Slackware 11 is Coming 115
ejd3 writes "In the slackware-current changelog Pat has stated that 'Although there's still quite a bit in the TODO queue here I'm making my steps carefully as -current is very stable, and I think it should ship as a stable 11.0 soon so that we can get back to the business of breaking things in -current. :-)' How much longer will the slackers have to wait?"
No need to wait (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No need to wait (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No need to wait (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No need to wait (Score:3, Informative)
swaret and slapt-get can bork your install very easily
unless you know exactly what slapt-get does
it's much wiser to rsync the current tree
then following the instruction in UPGRADE.TXT
which is basicly go to init 1
upgrade glibc shared libs, sed and pkgtools
then the rest: for i in a ap
Re:No need to wait (Score:1)
Re:No need to wait (Score:1)
that's a bad idea swaret and slapt-get can bork your install very easily unless you know exactly what slapt-get does
I hear this again and again. While I can see it being dangerous for an upgrade, I have also heard the general "swaret will eat your system" under normal use. Do you have any proof to this end?
Re:No need to wait (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No need to wait (Score:3, Informative)
Change your slapt-get sources over to the stable branch, and you'll get security updates.
Re:No need to wait (Score:1)
Why doesn't it appear on ftp.slackware.com? That's where I was looking for it... Ooooh, I see - he puts them in the tree for the most recent version (in this case 10.2). I never noticed that before. Thanks!
Re: (Score:1)
Re:No need to wait (Score:2)
Quick tip to any fellow wo
Re:No need to wait (Score:1)
Re:No need to wait (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:No need to wait (Score:1)
Re:No need to wait (Score:2)
Re:No need to wait (Score:2)
Re:No need to wait (Score:1, Flamebait)
The only trick with gentoo, is to update regularly rather than all in one large chunk. You also don't have the typical problems that occur with binary updates being linked to particular versions of libraries and thus needing to install those libraries too.
For instance, anything compiled against glibc 2.4.x will depend on that version of glibc, but the same programs will still com
Re:No need to wait (Score:2, Insightful)
With Gentoo or Debian/Sid or the like, you have to continuously maintain your computer (as packages change) to keep it up-to-date with security (or even to able to upgrade easily in a few years time). With Slackware or Debian/Stable, you just s
Re:No need to wait (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Friendly suggestion (Score:2)
Re:No need to wait (Score:3, Informative)
64-bit official? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:64-bit official? (Score:3, Informative)
- English is not my native language, so please excuse me if I mess things up -
Re:64-bit official? (Score:4, Funny)
All you need to do is rebuild your kernel. A Linux distro is just a bunch of programs and config files, its not 64-bit specific.
Re:64-bit official? (Score:1)
Re:64-bit official? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:64-bit official? (Score:2)
Re:64-bit official? (Score:2)
I can imagine various possible reasons for this: for example
The 32-bit compiler is more mature, and produces better code.
64-bit variables use more memory, so the memory bandwidth is more of a bottleneck.
The hardware may be compensating for lack of registers by clever caching strategies
I've no idea whether these ideas are true or not, but my point is that the only wa
Re:64-bit official? (Score:2, Interesting)
and it is indeed rocksolid. *All* of the slamd64 versions up to now.
I wish Pat would bless it as the official slack for AMD64.
Also, yes, stock slack runs on these well as well, only you lack 64bit stuff. Which comes in handy once in a while, if you develop your own machine learning algorithms, and test them on huge datasets. There are probably other applications where you don't miss
Re:64-bit official? (Score:5, Informative)
There are a couple of slack-based AMD64 systems besides SLAMD64. I liked SLAMD64, but haven't found it as trouble-free as some others apparently have. Frugalware claims to be pretty much Slackware with Pacman bolted on, and I liked it a lot. I also just downloaded something called Bluewhite 64 Linux, another unofficial port. That goes on my testing partition this weekend (replacing STX Linux, another Slackware derivative I was testing for installation on a friend/potential convert's older laptop).
So if Slackware is a niche player now (which I don't believe), then one part of that niche is as a base for new distros -- the excellent Zenwalk (which I run on my laptop), STX, Frugalware, Voltalinux (Slackware with pkgsrc?), Slax and Vector, just off the top of my head. Not as many derivatives as Debian, perhaps, but certainly a healthy number and probably indicative of a healthy distro.
I think Slackware's biggest "problem" is that it has little to no "community," at least as far as vocal fanboys (you know, the kind who visit Distrowatch to click through and drive up its numbers). I think it tends to attract and keep a self-sufficient, quieter crowd, and therefore its presence isn't as great as its numbers, if that makes any sense.
