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Slackware, the Oldest Actively Maintained Linux Distro, Releases Version 15.0 117

Posted by BeauHD from the wait-is-finally-over dept.
Slashdot reader sombragris writes: Slackware, the oldest actively maintained Linux distribution, released version 15.0 yesterday after a long release cycle that goes all the way back to 2016 where the last version (14.2) was released. According to the release notes, the whole spirit of this release is: "Keep it familiar, but make it modern."

Among the news, this release offers kernel 5.15.19, PAM, PipeWire and PulseAudio, Wayland and X11 graphical systems, and Rust and Python 3. As graphical environments, both Xfce 4.16 and the latest Plasma 5 (Plasma 5.23.5, Frameworks 5.90, KDE apps 21.12 running under Qt 5.15.3) are available, with Cinnamon and Mate also available from third parties. The main compilers are gcc-11.2 and llvm 13.0. The default browser is Firefox 91.5esr, with Chromium available as a third-party repository. And... no systemd at all.

Slackware can be downloaded from a variety of mirrors. BitTorrent downloads are going to be available too. I've used Slackware for 20 years and it's always impressed me with its stability and speed. I encourage everyone interested to try it. Slashdot readers arfonrg and saxa also shared the news.
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Slackware, the Oldest Actively Maintained Linux Distro, Releases Version 15.0 More

Slackware, the Oldest Actively Maintained Linux Distro, Releases Version 15.0

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  • Forget Firefox and Chrome (Score:5, Funny)

    by fustakrakich ( 1673220 ) on Thursday February 03, 2022 @09:13PM (#62235625) Journal

    It also comes with Seamonkey

    • I haven't played with Slackware for a few years.

      Could someone tell me how many floppy disks I need to download and write to install Slackware these days?

  • Long live to Slackware (Score:5, Insightful)

    by saxa ( 792531 ) on Thursday February 03, 2022 @09:17PM (#62235631) Homepage Journal
    Thanks to the team for that 6 years dev cycle and the outstanding product produced.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by BeauHD ( 4450103 ) Works for Slashdot
      Thanks for also submitting a story about the news!

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by saxa ( 792531 )
        Thanks man, you were just faster :) I actually saw it a day later :D, running it already from a long time, and I simply can not change anymore :D.

    • Re:Long live to Slackware (Score:4, Informative)

      by User0x45 ( 530857 ) on Thursday February 03, 2022 @09:57PM (#62235725) Homepage

      A great bit of kit, BDfL Volkerding and the team keep the dream alive.

      Congratulations.

    • I wish they released last year. I dont like KDE5 at all. There's no in between 14.2 released ages ago and 15. I actually run a Nov 2021 slackware-current as it was the last kde4 release (don't care about security).

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by saxa ( 792531 )
        Actually I do not see any reason why uoi would not be able to build your wn KDE4 on the released 15.0 ? I also do not use KDE at all, I am still on my dropline gnome :)

  • Slackware unleashed in 1995 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by williamyf ( 227051 ) on Thursday February 03, 2022 @09:21PM (#62235643)

    I bought the book, and used the distro. In dial-up times, having a CD was an advantage.

    Oh, the memories of my thesis, when I was young and naive... God dammed _doprnt

    Having said that: "Al lugar donde has sido feliz es mejor que no trates nunca de regresar"

    Nowadays there are better server and/or desktop distros. To each his own, if you are happy with Slackware, go ahead... I just moved on to greener pasture.

    • Re: Slackware unleashed in 1995 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by zangloo67 ( 9342081 ) on Thursday February 03, 2022 @09:40PM (#62235683)
      Slackware 1.00 was my very first Linux install, circa 1993, (0.99 Linux kernel, as I remember). I'd smail-ordered a CD-ROM media distribution from Walnut Creek that took about 9 weeks to arrive to Montevideo. It took me two nights to get the X-server up and running on my 386

      • Re: Slackware unleashed in 1995 (Score:5, Funny)

        by NateFromMich ( 6359610 ) on Thursday February 03, 2022 @10:10PM (#62235775)

        Slackware 1.00 was my very first Linux install, circa 1993, (0.99 Linux kernel, as I remember). I'd smail-ordered a CD-ROM media distribution from Walnut Creek that took about 9 weeks to arrive to Montevideo. It took me two nights to get the X-server up and running on my 386

        I remember going through the install menus. "Do I really need this Perl thing? Doesn't sound like it."
        I eventually figured it out.

