http://www.slackware.com/releasenotes/15.0.php
Slackware 15.0 release notes. Wed Feb 2 18:39:59 CST 2022
Good hello folks, nice to see you here again. :-)
Historically, the RELEASE_NOTES had been mostly technical information, but once again Robby Workman has covered the important technical details in CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT. Thanks!
We've actually built over 400 different Linux kernel versions over the years it took to finally declare Slackware 15.0 stable (by contrast, we tested 34 kernel versions while working on Slackware 14.2). We finally ended up on kernel version 5.15.19 after Greg Kroah-Hartman confirmed that it would get long-term support until at least October 2023 (and quite probably for longer than that). As usual, the kernel is provided in two flavors, generic and huge. The huge kernel contains enough built-in drivers that in most cases an initrd is not needed to boot the system. The generic kernels require the use of an initrd to load the kernel modules needed to mount the root filesystem. Using a generic kernel will save some memory and possibly avoid a few boot time warnings. I'd strongly recommend using a generic kernel for the best kernel module compatibility as well. It's easier to do that than in previous releases - the installer now makes an initrd for you, and the new geninitrd utility will rebuild the initrd automatically for the latest kernel packages you've installed on the system.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tekk on Saturday February 05 2022, @01:56AM (14 children)
Got myself all settle now. It's nice to be on a stable distro again c: 14.2 was so old it wouldn't boot on my laptop.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 05 2022, @02:09AM (6 children)
Thanks to the International Jew burrowing into tech culture like ticks, even the other "stable" distros won't boot on laptops. The International Jew likes a busted Linux, as they profit more from corporate sponsorship from Apple and Microsoft.
For the International Jew involved in Linux distos, pronoun management is more important than package management and people spend more time bitching about non-issues than doing actual fucking coding.
The International Jew: Not. Even. Once.
(Score: 2) by Frosty Piss on Saturday February 05 2022, @03:23AM
Go back to /.
(Score: 2) by corey on Saturday February 05 2022, @04:20AM (4 children)
The spam replies are kinda amusing, not only totally off topic but make zero sense. But nice use of punctuation. Who spends time typing this crap? Why waste your life doing that? Spend it doing something more interesting and useful.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 05 2022, @08:45PM (2 children)
Who spends time typing this crap?
Someone who wants to constantly remind Jews that there are people who want them dead for no other reason than that they exist. At best a Nazi sympathizer, and we can't rule out that it's the kind of person who would buy an assault rifle and kill a bunch of people in a synagogue. Because they exist.
Also, the continued repeated presentation of directed hate leads to chronicly eelevated cortisol levels in the targets, leading to decreased lifespans. It's evil.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 05 2022, @09:34PM
Oh look, another projecting Jew totally ignoring 2000 years of Jewish hate against the Goyim, especially the last 20 years and ongoing now. You're the same asshole calling Black truckers in Ottawa "Nazi sympathizers." Jewish Tropes Fulfilled: Saying "ow" as they hit you, telling you everybody hates them but they won't tell you why.
LOL I don't have a gun and I have no plans now or in the future to use one -- shitposting here makes me laugh, and that's all the Jew-related kicks I need. Also, when Synagogue "shootings" happen, it';s because the staff colluded with the FBI to stage one, so they can have an excuse to get a lower sentence for criminal Rabbis and hammer civil liberties and distract from Trump speeches. Jewish Tropes Fulfilled: False flags, Bolshevik-style abuse of the mental health system to imprison political opponents, "Oy Vey It's Annudah Shoah."
It's not all about you, Schlomo. May we see your license to practice medicine? Besides being wrong, Jews in medicine exist because artificial human misery and murder is a consistent revenue-stream. They're using their contacts within the governments, right now as we speak, to force humiliation rituals like masks and lockdowns on people, and that is not including the people dead from medical kidnappings and poisoned vaccines. Jewish Tropes Fulfilled Saying "ow" as they hit you, lying medically to prove some bogus point.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 06 2022, @08:06PM
The Jews shot in Pennsylvania were openly bragging about bringing "migrants" into the country. They are funding and organizing the non-White invasion and ultimate genocide of Whites in White countries and bragging about it, but cry about White supremacy whenever any White even tries to tell other Whites about it, never mind takes justified action. Jews and all non-whites need to GTFO of White nations while they still can. Thanks to the internet, Whitey is waking up to the truth and Jew lies and censorship can't stop it.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Sunday February 06 2022, @02:31AM
Someone with severe autism. They get agitated without the repetition. Maybe a fidget spinner or getting laid would fix them?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 05 2022, @03:40AM
I would install it but my floppy drive is broke.
