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Slackware 13.0 Released 252

willy everlearn and several other readers let us know that Slackware 13.0 is out. "Wed Aug 26 10:00:38 CDT 2009: Slackware 13.0 x86_64 is released as stable! Thanks to everyone who helped make this release possible — see the RELEASE_NOTES for the credits. The ISOs are off to the replicator. This time it will be a 6 CD-ROM 32-bit set and a dual-sided 32-bit/64-bit x86/x86_64 DVD. We're taking pre-orders now at store.slackware.com. Please consider picking up a copy to help support the project. Once again, thanks to the entire Slackware community for all the help testing and fixing things and offering suggestions during this development cycle. As always, have fun and enjoy!"
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Slackware 13.0 Released

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  • good job (Score:4, Informative)

    by muckracer ( 1204794 ) on Friday August 28, 2009 @08:25AM (#29229851)

    This release is, IMHO, a real milestone for Slackware. A major version jump in the desktop, a new package format, a 64-bit version, ext4, 2.6.29/30 kernels with all their goodies...wow, it's come a long way. Thanks to Pat and all other Slack'ers for putting it all together. Waiting eagerly for my subscription to arrive (yes, I put my money where my mouth is and Slackware is well worth the support). :-)

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Noryungi ( 70322 )

      Likewise: great job to the Slackware crew, and I am waiting for my CDs to arrive!

  • KDE 4.2 still isn't really ready for primetime rollout - you just need to fiddle with it too much to get some things to work and with slackware you'll be spending enough time fiddling with the core OS as it is. Why didn't patrick stick with 3.5 and leave 4.2 as an option?

    • I file bugs on KDE and have been concentrating on KDE 3 -> KDE 4 issues lately. Please tell me what is preventing you from upgrading to KDE 4, or what is keeping you on KDE 3, and we will file the bugs and get it worked out. Thanks!

      You can either reply here, email me at gmail with the same username as here, or use this form:
      http://dotancohen.com/eng/message.php [dotancohen.com]

  • by chill ( 34294 )

    Did Patrick ever get over his irrational hatred of PAM and HAL? Or are these still left as an exercise for the student?

    • by Viol8 ( 599362 )

      PAM can be a PITA. One machine I used had its /var/log directory wiped. Because some file in there (I forget whichi - probably messages or syslog) was now missing PAM couldn't write to it and consequently failed every single login. A pretty moronic coding error IMO.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by petrus4 ( 213815 )

      Did Patrick ever get over his irrational hatred of PAM and HAL? Or are these still left as an exercise for the student?

      There's nothing irrational about HAL hatred, at all. Have you seen some of the error messages the HAL/Dbus combo can produce on Ubuntu?

      Irrespective of whether or not HAL/Dbus are evil, however, the simple fact is that they're also unnecessary. I don't understand for the life of me why people don't simply use udev rules and the kernel's own hardware notification system for hotpluggable har

      • by Zashi ( 992673 )
        This was beautiful. I <3 you.
      • Re:So... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by chill ( 34294 ) on Friday August 28, 2009 @12:13PM (#29232963) Journal

        Sorry, no.

        My philosophy is do it the long, hard, manual way once so you learn it, then automate it with the computer. The same reason I'm using network manager instead of writing WPA-supplicant rules by hand; or using IKE instead of writing IPSec SPAs and SPIs by hand.

        Been there, done that, got the t-shirt, now I want to be able to move on and do something else while having the computer handle the tedious details.

        Nice rant, though.

  • "To use a generic kernel you'll need to build an initrd to load your filesystem module and possibly your drive controller or other drivers needed at boot time"

    Sorry guys , this is 2009. If the only options to get my devices running is some huge BLOB of a kernel or having to manually hack together an initrd I think I'll stick with other distributions. Installing a distribution is enough work as it is these days without having to worry about fundamentals such as getting the kernel to boot in the first place.