      • Re: Slackware unleashed in 1995 (Score:5, Interesting)

        by rufey ( 683902 ) on Friday February 04, 2022 @12:55AM (#62236091)

        Slackware version 1.something was my first, cira October 1994 on a 486DX2 and 16 megabytes of memory and a 520 megabyte hard drive (yes, both of those were measured in megabytes - oh how times have changed)

        Downloaded the install over a 14.4 US Robotics Modem.

        Ran Slackware for years and even subscribed to their bi-annual snail mail CD distribution (was only going to download the distro once over a modem).

        My nightmare story is that one night I wanted to try to install wine. This was when it was still very very very touchy (probably can be touchy today too). I can't remember if I found some packages to install it, or just got the source and built it. When I installed it, I no longer could log in as any user but root. Couldn't figure out why. So I blew away the system, rebuilt, and in the interest of seeing if I could lock myself out again and figure out what was happening, did the wine install again. Got locked out. After doing some more poking around (and maybe one more rebuild), I discovered that / was chmod'ed to 0700. Well, that would lock everyone out but root.

        X11 wasn't much of an effort to get running with a simple config. But trying to figure out all of the parameters that would work with the installed graphics card was fun. You hoped that you didn't ruin the card or your CRT monitor while testing out the config to find what worked best.

        Drifted away from Slackware at the turn of the century when my new employer was running Debian and I had a Sun Microsystems (running SunOS 4.1.4) workstation as my home machine. Haven't been back since, but its interesting to see it still going.

        Good times.

        • Re: Slackware unleashed in 1995 (Score:5, Informative)

          by rufey ( 683902 ) on Friday February 04, 2022 @01:04AM (#62236111)

          Drifted away from Slackware at the turn of the century when my new employer was running Debian and I had a Sun Microsystems (running SunOS 4.1.4) workstation as my home machine. Haven't been back since, but its interesting to see it still going.

          Its late, I shouldn't be commenting on Slashdot at this time of night.... By "home machine" I mean my primary computer at work.

          And I just realized that the younger crowd may not have even been born yet when Slackware started. That was 29 years ago. How time flies.

          Still good times though.

        • My dear friend scored a Tektronix X Terminal back then but couldn't get it connected to his host. Had no idea how to handle 10Base-2. 2 terminators and two t-connectors later, and he was in cursor lag heaven. It was beautiful.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by blinky ( 415843 )

        Same here. Loved the help message on menu install for "less" -- "less is more".

      • Slackware 1.00 was my very first Linux install, circa 1993, (0.99 Linux kernel, as I remember). I'd smail-ordered a CD-ROM media distribution from Walnut Creek that took about 9 weeks to arrive to Montevideo. It took me two nights to get the X-server up and running on my 386

        For me, it was 1994. I got the CD-ROM from "PC Shopper" Magazine (I miss that.) My first install to allow me to code in Ada for my college courses. Then downloading GNU Ada updates (and entire linux distros) through CompuServe over dialup (and me screaming at my parents and siblings whenever they picked the phone which of course cuck'ed the downloads.)

        I would have to wait till everyone was sleep to download that good shit. Oh, the memories :)

      • I installed Slackware 0.9 from a CD in the back of a book in 1994. Yup, already out of date. But it mostly worked, could be fixed, and served me well to learn how to deal with SCO Unix 3, which would defeat me constantly at the time.

        A week later I hook up with a sort-of neighbor running a dialup service, all on Slackware and stacks of modems and desk fans. The days, oh my. All this so I could troll AOL and IRC, and stitch together weeks of retrievals from usenet. And use gopher.