(Score: 2) by corey on Saturday February 05 2022, @04:24AM (2 children)
Yeah I used to be a big Slackware fan, I guess still am but I go with gentoo these days. Just saves figuring out compiler errors and configure options. Then again I’ve been on Fedora a lot lately out of time needs.
For me Slackware was good when resources were limited and software packages didn’t have 100s of dependencies.
Having said that I’m kinda keen to try using it again and just stick with Xfce or fluxbox. Wouldn’t want to build KDE or gnome.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tekk on Saturday February 05 2022, @06:41AM (1 child)
Huh?
You just do a full install: it's about 8 gb. If you don't want kde or xfce just exclude those and save a few gb.
You don't need to worry about configure flags and stuff: slackbuilds are just a ports system basically.
(Score: 2) by corey on Saturday February 05 2022, @10:17PM
Yeah that’s true, I forgot about slackbuilds. I used to build everything manually, a bit like lfs.
With gentoo, the amount of time I spend in-tangling ebuilds and use flag/masks may just send me the Slackware way.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 05 2022, @07:45AM
Installing from a Slackware 14.2 Live Edition solved this kind of problem for me.
Live Edition has all updates up to the time of the build integrated, including the updated kernel, and it booted OK.
https://docs.slackware.com/slackware:liveslak [slackware.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by turgid on Saturday February 05 2022, @11:55AM (1 child)
I've been running current for a few years now and updating it fairly regularly. There have only been one or two occasions where I had a problem with it and it was easy to fix. Sometimes changes in the installer were broken, for example, but you can use one from a previous build or work around it on the command line.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Informative) by tekk on Saturday February 05 2022, @05:34PM
That's what I've been doing. I think the only time my install broke-broke was before I used slackpkg+ and multilib stuff would get out of sync. Otherwise just hanging around in IRC and reading the changelogs it was really easy to keep up.
(Score: 2, Funny) by fustakrakich on Saturday February 05 2022, @05:02AM (1 child)
How many other distros include Seamonkey?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 06 2022, @11:58AM
Not enough of them.
(Score: 2) by Revek on Saturday February 05 2022, @09:34AM
It went on with little fuss and kde launched with no issues. I had to create the partitions and add a regular user.
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 05 2022, @12:41PM (1 child)
A memory from the 90's. Good to see that Patrick is still alive, and well.
But computing has moved on. No full disk encryption? No hardening of the software, or protection of user data from the web browser?
Those who value simplicity have moved on to OpenBSD, which is surprisingly leading edge and clean when it comes to these things.
People who value the ability to tweak their systems have any number of Linux distros to use, from Gentoo to Arch or Tumbleweed.
Still, cool to see Slackware still doing it's thing. FreeDOS and ReactOS are still out there as well. Time marches on.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 05 2022, @05:18PM
The real question: What's up with AlienBob these days?
Last I read into the story he was having some changes in his long-term employment arrangement, not sure if he could continue maintaining Slackware - I think this was in the 2013 timeframe.
I first tried the multi-CD Slackware installer set back around 1998 or so... it wasn't quite "ready for prime time" back then, couldn't keep a dialup (SLIP/PPP?) connection working across reboots, but it was pretty close - and very usable if you had an ethernet based internet connection.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Saturday February 05 2022, @01:25PM (15 children)
I've been trying different distros for years. The trouble with "stable" is that there's an unacceptably long delay between the release of a new version of some software with some fix or enhancement vital to your work, and its eventual arrival in the distro. This is particularly acute on "long term" such as Ubuntu 20.04 which is the entirely too aged "current" version. For instance, they're still stuck on AV1 1.0.0 errata, from just over 3 years ago. The current version is 3.2 and 3.3 is in release candidate status. Get a new computer with cutting edge hardware, and Linux kernel version 5.4 just won't do. One of the few software packages they stay current on is the web browser. They'd get too much flak if they tried to push a 3 year old version of a browser.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 05 2022, @03:15PM (8 children)
"Stable" distros are a relic of the past for personal computing and developer workstations. They originated from a time when bandwidth was limited, security wasn't nearly as important, and for those major exploits, everything was written in C or Perl so anybody could just patch that piece of software. Maybe you had a few hundred packages installed on your 1Gig hard drive and that's all you had to worry about. One guy or maybe a handful of people could maintain a stable distribution.
