Slackware 12.0 Released

Matt writes "Straight from our good friend and colleague in the fight for quality distributions, Mr. Patrick Volkerding, comes a brand-new and eagerly-awaited release of Slackware, version 12. HAL automount, KDE 3.5.7 and XFCE 4.4.1, Xorg 7.2, 2.6 kernels as far as the eye can see, oodles of updated applications and utilities, and hardware support for just about anything under the sun. Get it here. Enjoy! I know I will."

Why?

Slack is great for reasons other than this..

Slack's great for setting up tight servers in which you know every program running and where it's at.
Its also go for when you know how to set up a speed-server in which you need it up in 20 minutes.

If you want to change anything past what's on the CD, go get the source for each program it requires. There's soo much time wasted on that... if you can find the sources for that specific module..

Go Debian/Ubuntu. I like my package archives.

Re:Why?

Slackware Package websites:
www.linuxpackages.net
www.slackware-current.net
(There are more, but these are easy to remember.)

They're very nice for any omissions and/or upgrades between release versions.

Re:Why?

Slapt-get install ... too hard for you?

Yes, when it does not have what I want. Which is far too often.

Where Debian (and Ubuntu) "win" on the desktop is not because they have the best package manager tools, its because they have the most packages. I originally switched to Ubuntu back in 2004 because it was the only Linux distro (besides Debian unstable of course) that had a program I really wanted (bit tornado) in its package repository. Thanks to this huge repository and Ubuntu, I have gotten EVERY linux program I have wanted over the past three years without touching a complier. Heck, I haven't even had a compiler installed in the last year.

I know that ruins the effect of Linux for some, but compiling programs and chasing dependencies is the worst part of the OS for me (and other like minded desktop users). Each to their own...

Re:Not ideal for servers

$ cd
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=8G bs=1048576 count=8192

I dare you to tell me that command failed on your system, with space remaining on your partition containing /home.

Am I the only one?

It is a bit hard to jump back into Slackware... The long hiatus a while back left me seeking other distros which I have stayed loyal to.

Re:Am I the only one?

> It is a bit hard to jump back into Slackware... The long hiatus a while back left me seeking other distros which I have stayed loyal to.

No, you're probably not the only one. However, that opinion is the opposite as that of Jason1729 below, who states he gave it up due to too many updates and fixes, and he's probably not the only one to feel that way either. Between the two, Patrick is probably running at pretty much the right speed:

From: Patrick J. Volkerding ([e-mail])
      Subject: ANNOUNCE: Slackware Linux 1.00
      Newsgroups: comp.os.linux
      Date: 1993-07-16 17:21:20 PST

  The Slackware Linux distribution (v. 1.00) is now available for
  anonymous FTP.....

12 versions in 14 years, plus revisions between. All under his guidance. Most would have abandoned the effort sooner and with fewer releases, and probably due to doing so many in that time. Hell, most would have given up rather than rewrite it all in order to switch libraries.

Re:Am I the only one?

Oh my lord, did you just end a sentence with a preposition?

Once you go Slack ...

Once you go Slack, you never go back!

Well that used to be my motto, at least for my servers. But I really just got tired of having to compile things that I could not get with slackpkg or slapt. I have switched to Debian for my servers I alleviated my headaches with compiling apps (those not included or available). Mind you if you needed something that WAS available with slackpkg or slapt then it was a great system. And even still a better system to have a locked down tight server. I would rank it up there with Gentoo in certain aspects (of course not installation).

Since I will probably quest to install Slack again someday, does anyone know if it comes with a GUI installer yet? I have not installed since Slack 10 so maybe my question is obviously dated, but it is a valid one at that!

Noooooooooo!!! Not tonight!

I have work to do tonight! Don't make me choose between that and upgrading to 12.0!

Slak Rules

Always.

  Just tried to install the Fiesty Fawn thingy. It goes in alright but I need to be root to set the puppy up. I refuse to be crippled by some piece of .... that wants to protect me from myself. I refuse to put in my user password every damn time I want to do anything.

  It's easy to fix. Just crank in slak once again, over top of the toy.

  We'll have 12 in Slamd64 (64 bit slak) soon.