And text, of course. As soon as I boot up and people see text instead of a pretty splash screen I see that sphincter-tightening look come over some of their faces.
But beyond the entertainment value it's probably a bad thing.
Re:64-bit official? (Score:1)
you have the a.o.l.s usenet newsgroup and more importantly
the ##slackware channel on freenode
Re:64-bit official? (Score:3, Informative)
the ##slackware channel on freenode
Don't forget the wiki! [slackwiki.org]
linux, slackware, and text (Score:1)
On a side note, I had sucked the battery dry on the plane home for Christmas, so it was the first boot in something like 3-months. Funny thing is I could never get standby to work properly when I still had an XP partition on the lapto
Re:64-bit official? (Score:5, Insightful)
It makes perfect sense, as I'm one of those of whom you speak. I'm a UNIX professional who works with Solaris, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Redhat AS. I run Slack on my workstation and on a couple of smaller servers because it is about as unobfuscated (at least from my perspective) as you can get. No glittery anything, just a very solid Linux.
I need to send Pat money this time around as well as I think I purchased 10.1 but not 10.2. Anybody who seriously uses Slack should do the same if they can afford it. He puts out solid distro, and he's a nice guy.
Agreed: Pat's a good guy (Score:1)
Slackware is the most straightforward, uncluttered, trouble-free, and generic (in the nicest sense of the term) Linux distribution I've every tried (and I've done SUSE 8.2, 9.0, 9.1, RHEL 4, RH9, Mandrake/Mandriva, and Knoppix). I do plan to send Pat some $$$ because he consistently provides a wonderful Linux experience.
Re:Agreed: Pat's a good guy (Score:2)
Re:64-bit official? (Score:1)
I for one prefer slackware as a linux distro, because when you want it done and you want it done right w/o BS, use slackware.
As nice as other distros are to configure your system, most distros screw up the NORMAL tools in favour of their own. Then there is package hell!
Then I switched from the dark side and went to the BSD's.
Re:64-bit official? (Score:4, Insightful)
there is a huge slackware community, it's just very much like the BSD community. WEare simply too busy using it in embedded systems, and other places to take the time to run around posting to all forums "S1ac4war3 0wnz joo!" messages.
Slackware is the absolute best distro for doing really advanced things like stuffing it in an embedded device or making a super stripped down machine that makes an old useless 486 scream like a monster for a single important task... makes the best OS for a homebrew firewall that fits on a 8meg CF card.
I use it for developing apps for the gumstix embedded platform. installing the cross compilers for alpha processors is painless compared to a rpm or deb based distro.
Re:64-bit official? (Score:1)
That's it... The community is confident enough in the distribution that they don't need t
Re:64-bit official? (Score:1)
-collin
Marketshare? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Marketshare? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Marketshare? (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, I use Debian at servers, Arch Linux at my private desktop, Kubuntu at my laptop and Ubuntu at work. Please tell me I can't manually edit my config files and that the "GUI tools [...] with the actual config files hidden all over the place"...
I call BS
Re:Marketshare? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, Ubuntu is great too (I'm using it right now), and I haven't had much trouble configuring it the way I want. But after using Slackware regularly for a while, I can understand why he feels the way he does.
Re:Marketshare? (Score:1, Funny)
Blasphemer! System-V init is the only true way to do startup scripts. It makes a SHITLOAD more sense than the BSD-style. How do you even restart a daemon under BSD? I have no clue. Under System-V I can just call the init script with stop and then start or restart or reload if those are available options. On BSD you... uhhh... manually kill the daemon and relaunch it hoping you remember the options it passed on the commandline?
You prob
Re:Marketshare? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Marketshare? (Score:2)
That's not traditional BSD style though. Only OpenBSD still uses that as far as I'm aware. Most OSes which use "BSD style init" use a BSD/SysV hybrid. In FreeBSD and NetBSD it's called rcNG.
Re:Marketshare? (Score:1, Flamebait)
Yeah, having a bunch of scripts that call each other in an unclear order (unless you read all of the scripts) is a whole lot easier to understand than one directory - named after the current runlevel - full of scripts, all of which are run in the same order that ls shows them to you. "Hmmm, does lpr launch from rc.net1, rc.net2, or something else? When does nfs start relative to ssh?" The only "simple" thing about BSD-style init is that ther
Re:Marketshare? (Score:2)
Hmmm, does lpr launch from rc.net1, rc.net2, or something else?
Something else. rc.M
When does nfs start relative to ssh?
After. Both in rc.inet2, lines 101 and 82 respectively.
grep is your friend - Learn it. Use it. Love it.
