Slackware 13.1 Release Announcement

[celldweller1591]

After many months of development and careful testing, we are proud to announce the release of Slackware version 13.1!

We are sure you'll enjoy the many improvements. We've done our best to bring the latest technology to Slackware while still maintaining the stability and security that you have come to expect. Slackware is well known for its simplicity and the fact that we try to bring software to you in the condition that the authors intended.

Slackware 13.1 brings many updates and enhancements, among which you'll find two of the most advanced desktop environments available today: Xfce 4.6.1, a fast and lightweight but visually appealing and easy to use desktop environment, and KDE 4.4.3, a recent stable release of the new 4.4.x series of the award-winning KDE desktop environment. We continue to make use of HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) and udev, which allow the system administrator to grant use of various hardware devices according to users' group membership so that they will be able to use items such as USB flash sticks, USB cameras that appear like USB storage, portable hard drives, CD and DVD media, MP3 players, and more, all without requiring sudo, the mount or umount command. Just plug and play. Properly set up, Slackware's desktop should be suitable for any level of Linux experience. New to the desktop framework are ConsoleKit and PolicyKit. ConsoleKit handles "seats", things like dealing with devices when switching from one user to another. PolicyKit is a system for fine-grained access control, allowing a non-root user to run certain tasks with elevated privilege, but more securely than if the entire task were simply run as root.

Slackware uses the 2.6.33.4 kernel bringing you advanced performance features such as journaling filesystems, SCSI and ATA RAID volume support, SATA support, Software RAID, LVM (the Logical Volume Manager), and encrypted filesystems. Kernel support for X DRI (the Direct Rendering Interface) brings high-speed hardware accelerated 3D graphics to Linux.

There are two kinds of kernels in Slackware. First there are the huge kernels, which contain support for just about every driver in the Linux kernel. These are primarily intended to be used for installation, but there's no real reason that you couldn't continue to run them after you have installed. The other type of kernel is the generic kernel, in which nearly every driver is built as a module. To use a generic kernel you'll need to build an initrd to load your filesystem module and possibly your drive controller or other drivers needed at boot time, configure LILO to load the initrd at boot, and reinstall LILO. See the docs in /boot after installing for more information. Slackware's Linux kernels come in both SMP and non-SMP types now. The SMP kernel supports multiple processors, multi-core CPUs, HyperThreading, and about every other optimization available. In our own testing this kernel hasproven to be fast, stable, and reliable. We recommend using the SMP kernel even on single processor machines if it will run on them.

Source (full story)

[azaad_shri75]

thanks for the info, however I never knew that LILO is still in use......

[celldweller1591]

its basically used as a secondary bootloader when Grub fails on a machine like openSUSE gives you an option to choose after grub failure but Slackware has lilo by default.

[azaad_shri75]

started the download, couldn't complete it in happy hour time, so tomorrow it would complete and try out it,

[celldweller1591]

i had to stop it at 87% .Tomorrow i will able to test it !

[azaad_shri75]

so you also couldn't complete it........

[azaad_shri75]

download complete..........need to check it out.........:-P

---------- Post added at 09:29 AM ---------- Previous post was at 07:30 AM ----------

damn it, it still has a text based installer, of which am not comfortable of..........
after wasting 2 precious days---what I get is - while installing kde base- it says its corrupted....................hahahaha

I should definitely stay away from Slack..............

[celldweller1591]

never had much problem using that cfdisk . i work fine in 13.0 now!

[Liverpool_fan]

Originally Posted by azaad_shri75

download complete..........need to check it out.........:-P

---------- Post added at 09:29 AM ---------- Previous post was at 07:30 AM ----------

damn it, it still has a text based installer, of which am not comfortable of..........
after wasting 2 precious days---what I get is - while installing kde base- it says its corrupted....................hahahaha

I should definitely stay away from Slack..............

What's wrong with text based installer? :/
As for "corrupted", your download might have been corrupted? Or a media issue.

Slackware somewhat needs more knowledge about working of Linux and adequate knowledge with the terminal. It's a pretty decent distro if you manage to configure it properly. It's rock solid and never fails, as much as Debian Stable.
Perhaps unless you build a strong foundation with working with Linux, you should stay away from Slackware.

[celldweller1591]

+1 to that. Slackware is distro that makes you feel l337 with terminal installation, command line partitioner setup and even to run "X" you need to "startx" as root user. All it demands is just a bit of kung-fu skills in cli . As far as installation problems are concerned, one must do checksum after downloading the image. It hardly takes a min. to complete.