    • I tried creating a dos paritition with cfdisk. Chose the size and type (83 Linux). It couldn't write the primary partition to disk.

      bzImage takes a long while to load. They really should put the partitioner in the setup script.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by saxa ( 792531 )
        I dont know what you mean by a dos partition, but the partition should not be dos (c1) or FAT16, you really need a partition labeled 83 (linux). Try to use fdisk instead.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      I remember using it for my first time in college's computer science lab! I didn't know it was that new. Amazing. After that, I think I used Red Hat's.

    • Re:Slackware unleashed in 1995 (Score:4)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Friday February 04, 2022 @01:00AM (#62236105) Journal

      Nowadays there are better server and/or desktop distros.

      I don't think that's true.

    • My first distro was the one where they attempted to switch from a.out to Elf libraries, but broke the implementation. They X video drivers did not have any support for VESA Localbus for 16bit. And the installation was a series of floppy disks one downloaded for those unaware of a CD version floating out there. I spent my first year without X due to the VLB issue. I got really good with ircii, and later BitchX, as well as Linx and Pine. At first getting on the internet was a little manual bu using minicom to

      • You haven't lived until you've booted a floppy with the net card drivers and dumped source from 'slackware' somewhere out there, compiled the new kernel and all, and recovered from the little bastard script kiddies. Again.

        I still hate Atlanta.

  • Does anyone have a link to a book vendor online?

  • It's good to know that the old Slackware is back to kick some hippie distros.

    But it does run Quake?

    • If all else fails, there's aalib:

      https://www.jfedor.org/aaquake... [jfedor.org]

    • Yes, all four :) Quake, Q2, and Q3A have ports since the source code was released by John Carmack,
      but he couldn't release Quake 4 code due to the Bethesda incorporation.
      Q4 has an old 32bit executable, needs some effort but it runs OK.
      BTW, all Doom until BF3 Edition also have ports, some of them include Heretic and Hexen.

  • Ah yes (Score:4, Funny)

    by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Thursday February 03, 2022 @10:04PM (#62235751) Journal

    Ah, the name that got me into Linux.

    I just had to know what the heck this software was, on that CD in the computer shop, that had a name like that!

  • Well done for the milestone. I was somewhat late to the party. My 1st distro was a roll your own built around mythtv circa early naughties. 20 years goes too damn fast.

  • Happy Slackware fangirl (Score:5, Informative)

    by spaceyhackerlady ( 462530 ) on Thursday February 03, 2022 @10:32PM (#62235831)

    I've used Slackware since Slackware 3.1 aka Slackware 96. I've always liked Patrick's approach, a toolkit for building Linux systems rathr than a pre-packaged system, open the can and pour it out. Slackware doesn't hide the fact that it's Linux. It celebrates it.

    I did my Master's research (1998-2000) on Slackware, upgrading from a 486 to a Pentium MMX along the way. While that particular box is long gone Slackware has continued to serve me well. I hope it will continue to do so for a long time to come.

    • Re:Happy Slackware fand00d (Score:4, Informative)

      by storkus ( 179708 ) on Friday February 04, 2022 @03:14AM (#62236235)

      Other than the Master's research, this mostly mirrors my experience INCLUDING that I still run Slackware as my daily driver for security stuff (logging into bank, etc).

      I got my UNIX start with BSD 4.3 but every time I tried to install a BSD on a laptop it would kernel-panic--if it even got that far. Slackware has always been the most BSD of the Linux distros. I may try again with some recent Linux kernel changes.

      The thing about Slackware is that it's so heavily tested IT JUST WORKS OUT OF THE BOX even back then. (Sure video might need some twiddling but that's solved now.)

      Dependencies have always been its primary weakness, yes, and I would never consider Slackware for something like that (A/V comes to mind), but for simplicity and a low attack surface for a Linux distro its pretty good; only the libre-kernel distros might be better, but that really depends on everything else included, doesn't it?

      This is a lot longer than I intended it to be, but I'm waxing nostalgic; it seems appropriate that this release also has the 25th anniversary of KDE Plasma as standard as well (though I usually run XFCE).

