Slackware Linux 10.2 Released 250
excelblue writes "Slackware Linux 10.2 has finally been released. This release comes with Linux 2.4.31, with 2.6.13 available in the testing packages and glibc 2.3.5. This time, they've decided to get up with times and switch to Firefox, Thunderbird, and subversion instead of using the Mozilla suite and cvs from the previous distros. Here are Torrents of ISO images."
cvs & mozilla still available (Score:5, Informative)
it contains mozilla-1.7.11 and cvs-1.11.20
at least in latest-current that should be identical to 10.2
And in other news.... (Score:3, Informative)
Up with the times (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Retro Linux - Sweet! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This is nice but... (Score:5, Informative)
Slackware has 28 distros based on it [distrowatch.com] (29 if you include the new PocketLinux [gnulinux.de]), some of which are trying to be "Enterprise Level."
Support Slackware and Subscribe... (Score:3, Informative)
or as root:
Hope that helps. Slackware subscriber since 7.0
Re:YAY! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:cvs & mozilla still available (Score:4, Informative)
and how does ram amount affect cpu optimisation choice ?
Re:Is this true for Slackware? (Score:1, Informative)
Yes.
True that it is the oldest Linux distro?
No.
If so why does it not seem to have the mind share that Fedora, SuSE, Mandriva and [K]ubuntu appear to enjoy?
Because Slack is the most unforgivingly Unix-like of all the distros. If you want to use Slackware, you'd better be ready to spend a lot of time at the command line, compiling, swearing, and learning more about your OS and your computer than you ever wanted to know.
Vector Linux (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.vectorlinux.com/ [vectorlinux.com]
Now I just need to wait for them to update so they're compatible with 10.2...
Re:Sad there's no GNOME (Score:4, Informative)
From the changelog, and for anyone else interested:
gnome/*: Removed from -current, and turned over to community support and distribution. I'm not going to rehash all the reasons behind this, but it's been under consideration for more than four years. There are already good projects in place to provide Slackware GNOME for those who want it, and these are more complete than what Slackware has shipped in the past. So, if you're looking for GNOME for Slackware -current, I would recommend looking at these two projects for well-built packages that follow a policy of minimal interference with the base Slackware system:
http://gsb.sf.net/ [sf.net] http://gware.sf.net/ [sf.net]
There is also Dropline, of course, which is quite popular. However, due to their policy of adding PAM and replacing large system packages (like the entire X11 system) with their own versions, I can't give quite the same sort of nod to Dropline. Nevertheless, it remains another choice, and it's _your_ system, so I will also mention their project:
http://www.dropline.net/gnome/ [dropline.net]
Please do not incorrectly interpret any of this as a slight against GNOME itself, which (although it does usually need to be fixed and polished beyond the way it ships from upstream more so than, say, KDE or XFce) is a decent desktop choice. So are a lot of others, but Slackware does not need to ship every choice. GNOME is and always has been a moving target (even the "stable" releases usually aren't quite ready yet) that really does demand a team to keep up on all the changes (many of which are not always well documented). I fully expect that this move will improve the quality of both Slackware itself, and the quality (and quantity) of the GNOME options available for it.
Folks, this is how open source is supposed to work. Enjoy.
I'll look into the alternatives, though it's still sad I won't be able to depend on their stability as I would the base system.
Slackware's purpose is different (Score:1, Informative)
Slackware does not try to be like UNIX. If it did, it would have no documentation, no support, never update its packages and arrive at work in a nondescript brown paper bag.
Re:Patricks Health(Actinomycosis) (Score:5, Informative)
Brave guy to keep working as sick as he was.
You can rad about it here-
http://linuxreviews.org/news/2004/11/17_0_slackwa
Re:YAY! (Score:2, Informative)
It makes for some long PATH and MANPATH variables, but it works for me
Since there are only 20-ish extra programs that I need, I find it quite managable
Re:YAY! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:YAY! (Score:4, Informative)
Such that to install package a, you need to install package b, which requires packages c and d, which also require additional packages. Compiling from source can be less time intensive if you ask me.