Slackware... ironic that it's too much effort

The problem with slackware i found was i had to find and compile every single stupid dependency out there. Some people might find it "l33t" but i would suggest they haven't had enough experience with that kind of crud to be completely over it.

if it still lacks a ports or packaging system that allows easy to update packages and conflict resolution, it's not worth the time.

Re:Slackware... ironic that it's too much effort

That isn't unique to Slackware by any measure. Even Debian, with its fat 14-CD install set, can't include everything. You are more likely to find what you need in a Debian package, but once you step outside the repository, it's tough going. With Slack's simpler layout and simpler package tools, at least you have a chance when rolling your own.

AFAICT, there is no silver bullet, only trade-offs. Even Windows will get hamstrung by dependencies if you stray too far from the mainstream, though commercial Windows software often packages tons of OS updates with it, solving your dependency problems but often breaking previous software installs. Debian's repository is a walled garden, and they try to mitigate the pain of the walls by making the garden really, really big. Slackware is all open, but that leaves you on your own sometimes. RPM-type distros are somewhere in-between. Choose distro most suited for your needs. If, like me, you want to do lots of oddball stuff, automated package managers create more problems than they solve. But if you can live comfortably without ever installing things outside the repository, then Debian is for you.

Cleaning out my garage...

Cleaning out my garage a week or two ago I was going through an old box and ended up tossing a set of Slackware A floppies... That was such a refreshing change from downloading a boot disk and bootstrapping a system starting with compiling GCC.

I know its only peripherally related to the article, but man. V12 of Slackware? Time has flown, and things sure have changed.

And I just got around to installing 11

To my new hardware! At least I was still burning it in and hadnt put too much into configuring it yet. Time to flush and reload once again!

tm

I'm sorry...

but I thought Patrick was dying?

**duck**

Seriously though, anyone know?

Still too much work?

I used slackware on my desktop for many years (I started with 2.3 and kernel 1.0.8). A few years ago I decided it was just too much trouble, between regularly updating the kernal for security patchs (involving recompiling, redoing lilo, etc) and other system maintence, I was spending more time administering my system than using it.

Are things that different with linux now? (I'm not bashing slackware here, I tried many distros and always found slackware to be the best)

Version 12, wow.... I remember Slack in Dr. Dobbs.

Back then, they touted Linux as having 50,000 users!

Timing is everything.

*Sigh* Right when I get Gentoo running on my desktop too. I think I'm just gonna give slackware it's own HDD this time. Although I may need to wait to upgrade my desktop until the nVidia driver updates. I'd install on my laptop, but I just got all of the drivers (networking aside) working right. Perhaps my server (running Ubuntu 6.06) is candidate for Slackware?

Just in time for X-Day

Praise "Bob".

DVD and CD sets are still on pre-order :(

And yes, I always make a point by buying it, not downloading :P

Slack Vs. Other Distro

If you learn Ubuntu, you know Ubuntu. If you learn Slackware, you know Linux.

I used Slackware once.

Really, it was great. I even submitted the Slackware 11 release story. I got turned to it right when 10 came out because I wanted to try Linux. The problem was, I got tired of spending hours configuring everything. For example, getting everything ACPI-related on my laptop was possible, but getting something like the lid to work was a real pain because I had to A) figure out what was wrong (which would entail finding people with similar problems usually with DISsimilar distros), B) find the necessary software to make it work, if applicable, and C) configure it, sometimes with trial and error, so that it did work. So, really getting nice, modern features working was sometimes unbearable. This is why I switched over to CentOS, at least for the time being: it's 100% RedHat compatible, and I get the ease of using a distro that's more or less popular. If something doesn't work, I get the benefit of help from either CentOS or RedHat (not to mention I can use RedHat and maybe Fedora packages, which can help for some obscure tools and proprietary packages like fglrx).

Slackware has a plus side, though: it's easy to diagnose problems manually. If there was a bad driver, for example, it would usually dump to dmesg or some other log, without any filtering. There also were next to no distro-specific software and settings to get in the way of problem solving. If you had a problem, it was solvable with generic instructions (e.g. RedHat does it this way and Gentoo that way, etc).

Now that 12's out with Xorg 11 7.1, I might pick it up for a bit again.

Macs

Does anyone know how Slackware performs on Mac hardware?