      When I need security, I've been considering using a Live version with write-protected USB flash (Kanguru, etc) or CD / DVD & regular drive for just keeper stuff. Since it's been ported to most of the common ARM platforms (even both Pine Phones, amazingly), that's kewl too, even if not for daily driver stuff. [Okay, I'll shut up now]

      • I'm starting to feel like a base OS should be minimal and secure, and that something like snapd, flatpak, or AppImage should handle be used to handle complicated desktop apps and their dependencies. Unfortunately snapd requires systemd. Not sure about flatpak. And none of these are without security issues, though I think they are manageable at least for my purposes.

        Thoughts?

    • Even Slackware 2.0 had an install everything option. I didn't have room for that, so I installed the A, N, and D sets, and enough of the X set that I could run Netscape. Managed all that on a 386DX25 with 8MB and 120MB. Too bad I had about 15MB left... Meanwhile these days 50MB is not enough for /boot.

    • I've used Slackware since Slackware 3.1 aka Slackware 96. I've always liked Patrick's approach, a toolkit for building Linux systems rathr than a pre-packaged system, open the can and pour it out. Slackware doesn't hide the fact that it's Linux. It celebrates it.

      I did my Master's research (1998-2000) on Slackware, upgrading from a 486 to a Pentium MMX along the way. While that particular box is long gone Slackware has continued to serve me well. I hope it will continue to do so for a long time to come.

      Hahaha, similar to me! I was on Slackware through the 90's, using a 486SX and 1MB RAM (with a "turbo" button, you guys remember that?) Once I put 4MB, that shit was flying!

      Then, when I had more money, I had some guys help me build a better tower, using a Cyrix processor (but that chip overheated all the time causing my system to crash, and then I had to replace it with an AMD chip.)

      Amazing how things have changed. I'd never spend time building a PC from scratch, and running Ubuntu over WSL2 is a breez

  • I remember spending a Saturday at work (where there was a network connection) downloading Slackware 1.0 onto 60-something floppy disks. Those were the days!

  • Bogus link (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sconeu ( 64226 ) on Friday February 04, 2022 @12:16AM (#62236029) Homepage Journal

    That's a bogus link on the "variety of mirrors".

    It links mirrors.slacware.com

  • I fondly remember, around 1995, installing Slackware from a 2 Cd rom distribution on a Dell 486. Probably a Slackware v3
    The days when getting the video card right meant puzzling with a config file. No kde or gnome then either, just fvwm.
    Still it was fun to tinker with.

  • Slackware (Score:3)

    by ArhcAngel ( 247594 ) on Friday February 04, 2022 @01:03AM (#62236109)
    I installed Slackware on my PC for the first (and last) time in 1993. Never looked back!

  • Missed the meat (Score:4)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Friday February 04, 2022 @01:05AM (#62236115) Journal

    This is cool:

    For the first time ever we have included a "make_world.sh" script that allows
    automatically rebuilding the entire operating system from source.

    • Yes, that's great. It offers the one benefit of gentoo, building for your specific architecture, without the hassle of trying to get gentoo installed at all any more.

      Last time I tried I set some truly innocuous USE flags which were even documented and the system build died super duper early. What a shit show. I installed gentoo back when it was young, I ran it on my K6 laptop because building for K6 increases performance by something like half compared to running a generic build for example. And it was a lo

      • Gentoo isn't for everyone. It requires some knowledge not only of Linux but of Gentoo itself. Especially when things go wrong. I did not start with that knowledge; I had to acquire it over time. I am glad I did, but I realize it is not for everyone, and thus I don't recommend Gentoo for most potential Linux users.

        I think if I had to start over again I might do Slackware for the base OS, and then some combination of docker, snaps, flatpaks or AppImages for everything else. That was unpossible (tm) back

        • I just think it's gone backwards. I tried again with no flags and it still bombed. If you're accepting a state in which the system doesn't build when you follow the directions then your quality control isn't there at all. Might as well LFS. Which, last I tried, also didn't work if you followed the directions :D

          I used to have patience for that shit, now I don't. It used to be fun to me, now I just want to run stuff.

