Patrick Volkerding released Slackware 10-RC1 today. It includes the latest 2.4.26 kernel, Gnome 2.6.1+, KDE 3.2.3, GCC 3.4, XOrg 6.7 and more. A test kernel 2.6.6 option is offered via the “testing” tree. Slackware does not offer ISOs for the RCs (however there are some third party users that compile the RCs or the -Current tree regularly as ISOs), so if you are already running Slackware 9.1, you can use the excellent Swaret to upgrade to the latest packages (make sure you edit your /etc/swaret.conf prior of using swaret to allow for kernel upgrades and other options).
Slackware 10.0-RC1 Released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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yay
I know what I’m going to do when I get home from work.
Do anyone know if swaret should just be set up for teh -Current tree, or is something else required?
…left Gentoo I would so be on Slack. Long live Slack!
from this help page:
http://swaret.org/?menu=swaretconf5
VERSION
Set this to the Version of Slackware Linux you want to use. Possible Values could be 8.1 or
Higher or Current. If you set VERSION to ‘current’, swaret will keep you up-to-date with Slack-
ware Linux Current.
– Used for Dependency Support and other Feature
I’m not currently running Slack (I’m selling a Mac and building an i386 box), so I cant test this.
Can you set it up to update *everything* to -current?
Kudos to Patrick. This release sports some real nice updates to the initialization scripts. Slack now has very good udev and wireless lan support.
Time to beta-test, and make this another classical Slack release (in terms of speed and stability;)).
Can you set it up to update *everything* to -current?
Yep, just change VERSION=9.1 to VERSION=current. There are some packages on the “EXCLUDED” list, clean the list if you prefer, and don’t forget to rerun lilo.
Consdidering that slack has switched from xfree to xorg, swaret will bork that upgrade. Swaret doesn’t appear to know that xorg replaced xfree.
Just use removepkg or pkgtool to remove XFree86, and install X.org with swaret –install.
Here’s a question. Scenario:
Let’s say I have 400 packages installed. Patrick introduces a *new* package to -Current (e.g. K3B). How do I get it *automatically* with Swaret without having to explicity ask it by name?
I guess what I am asking is how to install all (or some) new packages off a repository that are not currently installed on a system.
I guess what I am asking is how to install all (or some) new packages off a repository that are not currently installed on a system.
I don’t know, I don’t use swaret. Maybe by using “swaret –install -p”? With upgradetool and a Slackware CD-ROM it is quite easy: “upgradepkg –install-new */*.tgz” (which would also upgrade installed packages).
Sorry, I mean plain “swaret –install”. It should ask you which packages you’d like to install from a list of uninstalled packages.
If your going to promote something, why not promote a project with a non racist author like slapt-get. The swaret project not only being racist and was removed from slackware has been known by many experienced users to break installation upgrades and may not happen in all cases but should be considered not a relient, and POS. Greets to the swaret author. Second if you want to upgrade your system you can use the cd and use the package tools that Pat so gracieously provides his users with called “upgradepkg” built with and for the OS by the OS author himself. (upgradepkg –install-new *.tgz) but when doing that make sure you skip the upgrading of a/aaa_elflibs-* package due to that it overwrites existing libs and isnt meant to be upgraded if you allready have a working system. Thanks –c0ldbyte
You can made a:
$ swaret –install
and say ‘y’ to the new packages. It’s not automatic : (
I think that there is another problem: What happen when P.W. remove an installed package, or substitute and old one for a new one: You must read the Changelog and/or you can use scripts like this one:
#! /bin/sh
# Sacamos la lista de paquetes instalados
for pkg in /var/log/packages/*
do
instpkg=`basename $pkg`
grep -q $instpkg /var/swaret/.cache/PACKAGES.TXT*
if [[ $? -eq 1 ]]
then
echo “$instpkg not found in repository” ;
fi
# echo “$instpkg [$result]” ;
done
This script show packages that can’t be found in official repository (searching in swaret cache).