Slackware rulez :)

This is BIG news for Slackware fans, and Pat did a great job as allways... Kernel 2.6.21.5 by default, latest KDE, Xorg 7.2, Compiz, Apache 2.2.4, PHP 5, HAL and Dbus, udev, gcc-4.1.2, and many other great software. Updated versions of the Slackware package management tools make it easy to add, remove, upgrade, and make your own Slackware packages. Who thought that we will see Compiz and HAL in Slackware? :) due to its conservatorism over the years.

Shameless self-promotion

First off, excuse me if I'm going a bit off-topic here. While the Slackware team was preparing version 12.0 I worked on a new package/update manager for Slackware, called SlackRoll [sourceforge.net]. I can't think of a better place to mention it than the Slackware 12.0 announcement thread in Slashdot, because it's probably going to be read by hundreds if not thousands of Slackware users.

One of the defining points of Slackware is the small set of official packages it features. On top of that, the native package management tools don't track depencencies and don't have the notion of remote repositories. All together, this doesn't adapt very well to users who want to try new software all the time and spend their days installing and removing packages. Doing that is hard with a vanilla Slackware, so people have created tools like swaret or slapt-get to simplify the process and be able to use remote repositories like the one at linuxpackages.net and similar, where they can download many unofficial packages that sometimes include dependency information slapt-get can use. I don't think that's "right". Let me explain. It's cool that Slackware is flexible enough to let you do that, but your system ends up in a very chaotic state after some time, in my experience (specially if you use slackware-current instead of slackware-stable). You can manage your system that way if you want, and maybe you're careful enough to do it, but it's very hard. That type of users would probably be happier with Arch, Gentoo or even Debian (I never understood the rivalry between Slackware and Debian; I've used both and both are great in their styles).

Patrick Volkerding probably thinks that way too, because he doesn't include those tools in Slackware. If I recall correctly, swaret was included for some time but in the end it was removed. He includes, however, a tool called slackpkg, which is clearly targetted at more "classic" Slackware users, because it lets you use one official mirror and manage systems composed of official packages for the most part, and includes some mechanisms to let you have some custom packages without being a headache (maybe downloaded from linuxpakages.net or slacky.eu or built with your own slackbuild scripts that you can also download from sites like slackbuilds.org). The problem is that slackpkg is slow (it's a big shell script), and doesn't let you track many corner events that happen frequently in slackware-current, so that's the starting point of slackroll.

Think of it like slackpkg on steroids. I specifically designed it to detect situations which are frequent in slackware-current, but it can also be used for slackware-stable without any problems. By design, it can:

• Detect packages being added to the remote tree.
• Detect upgrades and reverts.
• Detect packages being deleted from the remote tree.
• Give you the chance of choosing which package version to install if there are several available (main, extra, testing, etc).
• Be told which packages are not official.
• Detect when an unofficial package gets an official version.
• Detect when a package with a custom build is removed from the remote tree.

And more stuff. Like I said, slackpkg on steroids. It's much faster, uses less bandwidth, detects more events and it's probably more flexible. I'm pretty satisfied with the result, so I wanted to invite people to read the program's webpage and try it if you think you fall into the target audience. It would be fine if I was the only user, but more eyes mean less bugs and I think it's always a shame when you create a tool which you are proud of and SourceForge only shows 20 downloads because people do not actually know it exists. Its main problem is that the initial setup may be more complex than usual and you need to read a bit more to know how it works. Howev

Of course there's a new version

because I just installed 11.0 last friday and spent a while customizing it on this decTOP/PIC (366MHz with no DMA support in the default kernel takes a while to compile linux 2.6)

slackware experience again!

Thanks to Patrick and his helpers! Just got least expensive, but well equipped, Duo Core iMac last weekend with partition awaiting for some nice linux distro: and here you are! Except for SuSE (with other benefits of Linux world), somehow other distros did not stick with me: absolutely do not like Gnome UI experience, so those well meant distros, basing on it, never impressed. But slackware was always fun of learning or recalling what contemporary linux distro is made of. Thanks again!

What about Patrick's health, really? Couldn't find quickly how well he turned out with those former problems?

Ah, Slackware.

I'm working for a company that had Slackware as its primary server OS. Until I showed how much time it took to operate and maintain.

