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."

Am I the only one?

[wawannem]

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.

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

[timmarhy]

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:Why?

[PenGun]

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

  Oh well.

  Archives, you know we all can get at em'. You do understand there are tools to use your debby stuff elsewhere deb2targz being just one. What's a kernel structure and why just 2? We tend to roll our own kernels mostly.

Re:Am I the only one?

[DynaSoar]

> 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.

Slack Vs. Other Distro

[deimios666]

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

Re:Slak Rules

[big_groo]

What this guy is trying to say is that with Slack, you're going to have to use a terminal. Start with slack, get used to the terminal. You'll learn. You'll thank that random guy on /. that said 'Get used to the terminal'. Ubuntu is all GUI tools. When those fail (and they do), you have to go to the terminal anyway.

Yes, I meant to say 'terminal' several times in this post. Do you see a theme here? Welcome to Linux. (If this is your first Linux distro, try Slack, *then* try the others. You'll be back.)

Re:Slack Vs. Other Distro

[fractoid]

Any time I have to spend f$%king with my OS instead of playing games, reading web pages, checking and answering my email is wasted. It's this spending-time-on-your-OS-is-your-ultimate-goal mentality that's holding Linux back from more mainstream adoption. The perfect OS would 'just work', let me run applications, and not require my attention in any way.

Re:Not ideal for servers

[ChipMonk]

$ 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.

Re:Slak Rules

[Anonymous Coward]

Trying to jump straight into it (without basic familiarity with the Linux kernel and environment) will be unnecessarily hard.

Or very educational, depending on just how stubborn you are. *wink*

Ah, Slackware.

[jnelson4765]

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.

Re:Once you go Slack ...

[m3gatr0nX]

Once you go Slack, you never go back!

I'd have to agree with that statement. I've gotten too used to the Slack way of doing things and really appreciate its simplicity and the fact that I can keep it nice and lightweight. Ubuntu / Fedora / Suse are all nice, but I find them way too bloated for my needs on the desktop and as a server. Slack as a server works best. Sure you'll have to compile a lot of packages from source, but that's the only way you can be sure the software is configured correctly for your needs.

Re:Slak Rules

[Skrynesaver]

$ cp /bin/sh sh $ sudo chown root sh $ sudo chmod 4755 sh

Get thee from my sight, if having no root user by default is supposed to be secure, having a suid shell to solve resultant problems of inconvenience is without doubt the most hideous idea I've ever seen

Please reply that this was an elegant piss take, please