I just run
$ swaret –update && swaret –upgrade
…every once in a while (could put swaret –update in the crontab), it’ll check the mirror i’ve selected for new packages and asks me if i want them or not.
Didn’t know the swaret author was a racist though.
No, this is not the case. This is what I run too: “swaret –update && swaret –upgrade” but it does not install NEW packages, it only upgrades packages.
I waited it for a long time. Now I am using Slack 9.1
with Kernel 2.6.4. I hope grub will be contained in 10.0 version. Anyway, es ist sehr schön!. Aus Süd Korea.
I completely agree with c0ldbyte on this one. I know how to upgrade xfree to xorg. I was merely suggesting you shouldnt use swaret for the job. The tool has a shady history at best and has been removed by Pat himself from the package tree. Respect Pat’s decision and use the tools provided to upgrade your system.
Just use: swaret –upgrade -a
This will upgrade ALL installed packages that has a newer version on the FTP server.
If you do have some custom builds (eg. xfce-4.0.5-i686-1eugenia) which you would prefer to use instead of the official Slackware packages, you should add an EXCLUDE line in swaret.conf as follows:
EXCLUDE=.*eugenia$
Or if you would like to exclude specific apps, just add the app names to the EXCLUDE list. eg for someone who prefers XFree86 to Xorg:
EXCLUDE=x11
By default though, ALL installed packages will be upgraded by swaret –upgrade -aif they are not specifically listed in any EXCLUDE lines.
Hope this helps.
Ok, so if Swaret is not a good choice(?), what are the alternatives then? How would people compare swaret and slapt-get? Are there other automatic package update tools too?
The problem with third party update tools (swaret, apt4rpm etc.) is just this, they may work wonderfully some time, but when they break, you’re on your own and often in serious trouble. It was the same thing when I tried apt4rpm with some rpm-based distributions – often it did work very well, but always there were some serious problems eventually. (Well, some distros use apt4rpm officially too though.)
I do hope that Slackware would have its own official auto-update tool like swaret. That’s one of the biggest problems of Slackware (besides of non-newbie-friendlines, like text-based configuration), too primitive package update tools.
@ c0ldbyte: swaret does a good job, or it doesn’t. I’m totally uninterested wheter its author is racist or not. What’s next? being advised against XYZ because its author is left/right/whatever? No politics please.
Personally, I’ve not tried Swaret, because I’m a lazy person – too lazy to upgrade a machine.
just moved to slack 9.1 few days ago from suse, now 10RC is here
, maybe this relaese will solve my sound problem ;-/
There’s still “slackpkg” in extra/. Works very well.
Is your sound problem no sound per chance?
Run the alsamixer program from the command line and unmute your channels
you use alsactl -store to save the settings iirc.
Wish I still had connection at home so I could upgrade. Slackware 0wns
hi Matt, when i 1st installed Slack, i did run alsamixer & aslactrl -stroe, when i logged in to kde, i could run mixer ans set everything but can’t hear anything, then i downloaded alsa pacthe & applied it, now i even mixer can’t run , it dissapperd -;/
Azmeen Afaindi :=== ust use: swaret –upgrade -a ==
i think u mean –update -a ..
Sorry Azmeen Afandi , it was swaret –upgrade without -a
that was what meat, and that was what worked with me ..
I would have expected a big jump in version to at least sport the 2.6 kernel in its standard install.
To be honest, I have little incentive to upgrade.
I tried Knoppix 3.4 on my computer, and was very pleased, but it felt slower than Slack, no doubt due to the version of KDE.
I was curious to see whether this uptra-self-configurable distro (knoppix) will be able to find any of my soundcards (I have an onboard AC 97 and an Audigy PCI card). Alas, no luck there. I started sndconfig (according to the knoppix documentation) but that only found the AC 97 and said that it currently isn’t supported.
Well, if knoppix can’t do more to get my computer sounding, I don’t hold my breath for Slack. 8.1 is good enough for me.
Intersting. I’m running slack 9.1 stock. (Fresh install from a couple weeks ago.) My soundblaster card finally stopped working after a long illness, so I pulled it. This motherboard has onboard audio (Via Ac97) that I had not been using. I was quite happy when on my next boot I had sound without having to touch a thing.