Today, software is written in a hundred different languages and bandwidth is both fast and unlimited. 200Meg fiber to the apartment is even available in Monrovia and Yaounde. Also, a workstation or laptop might have six thousand packages (software + libraries) installed on it. The time to backport security patches to a "stable" software package that was never intended to be updated (devops culture) or without breaking a downstream package can take a team weeks. It's just easier and less resource intensive to follow a rolling release, where a security exploit is fixed that evening and rolled out to the distro by the weekend.
The only place that LTS or stable distros make sense anymore is the enterprise, where the resources are available (due to money and contracts) for backporting, and software updates are intentionally slow as to not fuck up the workforce productivity (build in lead-time for re-training the entire workforce because a menu item moved locations). But for personal computing, rolling release makes much more sense these days.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 05 2022, @07:33PM (7 children)
A "rolling release" when a new something gets broken in new ways every day? That thing is for when your time is worthless.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 05 2022, @10:08PM
We are trying out Tumbleweed as a compromise. You get up-to-date packages as in a rolling release but they have snapshots that allow you to stabilize around breaking changes. We aren't quite sure if it is truly the best of both worlds yet but so far it seems promising. There is also the boon that many of our European collaborators are already familiar with it. However, many in the other countries are not.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 05 2022, @10:21PM (5 children)
If your only experience with a rolling release is Arch Linux back in 2006, maybe I would see your point.
In 2022, automated testing is a thing. For the large distributions, packages undergo automated testing with supercomputing clusters under every use case imaginable before they hit the repos. Additionally, snapshots of the base system are taken with every update, so that in the rare case that something bad happens (three times for me since 2016 on the same install), you just roll back to yesterday's snapshot, wait a few hours for the fix, and then update again.
The "stable" under stable distributions only refers to the version number; not the quality or robustness of the software. A rolling release from openSUSE or Fedora is going to be stable for every day use, and you don't have to wait weeks for a backport when a security flaw is found, nor do you have to wait years for a new feature to trickle down to your software packages.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Sunday February 06 2022, @02:08PM (3 children)
My experience with Arch was indeed around that time, when they made the move to systemd. What a mess that was. Many manual updates of considerable complexity, over a period of several months. Had to do it all on a terminal. Not that I mind terminals-- I like them, actually. Finally, I must have got a command wrong. Or maybe the mistake was their end. My installation of Arch would no longer boot. It was easier to just download a new, current ISO and reinstall from that.
Then I at last had a working Arch system using the then new and shiny systemd, which caused such additional pain that I switched to a different distro. Basically, Arch bungled the switch. Some weird problem is going on, so I take a look at /var/log/messages and syslog, only to find out that under systemd at that time, those files no longer exist. Where'd the logs go?? The punks could have left some stubs telling me where to look, just a simple "messages has moved to ..." text in the old file, instead of nothing at all. Took an hour of searching the Arch site and Internet generally to learn that the new command to view the logs was "journalctl", and the logs were now in a subdirectory of /var/log/. Then I discovered that journalctl was much, much slower than the simple old "tail" command. The logs were now in a compressed binary format, and journalctl needed a full 30 seconds to decompress it so it could show me the last few lines in the log. Tail was able to do that in under 1 second. With the logs in hand again, I could get back to diagnosing whatever the heck was going on, considerably slowed and irritated by journalctl's 30 second delay. The problem turned out to be another one with systemd.
When I inquired about this move to systemd, I got a rude response that I didn't know what I was talking about, the decision had been made, and was final. Systemd was so obviously a huge improvement that only a moron could fail to see the advantages. Faster boot times, really? Whatever happened to the virtue of never having to reboot Linux because it was so awesomely stable, thus rendering fast boot times unimportant? Besides, 2 minutes to reboot Linux without systemd was a lot better than some systems I've worked on. Not like I was running a massive database that took forever to shut down and bring back up. No, I was to take them at their word. I found insulting being talked down to as a "luser" rather than as a system administrator of some knowledge. That was the last straw. I didn't stick around to find out what else sucked about systemd, I switched distros. As it turned out, Arch didn't have to configure systemd the way they did, it can still have the old text logs.
