of computer operating systems?
Ubuntu 9.04 won't install on my machine. Is there any chance that Slackware 13.0 will 'just work'?
Everytime Slackware comes up, I always get the urge to ditch the GUI.