Slackware 15.0 Finally Released After 5 1/2 Years

Wow, it has really happened. Slackware 15 is out and we live to see the day.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement. 

"Well folks, in spite of the dire predictions of YouTube pundits, this morning the Slackhog emerged from its development den, did *not* see its shadow, and Slackware 15.0 has been officially released - another six weeks (or years) of the development treadmill averted. This has been an interesting development cycle (in the "may you live in interesting times" sense). Anyone who has followed Linux development over the years has seen the new technology and a slow but steady drift away from the more UNIX-like structure. The challenge this time around was to adopt as much of the good stuff out there as we could without changing the character of the operating system. Keep it familiar, but make it modern. And boy did we have our work cut out for us. We adopted PAM (finally) as projects we needed dropped support for pure shadow passwords. We switched from ConsoleKit2 to elogind, making it much easier to support software that targets that Other Init System and bringing us up-to-date with the XDG standards. We added support for PipeWire as an alternate to PulseAudio, and for Wayland sessions in addition to X11. Dropped Qt4 and moved entirely to Qt5. Brought in Rust and Python 3. Added many, many new libraries to the system to help support all the various additions. We've upgraded to two of the finest desktop environments available today: Xfce 4.16, a fast and lightweight but visually appealing and easy to use desktop environment, and the KDE Plasma 5 graphical workspaces environment, version 5.23.5 (the Plasma 25th Anniversary Edition). This also supports running under Wayland or X11."

Also, for the first time ever a "make_world.sh" script that allows automatically rebuilding the entire operating system from source is included. All the sources have been tested and confirmed to build properly.

A Long Wait Will Soon be Over: Slackware 15.0 Coming Up

As Slackware fans will have duly noted the team around the BDFL are finally one step, actually untold steps, closer to nearing the long awaited 15.0 release. And high time it is as outdated as 14.2 now is something like 4.5 years into its life. Is anyone actually still running this, except on servers? On 7 December 2020 it was announced that alienBOB's latest Plasma 5 packages made it into the Slackware-current branch for testing and with that they finally fully replaced KDE 4. Shortly after XFCE 4.16 followed and now even includes the Whisker menu.

7 Alternatives to Kubuntu

Kubuntu is of course a valid distribution in its own right and the case for it has been stronger again ever since Linux Mint cancelled their own KDE edition in 2018. On top of that Kubuntu serves as a base for KDE Neon. Nevertheless, one or the other user might want to look at other alternatives and options to run a pre-configured and set up Plasma Desktop. A ready-made one because the desktop environment can be installed on top of any distribution base.

Last Week's Slackware Current Updates

Last week's Slackware Current updates, as always up to Saturday, this time with an important downgrade, or upgrade if you will, to eudev. Also Linux kernel 4.14.74 and new versions of Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird.

Last Week's Updates and Upgrades

Another day, another dollar. Or, err, another kernel update. The Linux kernel in Slackware current now stands at 4.14.73 as of Saturday 29th September. Lots of other miscellaneous security flaw and bug fixes as always, among them for the Apache web server httpd daemon. Better upgrade this one if you got a server running. Enjoy.

Things To Do after Installing Absolute Linux - Part 2

It's been a couple of days and a few more things became apparent that need doing when setting up Absolute Linux for the first time in areas with different time and date conventions than apply in the United States. Here's part two of 'Things To Do after Installing Absolute Linux' (continued from Part 1).
In particular you might want your date to be shown in the format that you're used to at home, but IceWM uses the US format by default and setting your timezone in the abs-panel doesn't fix this.

Things To Do after Installing Absolute Linux - Part 1

Absolute Linux is currently my favorite Slackware implementation short of my own, its use of the IceWM window manager helps keep it light and extremely responsive and the testing snapshots mean we're quite close to upstream instead of running an outdated 14.2. However, some things need fixing and sprucing up. The developer has been very responsive to the bugs found in my recent review, but I noticed later that the keyboard did not adjust to my chosen country layout although the Absolute Control Panel provides a tool for that in the system language settings.

Absolute Linux: Testing Snapshot/15.0 Based on Slackware Current

I have reviewed Absolute Linux here already twice before. AL 13.1 fared better in my testing than the initial 14.0 release, but it's been some time and things may have changed a bit. Absolute has always been an interesting Slackware modification for me, time to give it another chance. This time I am installing Absolute from the current tree, because a) the previous version is so old by now and b) the underlying Slackware current has undergone a major recompilation in the mass rebuild of 19th April 2018. There is no ISO available to install Absolute current from so I downloaded the file tree to another partition and pointed the Slackware installer copied earlier to a USB thumb drive to it.

