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Operating Systems Software AMD Linux

x86-64 Slackware Clone Released 207

Posted by timothy from the uniformity-in-diversity dept.
Rob_Ogilvie points out that another distribution for x86-64 (AKA AMD64) has been released: "This time it's Slamd64. Slamd64 10.1 is based off Slackware 10.1. Developer Fred Emmott ported Slackware to AMD64 in his spare time, trying to keep the distribution as close to Slackware proper as possible (even keeping binary compatibility for many existing packages). Finally x86-64 users have some real viable choices out there!"
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x86-64 Slackware Clone Released More

x86-64 Slackware Clone Released

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  • Good things are happening in the world of PC OSes. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CyricZ ( 887944 ) on Tuesday June 14, 2005 @07:22PM (#12818850)
    The past few weeks have been fantastic for PC operating system developments. Between the new Fedora release, this, the release of open source Solaris, the release of FreeBSD 5.4, Mac OS X on Intel machines, and the upcoming release of BeOS, things have really been happening at an amazing pace. We are truly coming up to a time of great innovation and change in the PC desktop/workstation landscape.
  • I've had AMD64 Gentoo running for over a year.

    • Re:Finally we have choices? (Score:5, Funny)

      by repruhsent ( 672799 ) on Tuesday June 14, 2005 @07:25PM (#12818881) Homepage Journal
      ...and it's STILL compiling!
      • :)
        I'm on package 353 of 397.
        Why did this get modded down? It was funny.
        For the record it does take 3-5 days for me to do a stage 1 install.

    • I've had AMD64 Gentoo running for over a year.

      Indeed, I've been running AMD64 Fedora 3 since it was released.

      What about the 64-Bit version of Windows XP?

      • Re:Finally we have choices? (Score:4, Informative)

        by thynk ( 653762 ) <slashdot AT thynk DOT us> on Tuesday June 14, 2005 @09:22PM (#12819689) Homepage Journal
        What about the 64-Bit version of Windows XP?

        Crap for drivers. Only been running an AMD64 for a few weeks now, so I've yet to try out the flavors of linux for it, but only ran XP64 for about an hour before formatting the drive. Doesn't do much good to run 64bit OS if you can't talk to your printer and you have to use hacked up inf files to get the on board NIC working.

        Give it a year or so to get some freak'n driver support and then give it a shot. Till then, stick with XP pro or Linux.
        • You know there's an easier way to install undecorated drivers than decorating them yourself. Disable the requirement for decoration in your registry.

          But either way so far there's little point for WinXP 64. No real apps yet and only a few wireless nic drivers. Yeah and I haven't tried to print yet.

          Hehe. Of course if it weren't for the odd game I would even have windows installed. Running a good X86-64 Distro like FC is great. 64Bit Goodness. Now if only I could only get a 64Bit Flash plugin, 64Bit versions
    • No kidding -- I'm a Gentoo user, and my first thought upon reading that was "Why is this news? All you have to do is recompile..."
  • I've been waiting for something like this. I use Slackware V10.1 and have been for years. I'll finally be able to pickup my AMD64 and run a real Linux. 8)
    • Hmm BSD init scripts are just loads of fun. Nothing like searching through one big script in hopes of finding a line of text to uncomment so you can start that special daemon on the next boot.
      • grep?

        Atleast its better than searching through a pile of seemingly random numberred symlinks....

        Jeroen
        • Symlinks that point to all kinds of scripts with conditional if, else, fi statements at that.
          • Hmm like I deal with the symlinks myself. Chkconfig does that for me. The only hassle is if I have to write a startup script myself but they are very straight forward and I rarely have to do that.

