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Slackware 13.1 Released 155

Several readers made sure we are aware that Slackware 13.1 release is out. Here's the list of mirrors. "Slackware 13.1 brings many updates and enhancements, among which you'll find two of the most advanced desktop environments available today: Xfce 4.6.1, a fast and lightweight but visually appealing and easy-to-use desktop environment, and KDE 4.4.3, a recent stable release of the new 4.4.x series of the award-winning KDE desktop environment."
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Slackware 13.1 Released

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  • by Rivalz ( 1431453 ) on Monday May 24, 2010 @08:11PM (#32330930)

    cheers to the developers. they really work their slacks off.

  • Slackware release announcement on slashdot is like fried chicken dinner to me. Is Patrick still at it?
  • by by (1706743) ( 1706744 ) on Monday May 24, 2010 @08:29PM (#32331056)
    on 4 architectures, I still have a special place in my heart for Slackware (though I use Arch and Debian on my main boxes now). Great distribution -- I even sent Pat "The Man" Volkerding home-made cookies when he was sick [slashdot.org].

    As the adage goes, Give a man Debian, and he'll learn Debian. Give a man SUSE, and he'll learn SUSE. But give a man Slackware, and he'll learn Linux. I certainly picked up more *NIX tricks from Slack than the other distros combined.
    • by gmrath ( 751453 ) on Monday May 24, 2010 @08:44PM (#32331134)
      It's a little early yet, but I wonder: will there be any comments written by the slashdotter whose sig is '"Ubuntu" is an African word meaning "Slackware is too hard for me"'?
      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by xtracto ( 837672 )

        I LOLed because my sig is almost like that... maybe there was someone else or you mistook my sig for that (btw, I got my sig from another slashddoter)

    • by plasticsquirrel ( 637166 ) on Monday May 24, 2010 @09:17PM (#32331426)
      I also cut my teeth on Linux with Slackware and used it for years, and it's the only reason I learned what I did about Linux. After switching to Ubuntu, I naturally got lazy and now I barely know what is happening on my own system. I can't remember the last time I compiled my own kernel, or really dug through "/etc" to figure out what everything does. That quote about Slackware has been around for a long time, and it has really earned the reputation as being THE distro to learn if you want to understand Linux. Its design is so clean and simple that it isn't nearly as intimidating as some people would expect. It also gives you a true appreciation for the elegance of the Unix design. Slackware is old school, from the era of beige boxes and Linux people who did things the old Unix way. It comes from the best place in the Linux tradition.

      Patrick ("The Man") is also a stand-up guy who has been doing basically everything for the distro from the very beginning. He's a living legend in Linux history, and he had the guts to make the right call to drop GNOME when it became too convoluted to maintain. He also gave Slackware the Subgenius trappings, and is otherwise a true long-haired geek who really GETS the Unix philosophy and does things the Right Way.
      • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Monday May 24, 2010 @10:36PM (#32331896)
        Lazy may have little to do with it. Between fundamental changes in the way kernel handles various parts of the systems (what the heck is /sys anyway) and the move from actually setting something up to having things automated there are very few underlying fundamental things you can now change yourself when tinkering with a modern user friendly system like Ubuntu.

        For one thing try and get Ubuntu to StartX with no screen attached. With older distros some level of xconfig would allow me to run X on a virtual framebuffer, but not Ubuntu. If Ubuntu isn't able to detect it via hotplug it just doesn't exist. Suppose you manually massage your fstab file then the gui filesystem utility in ubuntu breaks. In my case it's able unmount but not remount any file systems.
      • by BrokenHalo ( 565198 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2010 @01:30AM (#32332708)
        He's a living legend in Linux history, and he had the guts to make the right call to drop GNOME when it became too convoluted to maintain.

        Pat's a great guy, but his dropping GNOME pissed off a lot of people too, though I understand his reasoning. KDE was at the time a lot easier to build, while GNOME was riddled with circular dependencies that made maintaining it a bitch of a job.

        Fortunately for GNOME fans, the job was ably taken up by maintainers of the Dropline GNOME [droplinegnome.org] distribution. I have the impression they're getting a bit tired of it now, but others are around to fill the gap.
        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by muckracer ( 1204794 )

          > Fortunately for GNOME fans, the job was ably taken up by maintainers of the Dropline GNOME distribution.

          Well, for the record Dropline had already existed at that time. In fact, BECAUSE it existed Pat saw the need for GNOME on Slackware already taken care of and chose to remove it from the main distro ('if you want it, then install Dropline!).

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by eosp ( 885380 )
      Learn Slackware and you learn Linux. Learn Gentoo and you are Linux.
      • by BrokenHalo ( 565198 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2010 @01:37AM (#32332728)
        Learn Gentoo and you are Linux.

        Not so sure I'd agree that. Most people I know who learn Gentoo are simply following a cookbook. If you really want to feel that you're in control, giving Linux From Scratch a try is a good idea, but most of us wouldn't want the burden of trying to maintain a desktop system with that.
    • by tokul ( 682258 )

      But give a man Slackware, and he'll learn Linux.

      He will learn Linux (and other Unixes), but he will use other Linux distro later. In my case I started with Slackware and ended up with Debian.

    • Slackware was my second distro, after Red Hat. I tend to flit around and change distros almost at will, but I am running Slackware 13.0 on my main desktop at the moment. I also ordered the 13.1 CD set, and will install that when it arrives.

      I have to agree with the parent, I have certainly learned a lot about Linux from Slackware.

  • I love me some Slack (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Riddler Sensei ( 979333 ) on Monday May 24, 2010 @08:42PM (#32331114)

    I started using Slackware when I began college, and I still use it today. I'm sort of a "medium" user. I can work the scripts and the config files, and I even compiled some custom kernels in the past. But I'm not a CS guy - I majored in music. Even I, with my liberal arts degree, find Slackware delightful to use and I appreciate it's lack of fluff and its overall feel of being MY computer.