As long as you’re happy with your current setup, no need to change it, but you still might want to give a newer version of slack a shot.
And WTG to the slack team!
They should move to 2.6 kernel
And how does the authors alegedly being a racist have any bearing on the tool itself?
None what-so-ever. Its a nice tool.
I’ll wait for the isos, anyway great new. Still using the 2.4.26 gives me also the chance to run the hopeless adsl modem, which doesn’t work on 2.6.x
How s going on with Xorg 6.7 and XFree86 in speed?
Does anyone have problems with xfce? I always have my system updated to -current, but lately I have experiencing crashes xfce (I think it’s 4.05). Mostly it’s the panel that crashed when launching some gtk apps and xfterm4 hangs at start up. (I’ll see the window coming up but the command prompt never show up) I’ve been trying to get it to work because KDE/GNOME is a little too much for this low end machine.
Are you proposing that I remove my Audigy card? I am not going to do that. I can live with the fact that under Linux only AC 97 is supported – another pair of (crappy) loudspeakers will do the job, but the Audigy will stay, for Windows and BeOS.
Funny how in BeOS I have always had less problems than with Linux, when it comes to soundcards. Must be a coincidence, but I have been using BeOS AND Linux on at least a dozen different boxes and setups.
No, it is not yet stable enough. There will be some VM related changes. Plus there are some problems with reading the disk geometry, this caused problems for some Fedora/SuSE/Mandrake users. Kernel 2.6.x might be good enough for your home desktop, but it is good to be a bit conservative for servers, and stick with 2.4.x for a while…
Cool stuff! I will still not upgrade yet. I’m waiting for release 10 on slackware.com.
X.org 6.7 is an old version of XFree86, so it will be slower have less features and certainly many more bugs. For now XFree86 is the better choice.
X.org 6.7 is an old version of XFree86, so it will be slower have less features and certainly many more bugs. For now XFree86 is the better choice.
In other news, Mozilla is an old version of Netscape, so it will be slower, has far less features and certainly many more bugs. For now, Netscape is the better choice.
In other news, Mozilla is an old version of Netscape, so it will be slower, has far less features and certainly many more bugs. For now, Netscape is the better choice.
Speaking of which, I think it’s time for PV to ditch xap/netscape-7.1. Having both NS 7.1 and Moz 1.6 in xap is a waste of space, and NS 7.1 is rather old now.
$ diff http://ftp.getitforfree.com/pub/linux/slackware/9.1 /etc/swaret/packages.list.txt > new.pkg.swaret.txt
(or get the present pakages list from some conf file first > old.pkg.swaret.txt — get the full packages list (new included here) from the ftp mirror — dif.txt new old.txt > new.pkg.swaret.txt)
$ swaret –install < new.pkg.swaret.txt
I guess there is many ways of doing it, that’s the beauty of Unix.
8.1 is good enough for me.
Yes, but 9.1 has pretty good font rendering and font hintting(for web browsing), the best I seen on Linux (galaxies ahead of Fedora 2).
I’ve read the comments on swaret, and I’d like to follow on an earlier reference to slackpkg. To update my home system and keep it in sync with slackware -current, I’ve been using slackpkg (included in the /extras folder), and I’m very happy with it – I really recommend it. It basically downloads a package list from a slackware mirror and compares it with the package list on your machine. Running “slackpkg upgrade foo” searches for foo, and if there’s a newer version on the mirror, it’s downloaded and upgraded using the regular slackware tools (upgradepkg, installpkg, etc).
This eases the chore of going through the changelog, downloading packages, manually installing, etc, while still leaving you in control. I generally look at the changelog, open an xterm and go through upgrading package by package. You can use wildcards so “slackpage upgrade kde” should hit the entire list of kde packages.
Anyway, for me it’s perfect. I don’t have to worry that some update command will do something strange and try to download a zillion packages, and at the same time it’s a lot less work that grabbing each package from the mirror and upgrading manually. In other words it saves just the right amount of drudge work while using standard slackware tools and not doing anything surprising.