BSD-style scripts really aren't hard to figure out. For Slackware, check out - http://www.slackware.org/config/init.php [slackware.org]
Read through
Re:Marketshare? (Score:2)
Anyway, the point was not that it's impossible to figure the scripts out - it was that the scripts are non intuitive. Look at "rc.M" and tell me that it's obvious how that filename's connected to lpr. It's more difficult to do simple tasks with BSD-style init than it needs to be. Envision, instead, a SysV-style init setup:
Re:Marketshare? (Score:1)
2) timing those commands, both took about
Re:Marketshare? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's been a niche distro for many years now. The only reason slack is mentioned on /. at all is because of its important place in Linux history.
Slack is for hobbyists. It's rarely used in production environments because where money counts, slack is almost always out of the question for being way too labour intensive. Even in the hobby market it's filling a niche. Only a few die hard nerds like to be exposed to the inner workings of their system as slack does. Most others will just use a more automated dis
Re:Marketshare? (Score:2)
and THAT is the beauty of slackware
no bloat, no extra crap that one doesn't need
just the pure loveliness that one needs
Re:Marketshare? (Score:2)
I think you have slackware confused with Linux From Scratch.
Re:Marketshare? (Score:2, Informative)
Slackware is _THE_ most rocksolid stable distro there is. Which is why slack fanboys can give mac fanboys a run for their money on sheer loyalty.
And also why a *large* proportion of slackware installs are servers. It is most definitively *not* just a hobby system, although you can learn a lot using Slackware.
If you really insist, you can automate Slackware just as well as any other distro (slapt-get?).
Someho
Re:Marketshare? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Marketshare? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Marketshare? (Score:2)
Re:Marketshare? (Score:1)
As for its use in production environments, I'd say it's one of the few distros I've tried that is serious competition for OpenBSD in terms of stability and security (and securability). Pat doesn't throw in stuff just because he can or because it looks pretty. He also do
Re:Marketshare? (Score:1)
Yeah but 2 CDs worth of Linux distro is worth a hell of a lot more than 2 CDs on Windows, for eg. in Windows you're first 2 install CDs give you Windows (incl. Media Player, Web Browser, IM program) and Office. Any Linux distro will manage to fit media player, web browser,
Re:Marketshare? (Score:1)
The only problem I've ever had with Slackware is that it didn't always do as good a job at recognizing USB devices as some others.
My only real problem with Slackware is that Pat won't modify the base vim install to
in the global vimrc. Damn that bugs the shit out of me. I've emailed him and he was very nice about it, he simply said that he does the bare minimum mangling of any package configuration and if I could convince the vim maintainer to make that change that Slackware'd have
Re:Marketshare? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Marketshare? (Score:1, Insightful)
It's as if newer distros are so good at hiding things from you that even when you are looking for them you can't find them.
Re:Marketshare? (Score:1)
All the power to them, but obfusticating other people's free software and then charging money to untangle it for you isn't something I want to
Distrowatch (Score:1)
Re:slack is cool even for n00bs (Score:2, Insightful)
I tri
RSN? (Score:3, Insightful)
but Slack since putting it on my 486. But shouldn't this topic have
come out next week/month/year when Slack 11 is *actually* released?
It'll be ready Real Soon Now. Let's really discuss it then.
Think it'll have 2.6 as its default? Huh, huh, huh?
--User0x45
Re:RSN? (Score:3)
Re:RSN? (Score:2)
Or what about a highmem enabled kernel? At this point, I think it's reasonable for the kernel to support > 1GB RAM out of the box.
Re:RSN? (Score:2)
Duke Nukem Forever [slashdot.org] has made it to the front page twice [slashdot.org] in the past week. I think slackware deserves at least as much attention.
Health Issues (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Health Issues (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Health Issues (Score:2)
Re:Health Issues (Score:2, Insightful)
Slackware makes sense. (Score:5, Informative)
Slackware is a distro, like any other - and just like any other distro you tend to have to be familiar with it in order to get things done efficiently. However, what Slackware does let you get away with is to update packages direct from the developers without having to worry about exploding the "package database" or maintainance system. If you want "fancy" package handling systems you can use the likes of slapt-get or similar. Slackware won't tear you apart or breakdown into a locked up mess if you install something from a "non-slackware-approved" source package.
The default relative daemon sparseness of Slackware makes it quite easy to keep an eye on, especially if you're trying to keep an eye out for malicious things. The whole start up script system is rather simple enough too (will we get a soft-linked
That said, there's a few things which I wish were included by default in slackware (and perhaps will be in the future) but no single distro is perfect. Nearly all distros require some degree of tweaking.
Best of all though, Slackware is quick to download, quite often you only need the first ISO and you've got yourself a fairly comprehensive system ready to go, for someone who knows what they're doing.