  • Happy memories (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CptJeanLuc ( 1889586 ) on Friday February 04, 2022 @03:39AM (#62236269)

    Oh man ... the word "Slackware" always takes me instantly back into the mid 90s, sitting in my small student room figuring out how this "linux" thing works, jockeying around Slackware installation floppy disks. Plus the engineering challenge of figuring out how to get X11 onto your PC. Finding a graphics card that is supported, and going through nervewrecking configuration menus in which you had to figure out "dot clock frequencies" for your monitor, with warnings that you could fry your monitor if you made a mistake. The nasty sounds the monitor would make when it re-sync'ed that made your heart skip a beat.

    The pains of figuring some things out, and the immense satisfaction of getting it working. Celebrating every new release of the experimental 1.3 kernels so you could go home and recompile. Realizing how utterly retarded Windows 95 was and wondering why most of the world would accept anything less than a real OS. The joy of getting a 10 Mbps Internet connection to my dorm room when most people didn't even have dial-up. Figuring out how to get a CDROM working with linux. Embracing experimental support of dual processors in the kernel, buying a Tyan Tomcat III motherboard with two pentium processors, and doing parallell computing at home before the term "core" was even invented.

    Those were the days...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by saxa ( 792531 )
      Yeah man, exactly like that ! Pure pleasure at the end. Simple and functional.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by mce ( 509 )
      Are you the old me? :-) Up to and including the Tyan Tomcat, even. :-)
      Or are you my friend who was in the same boat? Also up to and including the Tyan Tomcat.
      We both were past the dorm stage at the time (though not by much), but other than that you could be one of us...
      Very, very sweet memories!

  • That would be cool and fitting.
    Not that I am an anti-systemd fanatic, but I thinks its nice to have variety.
    And at least a few posix compliant Linuxes out there.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Yes, he is staying with BSD init (rcX.d directories)
      For his opinions, you can read an interview with Patrick (slackwares maker and maintainer) from 2012 here [linuxquestions.org]

      volkerdi) Yeah, I see a few things coming down the line that may cause a shakeup to our usual way of doing things, and could force Slackware to become, well, perhaps less UNIX-like. I guess the two big ones that are on the horizon are Wayland and systemd. Whether we end up using them or not remains to be seen. It's quite possible that we won't end up having a choice in the matter depending on how development that's out of our hands goes. It's hard to say whether moving to these technologies would be a good thing for Slackware overall. Concerning systemd, I do like the idea of a faster boot time (obviously), but I also like controlling the startup of the system with shell scripts that are readable, and I'm guessing that's what most Slackware users prefer too. I don't spend all day rebooting my machine, and having looked at systemd config files it seems to me a very foreign way of controlling a system to me, and attempting to control services, sockets, devices, mounts, etc., all within one daemon flies in the face of the UNIX concept of doing one thing and doing it well.

  • No SystemD (Score:3)

    by Pepebuho ( 167300 ) on Friday February 04, 2022 @06:09AM (#62236499)

    Yeah!

  • I would like to change to Slackware, but there are some pieces of proprietary software that I need whose vendors don't offer packages for it, especially warsaw for online banking and Teams for work meetings. It is as if there were only distros that used rpm or deb packages. Would alien help?

    • pt_BR user? Warsaw works ok for CEF home banking. I just tested only entering my login, didn't enter the password.
      The problem is that Slackware isn't a "homologated" distro like Debian, OpenSuse and Ubuntu (yes they think Ubuntu is a "top seed" distro),
      so if some problem happens while you are running any non-homologated distro (not only Slackware),
      probably they won't give your money back: "You are running a non-homologated Linux distribution, you broke the contract".
      I run a Debian vm in VirtualBox for my ho

      • My bank seems not to be Linux-friendly. It does not offer a package for Debian. It offers a .deb package for Ubuntu, though, but it is for Ubuntu 18.04, from almost four years ago. I use the Fedora version in a Mageia machine. I like Mageia, but it does not always come with the latest version of Plasma, which I love.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jmccue ( 834797 )

      It may and should work now that Slackware has pam, but many proprietary applications still tend to be 32 bit.