            Heck it's alot easier looking for the sendmail initscript in /etc/init.d to edit the startup than searching through one massive script.
            • "Heck it's alot easier looking for the sendmail initscript in /etc/init.d to edit the startup than searching through one massive script"

              Yeah , its real tough doing grep /etc/rc.d sendmail

              And there isn't one massive startup script , thats BSD itself you're thinking of. Perhaps you should check out how Slackware actually does it before you critiscise.
              • No there's just one for different runlevels and rc.local. I ran slackware for years. I am quite aware of how it's setup.
                • If thats your only gripe you might as well complain that theres only 1 process that carries out the functions of init. Geez.
                  • Well if you want to get into it.

                    1) How about package management? No one can tell me Slackware has good package management.

                    2) How about lack of hardware detection?

                    3) How about lack of commercial support? Yes some exists but I wouldn't be surprised if Linspire has more than slackware now.

                    4) How about commercial application support? Do you think if I install Oracle on Slackware, Oracle would actually provide support for that install?

                    5) How about the lack of good administration tools? Sure somethings like
                    • >1) How about package management? No one can tell me Slackware has good package management.

                      It uses .tgz which for me is a godsend. No farting about with irritating package management systems that don't tell you what their doing.

                      >2) How about lack of hardware detection?

                      I'll agree thats an issue for a novice but setting up the correct modules for an experienced admin isn't in issue. Besides which hardware detection has a nasty habit of going tits up on install and boot as I've seen in mandrake and r

                    • >2) How about lack of hardware detection?

                      I'll agree thats an issue for a novice but setting up the correct modules for an experienced admin isn't in issue. Besides which hardware detection has a nasty habit of going tits up on install and boot as I've seen in mandrake and redhat occasionally.

                      Hardware detection works most of the time. If necessary it can be disabled. When it does work though it really speeds up the install.


                      3) How about lack of commercial support? Yes some exists but I wouldn't be

  • Why not Debian? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Debian on AMD64 [debian.org]
    • Maybe because the release they call "stable" is actually a euphemism for "hopelessly obsolete"?

      This is my actual opinion, not a troll. I've had too many incompatibilities because one year old software was TOO NEW to work with the latest "stable" release because "stable" used libraries a few versions old.

    • Re:Why not Debian? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Man in Spandex ( 775950 ) <prsn DOT kev AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday June 14, 2005 @08:09PM (#12819172)
      Maybe because that doesn't answer the fucking question which was "Are there any 64bit version of Slackware" that many would probably be interested in. Instead you come up and say "Why not Debian".

      It's like when I ask a question about compiling a certain program's source package and then the whole thing turns into a gentoo vs the rest of the world kind of conversation.

      Why not Debian? Who ever said this was a replacement to Debian? That's what you make it seem! Some ppl will take Debian. Some ppl will take Slackware It's just more choices.

      I want to use Slackware, why not Gentoo right? Those kind of questions are blindly asked without knowing what I really want and what I don't want. That's what you just did.

      A person wants this, but you suggest that.... No, stfu. That's not what the person wants.

      There's nothing wrong with Debian! (using Debian sarge on a fileserver) Your question was simply too vague and common among the OSS community where ppl like to steer away the conversations and start defending their favorite distro/software.
      • /me slaps Man in Spandex around with a large trout!

        Stop it! There you go making sense again!

        :-)
      • What advantages does slackware have that would make other distros a no-no?
      • And don't even start with the rpm / apt crowd. It seems that every question there is answered using the same template:

        Well in all you have to do is . It's really superior in every way, so why don't you switch?

        As if you really want to switch package managers, or use code to wrap the one your distro prefers with foreign command support. Of course, these people then follow up with, "That's why I use distro X, because I don't waste time doing what you are doing!"

    • Re:Why not Debian? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by CapnGrunge ( 233552 ) on Tuesday June 14, 2005 @08:11PM (#12819189) Homepage
      • No dependencies
      • If some package is outdated, download binaries or source and compile at will.
      • No forced update of some other package I don't want/need
      • Slapt-get and RPM are optional
    • Simple. No proper support for multiarch libraries.... Apt can't handle them.