    I salute you Pat. May you keep on Slacking.

    • Me too!

      (Well, I majored in Chinese. But during my first month in China, before I knew any of the language, my preferred method of coping with culture shock and homesickness was recompiling some 2.4.2x kernel to try to get my laptop to work with the weird networking setup they had at the school I was living in. Trial-and-error style too since their computer guy didn't speak a lick of English, he only knew how to click the buttons on Windows 95 in Chinese. Fun times!)

      (Oh yeah I played a bunch of Unreal too.)

  • by seyyah ( 986027 ) on Monday May 24, 2010 @09:15PM (#32331410)

    I've been running current, which is now equivalent to 13.1 and it's working well.

    A reminder to all: please seed the SW torrents and come to Linux Questions [linuxquestions.org] to discuss problems.

  • I'm still using Slack 12.2 on my work laptop. The trouble is that VMware Workstation has to work, and new kernel versions inevitably cause problems for VMware until they catch up. Pain in the ass, really.

    At home, I migrated over to BSD years ago, which was easy to do after learning all of Linux's internals running Slackware.

    Keep up the great work Patrick!

    • by DamnStupidElf ( 649844 ) <Fingolfin@linuxmail.org> on Monday May 24, 2010 @10:52PM (#32332000)
      Is VMWare a work requirement? If not, is kvm an option? I'm using kvm on slackware64 13.0 at work with no problems. An Ethertap bridge or qemu's userspace NAT works fine with Windows in an AD environment (although there are some limitations with userspace NAT). The Windows VirtIO drivers for disk and network were pretty easy to get working.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      One reason i am using slackware on all my home machines, is that you really don't need to upgrade. One desktop is running slack 13, the laptop and one more desktop is running 12.2. If its not broke --don't fix it.
    • by 0racle ( 667029 )
      The latest VMWare player works fine on 13, I doubt Workstation will have a problem. The hosted VMWare products work fine on the latest Fedora, I think it will be able to handle the more stable versions of Slackware.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 24, 2010 @10:16PM (#32331788)

    Another modest announcement for a release that doesn't promise to change the world or make you hip.

    Slackware: It gets the damn work done. Without the fancy.

  • Gah! (Score:3, Funny)

    by DoctorPepper ( 92269 ) on Monday May 24, 2010 @10:32PM (#32331868)

    Just freakin installed 13.0 on my computer yesterday!

    Thanks Patrick! ;)

  • I salute you Pat (Score:2, Informative)

    by kokoko1 ( 833247 )
    Being a slackware users and still love to follow slackware release and love to see that 'The Man' the living legend is working hard to give the community the stable and secure Linux. I salute you Pat and congrats on releasing Slackware 13.1
  • I'm admittedly a Johnny-come-lately Linux user, a mid-ish 20's (three cubed!) developer who switched to Linux (openSuSE) last spring. Loved it. Then a month ago, I (re)stumbled upon Slackware, which the online distro choosers (I know, I know) said was a match for me -- great performance mixed with not-quite-crazy learning curve, and even the learning curve would give me oh-so-adaptable "purity of Unix" skills. While downloading this new toy, I met Bob, who truly changed my life -- I became a fledgling membe
  • Can someone enlighten me as to what awards KDE has won since it started with version 4?

    As far as I can tell KDE 4 is still an overcomplicated mess and a long, long way behind the simple elegance of KDE 3.

    • by TheTurtlesMoves ( 1442727 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2010 @03:20AM (#32333204)
      Well there was the "cool background image" award from '03, the "don't release dev version to the public" award for KDE 4 (though i understand that has more to do distros carrying it too early). Then there was "doesn't sux as much as gnome and doesn't use the memory of windows" award in '05.

      Seriously though "simple elegance" is not a description i would use for kde 3.5 kede 4 or gnome. I say this typing on kde 3.5 and the other machine in the room uses kde 4 (its fine, don't know what the fuss is about). When i want simple elegance outside a command line, I stick with icewm.
    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by tokul ( 682258 )

      Can someone enlighten me as to what awards KDE has won since it started with version 4?

      Nominated for Darwin award. "How to f*** up things" category.

  • Thanx to Pat and all other folks for the great work!

  • Man, and I was just getting used to 13.0 13.0-64... I should really read the ChnageLog more often!!

    Great job Pat & crew, and here is to another great release of the best Linux distro ever!

  • I'm currently still running Slackware 11, but I've been considering making the jump to 13 for quite some time. The only thing though, is the laptop I'm running 11 on has a 32 bit processor. My desktop, which is only meant for gaming, runs Win7 Ultimate x64 and I don't want to bother with dualbooting/virtual machine or just running it on that. We purchased a new Dell laptop which has a 64 bit CPU, but I don't think the wife wants touching it, ha. One of the biggest factors that I love about Slackware 13 is t
    • by 0racle ( 667029 )
      What exactly is your problem? Slackware's default DE is technically KDE and has been for a very long time. Slackware 13 moved to KDE4 as it's default, but there are people that packaged up KDE3 if that's not what you want to run or it also ships XFCE, or several plain window managers if the full on desktop environment isn't what you want.

      Slackware 13 ran just as well as any other Slackware has, I doubt 13.1 will be any different.
  • Diskettes (Score:3, Funny)

    by blantonl ( 784786 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2010 @08:42AM (#32335274) Homepage

    Looks like I'm going to need to purchase a 50 pack of diskettes today

As you will see, I told them, in no uncertain terms, to see Figure one. -- Dave "First Strike" Pare

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