Slackware 12.0 Released 286
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."
Once you go Slack ... (Score:5, Informative)
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!
Slak Rules (Score:1, Informative)
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
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.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
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:Once you go Slack ... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why? (Score:2, Informative)
is not a slackware package site it's a easyes one and that should be taken down already sicne it's a trademark violation
Re:Once you go Slack ... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Slak Rules (Score:3, Informative)
Other than that, yeah Slackware is pretty fucking awesome. I gave Slack 12 (actually -current) a shot in the pre-RC stages and was pleasantly surprised. I might give this one a shot later on.
Re:Slak Rules (Score:3, Informative)
While it's got it's uses, if you're new enough to have to ask what the difference is (and there's no judgment in that; we were all new once), you probably shouldn't be using it. It won't help with the wifi drivers; they're all in the kernel and Slack uses a vanilla kernel.org kernel. Honestly, if Ubuntu doesn't support the hardware in question (it includes a few non-kosher drivers for stuff like Atheros), it probably won't run on Linux period.
Re:And I just got around to installing 11 (Score:2, Informative)
I highly recommend building confidence in the upgrade process. This way you will never have to worry about reconfiguring your systems or losing your data. There's no need to restore from backup and there's no need for your system to be down for more than a few minutes.
I don't know whether you do it or not but you should consider keeping a text log or a list or something of configuration changes in case you ever need to do it again. Mine is about 20 pages long but that's because I've customized or installed just about everything in creation at one time or another
Re:Why? (Score:2, Informative)
They provide tested scripts to roll your own packages. So you know what you're getting into and that it will work with your individual Slackware installation. They've worked very hard to prepare for Slackware 12. I think they were the first, in fact, to be ready for Slack 12.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
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:Slak Rules (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cleaning out my garage... (Score:1, Informative)
Patrick's sense of humor adds a nice touch to a great distro.
Re:Slackware... ironic that it's too much effort (Score:4, Informative)
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.
I used Slackware once. (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not ideal for servers (Score:2, Informative)
>Another gripe about Slackware is the lack of large file support. Unbelievable as it may sound, Slackware does not yet fully support
>large (>2GB) files.
What do you mean, "doesn't support"? I'm running slackware 12.0rc2 (installed just a few days ago, it figures) and any out-of-the-box application handles any size file I throw at it. What's the context for your claim?
Re:Not ideal for servers (Score:2, Informative)
Shameless self-promotion (Score:5, Informative)
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:
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
Re:Slak Rules (Score:3, Informative)
You're free to use Debian all you want, just don't EVER go around telling everyone else what they should use.
Re:Macs (Score:2, Informative)
i found a link to a howto the other day: http://macbook.mared.com/linux/ [mared.com] and it looks like it didn't need too much tweaking.
i inherited a G4 the other day and tried to install slackintosh on it but it wasn't having it. not sure why yet.
Re:Once you go Slack ... (Score:3, Informative)
Slackware is not for them, and it's not Slackware's fault.
Anyone that says Slackware is the best is right, and others that say Slackware are inadequate, they are right too.
To each it's own.
Re:Am I the only one? (Score:3, Informative)
3.5
3.6
4.0
7.0
7.1
8.0
8.1
9.0
9.1
10.0
10.1
10.2
11.0
12.0
(I don't know how many releases there were before 3.5.)