    • by Gothmolly ( 148874 ) on Friday August 28, 2009 @09:44AM (#29230847)

      You know that "Ubuntu" is Swahili for "too lazy to install Slackware" right ?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      so recompile with your root fs built into the kernel. that's probably what most slackware users do anyway. leaving code required to boot as modules is a headache waiting to happen. if you don't want do build a custom kernel, you can always stick with the huge kernel used for installation
    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      I think the statement about the generic kernel only refers to installation on nonstandard drives (eg. dmraid with various fakeRAIDs). If you stay in the realm of /dev/hd# /dev/sd# and common controllers interfaces like Compaq Smart Array for instance, you won't need an initrd to boot your kernel.

      And if you find the Slackware way (which, IMO is the most generic approach) cumbersome, pray explain how to boot an nVidia MediaShield fakeRAID RAID5 partition without an initrd for instance, as I would be very in
    • by petrus4 ( 213815 )

      "To use a generic kernel you'll need to build an initrd to load your filesystem module and possibly your drive controller or other drivers needed at boot time"

      You'll note the word, "generic," there. "Generic," implies that the kernel is attempting to load drivers for everything including the kitchen sink, because the user hasn't recompiled a kernel with support for only the specific hardware he actually owns in his machine.

      Compile a kernel to support only the devices you've got, and don't load anything as

      • by Viol8 ( 599362 )

        Last time I looked at /proc/config.gz for a 2.6 kernel it had over 3000 options. I have better things to do with my life these days I'm afraid. 2.4 kernel building at home was just about do-able. 2.6 is best left to people who do it as a job.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • As elitist as that sounds, its pretty accurate. Its not for casual linux users. If you want to know about it, there are plenty of other resources online. But you really shouldn't expect Ubuntu/fedora level ease of installation/configuration/upgrading, which has its pluses and minuses. Basically, the way I've always explained it to others is that slackware is for slackers. People who want to understand what and how they are doing before they actually do it. The kind of people that almost perversely enjoy get
      • by petrus4 ( 213815 ) on Friday August 28, 2009 @10:18AM (#29231347) Homepage Journal

        Quite frankly, if you don't know what it is, then you're not ready for it, so it doesn't matter.

        I've got mod points again, but they never get spent, because I consider it to be a sign of greater integrity, to refute posts I disagree with, rather than simply down modding them.

        Slackware was my first Linux distribution, during the mid 1990s. At the time, I'd only previously had exposure to UNIX at all via an ISP's FreeBSD shell account, and so I barely knew what it was at all.

        A newcomer who is willing to learn is actually going to be far better off with Slack than with Ubuntu or Debian.

        There is a much greater degree of simplicity within Slackware's overall design. Less complexity means less potential opportunities for things to break due to random, uncontrolled interactions of the various parts, and even more importantly, it also means that when something does break, it's a lot easier to find the source of the problem and fix it.

        Using a system like Slackware is also going to give a user good mental habits as well, and teach them how to recognise a genuinely sound distribution design when they see one. Debian's greatest problem isn't so much that it's a terrible design, but more that the people who design and use it actually think that it's great.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by muckracer ( 1204794 )

      > Explain what slackware is

      It's a Linux distribution. There are many other Linux distributions, but this one is Slackware! :-)

    • by fm6 ( 162816 )

      Is there such a reason? Beyond simple inertia. Slackware was maybe the first Linux distro to be widely adopted. I imagine that most of its users keep using it simply because it's not worth their trouble to switch to a more modern distro.

      It's a side project that wasn't meant to be a big deal, but now has lockin and is the main claim to fame of its inventor. Sort of like MS-DOS. (Ducks.)

  • by farrellj ( 563 ) *

    Finally!

    I admit, I started with SLS Linux, out of which Slackware grew (what do you mean you need 93 3.5" Floppies!?!?!)...and although I try lots of different distros, I keep on coming back to Slackware. Thanks to Patrick and his crew for all the work over the years!

    ttyl
              Farrell

    • 93??? I remember the first time I tried Linux, I had way less floppies than that. I remember they were labeled B1, B2, N1, N1, N3, D1, etc. for base, networking, development, etc. Extracted them from a tarball off a tape that was snail-mailed across the country to my school's data center 'cause the entire campus was served by a single 56k CSU/DSU at the time and ftping would have swamped the connection for a year and a day. Then some of us brought our PCs to the data center to make the floppies because

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