Bad News re. Funding and Thoughts on Slackware's Direction

Bit of bad news here in the sense that Patrick Volkerding, BDFL of Slackware, is struggling to make a living to put it mildly, as the Slackware store has somehow omitted to send him most of the proceeds of the last two years. The full story and thoughts on what a future Slackware could look like here at AlienBob's. There's also a thread on LinuxQuestions discussing future payment options to ensure that donations and funds are actually reaching Pat. Whoever ripped him off: slime balls! 'Nuff said.

This Week's Updates in Slackware Current

Here's a list of the latest updates over the course of the week, notably the gstreamer plugins have been upgraded and the kernel is now at 4.14.56 to ensure you're always running the latest in the LTS line that Slackware is using.
Also, on 17th July it was 25 years since the Slackware 1.0 release although apparently there's some dispute or uncertainty whether it was really the 16th August. Anyway, enjoy!

The LiveSlak Project: Running Slackware-Current Live Images With or Without Persistence and Installing Them

Eric Hameleers has unofficially contributed to Slackware for what feels like forever. He not only runs his blog Alien Pastures dedicated to Slackware and offers a huge selection of packages pre-compiled on his vanilla systems, readily available for our perusal. He also offers the Ktown repository with updated packages of KDE4 and the next generation Plasma desktop for both the stable and testing branches of Slackware. He also started the Slackware Live project based on his own LiveSlak scripts to give people an opportunity to run Slackware current without committing to an install and to get an idea what the next version will be like.

Last Week's Updates and Upgrades in the Slackware Current Testing Tree

Here we are again, a recap of the week's updates to the testing branch. Every week a new kernel it seems, this is now at 4.14.55. Apart from that a slew of upgrades again like the kernel firmware package and Pulseaudio. Also binutils have been upgraded to 2.31. This is all for the x86_64 architecture which I am tracking but 32-bit is usually identical.

Last Week's Slackware Current Updates in Review

Last week was a bit quieter than what we have gotten used to. From a user perspective the most interesting upgrades are probably Thunderbird 52.9.0 and MariaDB to 10.3.8. A slight incremental change of the kernel version to 4.14.53. If you're running the current branch this should be of interest. Happy slacking.

This Week's Changes in Slackware Current and 14.2 Changelogs

The change log in Slackware-current continues to be busy, with rebuilds, fixes and upgrades coming out almost on a daily basis. All this activity bodes well both for an up to date but still stable system if you're running current and for a new release being not too far off any more this year.  Vim and Networkmanager have been upgraded and the kernel is now at 4.14.52, with the necessary sources, kernel-headers and modules packages of course available as well. Mozilla Firefox has now switched to 60.1.0 ESR, indicating this will be in the next stable release.

This Week's Updates in Slackware Current, First Indications Slackware 15.0 Getting Closer

This week rebuilds of the aaa_elflibs and the pkgtools packages with version numbering for Slackware 15.0 were upgraded in the Slackware Current branch, a sure indicator that a new release is edging closer. Apart from that, lots of patches, recompiles and rebuilds. There's also been another kernel upgrade to 4.14.51 that is worth mentioning.  All in all a good sign, Slackware is very active and it now shouldn't be too long anymore before the first beta will be out for testing. Slackware 15.0 it is!

Slackware 14.2 Updates and Keeping it Relevant

One of the most clicked posts on this blog and certainly the most visited one for this week is Slackware 14.2 Still Getting Updates from April 2016, believe it or not. This of course referred to when the current stable release was still in development and is not so useful now. But it shows the demand there is to find out about Slackware stable updates and  presumably how to keep a release that's over 1.5 years old relevant. Time to show 14.2 some love.

This Week's Slackware Current Changelog Updates

Blimey, lots of activity in the Slackware changelog in the last few days so we'll better post them all together. Otherwise you could of course just look at the Slackware page or subscribe to the emails. So here we are. Does all this activity mean we're nearing a release? Let's hope so.

Long List of Changes to Slackware-Current with Kernel 4.14.49

Hi all, it's been absent for a while after the last release and as I was busy with other things but in the run up to the next Slackware, what will probably be Slackware 15.0, I'll be once again monitoring the changelogs and be posting about major updates here.
We've had a major update to the PC architectures this morning, bringing an update to the 4.14. LTS kernel to all users of the current branch and a fix to resolve a bug that caused 100% CPU usage.

Slackware: Kernel 4.4.10 and Liveslak Images

Ola! While we're still waiting Eric Hameleers has quietly (sort of) updated many of his packages, among them Chromium 51, and also released v1.0.0 of his liveslak project, still based on Slackware Current as of now, on his Alien Pastures blog. Eric writes he considers

Slackware: Kernel Upgraded to Linux 4.4.9 in Current

Today Slackware upgraded the kernel in the Current branch and with that for the upcoming and highly anticipated Slackware 14.2 release to linux 4.4.9 with all the corresponding modules. The init scripts were also updated to sysvinit-scripts-2.0-noarch-31. As usual, this can be traced in the changelog.