  • Forgive My Noobness But... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why is this news? Don't the big ones (SuSE, Fedora, Gentoo, etc) already support AMD64? I think SuSE 9.3 supports both AMD64 and EM64T (Intel's version of the 64 bit arch).

    I'm not trying to troll, I'm just wondering if I'm missing something? I don't know much about 64 bit.

    • Re:Forgive My Noobness But... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by eclectro ( 227083 ) on Tuesday June 14, 2005 @07:42PM (#12819004)
      Don't the big ones (SuSE, Fedora, Gentoo, etc) already support AMD64

      It's news because slackware *is* one of the big ones that has been around since pretty much the beginning of Linux.
    • You are correct, however, this is news for Slackware and 64-bit processor support. Working for a large hosting company, we get many requests for Linux operating systems that are not "the big ones", and not listed on our typical build pages. Users want an OS they are comfortable with, not just what we advertise. Thanks, Fred - a quick test install on my Opteron scratch box works as expected. (And it is Slack - not rpms or debs or ebuilds...)
    • EM64T is basically AMD64, and you can run pretty much any AMD64 stuff on EM64T. It's not really what one would call "Intel's version." IA64 (aka Itanium), on the other hand, is Intel's 64-bit architecture. It was, obviously, not such a great success.
      • From this [pcpro.co.uk] article:

        Intel was reluctant to swallow its pride and admit that AMD was defining 64-bit computing, so it announced a 64-bit instruction set of its own called Extended Memory 64-bit Technology (EM64T). Frothy name aside, EM64T is almost identical to AMD64, enabling it to run Windows XP x64. Newer Pentium 4s, such as the 600 and 800 series, support EM64T. The main difference between EM64T and AMD64 is that EM64T includes SSE3 support, which has been added to only the latest Venice core Athlon 64

    • I did no K8-specific optimisations, just generic x86_64, so it should work fine on EM64T.

  • where's the torrent (Score:2, Interesting)

    by tota ( 139982 )
    Great news indeed.
    Well done, even the site looks like slackware.com

    I've always liked slackware because it is small and simple.
    I've been using slack since 1995, then I tried all the other distros but I always go back to slack when I want something simple to build from: the CD is quick to get you to shell where you can chroot, the installation is quick and takes the minimum amount of space (why would you need >500MB for bash + ls?!! Fedora anyone?), etc
    It will definitely have a place on my x86064 systems

  • Uh.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by pherthyl ( 445706 ) on Tuesday June 14, 2005 @07:47PM (#12819042)
    This is good, but it's not like there was no choice for x86_64 before. Debian, (K)Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse, Mandriva all have 64 bit versions out.
    • Yes, but then you're still stuck with Debian, (K)Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse, or Mandriva..

    • Re:Uh.. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by lnjasdpppun ( 625899 )
      The problem is none of them are Slackware.

      I use and love Slackware because I find everything it does easy to understand and therefore easy for me to change as I need. The part I like best about Slackware is its init script setup, it's the only method I've actually come to understand from trying various other distros - and I didn't even need to RTFM to figure it out.

      Slackware is fairly basic and just gets out of my way so I can do things the way I want. Thats what I want from an OS and none of the ones y

  • not finally (Score:3, Informative)

    by __aaitqo8496 ( 231556 ) on Tuesday June 14, 2005 @07:54PM (#12819075) Journal
    In case you hadn't heard, AMD64 distros have been abailable for a while now. Want something Debian-based? Try Ubuntu Hoary [ubuntu.com], which has been out for several months now.

    ISO for AMD64 [ubuntu.com]

  • Good lord that's a lot of Trolls (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Just because someone asks why this is news? Seriously, this is adding one more distro among how many? Looks like a bunch of goofballs out there taking offense at someone questioning slashdot.