Magnet URI links (Score:3, Informative)
Note that slashdot mangles URI's so ther is NO space before the last two charachters like it prints here...just get rid of the space
Disk 1
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:YYXZAJR2B3WFBOZCWCFXUSZBOA2MR
Disk 2
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:YWPGO6H445YQILY5A5XYGSZATPQCP
Disk3 Source
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:FVUYDWUGGYSDXS3CH6KU4SDOEJIJK
Disk 4 Source and Extras
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:PVCGFALOO52JJOSEHJA7YCIHHWERH
Re:YAY! (Score:3, Informative)
I can create a testing linux install in less than 20 meg with slackware as it is. using slack on my development pc makes it easier to make the embedded linux device work through the testing phases and I have only been able to get cross compiling and uclibc cross compile to work easily under slackware instead of the rpm or deb based setups. it's great when you download GCC and simply type
Slackware is the #1 choice for people wanting to really tinker on the bleeding edge but not have to have a ream of paper telling you what changes and command line switches to have to se so that app will install correctly on the distro that does not follow the software developers wishes.
I also found it's easier to design your own embedded distros under slackware than under mandrake,fedora,ubuntoo, etc... (never had the time to dink with gentoo)
i equal slackware to other commercial unices for heavy design work.. it's just easier in it.
granted, my servers at home run centOS, my desktops use Mandriva but for the real nitty gritty, it's slackware...
like today, I'm hacking the firmware/linux install on this 4 video input Ethernet video device I found on ebay. and am 1/2 way to getting a tiny slackware install running on it for a complete redesign of how the thing works.
Checkinstall (Score:4, Informative)
Checkinstall [freshmeat.net] is your friend. You'll never have to type "make install" again. Instead, run checkinstall at the "make install" stage, and it builds a package for your distro (it handles .rpm, .deb, and .tgz based distros) and installs it. You can then just use your distro's package management tool, in Slack's case pkgtool, to remove it at a later time.
I think it's in the extras directory on the second Slack CD, if memory serves correctly.
Re:Is this true for Slackware? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Floppy or MS Windowe required(?) (Score:2, Informative)
Burn the ISO to CD and boot it. Disc 2 has (at least in the past) a number of troubleshooting tools on it when you boot. It's sort of a rescue disc. (I say at least in the past because my 10.1 discs are not working that way, though I suspect it is a bad burn.)
I was looking for the point at which they switched to bootable CDs and more info on the boot/root floppy situation, but Slackware.com is coming up blank. Maybe somebody else knows.
Rich
Re:This is nice but... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Is this true for Slackware? (Score:2, Informative)
No More Gnome (Score:3, Informative)
Anyways, I thought I'd mention that this is the first official release of Slackware in which there is no Gnome. Patrick has (perhaps wisely) left Gnome to be an add-on supported by 3rd parties.
For the player haters (Score:5, Informative)
MISCONCEPTIONS FALSE: Slackware uses a very simple package management system that accomplishes two things. 1. it allows you to track files installed. 2. allows you to upgrade to newer versions (yes there is versioning). And as a bonus, your not bogged down with dependancies.... oh wait you want cyclical dependancies??? FALSE: Why? because it still uses 2.4 kernel? Please! stability is the issue here. Purchase a RedHat Advanced server and you'll find it STILL uses 2.4. You cant please everyone all the time, but you can still produce a quality product with proven technology. AD-HOMINIM: This argument is too often used against Slackware in general. For what it is, an "everything is a file" operating system, you must expect to have to get to the command line eventually. If your using it as a server in place of another Unix OS, its not any harder to manage. If your using it to replace RedHat or SuSe, still, its not any harder, and with the added bonus that you dont have as much bloat (did i mention cyclical dependancies?). TRUE: So is Linus Torvolds, and as far as direction, every company, ceo, lead developer must make thier own decisions and you just cant please everyone all the time.
Before the mods make me -1 troll, let me just say Slackware is not perfect, but nothing is. I dont like the fact that PAM will probably never be added
I use it as a desktop and a server. My servers are usually stripped down and single serve boxes, and slackware is a perfect fit. By trade, I work with Solaris, AIX, and RedHat. The only reason I dont push Slack at work is that my company wants to spend the money to have a finger to point at (specifically a large company to point at) when a problem arises.
But in the 5 years i've been using slackware, I've never encountered a show stopper.
Re:YAY! (Score:1, Informative)
>packages..like when I download something, untar;
>make; make install : where can I find out where it
>put all it's stuff?
