Free as in Freedom, Slack as in Slackware
November 29, 2010
It seems there is another minor problem in the -current branch. It relates to ImageMagick. Suppose you want to add a line to a screenshot. You open screenshot.png with display, then go to Image Edit, select Draw, Element (line), its colour and width, then switch to the image, draw a line … but it does not appear. Luckily, the problem is easily fixed. All that is needed is to recompile ImageMagick, possibly after downloading its latest version (6.6.6-1 at the moment of this writing).
November 19, 2010
Everybody who follows the -current branch has surely noticed huge updates that took place earlier this week. I couldn't stand and installed them on two machines with different video cards. Almost everything works just fine! Cyrillic fonts look a bit unusual in Firefox but this is not crucial. gv has a minor problem but it can be easily fixed by a patch provided by Gentoo. Eric Hameleers has published interesting and useful comments on the latest update.
October 16, 2010
Life is going on (still or once again?) and there are new changes in the ChangeLog.txt of the -current branch. The changes include updates of the kernel, glibc, and the GNU Compiler Collection as well as a few minor ones. Thus, this is high time to update the system. But not only. Eric Hameleers has prepared a package of the beta release of LibreOffice, a fork of OpenOffice.
September 15, 2010
We've got to know about another distribution based on Slackware and its new release. The distro is called Superb Mini Server (SMS). According to the site, SMS is a "distribution with web, DNS, DHCP, file, print and fax servers, iptables firewall, mail server with spam filter and anti-virus scanner, and BitTorrent station. It also includes Webmin, a web-based administration tool, but no graphical desktop." Another quote is taken from the FAQ: Why Slackware? top Two Reasons a. I like it and I find it the best Linux distro for me ;-) b. Because for Servers you want simplicity and stability, and I didn't find anything other more stable and secure than Slackware. Good luck, SMS!
September 6, 2010
Distrowatch has published a review of another distribution based on Slackware, AUSTRUMI-2.1.6 this time. The project seems to be worth trying as a live CD.
There are two additions to our Slack Links. These are Imagineos (formerly GoblinX), a bootable live CD or pendrive distribution based on Slackware, and dotnew, an utility aimed to help with the management of .new system configuration files. Dotnew is another project by George Vlahavas, who also maintains Depfinder, a tool that finds dependencies of Slackware packages.
September 4, 2010
Well, Summer's almost gone, We had some good times :-) Now, it's time to get back to Slack, and this is always fun. Meanwhile, Distrowatch has published a review of Salix 13.1.1, a distro for the most lazy Slackers :-) Even though Caitlyn Martin is known to be, hmmm, a bit sceptical about Slackware, her review of Salix seems to be pretty balanced.
July 2, 2010
Dear fellow Slackers! We are very happy to publish one more, and probably the last one, interview related to the Slackware release 13.1. This time, our guest is Stuart Winter, one of the Slackware developers and maintainer of Slackware ARM, which already has its third release. Enjoy!
June 11, 2010
This time, good news have come from South Africa. Kongoni GNU/Linux isn't dead but is approaching the next release. Recall that Kongoni is based on Slackware but employs the ports system for building packages. Its development was stopped earlier this year.
There are two additions to our Slack Links. These are another Russian resource dedicated to Slackware and mkslack, a SlackBuild generator script by David Woodfall
June 11, 2010
Dear fellow Slackers! We are happy to publish an interview with Eric Hameleers, a member of the Slackware core team. As well as the earlier interview with Robby Workman, it is devoted to the recent release of Slackware-13.1. Enjoy!
June 5, 2010
Another review of Slackware release 13.1 followed by good reader's comments is published by Linux.com. A good read if you have a few spare minutes.
June 3, 2010
The Slackware 13.1 Interview by Robby Pedrica seems to be the first review of the latest Slackware release written in English. To the contrary to the review published by LinuxJournal, this one was written by a person who seems to know well the subject of his writeup, so that we can recommend it to our readers.
May 30, 2010
Dear fellow Slackers! We are happy to publish an interview with Robby Workman, a Slackware developer and one of the mainainers of the SlackBuilds.org project, he has kindly given us on the occasion of the Slackware-13.1 release. Enjoy!
May 26, 2010
On May 24, the world got to know that Slackware-13.1 was released a few days earlier :-) Though a bit late, we sincerely congratulate all Slackers with the new release of the best Linux distro in the known Universe!
May 7, 2010
Congratulations to all slackers in the world! The long-awaited Slackware-13.1 BETA1 was released yesterday, and "A stable release should be just around the corner" :-) The BETA1 has the latest stable kernel, the latest versions of openssh, openssl, firefox, KDE, and many other programs.
March 7, 2010
Many of those who compile TeX Live do probably use an excellent SlackBuild script by Robby Workman. Unfortunately, it does not work on the -current branch after the latest updates. Compilation breaks with an error message like
pngimage.c:(.text+0x24c): undefined reference to `png_check_sig'
The problem can be fixed with a patch similar to one of the patches used for building teTeX. Just insert a line like
cat $CWD/texlive.png14.patch | patch -p1 --verbose || exit 1
somewhere just below the first chmod -R a-s .
March 2, 2010
And here they go! A bunch of updates for the -current tree and a number of security patches for regular releases. Don't miss a post by Robby Workman on AOLS if you are playing with -current. Update: We also recommend to check Some goodies to play with at Eric Hameleers' blog and comments that follow the post.
March 1, 2010
Slackware ChangeLog stalling… or not? Eric Hameleers provides an answer to the question that keeps Slackers from sleeping quietly for a month now. Robby Workman adds a few more details (see reader's comments below Eric's post). In short: be ready for the show ;-)
A feature story of Issue 343 of Distrowatch Weekly is devoted to comparison of three desktop distributions based on Slackware, namely, Zenwalk, Salix, and GoblinX. All three use Xfce as the default desktop environment, all three have nice artwork, all three employ automated package management. But which is the best of the three? You can find a point of view of Bernard Hoffmann here.
February 13, 2010
There are a number of new items in our Slack Links. Ode to Slackware by usr_local is … well, what says the title :-) The Ode is inspired by Slackware Linux—Less is More, an article by Richard Hillesley published by ITPro. The articles do not contain any technical information but thoughts about Slack, including its history, and Linux in general. A nice weekend reading.
Two other new items also relate to the history of Slack and partially overlap. The first one is Unofficial History of Slackware releases by Tom Newsom. Another one is A complete overview of all Slackware versions by Niels Horn, who maintains a few other materials related to Slack.
The history of Slackware development is also briefly covered in a talk made by Eric Hameleers at T-DOSE 2009 ("Technical Dutch Open Source Event"). Probably more interestingly, Eric Hameleers has also covered Slackware package management. A pdf file with the slides of his talk can be found here (about 500kB).
January 10, 2010
Hello everybody in the new year! There are a couple new links in our Slack Collection. One is Slackpack, a package manager by Pavloudis Zisis aka Mystical Groovy. According to the docs, Slackpack "has a friendly GUI environment and can install packages, list installed packages, remove Slackware Linux packages (.tgz or .txz), and convert to .tgz format from .deb or .rpm. It can download Slackware Linux packages from package repositories, and can create .tgz packages from an application's source code." Good luck, Slackpack!
Another link leads one to A Pooling of ##slackware and Slackware Resources by Ron Sinclair. It's not easy to follow listings of discussions on ##slackware but sometimes they happen to be pretty helpful. The site also contains a number of links to resources related to Slackware.