I’ve update base 9.1 installs to current a couple of times recently, withut removing XFree86. Both times swaret pulled down the xorg files.
You still need to configure Xorg, of course.
xpkgtool at http://xpkgtool.sourceforge.net/ looks interesting. Any comments on this tool compared to swaret.
I’m a happy swaret user.
Hmmm I couldn’t find anything linking Luc Cottyn to ‘racism’, but perhaps the detractor is referring to the incidents described here:
http://voidmain.is-a-geek.net/forums/viewtopic.php?p=5969
“Funny how in BeOS I have always had less problems than with Linux, when it comes to soundcards. Must be a coincidence, but I have been using BeOS AND Linux on at least a dozen different boxes and setups.”
Thanks for the BeOS thread crash. My days wasnt’ complete until now.
The best alternative is … your own head … armed with
pkgtools 🙂 Especially if you are within the famous .fi
domain 😉
I do agree that a rank and file user who doesn’t use
KDE/Gnome can happily live with Slackware 8.1, i.e.,
without 9.x and 10.x series.
But time is running forward and we are running with it.
I was really hoping for the 2.6 kernel to be in this time around. Eh, I’ll wait until the official release is out.
On the subject of not using swaret because the author is racist.. It’s called boycotting – there is nothing wrong with it. A lot of people boycott companies because of their business practices, or because of beliefs of the company leader. No reason to badger the poster for acting on what he feels is a right move, assuming that the guy is racist.
I myself don’t use swaret anyways, it’s a pain in the but to use on 56k.
<humor>
SlaXware. Yea, you know it’s catchy
.
First Mandrake and now Slackware make the mistake of releasing a version 10. Learn from RedHat, you can only go to 9 before you change your name!
</humor>
YAY, another iteration of my favorite distribution.
Excellent! Now if only bootsplash is incorp’ed into the kernel and stuff.
-Nx
So, does anyone know when the final version will be released?
I never tried Slackware before (I’m a Mandrake fan), but I know a lot of people who use it and say it’s great. So I think I’ll try the new final version.
“The swaret project not only being racist and was removed from slackware has been known by many experienced users to break installation upgrades and may not happen in all cases but should be considered not a relient, and POS. ”
Do you have a single piece of evidence for this?
I have searched the swaret site, forums, mailing lists and google, but fail to find anything offensive.
I’ve always found swaret to work fine. It was the reason I switched from Gentoo as I found there are only a few apps I really need to compile from source, the rest don’t really benefit and its easier to download them pre-compiled.
“No, it is not yet stable enough. There will be some VM related changes. Plus there are some problems with reading the disk geometry, this caused problems for some Fedora/SuSE/Mandrake users. Kernel 2.6.x might be good enough for your home desktop, but it is good to be a bit conservative for servers, and stick with 2.4.x for a while…
”
wrong. vm related changes have already been done if you are talking about object based rmaps and are fairly minor. the disk geometry problem is not within the kernel at all since it doesnt handle it in 2.6 series. fedora/suse/mandrake problems are with parted and grub not within the kernel.
so your statement is correct for various reasons but the arguments are wrong
As someone else has mentioned, Swaret was removed from the Slackware package tree.
I’ve been running Slackware since version 2.2 – Patrick does not remove packages from the tree without good reason.
I have been using Swaret for awhile now, and it has worked well for the most part.
There have been times where it seems to miss updated packages, but I’m not sure if that is more of a problem with the mirror I use.
From where i can download an ISO File???
From where i can download an ISO File???
Slackware does not offer ISOs for the RCs (however there are some third party users that compile the RCs or the -Current tree regularly as ISOs)
So you can either wait for 10.0 official, or download an unofficial iso from someone else.
> From where i can download an ISO File???
Wait for the final version to download ISO … or else do an ftp install from a mirror of the -Current version (it is smaller like that to try the new packages.tgz).
I will be waiting. BTW there should be a visible link on the site about dev version with link (I never didn’t find it before this day, only the ftp dirs).
