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Slackware 14.2 Released, Still Systemd-Free (slackware.com)
sombragris writes: Slackware, the oldest GNU/Linux distribution still in active maintenance, was released just minutes ago. Slackware is noted for being the most Unix-like of all Linux distributions. While sporting kernel 4.4.14 and GCC 5.3, other goodies include Perl 5.22.2, Python 2.7.11, Ruby 2.2.5, Subversion 1.9.4, git-2.9.0, mercurial-3.8.2, KDE 4.14.21 (KDE 4.14.3 with kdelibs-4.14.21) Xfce 4.12.1... and no systemd!
According to the ChangeLog: "The long development cycle (the Linux community has lately been living in "interesting times," as they say) is finally behind us, and we're proud to announce the release of Slackware 14.2. The new release brings many updates and modern tools, has switched from udev to eudev (no systemd), and adds well over a hundred new packages to the system. Thanks to the team, the upstream developers, the dedicated Slackware community, and everyone else who pitched in to help make this release a reality." Grab the ISOs at a mirror near you. Enjoy! The torrents page can be found here.
According to the ChangeLog: "The long development cycle (the Linux community has lately been living in "interesting times," as they say) is finally behind us, and we're proud to announce the release of Slackware 14.2. The new release brings many updates and modern tools, has switched from udev to eudev (no systemd), and adds well over a hundred new packages to the system. Thanks to the team, the upstream developers, the dedicated Slackware community, and everyone else who pitched in to help make this release a reality." Grab the ISOs at a mirror near you. Enjoy! The torrents page can be found here.
Now with Plasma 5! You can plug the stick into any machine, and it runs perfectly right out of the box, two monitors, weird audio, doesn't matter, everything works.
Once you go Slack, you never look back!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Systemd isn't mentioned anywhere in the release notes or the website...
ChangeLog: http://www.slackware.com/chang...
Eudev is more or less a fork of udev before it was absorbed by systemd. In my dealings with it, it works exactly like how udev worked before the systemd developers hijacked the project so, I would imagine it was a trivial but necessary change for Slackware.
It will be interesting to see how long Slackware can resist systemd. Even venerable projects like LFS (Linux From Scratch) seem to be leaning towards its adoption. They still provide the non-systemd book as the default but, looking at the mailing lists, I'm not sure how long it will remain the default.
lol
The first test in our automated testing process (which reviews every pull request before it's merged) is to test for "sleep"... we completely disallow it to be used... ever!
How did it get this way? Well, I'm sad to say that it was actually my fault. I have a habit when I'm debugging particularly tricky MPI code (we do massively parallel scientific simulation) to use "sleep(pid)" where "pid" is the "processor ID" or "rank" of the current MPI process. I use it to "serialize" print statements so they don't clobber each other. There are definitely other ways to achieve the same thing... but this is quick and dirty while I'm developing.
Unfortunately... I accidentally checked in code with these a couple of times. Running in serial (1 processor) it only causes a 1 second slowdown... but if you're running on 10,000 processors... well... you're going to be waiting a while!
Since it happened twice, "sleep" got the perma-ban by our devs (to save themselves from me!).
Anyway - a little off-topic... let me try to pull it back on topic. Slack was the first distro I ever loaded back in the 90s. I downloaded it to several (20ish?) 3.5" disks at my job (after school job doing tech support at a local ISP)... got them all home and tried to install it and guess what? Yep. One of those disks was corrupted. Took two more tries before I was able to get it going... but my mind was permanently BLOWN once I got it working :-)
Slackware -does- use the standard init system. Everyone -else- has been making crazy things up and doing their own thing.
Couldn't be simpler:
open /etc/inittab
# These are the default runlevels in Slackware:
# 0 = halt
# 1 = single user mode
# 2 = unused (but configured the same as runlevel 3)
# 3 = multiuser mode (default Slackware runlevel)
# 4 = X11 with KDM/GDM/XDM (session managers)
# 5 = unused (but configured the same as runlevel 3)
# 6 = reboot
# Default runlevel. (Do not set to 0 or 6)
id:4:initdefault:
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”