Re:Slackware makes sense. (Score:3, Interesting)
Why do you want a "soft-linked /etc/init.d"? Or better yet, why not just build one for yourself (and package it for others)? Slackware doesn't get in your way. I know because I actually rewrote the whole rc script system from scratch several years ago, and it's been working fine in several Slackware versions since then. My rc designs isn't based on symlinks, though.
Re:Slackware makes sense. (Score:2)
Re:Slackware makes sense. (Score:2)
Ah, you mean applications that are not portable ... or at least the installer isn't portable. BTW, I do have a dummy /etc/init.d tree. It's never used during system startup. It just satisfies the craving by some programmers to make their installer automatically startup some daemon on my system. Yet the daemon will never run unless I set up the rc tree that really runs to do so (and I won't unless I know what the daemon does and have a need for it). BTW, the rc tree that really runs has no symlinks.
Re:Slackware makes sense. (Score:2)
Man I hope not!
Re:Slackware makes sense. (Score:2)
Slackware user (Score:1)
Re:Slackware user (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree on Pat's great work, and he's such a drama queen.
Re:Slackware user (Score:2)
Re:Slackware user (Score:1)
hmm
I do it only when I miss some important kernel feature.
Slackware kernel packages are something you can rely upon.
I'd guess most slackers stick with it.
Time for a poll, maybe?
Yes, RSN, but that's news for Slackware because... (Score:4, Insightful)
...it doesn't have a PR machine (even a volunteer one) behind it cranking out a steady stream of news. Look at Distrowatch Weekly's upcoming releases and announcements, and you see release roadmaps, schedules, plans, estimates and pre-order information going all the way out to December. Slackware is nowhere on there.
Even on userlocal.com, supposedly the Slackware community site, and the top items are from February and April (and the latter's about Zenwalk). Other distros start work on their next release before the current one is final, and we hear about it from one release right to the next. Hell, we heard about the Suse and Ubuntu delays for what would seem like forever if we didn't have all that "when is Debian going to release" and "Vista delayed again" coverage to compare it to. So Slack gets a RSN item on Slashdot. Seems small in comparison to all the coverage of alpha flights, umpteen betas, RCs and golden masters some distros get all over the web.
Personally, I'm happy to be using a distro done by a guy more interested in getting a solid product out the door than getting a good press release out the door.
Re: (Score:1)
Fedora has better hardware support? (Score:2)
Eh?
Linux is Linux is Linux. www.kernel.org has all the hardware support you need. Get a tarball, extract, configure and compile
slackware is fun (Score:1, Insightful)
Slackware: It just works (Score:5, Interesting)
I too am a fan of Slackware, and am typing this on a Slackware 10.2 system with a 2.6.16.9 SMP kernel (built from the kernel source [kernel.org]), to support one of those new dual-core Pentium 4 gizmos. In other words, it goes like stink...
Even though I can download the CD images, I always buy a copy of each new release.
It's not a crime for a Linux system to look like Unix, and if your hardware barfs over a text-based install, you really do have a problem. I like being able to download source (including kernels), build it and it just works. I still have nightmares about the time I tried to help somebody upgrade a kernel on a Fedora Core box. Shudder.
Slackware isn't a pre-packaged Linux system in a can: open the can and pour it out, ready to go. It's a construction set for building any kind of Linux system you want. And it's all the better for it.
Thanks, Patrick.
...laura
Re:Slackware: It just works (Score:1)
I would add that if there's something Patrick didn't include that you need, it's easy to add it without problems. (Except GnuCash, but that's more a result of being based on old Gnome libraries, and I've figured out how to make it work reliably.)
Re:Slackware: It just works (Score:2)
We ordered an infomagic CD set of redhat, slackware and debian CDs. There were the 3 of us friends. We knew NOTHING of unix or linux.
So we distributed the CDs and tried installing it. I got redhat first and failed. It was too complex.
Then we switched CDs and tried again. I got debian. I installed it but the dselect packages and interface were way too much. I didnt know how the system worked. It was crazy and confusing at the time.
So the others gave up and I to
Re:Slackware: It just works (Score:2, Interesting)
I heavily modified that installation through the years and still
Slackware user turned FreeBSD (Score:2)
It was stable, it was simple, it was perfect for a beginner who wanted to really learn Linux.
Since last year I've switched to FreeBSD. I do love FreeBSD but I didn'at switch because I got tired of Slackware. Right now I have a Windows machine and a FreeBSD machine. Probably next year I'll get a third computer as a dedicated mail se
Slackware and the Easiness Factor (Score:2, Insightful)
Finally (Score:2)