  • Mirror problems (Score:3, Informative)

    by fred87 ( 720738 ) <mail@fredemmot[ ]o.uk ['t.c' in gap]> on Tuesday June 14, 2005 @08:20PM (#12819252) Homepage
    We've been having problems with rsync timeouts and I've not been able to get hold of the admin of the primary mirror. ftp.heanet.ie/pub/slamd64/ contains the .xdelta files for final compared to RC4 - full isos should have finished in a few hours. Sorry for the delay.

  • Viable? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Finally x86-64 users have some real viable choices out there!

    Viable? In what sense is a one-man fork of what is essentially a one-man operating system viable?

    For historical reasons Slackware has a special place in the hearts of many in the Linux community, granted. And it may even be a decent choice for enthusiasts and roll-your-own professionals. But any serious enterprise would be beyond foolish to entrust their IT center to an OS developed, packaged and supported entirely at the whim of just a coup

    • Re:Viable? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Rooktoven ( 263454 )
      I for one trust it (and use it). Pat serves as the same sort of benevolent dictator as Linus does on the distribution level. He has constructed a rock solid concept that could survive him, as Linux would survive the loss of Linus.

      The point is that Pat has put together a system with a strong guiding philosophy holding it together, and as a result it has a lot of devotees who wouldn't let it go under.

      IT pros who use it utilise it do so because it's not tied to any sort of BS abstraction layer (ie dependen

    • Re:Viable? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ifwm ( 687373 )
      "But any serious enterprise would be beyond foolish to entrust their IT center to an OS developed, packaged and supported entirely at the whim of just a couple of guys with no real infrastructure behind them"

      You just described not only the foundation of Linux, but the current operating state of most OSS projects.

  • Slack FAQ (Score:3, Interesting)

    by CapnGrunge ( 233552 ) on Tuesday June 14, 2005 @08:28PM (#12819316) Homepage
    Why is this news?
    Well, it's slackware working in another architecture

    Why not Debian/*buntu/Fedora/yadda?
    I don't like [package] management getting in my way, that's why.

    It's outdated!
    Get some fresh source or search slackware-current or linuxpackages

    If I wanted to compile I'd get gentoo!
    Your choice.
  • You could also look at Gentoo as well, which has had 64 bit compatibility for a while. Course who'd want to look there for a distro who makes you compile things *gasp*
    • Gentoo really has the right idea here. They don't do "porting" or even selective patching. They write one ebuild per package and make it work for all architectures. No need to maintain multiple trees, no huge mess.

      If Gentoo had the resources to make and distribute binary packages with every combination of architecture and USE flags, it would be perfect.

      • Sounds like a project. Create a gentoo ebuild for a package which will (when it's running) connect to a central server and distribute all your binaries (by package and relevant use flags) with some form of p2p. Use checksums to verify that binaries are good (or at worst it takes multiple matching injectors to get a malformed package to look good). Add a paranoia option to let you control how many packages are actually rebuilt locally anyway to check the files match. Finally add an installer option whic
  • Looking at the build scripts, you realize that x86_64 support isn't exactly a gargantuan effort. Half of the packages even look at an environment variable to know when not to pass -march to gcc. I suspect that the only reason that Patrick himself hasn't rolled out binaries is because he doesn't have the hardware to test it.
  • "Finally ... some real viable choices"? Come on, lots of different linux distros and all three BSDs have had AMD64 support for quite some time now. How much more blatent can you make a troll, and still get your "story" accepted?

  • wha...? (Score:4, Informative)

    by KillerBob ( 217953 ) on Tuesday June 14, 2005 @09:08PM (#12819582)
    That's not a clone of Slack 10.1, it's an officially sanctionned port.

    Furthermore, Slack 10.1 will run just fine on AMD64, because AMD64, and ia64 as well, are backwards compatible and will run code intended for 32-bit processors. The difference is that the code in slamd64 is optimized for Athlon64/Opteron, a feat which is entirely doable by anybody who knows how to compile a kernel and their own software.

