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Free as in Freedom, Slack as in Slackware

December 27, 2008

"At a time when new and buggy features cloud basic computer functions, it's refreshing to see a new release of a distro like Slackware that stays true to its core philosophy … Slackware isn't for everyone. But in a landscape where distro and application developers are increasingly catering to new Windows converts, it's nice to have one who's sticking to his original goals. Slackware is still keeping it simple for Linux users who like using Linux." (Revised Slackware keeps it simple, by Susan Linton, published on Dec. 23, 2008, by Linux.com)


December 18, 2008

The latest release of DistroWatch Weekly News reports on the Faculty of Physical Sciences at the University of Glasgow recently migrating their main logon server across to Slackware Linux. "I have never liked Red Hat (too many 'extras' between you and the operating system), ditto SUSE, and looking at the top twenty Linux distributions on DistroWatch, I could see that many were more suited to desktops, while many more had no 'pedigree' and were simply re-vamped editions of something else. Then my eye hit upon an old-timer that was said to be a bit difficult, devoid of GUI management tools, and rock solid. Yep, I'm talking about Slackware, the oldest surviving Linux distribution, now at version 12.1". According to DistroWatch, the author is happy to be re-acquainted with his old friend Slackware and is recommending it to others for use on their servers. And so do we :-)


December 11, 2008

Here it is, Slackware 12.2, "a must-have upgrade for any Slackware user"! Our heartful congratulations to all True Slackers in the world! Thanks, Man! :-)

The release is accompanied by more than 1100 build scripts from the SlackBuilds crew. Thanks folks for your wonderful work!


December 4, 2008

No time to sleep this time. The 12.2 directory tree is not ready yet but Slackware 12.2 is announced already. :-) Let's go to the store, folks!


December 3, 2008

Patrick Volkerding has announced "Slackware 12.2 release candidate one. :-)" The sky seems to be greeting this event :-)


November 13, 2008

In late October, LWN.net published an article that sheds light on a remark made in the ChangeLog of the -current branch on November 7. The issue relates to the order of TCP options introduced in the 2.6.27 kernel.


October 17, 2008

Zenwalk: Slackware's Moment of Zen is a recent review of a Slackware-based distribution that has its own package management tool. According to the author of the review, "Zenwalk is more like Slackware than some of the Slackware-driven pendrive distributions."

Sébastien Boillod has released another tool aimed to simplify package management. According to the author, "Spack aims to shrink drastically the code you are required to write to make a decent Slackware package."

Last but not least :-) We have found that Jeffrey Denton (the author of "Slackware System Hardening") maintains Slackware Snort Installation Guide. The writeup not only covers installation and configuration of Snort but also that of OSSEC, LogWatch, ntop and a few other tools.


July 22, 2008

Grant Coady posted a writeup on using LZMA data compression utility with Slackware. Thanks Grant for the interesting reading!


July 1, 2008

Ndiswrapper in Slackware published by PolishLinux.org describes how one can set up a Lantech wireless router with WEP encryption in Slackware-12.1. According to the author, the article "can be used as a general tutorial for configuring your WiFi manually in Linux." Update: Linux Gazette published a more detailed article on the same subject, providing both instructions and a number of useful links.


June 18, 2008

What is the difference between `the Debian way' and `the Slackware way' in the field of distribution management? This is the question discussed in a recent blog `Debian — troubling signs; can Slackware teach us anything?' "The idea is to really attempt to illuminate people on why … a classic approach such as Slackware still has merit in this world of modern feature-crazy distributions."


June 4, 2008

There have already been a few reviews of Slackware 12.1 here and there. Hardly any of them was worth spending a minute to read since they mostly boiled down to a kind of discussion of `philosophy behind Slackware.' Finally, Linux.com published a review of a person who really installed version 12.1 and now shares his experience with the readers as well as provides a number of useful links and hints.


May 21, 2008

Planète Béranger published an interesting material based on a thread on LinuxQuestions and related to derivatives of Slackware and possible violation of the GPL.


April 6, 2008

Congratulations to all slackers in the world!

On May 1, Slackware 12.1 was released as -stable, and now it's perfect time to re-partition your old and dusty drive and begin a new exciting journey with the old and ever-new friend named Slack! Donch'ya think so? ;-) We believe you do! Thus have a nice trip!

In our turn, we are sending huge thanks to Patrick and to everybody who helped him with the release. Thank you!


