Slashdot Mirror
Slackware 13.1 Released
Several readers made sure we are aware that Slackware 13.1 release is out. Here's the list of mirrors. "Slackware 13.1 brings many updates and enhancements, among which you'll find two of the most advanced desktop environments available today: Xfce 4.6.1, a fast and lightweight but visually appealing and easy-to-use desktop environment, and KDE 4.4.3, a recent stable release of the new 4.4.x series of the award-winning KDE desktop environment."
cheers to the developers. they really work their slacks off.
Slackware hasn't officially packaged GNOME since 2005. There are various community projects which allow you to use GNOME on Slackware, however.
Slackware release announcement on slashdot is like fried chicken dinner to me. Is Patrick still at it?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
on 4 architectures, I still have a special place in my heart for Slackware (though I use Arch and Debian on my main boxes now). Great distribution -- I even sent Pat "The Man" Volkerding home-made cookies when he was sick.
As the adage goes, Give a man Debian, and he'll learn Debian. Give a man SUSE, and he'll learn SUSE. But give a man Slackware, and he'll learn Linux. I certainly picked up more *NIX tricks from Slack than the other distros combined.
I started using Slackware when I began college, and I still use it today. I'm sort of a "medium" user. I can work the scripts and the config files, and I even compiled some custom kernels in the past. But I'm not a CS guy - I majored in music. Even I, with my liberal arts degree, find Slackware delightful to use and I appreciate it's lack of fluff and its overall feel of being MY computer.
I salute you Pat. May you keep on Slacking.
Ok, what's with excluding GNOME?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Ok, what's with excluding GNOME?
IIRC it is too hard to build. I also have the impression that the user base for GNOME and Slackware don't have much overlap.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It created a lot of extra test/patch load for Pat. He uses KDE typically, so it gets a lot of daily use on his desktop. Not so much GNOME.
The "lightweight" desktops (of which XFCE is probably the heaviest) don't involve as much code, or configuration management, so they are shipped in their stock forms. Bugs found in Slackware's XFCE/Blackbox/Fluxbox/etc. should be reported to the programmers.
I've been running current, which is now equivalent to 13.1 and it's working well.
A reminder to all: please seed the SW torrents and come to Linux Questions to discuss problems.
YOU BITE YOUR FORKED TONGUE.
Unfortunately, Slackware hasn't carried GNOME since 2005. Mr. Volkerding dropped it because it was "too much work". There are other third party GNOME packagers for Slackware. However, GNOME isn't just a desktop - it needs support from underneath X for some things, so any set of GNOME packages makes changes to Slackware that are more or less compatible with a basic Slackware install. I used Dropline for a while, but came to the decision that I wanted my desktop to be officially supported on my distro, not an afterthought. And, in the end, the "one-man-distro" concept that Slackware is just wasn't enough any more.
This really made me sad. Slackware is the garage-built Apple II of the Linux world (I figure SLS was the Apple I). Unfortunately, Linux has moved on from what one person can really package together. Slackware losing GNOME was just a symptom of this larger issue. I know for a fact that many people have offered to help Mr. Volkerding with various aspects of Slackware. I know at least one of the major GNOME packagers for Slackware has offered to do all the GNOME work for Slackware. I myself have made the offer too. Mr. Volkerding just doesn't seem interested in a community for Slackware. As I said, a one-man garage OS just isn't enough, unfortunately.
I ended up standardizing on Debian for all my machines. I've ugraded two production machines across three versions of Debian now - it just works, always. Debian is conservative, which is perfect for production machines. And it has real package management.
Every time I see a new Slackware version it makes me sad. Like seeing an old man wheezing on for another birthday. I'd rather see it go now, than continue to bleed marketshare into complete irrelevancy.
I'm still using Slack 12.2 on my work laptop. The trouble is that VMware Workstation has to work, and new kernel versions inevitably cause problems for VMware until they catch up. Pain in the ass, really.
At home, I migrated over to BSD years ago, which was easy to do after learning all of Linux's internals running Slackware.
Keep up the great work Patrick!
Nope, it's for us old farts who have long since stopped worrying about whether we're considered 'cool' but know how to spell 'Kernel' in addition to being able to build one.