    Don't get me wrong. It's a great boon to people who prefer Slack and run AMD64, but that only comes in saving them the time to compile their own, but it's by no means the great saviour: I've been running Slack 10.1 on my Athlon64-based server for a while, and all I had to do was compile a kernel and recompile Apache/PHP/MySQL/Sendmail/UW-IMAP. Technically, I didn't even have to recompile those, either....

    • Re:wha...? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Rich0 ( 548339 )
      The difference is that the code in slamd64 is optimized for Athlon64/Opteron, a feat which is entirely doable by anybody who knows how to compile a kernel and their own software.

      Well, it is a little more painful than that since quite a few packages don't compile or run cleanly on AMD64 without patching.

      all I had to do was compile a kernel and recompile Apache/PHP/MySQL/Sendmail/UW-IMAP

      I notice you didn't put java anywhere on that list. I have had no end of java pains on AMD64 - half the packages sor

      • Re:wha...? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by zdzichu ( 100333 )
        don't compile or run cleanly on AMD64 without patching.

        One of the strength of Slackware (and for me, reason I stayed with it) is policy not to patch sources. Except some extreme cases, like broken glibc.
        By applying patches, Slamd64 ruined Slack :/

        • Re:wha...? (Score:2, Informative)

          by fred87 ( 720738 )
          I applied no patches which weren't required to make packages compile/run on x86_64. I do not see how this can be considered ruining slack, rather than a neccessity.
      • . For what should be the most portable language there is, it certainly gives me lots of pain...

        There's a big difference between porting java code and porting the java platform that java code runs upon: The former is (mostly) platform-neutral, the latter is the infrastructure needed to acomplish that, and it must know about platforms, so that java code doesn't have to.

    • Re:wha...? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Rob_Ogilvie ( 872621 )

      That's not a clone of Slack 10.1, it's an officially sanctionned port.

      It is a port, but it's not official.

      Furthermore, Slack 10.1 will run just fine on AMD64, because AMD64, and ia64 as well, are backwards compatible and will run code intended for 32-bit processors.

      Yes, Slack 10.1 will run fine on x86-64 boxes, but it won't take advantage of any of the 64-bit extentions OOTB (nor ever as well as slamd64). And no, IA64 is not backwards compatible and will not run code intended for 32-bit processors

  • if i wanted to build a computer with an athlon 64 processor, specifically to run some sort of x86-64 compatible linux, what motherboard, video card, sound card, etc should i get to ensure maximum compatibility?

    • Re:what's the best AMD64 hardware? (Score:4, Informative)

      by tweek ( 18111 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2005 @01:45AM (#12821015) Homepage Journal
      I bought my beast from Micronux:

      http://www.micronux.com/ [micronux.com]

      This model:

      here [micronux.com]

      It's a good system and it came with CentOS4 for x86_64 which I gave a few days before wiping and installing x86_64 gentoo.

      I've since bought an additional GB of memory to dedicate to various vmware machines for envrionment testing and some work-specific windows stuff.

      The only issues I've had with an all x86_64 system has been related to codeweavers and transgaming stuff. Oh and some issues with Flash. I spend most of time browsing with a native compiled firefox version and switching to firefox-bin under multilib when I need the non-64bit plugins.

      I even did my first stage one install in a LONG time (I normally do a stage 2 on installs for obvious time reasons) just to see how it would perform and even with just the 1GB of ram at the time, I was done in a couple of hours and running X. The system really does scream. FYI, PCI-Express in SLI mode is non-existant under linux right now but dual-head works fine.

      Micronux is a solid company and I plan on buying again from them in the future.
  • Wow, I beat Slack by a week with my homebrew "distro". If you want an engaging puzzle, try building your own install kit by hand from bits you have lying around on a working system. (For extra points try it with no network and the only removable storage being on USB.)
  • haha, slackware

    1996 called it wants its distro back

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