Patrick Volkerding, Slackware’s benevolent dictator for life, has ‘released’ Slackware Linux 11.0 Release Candidate 2. From the changelog: “This is mostly frozen now unless bugs (or irresistible upgrades) come up, so I’ll call this update Slackware 11.0 release candidate 2.”
Really nice work – the best of the GNU/Linux distros.
The best. Sure is!
My hearfelt thanks go out to Pat. Slackware is the best of the best.
As always, Pat will give us a stable, reasonably current, and simple distro. No unneeded services, which keeps things simple, clean and fast. Slack makes a good KDE desktop, easy to add third-party GNOME modules, and nice tools if you want to compile your own applications.
It was my 2nd distro and I always liked it. It doen’s do the bling blong thing, no fancy whizzling magic, but gives you control and stability in a world where most distro’s try to hide their complexity from the user – while slack shows that complexity doesn’t have to be hided, as long as your distro isn’t overly complex in the first place.
I just want to let you know, “bling blong” made me laugh.
Couldn’t agree more, i’ve test numerous distro’s (Ubuntu, SuSE 10, Gentoo, Fedora etc.) but I always return to using Slackware. I can’t wait for Slack 11 to come out and combine it with Dropline Gnome 2.6.
The dropline team does a great job maintaining GNOME for slackware and in my opinion making Slackware the best distro out there.
If you want to try it: http://droplinegnome.org/
Or take a look at the screenshots:
http://www.droplinegnome.net/?page_id=7
Ubuntu should learn more from dropline in customizing the GUI and give it a clean and shiny look.
Dropline Gnome 2.SIX? Are they really falling that far behind?
From their site:
dropline GNOME 2.14.3 Available.
http://droplinegnome.org/
Dropline gnome 2.6 will come when Slackware 11 and gnome 2.6 have been released.
You probably mean Dropline gnome 2.16…
lol yeah I must be sleeping, I meant 2.16 of course
IMHO Freerock Gnome is much better, closer to the Slakware philosophy:
http://gsb.freerock.org/
When I was trying to use Dropline, I had always problems with uninstalling PAM…
Here is an article I found about customizing Gnome. Good stuff.
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/06/17/1538223
I can’t wait for it to come out. Slackware has been a nice distro to work with, although I wouldn’t call it exactly “stable.” So far, I’ve had to reinstall slackware itself twice because it somehow broke itself. I’ve had to reinstall dropline and various subcomponents (mostly firefox) several times, as well.
Overall, though, the simple packaging system and overall speed is well worth it.
p.s. Hurray customization
http://24.12.0.88/~bytecoder/screenshots/7-4-06.png
Slackware only breaks (in my experience) when you do an upgrade via swaret or slackpkg and don’t read the changelog. Quite often a package will be split into two or three smaller packages along the way and the upgrade will not install the newly created packages.
For example, Jul 26,2006 x11-6.9.0, Patrick removed freetype and fontconfig into seperate packages. If you only perform an upgrade of x11, your system will no longer have freetype or fontconfig installed. You need to read the changelog with every update and manually add those packages that have been split off into individual packages.
The only automatic installer I use is dropline’s. I pretty much just leave everything else in the base system the same, except for the kernel which I always upgrade to 2.6.
Well, you can’t exactly call Slackware unstable when you use a third party Gnome vendor that is specifically not endorsed by Patrick because Dropline replaces key libraries.
GWare and Freerock are the recommended gnome sources for Slackware as they retain the base libraries installed, therefore not compromising stability.
Well I suppose I can’t in that regard, but I’ve had trouble with vanilla slackware as well. Specifically, I’ve had trouble installing several times, the last time it couldn’t install a bootloader for some reason. I had t o install ubuntu since I couldn’t boot into my slackware system, but then I realized I could just use the grub it installed.
I haven’t taken a look at slackware in a number of years. (Last time I installed it was some time before 2000.) My question is about how security updates and bug fixes are handled. If there is a problem with a package that is included in the distribution, what is the method for updating that package?
Like with Debian, you just run “apt-get update” and “apt-get upgrade” to keep up to day. Pretty simple. Or like Gentoo’s emerge system.
And most of the modern distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, and Suse kind of take it to the next level by automatically updating the list of potential updates and then informing the user that updates are available.
Anyway, I’m just curious how Slackware handles updates.
Hello.
I subscribe to the Security mailing list and use slackpkg. It works like this:
slackpkg update
slackpkg upgrade-all
Very easy.
For Security, Patrick updates Slackware 9 (if reasonable/possible) and all Slackware 10 releases: 10, 10.1,10.2 and current.
Ryan
So,days of 10.2 are soon over on my machine. I will just wait for a while to have more 11.0 ports on linuxpackages.net
Gosh, how I’m in love with this distro. Remember now an then to actually buy the CD/DVD from Slack’s store. They worth every penny.
during short period of time someone changes most of the programs in his distribution, changes the name to RCx, few days later announces final version, which is called ‘stable’ and .. nobody protests?
That’s why it’s a “Release Candidate” – no new packages, just fixes to current packages are updated for security or packaging issues.
A more interesting question for me is to ask “Why am I paying for a broken system?” – think Windows (flavor of the week) where anything can change at the next fixpack that’s not security related – not just fixes to current stuff.