Despite that experience, I agree that some means of staying more current is good. Yes, you might run into a few bugs. That should be balanced against the fact that not being current means you are dealing with known problems that have been fixed. Especially bad if those are security fixes. Granted, pretty much every distro rushes security updates out ASAP. As I see it, the main argument in favor of more conservatism is to hold off on an update that is clearly too ambitious, as Arch's move to systemd was. Those are comparatively rare. In most cases the alternative is nothing, just live with it, or backporting, lots of backporting. Current is usually better than that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 08 2022, @06:50AM (2 children)
One thing that people don't understand is that there is one important area where it is head and shoulders above the competition, which is also the open secret behind its adoption. Systemd makes packaging and maintaining a distribution much easier. It does that in a number of ways and a number of the touted benefits in other areas are actually ways to make the packagers' and maintainers' job easier. They know they can't say that directly out loud but there you go.
Think about it this way for a second: compared to the alternatives, there are some aspects where systemd is better and aspects where it is worse. In many ways choosing between them (when everything else is equal) is a push or depends on context. But things were not equal. The alternatives to the systemd ecosystem were already in place (and a number are still used today alongside it!). Why invest all of the time energy and effort in changing things to the systemd ecosystem when the problems in the system can be addressed with less overall effort using alternatives? Because they knew that in the long run the changeover would make their lives easier at the expense of everyone else having to expend effort on changing their set ups too. Once you change over and get used to things, you don't really notice the changes as a user. But I guarantee that they see them and they don't want to tell you that they do.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday February 08 2022, @06:44PM (1 child)
> Systemd makes packaging and maintaining a distribution much easier
I've never heard that one before. How? How does it do that? Improvements in package managers can make distro maintenance easier, I'll buy that, but how can systemd do that?
> They know they can't say that directly out loud but there you go. ... they knew that in the long run the changeover would make their lives easier at the expense of everyone else having to expend effort on changing their set ups too. Once you change over and get used to things, you don't really notice the changes as a user. But I guarantee that they see them and they don't want to tell you that they do.
Oh, it's a secret. The shame of it, how dare they make their lives easier at the expense of the users. And hide what they've done.
> Think about it
I am. And I'm skeptical. This idea that it's a big secret doesn't quite pass the smell test. It doesn't add up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 09 2022, @12:02AM
Who boots machines a lot? One category is distro maintainers. Who starts/stops/restarts a lot of services with underlying config changes? Distro maintainers. Who debugs problems where journald's configuration makes sense? Distro maintainers. Who maintains startup scripts? distro maintainers. (BTW Who maintains unit files? Preferably upstream.) Who configures the base security stance? distro maintainers. Manage system accounts? Distro maintainers. Tmpfile separation? Distro maintainers. Manages service dependancies? distro maintainers.
There were some examples in there of systemd moving the complexity from the maintainers to someone else. But there are many more finer details and I could go on but I am not sure which benefits and drawbacks of each type you are aware of. Remember daemontools? Look at the mailing lists. Some of the same people that advocated against adopting daemontools are now advocating for systemd. The same goes with other services that fix many of the problems that systemd supposidly fixed. Why is it that distro maintainers were against many of those but for systemd? Because a lot of the alternatives make the users' lives easier while adding the complexity to the maintainers, the exact opposite of systemd's approach of spreading the pain around.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 07 2022, @12:04PM
My desktop runs whatever the latest Ubuntu is. My laptop runs Ubuntu 20.04. On my desktop if I hover over a program's panel window list entry (taskbar on Windows) it displays a mini screenshot of the program. Same on the laptop. However if I minimize the program its mini screenshot isn't displayed on my desktop yet it's still displayed on my laptop. For me, the whole fucking point of those mini screenshots is to see which minimized program is what. If the programs aren't minimized then there's no need to use the screenshots since you can directly see it on your desktop or you can minimize whatever's in front to find what you're looking for.
So sure, the code behind the feature still works, but the feature has been distorted into uselessness. Automated testing is useful for finding some classes of bugs. However it isn't related to the persistent software feature regressions that modern software likes to gift down its users' throats. The longer I can stay on the older, more usable software versions the better. Had I known Ubuntu removed the "Recently Used Directories" listing from its file picker, I wouldn't have even updated to 20.04.
(I wish I had a PDA so I could compare its usability with a smart phone. I bet the PDA would win.)
(Score: 2, Disagree) by bart9h on Saturday February 05 2022, @04:44PM (1 child)
This is the only reason I had ditched Slackware back then: it's fine to use the "stable" (old) version of most packages, but for some software I want the latest version.