No, I think you're confusing it with Gentoo.
Yup - 100% true... it's well-known that Slackware has not had any sort of GUI-support since 2005 when they dropped Gnome.
It's amazing that they even keep X.org packages in mainline.
Oh wait - someone just told me KDE and XFCE are fully-supported! How in the world did you and I both miss that?
Hey, I hear you. My first Linux installation was with Slackware - stack of 3.5" floppies and a green CD with Bob.
I moved on to Debian ages ago, but I share your warm feeling for Slackware.
Thanks for the replies to other guys here. As for that AC rambling on about Patrick kicking the bucket, the fuck, why are you even here?! Go hang out in MSDN or Apple bullfuckingshit or whatever it's called.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
So you're deploying to servers and yet you're crying a river about the lack of Gnome? What am I missing here?
Another modest announcement for a release that doesn't promise to change the world or make you hip.
Slackware: It gets the damn work done. Without the fancy.
Just freakin installed 13.0 on my computer yesterday!
Thanks Patrick! ;)
No matter where you go... there you are.
you're not missing anything my good sir!
the grandparent is missing a boot in his ass.
(lights pipe)
what a wonderful day.
Hm, I always thought that Slackware's conservatism is what made it one of the most stable and unix like that kept it ahead of the pack for me. The server market also doesn't need a lot of extra packages installed either. Gnome libraries would be nice though. I wouldn't mind if he dropped the KDE window manager also. I want stability, not pretty. Xfce is fine. Back to his "roots" on the server/developer side. Easier for one guy to handle. It might sound a bit "Apple" like, but having that kind of control is kind of a good factor in the stability arena. And I don't see him really shutting people out. Otherwise you would be lucky to see an X server at all on his distros (minor exaggeration ok?) But I sure wish he'd please load the vesa driver into the xorg.conf file, since Xorgconfig seems to have gone missing. It works on everything, and I do like using graphical partition managers.. :-)
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Yeah, and we're so old-fart'ish that at the time when we installed it on our system Slackware was the hottest new thing around.
Over the years every component in our systems might have been replaces 2-3 times each, yet the soul of the machine is still slack.
- These characters were randomly selected.
In defense of Slackware, keeping both Gnome and KDE is redundant. The Ubuntu team (to name just one), apparently, agrees with me. Both DEs serve the same basic purpose: to GUIfy the system configuration and file management. Why would anyone need both? Do you like Gnome? Get a distro with Gnome. Like KDE? Get a distro with KDE. Then there are distros with both of them working, more or less: get one of those if you need to switch every day. But you wouldn't get Slackware anyway, if having a nice DE was that critical to you. Slackware's main strength is transparency; I use Slackware because I want a very fine level of control, and I don't want the system to do anything without me telling it to. Ergo, I use neither Gnome nor KDE, but WindowMaker, a WM so sublime, it still feels like a modern desktop, even though not a single update came through in 4 years.
And like others noted, what are these "production systems" that need Gnome? What part of Gnome is so critical to your server or build environment? If you know what you are doing, or if you are poised to learn how the system works, you will be using XFCE or lighter. There is nothing I can think of that KDE or Gnome will do for you that you cannot accomplish in seconds in bash. (Some tasks may require scripting, but that's what Gnome does too, right? Except that it does a lot of other things, which screws you over in the long run.)
I, personally, would drop my jaw if he dropped KDE from the default package. I may be a rarity but I do use Slackware for my day to day email reading, movie watching, and music listening. It is nice to have that extra bit of eye candy available as an option for us who want to use it.
Being a slackware users and still love to follow slackware release and love to see that 'The Man' the living legend is working hard to give the community the stable and secure Linux. I salute you Pat and congrats on releasing Slackware 13.1
http://askaralikhan.blogspot.com/
Some assembly required :-)
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Ok, enough of the 4chanese already.
This really made me sad. Slackware is the garage-built Apple II of the Linux world (I figure SLS was the Apple I). Unfortunately, Linux has moved on from what one person can really package together.
Has it? Somehow PV manages just fine with KDE and XFCE. Apparently, GNOME is the only thing that has moved on from what one person can really package together. I'd say that says a lot more about GNOME than it does about Linux, or Slackware.