April 6, 2008

As we all know, Slackware release 12.1 is to appear soon, and this is probably the best news, but today we'll look back into March and list a number of articles published somewhere outside the slack world but still worth reading (in our very humble opinion :-)

HOWTO recover deleted files on an ext3 file system, by Carlo Wood. "It happens to everyone sooner or later: a split second after you hit Enter you realize your mistake, but it's too late; you just deleted a valuable file or directory for which no backup exists. Or maybe you have a backup, but it's a month old…and in shock you see the past month flash before your eyes as you realize in pain what you'll have to do all over again…" An interesting reading regardless of whether you use ext3 or not.

My Awesome Secure and Portable System, by Brad Cable. An interesting writeup with a lot of technical details on building a secure system on a 1GB USB drive. The core of the system is GRML (a Debian-based live CD for sysadmins) but some of the ideas implemented can be used on other systems.

Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?, by Jon (the article actually dates back to May, 2007). A nice writeup providing a number of well-thought examples demonstrating how effective can vi be in comparison with `usual' text editors.

Last but not least, it's finally spring in Moscow, and this is definitely another good news :-)

[Mikhail]


March 19, 2008

Dear fellow slackers,

We are very glad to present the second article by Tom Newsom on running Amiga in Linux. This is not just a review of another Amiga emulator but an emotional history of the process of creating and debugging a working port of AmiKit to Linux. Yes, it's hard to believe but Tux meets Amiga, published earlier this year, caused or at least stimulated the appearance of a great new tool for all fans of Linux and Amiga.

Enjoy!


March 8, 2008

"Contrary to popular assumptions, DRAMs used in most modern computers retain their contents for seconds to minutes after power is lost, even at room temperature and even if removed from a motherboard … This phenomenon limits the ability of an operating system to protect cryptographic key material from an attacker with physical access." This is one of the main results of a research conducted at Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. The full research paper is available here (pdf). One of the authors of the research discusses the result in his blog. The news has also been discussed at Wired, News.com, Bruce Schneier's blog and a number of other places.

[Mikhail]


January 30, 2008

Are you on old school Amiga user who gave up that most brilliant of operating systems? Even in case you aren't, we believe you will enjoy reading Tux meets Amiga, or Amiga emulation using UAE or E-UAE by Tom Newsom.

[The Slack World team]


January 27, 2008

Dear fellow Slackers,

After another period of inactivity (or, rather, activity not related to Slack), here is a brief review of materials that attracted our attention in late 2007 and January, 2008.

In mid September, 2007, Linux.com published an article "30 Days with JFS" by Keith Winston, in which the author shared his positive experience of using the JFS file system on Slackware. The article inspired me to use JFS (and XFS, which I have never used before either) when installing Slack-12.0 on a server and on a desktop machine. I haven't performed `stress tests' as did Keith Winston but still I am pretty satisfied with both systems, since I had no problems with them thus far. I am especially glad that I have replaced ext3 with JFS and XFS on a desktop machine since there are no more long fsck-ing on multi-gigabyte partitions. I have even converted a Linux partition on a USB flash stick to JFS, and it works fine :-)

Another article that attracted my attention was Slackware's "magic package maker" by Drew Ames, devoted to src2pkg, a tool by Gilbert Ashley that implements an approach to building Slackware packages alternative to using SlackBuild scripts.

Src2pkg can build packages from sources, from RPM and Debian packages, and from binary packages. Building a package can be as simple as

$ src2pkg htop-0.7.tar.gz

though this is probably not the best way. Still, there is at least one important point to notice: src2pkg allows an ordinary user to build `real' packages. The package will even contain a slack-desc file though in this particular case it won't contain any useful information. Interestingly, in certain cases src2pkg is able to create a `good' slack-desc file basing on the information it finds in the source package. These `automatically created' slack-desc files have permissions that make them world-writable but I believe this doesn't affect the quality of a package much.

Src2pkg has a comprehensive HOWTO, together with man pages and a FAQ. Certain useful advices on using the tool can be found in this thread on LinuxQuestions.org

I have faced some minor problems when using src2pkg for buiding packages for /usr/local instead of /usr but all in all I think src2pkg is a great tool worth trying, especially in case a satisfactory SlackBuild script is not available.

A number of users have faced problems when trying to boot an installation CD/DVD of Slackware-12.0 on older computers. In this thread on LinuxQuestions.org, Alien Bob explains that the way to fix the problem is to rebuild the iso file using '-boot-load-size 4' (as is actually suggested in isolinux/README.TXT). Other options that can improve building a bootable image have been suggested on AOLS by Joerg Shilling, the author of cdrecord.

On January 21, Slashdot informed the readers about a CLI approach to finding a life partner (yes, a woman! ;-). Probably more sad than humorous, "Help me keep the shell people alive" caused hundreds of comments by Slashdot readers. Enjoy if you haven't read it yet.

[Mikhail]

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