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!"
Re:Purpose (Score:5, Insightful)
Slackware is for people who don't understand packages? I think you have that one backwards mate.
Anyone who uses Slackware regularly understands much more about Linux than your average debian / ubuntu user, and is certainly not going to be burned by the "complexity" of a package management system. This is because much of the configuration is manual.
It's often quoted... if you use Ubuntu, you'll learn Ubuntu. If you use Slackware, you'll learn Linux.
I've been using Slackware since '96, and I continue to use it in various capacities today. Installing Slackware and playing with it, writing programs for it, was seriously the best thing I ever did for my knowledge of computers and for Unix environments. I have skills that far surpass any of my co-workers or friends, and have often been the only one that could sort out issues with any sort of Unix environment.
Thanks Pat for the hard work.
Re:Overweight (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Purpose (Score:5, Insightful)
You can expect to get yourself into distro wars, but arguing from the Slackware side rather than Ubuntu side.
There are some other, more minor, technical differences but that is the main thing.
Re:good job (Score:3, Insightful)
Likewise: great job to the Slackware crew, and I am waiting for my CDs to arrive!
Re:Purpose (Score:5, Insightful)
I was actually just thinking about this. Slackware is *just like* LFS in its simplicity. This is a good thing for those who desire it. Slackware is an LFS system that has been tested for stability and provides a simple, easy for an admin to takeover package management system. Slapt-get provides higher level package management for those who desire it--including support for dependency resolution.
Believe it or not, not everyone wants to be met with GUI greeters, setup wizards, beginner-oriented defaults, and enabled-by-default automatic updates.
Re:Purpose (Score:5, Insightful)
Its purpose is to be an absolute garbage, unpolished Linux distribution. You may as well LFS.
And this "absolute garbage, unpolished" distribution also happen to be the oldest still-existing distribution in the Linux world. Surprising, that.
Hmmmm... Maybe they are doing something right, after all? Like, perhaps, being stable, complete and a joy to work with?
As opposed to, say, the RPM-Hell, bugged-to-the-bone, over-bloated and absolutely nonsensical but politically correct other distribution(s)?
Just a thought for you...
Re:Purpose (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Purpose (Score:5, Insightful)
what are the advantages of using Slackware? What can I expect?
More hands on experience with the guts of a running Linux system instead of hands on experience with a package manager? That may or may not be an advantage for your particular application but it's a nice option to have.
Slackware was the first Linux distro I ever tried and I've remained partial to it ever since. My introduction to Linux came in the form of a $1.99 CD (hard to download the distro in the dialup era) that had Slackware, Debian and Red Hat on it. I picked Slackware because it had the coolest sounding name. I think it was to my long term benefit because I got a lot of experience with the nuts and bolts of Linux through sheer necessity. I don't know as if that would have happened if I had picked one of the other two.
I run Slackware for my servers at work and my firewall/nat/misc server at home. I spend more time setting it up but the knowledge of what's going on and the level of customization that I can achieve makes it worthwhile, at least IMHO.
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Re:Much as I like Slackware... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Suggestion for slackware team (Score:3, Insightful)
> Explain what slackware is
It's a Linux distribution. There are many other Linux distributions, but this one is Slackware! :-)
Re:So... (Score:2, Insightful)
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 hardware. Is it because HAL apparently comes with a database of most hotpluggable software as well, so you poor babies don't have to look up device names in order to write said udev rules?
The bottom line is that most of you want to be morons. You crave indolence, stupidity, and ignorance. You want whatever system you're using to feed you, burp you, and change your nappies...and then, as often as not, you're the same people who show up in the Ubuntu forums crying about how your machine won't function, and simply stops at a black screen.
Slackware doesn't facilitate wilful ignorance, stupidity, or laziness. You want something that does, and so Slackware gets abused whenever it is mentioned in front of you.
It isn't Slackware that's the problem; it's your desperate craving to avoid having to think.
Re:Games (Score:3, Insightful)
If you lost, that's to say, if you set the refresh rate above what you monitor could take, you got a smoking monitor.
I've often thought it; Jim Gettys needs to change his name to Dr. Frankenstein. ;)
Re:Humor Impaired (Score:1, Insightful)
You don't know much about VGA hardware, or even XF86 (and similar) modelines, do you?
You don't actually control refresh rate, or horizontal scan rate; you set a dot-clock. On modern cards, there's a programmable clock that is directly set to the desired rate, but on old cards, you had 4 or more discrete clocks controlled by, among other things, one or several crystals.
Then you output a hsync pulse every certain number of dot-clock cycles; this establishes your hfreq, but _only_ in terms of your dot-clock. And a vsync, of course, comes every so many hsyncs, deriving refresh rate.
So if you tell your X server that dotclock 3 is 20 MHz, when it's really 40 MHz, then your defined modeline with 60 Hz will actually be 120 Hz. Which allegedly may smoke some monitors.
Now, AFAIK, the real danger has nothing to do with refresh rate; I believe some monitors are vulnerable to burning up from excessive horizontal scan, but refresh rate seems ridiculous. And practically any multi-sync, and some fixed-freq monitors, fail nicely, so nobody's really needed to worry for a decade or two.
Re:Purpose (Score:3, Insightful)
A BSD style init script system rather then a SYSV one. It's easier to grok, IMO.
disclaimer: when i graduated college, i switched to ubuntu, which is much easier to break when you muck around with init scripts and packages and such, but requires much less mucking. Slackware still holds a special place in my heart, though.
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Re:Yay! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Purpose (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not fond of Slackware in a production environment because upgrading and package maintenance is a pain in the ass. Instead of typing (for example) rpm -q *program*, you have to teach people how to determine which binary version is present, where it is
$ ls /var/log/packages/*mysql*
$ whereis mysql
and coach them in installing new ones
# installpkg package.tgz|tbz|txz
and making sure the dependencies are okay
now finally something true ;)
nothing will prevent you from installing a new package to discover that it doesn't run because of some missing library except your experience and trial & error.
I'm not terribly fond of "off the shelf" rpms, but it's easy to make my own
it's also easy to create slackware packages
and then put them in my own repository, and push them out to every machine that needs one. It's a simple and effective infrastructure, and one that can be grasped by minions who are not capable of scratch building binaries with weird dependencies.
first, true - slackware has no official repositry management, although there are several solutions included in latest versions. i personally haven't tried them as i rely on my own simple scripts...
second, if minions can't grasp building binaries on slackware, they won't be able to create those rpm packages as well. on slackware you have one large package, while on other distros you would need those -dev packages, which might be even harder to grasp for them - "hey, i have curl installed !!11!"