[azaad_shri75]

Originally Posted by Liverpool_fan

What's wrong with text based installer? :/
As for "corrupted", your download might have been corrupted? Or a media issue.

Slackware somewhat needs more knowledge about working of Linux and adequate knowledge with the terminal. It's a pretty decent distro if you manage to configure it properly. It's rock solid and never fails, as much as Debian Stable.
Perhaps unless you build a strong foundation with working with Linux, you should stay away from Slackware.

yeah you right........I only said that I am uncomfortable....as it completely console based, which makes it us to be extra cautious , so that we dont end up deleting other partitions in use......... thats it, however debian's installer is little easier than slack's........after 2-3 yrs non use of linux and to remember commands , that too mounting file systems is not easy.......
anyways am fedora and suse boy:-P

[celldweller1591]

openSUSE is gr8 but when it comes to dual boot it with another linux distro, it becomes hell of a headache

[azaad_shri75]

^ what makes you say so, I used it for more than a year in dual boot without any probs.........I think it was 10 or 10.1............and 2-3 yrs before that .....I used 3-4 distros with common swap and and with windows...........

waiting for debian 6 named squeezy.......

[celldweller1591]

i had a lot of bad experiences while making openSUSE 11.0 work with ubuntu 9.04 ! Now i have them both in different HDD so they work f9 now . Grub used to get fail while installing and i checked my iso with md5 checksum still it used to fail and that common swap was a bloat .

[azaad_shri75]

yeah sometimes strange things do happen........all part of the experience........

how to do checksum,please guide me.

[celldweller1591]

Every file you download link also contains an md5sum of files (download it separately).

To find the checksum of files you downloaded, type in konsole
cd /home/celldweller/opensuse (replace this by your iso image destination directory)
md5sum file.iso (replace file.iso with actual file name)
o/p :- 24ea1163ea6c9f5dae77de8c49ee7c03 file.iso
you will get a weird combination of alphabets and digits on the left(its called alphanumeric string). Thats your md5sum. Compare it with the md5sum of the file of the download link. If both are same, you are good to go.

OR

cd /home/celldweller/opensuse
md5sum -c MD5SUMS

and you will receive a lot of error messages, look for something that says
file.iso : OK

[azaad_shri75]

googled and tried-on windows........my download is ok, might be media or writer problem,

thanks a lot for the info.......

[manu somasekhar]

Which is better Opensuse or this? I am a new user to linux and using ubuntu now. I used linux mint,opensolaris,puppylinux,fedora. I felt almost of them are alike. Dont know about much console operations Sorry for my noobness

[Garbage]

If you are new user of Linux, then don't go for Slack. Stick to Ubuntu / Fedora / SuSE.
Once you are comfortable with CLI, then you can go for ArchLinux or Slack.

[azaad_shri75]

Originally Posted by manu somasekhar

Which is better Opensuse or this? I am a new user to linux and using ubuntu now. I used linux mint,opensolaris,puppylinux,fedora. I felt almost of them are alike. Dont know about much console operations Sorry for my noobness

here also you would not find any difference as all would be same........
if you want to try - then go for opensuse....

[celldweller1591]

Linux Mint/Ubuntu is better IMO for newbies

[gopi_vbboy]

whats the big deal abt knoppix..is it like slackware...i got a live...i tried it has more progs than gui..its like arch i gues..kiss

[manu somasekhar]

Thanks guys. Now downloading opensuse 11.2.....

[Gauravs90]

I installed KDE Desktop environment on ubuntu today and its looking great.
but i'm getting lost in KDE

[celldweller1591]

but i'm getting lost in KDE

you will get used to it. else install Gnome..
sudo apt-get install gdm
and reboot the pc

[manu somasekhar]

Tried opensuse and failed . I dont like its kde theme. Linux mint kde was better. Also i cant see my ntfs windows partitions. So going to change to kubuntu

[Gauravs90]

Originally Posted by celldweller1591

you will get used to it. else install Gnome..
sudo apt-get install gdm
and reboot the pc

No i installed ubuntu first which comes with gnome. Then i installed KDE desktop environment for first hand experience but it f*ckd gnome, like mobile cursor and fonts of KDE became default in gnome and gnome looks quiet ugly

Also my whole ubuntu changed to kubuntu. After these all i tried to remove KDE but it doesn't go away. I uninstalled all its packages but to no avail. Then i have to format and reinstall ubuntu.