      You may need to install Alienbob's multi-lib packages then that software. But since it is proprietary, you may violate the license trying.

    • Similar issues with Gentoo. Got most of the stuff working eventually. It was a pain, though, that I would not expect most people to endure.

      I needed TeamViewer for my job, and had a nightmare of a time before reading the friendly Emerge message that said it would only run from a session started by an X session manager. (Fortunately I still do use X11.) Once I finally figured it out, it's been fine ever since.

      There are options for running most anything on most any Linux, but, again, not necessarily easy o

  • I don't remember the year or version, though it was in the mid to late 90s. Slackware was my first distribution. I would have to ftp it in floppy sized chunks (walnit creek did the chunking) using my dial-up shell account, then zmodem it to my computer then copy it to a floppy. Rinse and repease 53 time and you had yourself a linux system ready to install! It was a grand day when I got a CD drive and SuSE sent me free CDs :)

  • I started with SLS way back when (late '92?), but soon moved over to Slackware as soon as it came out. While I've moved to Ubuntu (with a special love for Mint), I have bought and installed every copy of Slackware since, all the way to 14.2. While you might use another distro to try out and use Linux, you use Slackware to learn what Linux actually is all about. All due thanks to our BDFL, Pat V!

  • I used Linux for almost 12 years or so before I bothered with a GUI. First Slackware, then Red Hat, then CentOS, then SuSE, then Debian. In that era my first web server etc was NetWare 4 to 5, Apache/Tomcat/BorderManager... And it all worked.

    From 386s through 486Dx50s, PIIs, and a world of Athlon chips. Shuffling RAM sticks and hard drives, upgrading modems every 6 months, and finally an ISDN line. Woot.

  • 1st distro (Score:3)

    by MrDoh! ( 71235 ) on Friday February 04, 2022 @04:14PM (#62238389) Homepage Journal
    Found a CD (from Walnut Creek as another poster just reminded me) at some charity jumble sale thing. "what the... for a tenner? Might as well...".

    At the time, we were using SCO Unix(and a bit of Xenix), and paying a fortune for licensing. Creating a 40mb partition just for this, gave it a go and was blown away with what it could do, heck, it even /looked/ better (console!) than the work system. Dragged PC to work to show them as they didn't believe me, after playing with... hmm. MK Unix? Can't remember, something for 90 quid that we'd tried and not much worked.

    Anyway, setting up the machine, powering on, and even on my low end desktop, it felt snappier than the Compaq server we were using. "ok, ok, lets see if it'll run our software." one tar(cpio?) to a floppy, and extracting on my machine, ran Make, and... everything worked. Boss "and how much is this?" "free, zero cost" "hmm, it can't be any good, can it? there's a trick to it" "if there is, I've no idea what it is". Now, in the end, they decided to stick with what they had, to be fair, the SCO Unix stuff /was/ well supported on the hardware, but still having that as a backup, every coder in the company ended up installing slakware on their home machines because it did work.
    A year, maybe 2 later, running support at the local college in a room with 100+ win3 machines, turning on, they'd immediately copy an image local, boot from that, and it worked great, even if it was heavily limited on what it could do. But that one machine, right near the entrance, behind the pillar so was THE only machine in the entire room the helpdesk couldn't see the screen of, happened to get a dual boot system. Mash... ALT? down as it booted up, et voila, booted into Slackware. And I got so much work done on that machine. As the windows partitions would be cleared/wiped routinely, that machine got me through a 2 year course, having a full dev environment running so I could get work done.

    Dabbled with a few (lots) different versions of Linux, but Slakware just 'felt right', it had everything in the right place (same as SCO unix that I was familiar with).

    Glad it's still getting updated.

  • We adopted PAM (finally)
    as projects we needed dropped support for pure shadow passwords.

    • It never made sense for them to be so stubborn as to refuse to include it, honestly.

      • funny related story but if you check my sig i made an open source forum for my college thesis (link likely doesn't load, it's THAT old)

        back in that day i was looking to know which linux distro i was going to use to code. I wanted to use slackware but decided against it because my code depended on a PAM library!

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