(Never mind that, contrary to popular belief, PV has a team of helpers, residing mostly at slackbuilds.org.)
Every time I see a new Slackware version it makes me sad. Like seeing an old man wheezing on for another birthday. I'd rather see it go now, than continue to bleed marketshare into complete irrelevancy.
Boo hoo. You're just whining because PV is still snubbing GNOME for being a convoluted piece of crap.
You're acting like it's either KDE or GNOME. Neither is also an option, you know.
Even for regular users, it's easy to pull together a simple workable desktop using for one example, a ~/.fvwm/.fvwm2rc file that has everything they need. New programs are easily added to the start menu as needed with a simple text editor. But that isn't even necessary for regular users.
But I know. I know. It doesn't have the complexity of a 'modern desktop' from Microsoft or Apple. It's not at all 'cool.'
You know, it's almost 2AM here right now. But you've inspired me.
My wife is fast asleep, so I can do this. I'm lighting up a pipe of burley tobacco, in the house. Something strictly forbidden, but nobody will ever know.
Praise Bob.
I'm admittedly a Johnny-come-lately Linux user, a mid-ish 20's (three cubed!) developer who switched to Linux (openSuSE) last spring. Loved it. Then a month ago, I (re)stumbled upon Slackware, which the online distro choosers (I know, I know) said was a match for me -- great performance mixed with not-quite-crazy learning curve, and even the learning curve would give me oh-so-adaptable "purity of Unix" skills. While downloading this new toy, I met Bob, who truly changed my life -- I became a fledgling member of the Church of the SubGenius. Later, while installing, upon seeing that one of the options was "Newbie: Use verbose prompting (the X series takes one year)"... that, my friends, is when I knew I was truly home.
to GUIfy the system configuration and file management.
Get real. That's what curses is for.
or TCL/TK if you insist on being fancy.
True, but I always did do a lot of hand-compiling on my Slackware boxes. The thing is, Slackware offers a great platform for tearing stuff down and tinkering with it, while leaving enough of a world to stand on while you do so. I used Slack on my desktop systems for many years (from 1995) until I discovered Arch, which is similar in everything I like about Slack, but with a more powerful package system.
But Slackware is still my preference for any kind of server. It's so simple, I can set it up from bare discs in less than 30 minutes.
Can someone enlighten me as to what awards KDE has won since it started with version 4?
As far as I can tell KDE 4 is still an overcomplicated mess and a long, long way behind the simple elegance of KDE 3.
Thanx to Pat and all other folks for the great work!
Man, and I was just getting used to 13.0 13.0-64... I should really read the ChnageLog more often!!
Great job Pat & crew, and here is to another great release of the best Linux distro ever!
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
isnt that Gentoo?
Slackware is slightly more hardcore AFAIK, if you just want to compile to max out ur MEGAHURTZ, gentoo is the way to go
People, what a bunch of bastards
Curses? I don't think GUI means what you think it means.
Whoosh!
Better than Gentoo?
Well, I'd say that it's different but similar; not better or worse. Gentoo is great when you want to spend hours building and configuring the ultimate speed machine you don't have to update too often. Slackware is great if you want to get a simple, reliable and (not quite as) fast system up and running in about an hour (sometimes less). I switched from Gentoo to Debian then hastily to Slack back in about '00 and have been using Slack since. Other distros just feel bloated now; I recently tested out Ubuntu 10.4 and although it is very polished and great for non technical users I still just can't get past the fact that it seems overweight to me and I don't like the fact that I have to set the root password after install. The whole "protect the user from themselves" philosophy just doesn't wash with me.
And if it doesn't take four hours to start.
Seriously, installed Ubuntu 10.04 and I can't believe how fucking long it takes from login to a ready desktop in my quad-core AMD - it's slower than Win7!
Dilbert RSS feed
I ended up standardizing on one size fits all tees for all the family. The dog looks stupid but they're a better fit on him than the goldfish.
I use Arch which has a rolling release cycle, the entire concept of upgrading through OS versions is a holdover from the days of physical media. The only OS version should be the date of the snapshot you use to bootstrap. That whole conservative distro thing, as applied to Debian, is nonsense. Running stable software does not and has never practically implied running last years software releases.
