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Slackware 5.0 Coming
cyan writes "It appears that Slackware is finally going to be glibc based. This was revealed today via an announcement which was sent to the slackware-announce mailing list. A directory called "slackware-current has appeared on cdrom.com, so people may take a look at what's in store if they wish. Note that this should in no way be considered "stable", it's more for testing purposes. Check out the ChangeLog.txt for details; looks promising for all us Slackware freaks ;) " It seems the Slackware folks have been quite busy recently...
This is good to hear. Despite all the crap the Slack guys have taken for sticking with libc5 for so long, I think their timing is perfect. When glibc2 first came out, a large portion of the software out there, which was all written for libc5, wouldn't compile against it without extensive tweaking. (My personal theory is that that's the reason that so many newbies (which tend to use Red Hat) are convinced that compiling is hard, but that's beside the point...)
Then we reached the point where some things were requiring glibc2, but many things still didn't compile under it, so Slack 4.0 included glibc2, but was still based on the old stable libc5. Now, however, most everything compiles under glibc2, so it's time to make the transition... and that's what Slackware's doing.
Hmmm, I like this idea! A few modifications of course. GNU utilities should be OS neutral (of course), so it should be generic enough to handle packages for non-Linux and non-GNU systems. Make it work with BSD, Solaris, etc., and you'll have a winner. Have a low-level translation layer, on top of which would be a LSB layer or a BSD layer, etc. Such a system could even be adaptable to d.f. systems like Windows.
.gpm packages to until the distros catch on. Also create a generic packager on the order of automake/autoconf (autopack?).
It needs to be generic, and it will probably need a project site to upload various
I'm already working on my own projects. Anyone out there interested in taking the ball and running with it?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
You can do it, by much the same method (hand-picking packages to install). I've installed Windows 95 on a 486 DX-33 with a 120 meg HD and 8 megs of RAM. It _crawled_, but still ran.
I can get Windows 98 down to 200 megs without too much effort. Not sure what the minimum size is.
The biggest difference that I know of is that Windows performance suffers terribly with less RAM, less disk space, and a slower machine, while Linux's doesn't (unless you're doing compiles or using processor-intensive applications or have a huge desktop).
I haven't used BSD extensively, but I suspect that it behaves similarly.
Windows 2000 is a renamed NT 5.0. Different beast from the 9x series, and more resource-hungry. I have no idea what the minimum practical installation size is for it.
This is just personal taste. Slackware is actaully very _unfriendly_ for casual users or users who don't want to have to be constantly tinkering with the guts of the system when installing or reconfiguring something. I just happen to like configuring things myself.
I'm told that Debian is also good for this, and doesn't _make_ you do this, but I haven't had a good reason to switch so far.
Hey at last!
This is one of the best distributions of Linux I have used - it was also the one that introduced me to Linux back in '96.
I remember thinking - "Hey this is really cool...but not very useful!"
It's now 1999 and I now have a home network with a 486 server running RH5.2 - Samba, Apache etc..
I also use AbiWord, netscape, Lynx, Gimp and a s***load of other USEFUL apps -
I guess one has to eat one's words!
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Anyway where was I? Oh yes..
I still think Slackware is one of the best distribs.
The thing I like about Slackware above the the other distribs is that; it is compact, very flexible installation and the authors prefer stability over 'new features'.
Hell, it is running on a 300Mb partition on my Compaq 486/25 Lite laptop and Xfree is installed!
Try doing that with Red Hat!
I dont see this moving to stable till 2.4 kernel is released this fall. Also this has been on slackware.com for weeks now as news but just monday there was a /slackware-current dir.
If I understand correctly, the main functional difference is a different format for binaries. This means that you can't link object files produced with glibc with object files produced with libc5. This doesn't matter if you're compiling everything from source code (because your compiler will give you the same binary format that the rest of your system uses), but it makes it impossible to link in libraries that you receive just as binaries (object files) that are in the wrong format.
Disclaimer: I haven't messed with the compilers in detail, so I may have missed several very large points
The whole libc5/glibc2 transition took orders of magnitude longer than it should have, thanks to the foot dragging efforts of slackware among others (Hiyah, Caldera!).
Why is this important? The next time you hear some Berst wannabe complaining about incompatibilities amongst the distributions, this is one of the big things they're talking about. Programs compiled against libc5 won't run if only glibc2 is installed, and vice versa.
I'm not suggesting that distributions jump on every bandwagon that comes along, but how many years ago was development on libc5 stopped in favor of glibc2?
This is why I support a Linux Standard Base.
Someone asked for a "Why Slackware" type advocacy thing, and here's my lame and feeble attempt at such a thing.
Let me begin saying that in 1996 I first started messing with Linux based on a couple of books, an unleased book and Linux Configuration and Installation. LC&I was written by Pat Volkerding, the creator of Slackware, and at that time at least Slack was the predominant Linux distribution.
The case to be made for Slack is quite simple really - once you learn where stuff is, you know where to find stuff. It's the old Windows versus Linux argument all over again - with Slack I can fix my system when it breaks, because I've gone through enough Pain And Suffering (tm) learning about it to know where stuff goes. Now I can make my system sit up and beg. I pity the po' fools who get themselves a copy of redhat to "mess with linux" and end up using Windows a week after because they were unable to accomplish anything with their new OS.
The case to be made for using Slack is the case to be made for using Linux.
keeping the world safe for prematurely grumpy old men for oh, about 7 years now
Slack 4.0 actually includes glibc2, it just doesn't use it for its primary libc. What it doesn't have that XMMS (which I run pretty constantly) and Mozilla (which I'm actually posting this with) require is thread-safe Xlibs. You can download and install those; it's simple. There's a handy link on the XMMS site, and you just uncompress the tarball into the Xlib directory, and you're good to go.
I'm not trying to start flames so don't consider this an invitation, but my IMPRESSION of Slackware, which I've gotten only second-hand from Slashdot and a few distrib comparison reviews, is that Slackware is a dusty old distribution with a fanatical following but it's not relevant any longer. (If that's not true - they certainly have a perception problem, but if there's something truly great about Slackware they might not give a damn about 'image'...) So what would Slackware's target audience be interested in that isn't served by Mandrake6, Caldera, SuSE or Debian -- name say 3 things that are exclusive to this distrib? What's the most recent review of the currently-shipping Slackware?