I tried installing those from source. The problem is when they need newer version of the required libraries too, and that leads to a nasty snowball effect, until the system is a mess.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 05 2022, @07:30PM
Some of us know that sonames exist for a reason, and that static linking is a thing too.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 05 2022, @05:21PM
From some perspectives, an advantage of a Slackware release is that it comes with everything and the kitchen sink under a single version number by default. In comparison, you might start with Ubuntu 20.04.3 - but you inevitably end up adding a few dozen things (through apt install) before you have a system that works for your needs, for Slackware we might have needed to add two packages to get the same functionality. Documentation requirements (low score wins): Slackware 3, Ubuntu 27.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by chewbacon on Saturday February 05 2022, @06:21PM
I've always liked Slackware's "fuck you, Imma do my thing" mentality and the grassroots of it all. But, yeah, it takes too damn long to get to current with slack and, before I moved on from slackware, it was too much work to update a piece of software or a kernel when I could go to Ubuntu and sudo apt upgrade -y.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 05 2022, @07:36PM
With Slackware, it is usually no problem to download a source package from "-current" and compile it on your stable install.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 05 2022, @08:57PM
It sounds like you might like Arch or one of its more accessible forms (Manjaro, RebornOS, Mabox), etc. Kernel and packages are as up to date as they get. I downloaded the new Slackware out of curiousity, but consider it with respect as one of the grandfather editions of LInux. Crucial to the existence of modern Linux, a building block, but maybe not relevant today. A bit like Daguerreotypes are to digital photography....
(Score: 3, Insightful) by acid andy on Saturday February 05 2022, @09:00PM (4 children)
Glad it's out. It's a pity they felt they had to bring in elogind and PAM though. Ever get the feeling that all Linux distros will very, very lowly morph into something we don't want to run anymore? I hope it won't, but I've had a shitty day.
error count exceeds 100; stopping compilation
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday February 05 2022, @10:49PM (3 children)
What's bad about PAM and what's elogind? The day that systemd comes in, I'm out. Every so often things need to be burnt down and rebuilt from first principles.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 06 2022, @12:32AM
elogind is a daemon that manages user logins. There is some controversy around it because it was forked from the systemd project and many people feel don't like it because it does not follow the ConsoleKit API exactly, could be the start of the systemd slippery slope, depends on PAM, and other concerns. The major reason it is the main alternative to systemd-logind is because it has compatibility with software expecting systemd-logind or D-Bus or ConsoleKit and most of the alternatives are no longer maintained and some of them have known vulnerabilities.
(Score: 3, Informative) by acid andy on Sunday February 06 2022, @12:42AM (1 child)
I just found PAM over-complicated when I was trying to get GDM working on the unofficial Slackware port on my PinePhone. Granted, it was the first time I'd come across PAM and I didn't spend a lot of time trying to learn about it, but the documentation I found didn't seem to be much help.
From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
So I just don't like that it came from systemd, but then ConsoleKit2 that Slackware 14.2 uses apparently was a fork of a systemd component as well, so maybe my knee-jerk reaction was unwarranted. I'm just rapidly becoming an aging codger that's resistant to any kind of change, I guess.
error count exceeds 100; stopping compilation
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 06 2022, @08:27AM
As someone that has worked with PAM: depending on which side of the PAM API and config you are on, it is either dead simple or only the one guy in our office who regularly deals with PAM can figure it out by making the proper sacrifices to the proper gods. The documentation is also obviously written by people who know PAM inside and out, so the curve is quite steep.
Also, ConsoleKit2 forked from ConsoleKit. But both are abandoned and ConsoleKit2 was originally adopted as a stop-gap measure. Frankly, you need something to do the job done by them, elogind, and systemd-logind, etc and many applications expect systemd-logind-like interfaces. The de facto standard by the systemd project is reasonable enough and compartmentalized in this area and there are a number of alternatives that provide similar interfaces that are not systemd.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by stormreaver on Sunday February 06 2022, @03:02AM
Slackware was my first distribution (or the first one I remember?) in the early life of Linux, circa 1993. I used it for two or three years. It taught me a lot about Linux, especially that I really wanted an automated system of installing and uninstalling software. It taught me how easy it is to hose a system as root -- especially when downloading, compiling, and installing software, manually managing dependencies, etc.
Fun times.