I’ve been using swaret for about a year and with the recent xorg change these are the steps you need to take to ensure that updating to current will change over to xorg from xfree86.
1) Use pkgtool and remove all packages with xfree at the beginning. That way swaret will see that kde or gnome for example require xorg as a dependency.
2) Make sure to run swaret –dep a couple times afterwards. Swaret is usefull but not perfect.
3) For the other small tips go to
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&threadid=…
Hope this clears things up. Slackware is by far the best distro I’ve used. Some people are starting to call it old fashioned as it still uses lilo and older methods of doing things. I don’t see this as it’s keeping up with the most “modern” of the distro’s out there and in most cases over throwing it.
Happy slackin’
I’m not a slack user yet (I plan to, it’s the only tolerable linux distro out there). So what’s up with this swaret issue? From what I read from slack users, forums, mailing lists, Patrick seems to be a very nice guy, so I believe he must have had a good reason for dropping support for swaret.
Some folks wrote that its software, and no one should care about politics. I don’t say I care that much. But if there is no real (technical) difference between swaret and slapt-get (or there is only a slight difference) I still want to use the one which has a more symphatic developer base.
Some one put a link to guide for installing slack please.
http://www.slackware.com/install/
Lazy anonymous!
I did a little research into the subject because I was curious myself. Most of the contention with swaret seems to involve a particular developer, xbone. In multiple instances it seems that he would instigate false rumors about the competition under pseudonyms, primarily slaptget but also slackpkg. The freshmeat site for slaptget http://freshmeat.net/projects/slaptget has an intersting chain of posts in the comments section, the most recent of which is from the current maintainer of swaret (LinuxSneaker)
If LinuxSneaker is also unpopular and/or otherwise a pain I have not seen anything about it. I do remember when swaret first started getting mentioned on LinuxQuestions.org I tried it out. Xbone’s attitude (sort of arrogant) plus the fact I already had my own procedure for keeping up to date made swaret undesirable to me.
Also interesting is that I can’t find any mention of the removal of swaret in the change log. It just seems to have been taken out without comment.
by LinuxSneaker – May 8th 2004 21:00:04
There seems to be a dredging up of old comments that the former maintainer of swaret made about slapt-get. The issue has long been resolved between the folks at freshmeat, the developers of slapt-get, and all other involved parties.
X-bone is no longer attached to the swaret development team, and I would hope that anyone reading this would judge either program on its merits.
LinuxSneaker
swaret maintainer
No, this is not the case. This is what I run too: “swaret –update && swaret –upgrade” but it does not install NEW packages, it only upgrades packages.
swaret –update && swaret –install, just read the fine manual.
whats with all this stuff about the swaret author being a racist? ive never heard anything about that, and google doesnt have anything about it either.
I smell a suite brewing…
I do agree that a rank and file user who doesn’t use
KDE/Gnome can happily live with Slackware 8.1, i.e.,
without 9.x and 10.x series.
But time is running forward and we are running with it.
Welp, welp…. sure, time is running forward blah blah blah but how about detecting and supporting an Audigy soundcard? I mean, it’s 2004, I’d expect for a modern OS to detect and configure BOTH my soundcards.
Besides, I do use KDE, but I think it was usable enough at version 1.1.1, when it could run on a 486.
I’m fairly new to Linux (about 1.5 years). I have not had the chance to try Slackware myself, however one my wife’s high school students gave us a Slax demo on my wife’s 7+ year old IBM Thinkpad (which has Fedora 2 installed). I must say it performed VERY well. I am eager to give Slackware a try.
Casual Observation:
It appears to me that every Slackware article that I have read on the net contains nothing but positive comments. That is truly amazing. That must speak volumes about Slackware and it’s quality. (Going out on a limb) It seems to me that Slackware is a distribution (perhaps not the ONLY distro) that everyone likes.
Once version 10 (official) comes out I will have to give it a whirl.
Slack 3.4 is what I started with, and no other distro could match it at the time, except for OpenLinux lite (which I still find a very polished and feature-rich distro).