I never understood the criticisms of slackware there. I used to package stuff for servers, for desktops I used to maintain (compile) everything manually. That was the idea, Slackware was the no-nonsense base system and the administrator took care of the rest. With Arch, I package everything because it's so easy. With Debian and derivatives, the majority of users appear to use the default packages; OpenSSL for example :-o
Really? I've been thinking of doing one to address some of the braindeadisms that afflict most distros. No PAM, no UUID identifiers for drives, no KMS switching to non-24*80 text resolutions unless specifically configured to do so... Or perhaps the time has come for me to check out Slackware again?
What am I missing here?
This: "I ended up standardizing on Debian for all my machines.", because Linux distros are almost the same except for all the tiny little ways they aren't. Particularly if your own desktop doubles as the development/experimental box, it makes perfect sense to run your server distro on your desktop. Of course you can complicate it by running Slackware on your desktop and either work remotely on a Debian machine or deal with any distro variations later in the process, but it's not the KISS solution.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
So, tell me, Oh Wise One, how do do you properly spell 'Kernel'?
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
Oh those great old days LOL
When bad floppies ruled and a root/boot floppy was needed to get your system off the ground.
Kernels took forever to compile and modelines in X were a bitch and one feared the burning smell from their monitor.
4MB VRAM video cards ruled the day, 3d was a novelty that virge made painful
oh and dotmatrix printers, fanfold paper and cassette tapes too
I'd rather see it go now, than continue to bleed marketshare into complete irrelevancy.
Slackware isn't about "market share." Neither Pat nor users of his distro care about their share of the market.
Slackware is about doing things right. And as the last remaining distro that places correctness ahead of feature bloat, Slack must continue to exist.
The fact that it doesn't run GNOME is irrelevant. I don't need my Exim box to run GNOME. I don't need my SpamAssassin box to run GNOME. I don't need my WebDAV/CalDAV server to run GNOME. I don't need GNOME to run screen and vim.
It's all well and good that you want a thick GUI layer on top of your OS. It's okay to want contortionist "integration" changes to enforce a distro configuration regime. There are a lot of options for you if you like those things. However, if you don't, Slackware is your AAA Ace A #1 option.
A GUI-less Debian install is still Debianized (not that this is a bad thing intrinsically but could be undesirable) . A GUI-less Centos install is still full of Red Hat crap (this is a bad thing). BSD is, well, fine if you're interested in that sort of thing, but most of the useful stuff is in ports anyway.
Slackware has none of that garbage. It's pure, unadulterated Linux, carefully crafted to not just work, but work right.
Pat is The Man. The only better Linux is the one you handcraft yourself from a ttso boot/root floppy and a mini-gcc binary.
I haven't been around Slackware in a while. I thought Slackware's main selling point back in the day was that it was an 18 floppy install. What's up with this 6 cd / 1 dvd thing? I get modern distros come with apps and stuff, but it just seems a sad day when a slackware iso is larger than a Windows iso (yes, I know the Windows iso doesn't come with apps, that's besides the point). Just saying. My first Linux box was a 486 with 12 meg of ram, 500 meg harddrive, I ran X, an FTP server and a webserver off of that thing.
Not trying to be a hater, just don't get this size thing. I guess I won't be installing this version of slackware on an old system I pull out of storage. Need to go find RedHat 6 I guess.
I'm currently still running Slackware 11, but I've been considering making the jump to 13 for quite some time. The only thing though, is the laptop I'm running 11 on has a 32 bit processor. My desktop, which is only meant for gaming, runs Win7 Ultimate x64 and I don't want to bother with dualbooting/virtual machine or just running it on that. We purchased a new Dell laptop which has a 64 bit CPU, but I don't think the wife wants touching it, ha. One of the biggest factors that I love about Slackware 13 is the way it works with 64 bit CPUs in the RISC architecture. Just by reading up on it, I think Windows could use a few tips from the way it micro-manages and multi-tasks applications. The way it handles CPU usage for an influx of applications open also is awesome, considering when I used Slackware 13 once, I had a ton of programs open. Now, Slackware with KDE... I don't know. My Slackware 11 was a base install, and I installed XWindows for GNOME separately.... just because I HATE the look and feel of the new GNOME. Anyhow, just throwing my opinion out there. If anyone loads 13.1 and has a good opinion about it, feel free to leave me a reply or send me a message.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
Looks like I'm going to need to purchase a 50 pack of diskettes today
Lindsay Blanton
RadioReference.com
read the parent of your parent, they spelled it kernal
im not a fan boy but i use Ubuntu on a 933mhz pIII and 512 mb ram. i was at 128 and having a problem, so i had slackware. some how I dont think the ram performance is better but, there should be comparisons done soon. Phoronix anyone? Im sure there's already been a slack vs arch right?.