For source packages, try GNU Source Installer:
http://www.gnu.org/software/sourceinstall/sourcei
Then you can say:
$ sourceinstall --add whatever.tar.gz
or
$ tar -zxvf whatever.tar.gz
$ sourceinstall --add whatever/
and then you can get the list of all installed files:
$ sourceinstall --check whatever
But you do not need it if you just want to remove it:
$ sourceinstall --remove whatever
If you want the whizzy GUI you can run
$ sourceinstall
without args.
Re:I just installed 10.1 (Score:4, Informative)
Just use swaret [sourceforge.net] to upgrade your box to either 10.2 or current. Shouldn't take more than a few minutes.
Re:Support Slackware and Subscribe... (Score:1, Informative)
/usr/local (Score:3, Informative)
There have been de facto standards for this for decades, and standard layouts for Linux for years. If package developers pick random install locations, that's their foolishness. (This applies to any O/S, not just Linux.)
Having a database/registry of where an application put's it's files is a damn good idea.
Having standard places is equally important.
Re:Checkinstall (Score:2, Informative)
Re:History of slackware? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:cvs & mozilla still available (Score:1, Informative)
The amount of RAM really should make no difference unless you start looking at the other types of flags .
This is true for Slackware! (Score:3, Informative)
lack of good automatic package management, [..] lack of all the advanced stuff like Project Utopia
By omitting nonessential bells and whistles, Patrick Volkerding doesn't have to waste his time and energy QA'ing them. He puts more QA hours into features essential to the operation of a production server, instead. This is of critical importance. QA effort cannot entirely eliminate the bugs and incompatabilities within and between packages, but the more hours are spent doing it the closer the distribution can get to this ideal form. Stability and security are the most essential characteristics of a production server.
lack of newbie-friendly administration tools
Don't need them. You may be right that their absence has prevented newcomers from adopting Slackware, though. It would be nice if more companies based their services on Slackware machines -- their services would be more robust, my skills would be more in demand :-) and it would result in more third-party QA'ing of Slackware packages. But I can't bring myself to care too much because the more popular Slackware has become over the years, the more packages Patrick has agreed to incorporate into the distribution to satisfy a wider audience. "More packages" is bad because ...
the relatively small selection of official packages
"More packages" is bad because the number of relations between packages increases in proportion to the square of the number of packages, and the number of incompatabilities between packages is proportional to this number of relations. The smaller the package set, the more effective Patrick's QA hours are at weeding out incompatabilities in the distribution as a whole. In fact I think Slackware has gotten somewhat overbloated with packages, and would welcome a little trimming of the fat. (Of course, what I consider fat might be necessary to someone else's business, so perhaps it's best that this is left up to Patrick, who gets a more gestalt picture.)
As an aside, I suspect what is hurting Slackware's wider adoption the most are its de-emphasis on desktop environments (it actually does pretty well at this, just not as well as some other distributions) and the popular misconception that the newest possible version of software is necessarily the best. In my experience, the decision to press a distribution into production service is often driven by what the IT elite at the company have running on their desktops. (This is more true in small companies, and less true in larger companies, where issues like availability of support by contract are more important. Though, here too Slackware comes up short.) Since Slackware holds little appeal to the desktop user, it does not take advantage of this vector. Also, since Patrick follows the sound, traditional practice of selecting for inclusion only those versions of software which are stable, the software which ships with Slackware is usually not the newest. If you look at the Slackware changelog, you can see various notes of the form "foo version x.y.13 exhibited such-and-such problems, reverted back to foo version x.y.12". Which is the way it should be done.
Inserting gratuitous plug here for my Code of Engineering [ciar.org].
-- TTK
Re:Floppy or MS Windowe required(?) (Score:3, Informative)
Ask and ye shall recieve.
Slackware has had bootable CDs since at least 3.9/4.0 (4.0 was basically 3.9 with a 2.2 kernel) using floppy emulation all the way up to 8.0 (which gave you a choice of a 2.2 or 2.4 kernel). Starting with 8.1, Slackware has used el torito (I think I spelled that right) bootable CD images. Lots of older BIOS's won't boot an el torito CD, so I always keep one 8.0 live CD handy for rescue operations on those. IIRC, some AMD64 724-in motherboards shipping with a flakey BIOS that didn't like el torito CDs either. Again, IIRC, these were mostly Emachines, which would explain everything.
Re:No DVD ISO? (Score:3, Informative)