Slackware is great for many things - single-purpose machines, getting that old P1 running, etc. It has a few major flaws that make it unusable in businessland:

1: too #$%) hard for a new admin. It requires a lot of arcane skills to get set up properly - skills that don't come cheap, and are hard to find in the marketplace.

2: No dependency management. Debian- and RH-based distros have had dependency tracking for ages, and the capabilities of up2date, yum, and apt-get are far in advance of what you can do with any slackware package management system. Plus, there is literally nothing in Slackware that matches RHN.

3: Proprietary software. Although with enough hacking, you can get a lot of it to run on Slack, the provider will not give you any support. And without that, you're hosed. We've ended up using RHEL on a Websense box because they would not recognize a bug that showed up in CentOS. You know what? The bug went away on RHEL.

Given all that, I still like Slackware as a Swiss Army knife-type distro that I can use for things where I don't have to maintain it too much. It runs on just about anything, and can be slimmed down far further than any other distro. I just can't justify businesswise the amount of labor it takes to maintain, when we are short on skilled *nix admins anyway.

12

12. For when 11 just isn't enough.

Slackware was fine for 1990s desktop hardware

...when all you had to worry about when setting up the kernel/modules was what type of hard drive you had, any serial and parallel ports and a few other subdry components such as a zip drive.

These days you have all sorts of wierd and wonderful USB devices which people expect to be recognised when they get plugged in , and not have to sudo to load the module manually , plus laptops have various different bits and pieces such as battery monitors , lid buttons and on and on.

Yes , you *can* get all this to work in Slack , but boy is it painful. Slackware is fine for vanilla servers sitting in a cupboard using bog standard hardware , but for anything slightly exotic , forget it. Life is just too short.

Praise "Bob"!

For, the SubGenius must have SLACK!

Thanks Again, Patrick! =)

I may be one of the few people who still appreciate Slackware, and wouldn't really change much about it, despite the differences between it and other distros. Those differences are what sets it apart! (imo)

Cheers

Whew! Thank God!!

Glad that he overcame that acute health crisis [slashdot.org]. That likely was just a case of tonsil stones [wikipedia.org]. Roffles!!!

Yes, but does it have compiz and XGL?

Slackware is still the one and only distro were setting XGL working is a MAJOR bitch.

I hope this has been fixed.

Yes, but... does it support

iphone?

Re:no ZFS, lame

As new files are added/edited, each zone has their own copy, but 90% of the files are shared, so we avoid wasting disk space. If we could do that with UML or Xen, we would. But we can't, so we don't.

Do it exactly the same way. Install your master VM to an LV. Take [a] snapshot(s) of the LV. Use the snapshot(s) for your new VMs.

(With that said, I believe snapshots in LVM have a much greater overhead than they do in ZFS.)

Re:*BSD is Dying

Ah crap. And I just bought a copy of FreeBSD 6 Unleashed yesterday.

Re:Old Time Rock N' Roll

Don't you mean "I don't feel superior to lesser nerds if I don't use the console 100% of the time and compile everything myself"? :)

Re:your living in the past

Nah... I prefer hardcore than softcore...

Blame Creative.

You won't be using Linux anytime soon. Q3 2007 at earliest.

http://opensource.creative.com/soundcard.html [creative.com]

X-Fi series
The X-Fi series of products are not supported under Linux. (Yet)
Closed-source drivers will be available for the X-Fi series of sound cards.
It looks like the first public Beta will be available end calendar Q3 or early calendar Q4.

Re:your living in the past

Let me precede my comment with a disclaimer: I am a Gentoo user.

I haven't yet tried Slackware, though from what I've seen and read, it is a very nice distro. And aside from the attitude towards compiling, it seems pretty similar to Gentoo in the underlying philosophy.

All that being said, I fail to see the point of your post. Most people would rather not install every single thing by compiling it first, which is the default method on Gentoo as well as Gentoo's most distinctive feature.
Furthermore, such fanboyish trolling in a discussion about another distro is... well... fanboyish trolling.
And apparently, I have just fed you.

Well, never mind. But I've just come to wonder: was there even an article here when Gentoo 2007.0 came out? I know I haven't seen one - actually, I don't recall ever seeing an article about a new Gentoo release - but I do see Slackware articles.

It's probably just that Slackware has a better marketing team ;)

Re:Not flame bait, just an observation..

Agreed.