are you really nitpicking over the definition of graphics over characters. Ok, so nethack doesn't have any graphics, u happy?
Amen! but i think we may be feeding a troll anyway. that guy was clearly talking out his A** WTF is marketshare for a product that doesn't sell? Haven't you heard? This is voluntary Communism, there is no market!
Slackware dropped packaging Gnome themselves because others were doing it better. Dropline was the group pointed to when it happened, but I doubt they're the only ones.
However most likely I've been trolled, Gnome is the default desktop in Fedora, including Fedora 13, you have to go out of your way to get a roll with KDE as default or use yum and install it later.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
If by "max out our megahertz" you mean sit there with your CPU at 100% capacity, waiting for a source-based install to compile then yes, I would suggest using Gentoo Linux for that.
For me, on the other hand, I trust the uniformity of the x86_64 architecture and Patrick Volkerding's willingness to listen to those who find bugs in the Slackware-Current tree.
"Ubuntu" - an African word meaning "Slackware is too hard for me."
Only if you can't do it in C or C++ and you need the speed.
I have comments all over this discussion, so I can't mod you way up.
As for adding outside stuff to Slackware, that has gotten a lot easier over the past couple years, thanks to SlackBuilds.org and its nice TUI add-on, sbopkg.
So, tell me, Oh Wise One, how do do you properly spell 'Kernel'?
Easy; "Colonel"
I nuked a monitor once by transposing the horizontal and vertical modelines... man, it was crisp for about half a second, then *pop*! A learning experience, that one was...
Truck driver, plumber, Linux systems engineer.
It's doubtful that Patrick would drop KDE. It's too widely used, the build system is (relatively) straightforward, and the horrors of Gnome were well-known before he made the decision that brought its issues into stark relief for the community. Dropline and company have worked very well in its absence.
Nethack does have a GUI.
then what r u talking about? You can make a "Graphical" user interface based on curses. Unless your talking about that sprite package for nethack.
I tried using my hard drive as an soundcard once while encoding MP3s. That was a pain in the ass to recover. It did teach me to check the device in a commandline a couple times before hitting enter though.
-- toolie
I am talking about this.
> Unfortunately, Slackware hasn't carried GNOME since 2005.
Not packaging GNOME is a feature, not a bug.
Why anyone would want to use such a ridiculously bloated mess is beyond me.
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson
I'm a Slacker and I have NEVER missed Gnome. Just got a new netbook and Slackware 13.1 works like a dream on it.
I friggin' HATE Debian (and it's derivatives) because of stupid things like their affinity for sym-linking EVERYTHING and goofy-shit like Enabled-Sites with httpd.
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
IMHO anyone knocking Slackware while touting some other distro exalting "real package management" is a troll at best and either never actually used Slackware or never did long enough to begin to understand the concept of "real" OR "package management". Additionally they still haven't a clue as to the price one pays for "dependency auto resolution". I'm not trying to denigrate any other distro, they all have their place with benefits and limitations, but basically there are numerous RPM based distros and a plethora of DEB based distros... and then there is Slackware, all by itself, head and shoulders above the rest - as solid as BSD and with a better license. Take your phony sadness elsewhere.
I had the floppy wrangling down to a science. I'd take over a row of stations in the 24-hour computer lab late at night, moving all but one rolling chair out of the way. Start one disk...next...next, rolling along, and by the time the last one was running the first one would be done. I had 19200 IVDM service at the apartment, so all I needed were A, AP, and N, and I'd go get the rest @ home.