Slackware 7 Beta Out

Anonymous Coward writes "Check the current tree changelog and you'll notice that Slackware 7.0.0-pre1 beta is out. Seems it won't be too long before the next major release; now completely based on glibc2."

Comments

Re:What? No Dobbshead?

[Field Marshall Stack]

Ahem, you can use it, as long as you remember to ASK PERMISSION FIRST. The canadian guy (Bob Dean, I think his name was) was passing himself off as J. R. "Bob" Dobbs, as some sort of odd marketing stunt to get people to listen to the Media Ecology CDs...despite the fact that he had nothing to do with the Church of the SubGenius, and preached an odd doctrine that was largely at odds with...well, everything.

What Dean did with Media Ecology was the equivalent of putting GPL'ed software in a commercial release and ignoring the GPL. Very bad thing...
--
"HORSE."

Slack beta

[trelyle]

Good god, but slack was my first attempt at a Linux install. What an absolute nightmare. Is it valid to still be a bit gunshy about retying something that caused me severe emotional distress? I am real used to the Mandrake/Redhat way of doing things. Might be a good idea to broaden my experience though, and try some new flavors.

Re:Slack beta

[Raereth]

My first-ever Linux install was Slackware 3.0, and I didn't have much trouble with it. I'm now running 3.6, and personally I've found it easier to use (in some ways) than RedHat - on a friend's RH 6.0 installation, I tried for about half an hour to get it to even access the Internet through a LAN. The same thing on Slackware took me about five minutes, without prior experience. Now, if only Slackware had some sort of package manager..

--Raereth, who often gets very irritated trying to compile and install source tarballs..

Re:Slack beta

[Chainsaw]

Now, if only Slackware had some sort of package manager..

Use the pkgtools, which are easily accessible from the setup utility. Standard .tar.gz files for Slack are easy to handle this way, even for an OS/2 developer like me. Slack 3.2 was my first Linux ever, and I still prefer it over DeadHat and all other distros.

Re:Slack beta

[patrikr]

> Now, if only Slackware had some sort of package manager..

% ls -1 /sbin/*pkg*
/sbin/explodepkg
/sbin/installpkg
/sbin/makepkg
/sbin/pkgtool
/sbin/pkgtool.tty
/sbin/removepkg
/sbin/upgradepkg

--

Re:Slack beta

[schon]

Have they really made glibc as fast as libc5?
And as stable?

Odd.. I was under the impression that libc5 was slower than glibc...
(which is why benchmarks show SUSE and Redhat outperforming Slackware
and Caldera (1.3)...)

Is there anyone 'in the know' (one of the developers, perhaps?) that
can clarify this?

Long live Slackware!

Straight from the horse's mouth:

[patrikr]

Here's what Patrick Volkerding said about it in the slackware.com forum:

-----------------------------------------------
I've stayed out of this for now, but I do think I should
lend a little justification to the version number thing.

First off, I think I forgot to count some time ago. If I'd
started on 6.0 and made every release a major version (I
think that's how Linux releases are made these days,
right? ;), we would be on Slackware 47 by now. (it would
actually be in the 20s somewhere if we'd gone 1, 2, 3...)

I think it's clear that some other distributions inflated
their version numbers for marketing purposes, and I've had
to field (way too many times) the question "why isn't
yours 6.x" or worse "when will you upgrade to Linux 6.0"
which really drives home the effectiveness of this simple
trick. With the move to glibc and nearly everyone else
using 6.x now, it made sense to go to at least 6.0, just
to make it clear to people who don't know anything about
Linux that Slackware's libraries, compilers, and other
stuff are not 3 major versions behind. I thought they'd
all be using 7.0 by now, but no matter. We're at least
"one better", right? :)

Sorry if I haven't been enough of a purist about this. I
promise I won't inflate the version number again (unless
everyone else does again ;)

Pat
------------------------------------------------

--

ah, slackware....

[Anonymous Coward]

Slack was a great distribution to learn on, I remember the fun I had upgrading 3.4 to glibc (and consequently reinstalling 3.4, and upgrading again. The 2nd time i managed to not fuck it up).. but I've learned, I've prospered, and nowdays i simply don't have the time to do all of that stuff by hand. apt-get dist-upgrade has made me incredibly lazy, as well as incredibly efficient. I remember not being able to do a ton of things when I had 3.6, that really pissed me off (things like running mozilla, compiling xmms, and compiling a kernel (?!) on my laptop). Ah well, those days are long gone, I'm quite happy w/ debian. I still think every new linux user should be *required* to run slackware for at least a year, though, so they actually LEARN something.
-dilinger (who's been up for over 24 hours now)

What? No Dobbshead?

[Field Marshall Stack]

Alright, Slack doesn't come up on /. very often, but...am I the only one who thinks it'd be excruciatingly cool to have a Dobbshead logo for Slack posts? I was so disappointed by the generic tux logo on this one...
--
"HORSE."

There's only one "core" Slack guy

[Paul Crowley]

OK, that's a good reason not to use Slackware, but there are many others.

You know, it's a myth that the other distributions don't let you reach in and tinker with things. It's still allowed; it's just not always necessary.
--

Re:Version numbering

[jfunk]

SuSE did this some years ago, bu then they switched to 4.x

SuSE started at 4.2.

SuSE's YaST started at 0.42.

See a pattern? Gee, I wonder... :-)*

Re:Slackware advantages?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used both Debian and RedHat. Neither one of them even comes close to Slackware in QUALITY and STABILITY. Other distributions that jumped on the bandwagon and based releases off of the newer glibc libraries sacrificed quality and stability at the expense of their users. glibc2.07 was a "beta". glibc2.1 was the official release. glibc2.1.2 is finally reaching the point that it is stable. Is it foolish to wait for a "stable" library release or is it foolish to jump in with both feet and base a distribution off of a "beta" library release. Installing Slackware was much easier than installing either Debian or RedHat. Configuration after install was a piece of cake. Even though Slackware does not use Linuxconf or other graphical configuration utilities, their scripts do an outstanding job of helping you to set up the system. Upgrading software on Slackware is, at least in my opinion, much easier than upgrading on either Debian or Redhat, and it leaves "me" in control, not the dpkg or rpm package managers. Slackware's philosophy is "KSS" and it works. Some distributions are overly complicated because of the elaborate schemes the maintainers come up with in trying to simplify things for their users. *NIX ain't hard if you site down and read the doc's, unfortunately most people seem unwilling to do that today.