The reason noone can criticize Slackware is, it’s concept is so good! The config, startup and support scripts are logically connected and it’s inner working is easy to follow and observe. So, Slackware is simple even though it traditionally offers less in terms of “ease of use”, compared to distros like Fedora, Knoppix, Mandrake or SUSE.
I just got my slack install up to 10 rc1. And wanted to try out the 2.6.6 kernel. But I don’t want upgrade the 2.4.26 kernel, I want to go back to it if I have to. Does anyone know if I can just edit lilo and install the 2.6.6 kernel and modules packages and upgrade all the other files that I need? Such as alsadriver-1.0.5a mkinitrd-1.0.0? or is there more to it?
You should be able to run both kernels by making multiple lilo entries.
Every time I compile a new kernel, I rename the previous kernel in /boot and update lilo.conf appropriately.
That way if I have pooched the new kernel, I can reboot and pick the old kernel and get back in to fix whatever might be wrong with the new kernel.
I have only ever done this within the 2.4 world.
just finished uograding , and took about 580~mb
swaret –update -a && swaret –upgrade
worked great.
Does anybody have a guess as to when we should expect Slack 10 (official) to be available?? I’m sticking with FC2 for right now, but I am thinking about making the switch when Slack 10 comes out.
recently installed slack 9.1 on my acer travelmate 243 laptop which has on-board intel sound chip, everything is fine , mixer too, but when i play someting i always get resource busy , somtimes no error but i can’t hear anything
There are at least two possibilities:
1. DIY (check README.TXT at isolinux directory).
2. Ask Google 🙂
IMHO, you can do a
swaret –get -a
to get all the packages.
Plus, you can rsync. Look in the swaret.conf file for the location.
Finally.
From the way 9.1 worked on my Centrino Laptop, I’m expecting
great things from this one.
After Red Hat, Mandrake, and even a botched Suse ftp install I’ve settled on Slackware since version 8.1 and never looked back.
Slackware 9.1 is excellent and once a dedicated user learns how the whole system works the rewards are priceless, total controll of your system.
There is no higher high than being in total controll.
And on the other plus side, it makes both a good desktop just as well as a dedicated server.
With a couple clicks and typing a root password I turn my desktop system into a fully loaded server and in reverse with a couple clicks and root password I turn the server back into a regular desktop. It’s hard to find this kind of flexibility, simplicity, and elegance on any other OS or even Linux distro.
Slackware rules!
No need to go out and get Swaret to use rc1…slackpkg is in -current (can be found in extra/slackpkg/slackpkg-1.2.2-noarch-2.tgz)
“Speaking of which, I think it’s time for PV to ditch xap/netscape-7.1. Having both NS 7.1 and Moz 1.6 in xap is a waste of space, and NS 7.1 is rather old now.”
So? Just remove one of them…whichever one you don’t like. Besides, define “rather old”. Everyone has views, but its bad to judge a tool by how old it is rather than how well it performs. Not ALL software in the world needs to be updated every other month.
“Hmmm I couldn’t find anything linking Luc Cottyn to ‘racism’, but perhaps the detractor is referring to the incidents described here:
http://voidmain.is-a-geek.net/forums/viewtopic.php?p=5969“
That’s just a summary…something someone found that was put together by someone else. Sorta similar to getting hearsay from the 10th person, but yeah, he’s pretty much right. There was a big comotion about this in #slackware, irc.freenode.net. Pat WAS contacted by someone within that channel and Pat DID remove the tool.
I’d rather use Slackpkg, since it’s maintained by a Slackware developer…pretty much makes it a part of Slackware, IMO…more so than any current 3rd party pkg mgt tool.
Lastly, c0ldbyte is not a detractor. We at #slackware do not offer support for Swaret for 2 reasons: 1) the tool is 3rd party and while it does a good job, we’ve seen too many questions on how to fix things that Swaret has broken. 2) Luc is a bit controversial, especially after he apparently did in regards to that link you provided.
;^)
I may be missing something, but slapt-get will upgrade, right?