Free as in Freedom, Slack as in Slackware
December 24, 2007
Dear fellow Slackers,
Today, we want to address you a short but sincere message by Loki Harfagr:
Merry "any celebration of yours" to all of you!-)
All the best for you all in the upcoming year, including many happy returns of Slack!
Besides this:
We wish you all good wishes for the festive season under whichever God floats for you and whatever FOSS you run. We also wish you all you desire for the coming New Year.
Hag a goog glogg naighg gnow, gneed to gggnav somg sleeegp bgodgies gneed gregst...!
[The Slack World Team with an invaluable impact from Loki]
November 18, 2007
Laurens Vets has kindly let us know about a small HOWTO on setting up a Linux-VServer on Slackware 12.0. Thanks Laurens!
For those (of us) who haven't tried Linux-VServer, here is its brief description taken from SecurityFocus: Linux-VServer allows you to create virtual private servers and security contexts which operate like a normal Linux server, but allow many independent servers to be run simultaneously in one box at full speed. All services, such as ssh, mail, Web, and databases, can be started on such a VPS, without modification, just like on any real server. Each virtual server has its own user account database and root password and doesn't interfere with other virtual servers.
[Mikhail]
October 31, 2007
TG has kindly let us know about a tutorial published by HowtoForge in their "Perfect Desktop" series and dedicated to Slackware 12.0. The tutorial covers different aspects of running Slack, from its installation and basic setup to configuring KDE and adding programs not present in the stock setup. The text discusses different ways of adding packages and provides real-life examples. The tutorial is likely to be aimed at new users of Slackware but even a more experienced slacker may probably benefit from reading it.
[Mikhail]
October 6, 2007
Earlier this year, Grant Coady shared his experience on setting up and using a VMware server. As was pointed out in the article, one had to patch VMware server 1.0.3 in order to make it work with kernels more recent than 2.6.19.x. Yesterday, Dieter Manstein kindly let us know that this is no more the case for the VMware server 1.0.4, released recently. Thanks Dieter for the useful information!
Other interesting news has come from the Puppy Linux project. Puppy Linux is a nice live CD project, with its own userbase and its pretty own style. A surprising thing is that its latest release is built to be binary compatible with Slackware 12.0. More can be found in the release notes. IMHO, this is another sign of Slackware being recognized by the Linux community as one of the best distributions available.
Actually, the best one but we don't often take time to tell the Linux community how good Slackware is ;-) Luckily, there are persons like Gary Maxwell, who has written an article Slackware: the classic distro that's as timely as ever, published recently by LXer. Thanks Gary! Our thanks are also addressed to Manuel Otto, who posted information about the article on AOLS.
Finally, I'd like to mention an article 30 days with JFS by Keith Winston, published in mid September by Linux.com. As we all know, JFS is one of the file systems supported by Slackware. Unfortunately, information on JFS is comparatively poor. In the article, Keith Winston shares his (positive) experience on using JFS in Slackware 12.
[Mikhail]
September 22, 2007
Niki Kovacs, one of the AOLS regulars, is studying the possibility of building a very lean system similar to one that can be built using Linux From Scratch but on the basis of packages that come with Slackware. The first results of the investigation are presented in the writeup called Linux From Slack. :-)
Update: According to the recent announcement, the above page will soon merge into the newly created Minimal System project.
July 8, 2007
Dear Slackers:
The first review of the brand new Slackware-12.0 is here. We hope you will not only enjoy reading this writeup by Michiel van Wessem but will also find it useful.
[The Slack World Team]
July 3, 2007
Congratulations to everybody!
Slackware-12.0 is released! Thank you, Patrick! Thanks, the CREW :-)
July 2, 2007
Slackware -current supports installation on encrypted partitions and logical volumes!
As one could have noticed, Eric Hameleers has written two excellent writeups for the -current branch. These are `Installing Slackware on encrypted volumes' (README_CRYPT.TXT) and `Installing Slackware on Logical volumes' (README_LVM.TXT), both available in the root directory of slackware-current. Yesterday I tried the first of them and I can witness that it works. :-)
The only thing I had to change was setting the "boot=" line in lilo.conf to read boot=/dev/hda instead of boot=/dev/hda1 that I thought to be right after studying the writeup. This minor mistake gave me an interesting experience of using Slackware installation DVD as a rescue disk for an encrypted system. :-) Once again, Eric's writeup occurred to be useful because the procedure used during installation was applicable in that situation, too.
Interestingly, the July'07 issue of the Linux Gazette contains two articles on the same subject: Setting up an Encrypted Debian System, by Kapil Hari Paranjape, and Encrypted Storage with LUKS, RAID and LVM2, by René Pfeiffer. It is remarkable that Eric Hameleers published his articles prior to Linux Gazette :-)
[Mikhail]
June 2, 2007
Suppose you need to run both Slackware Linux and another OS on the same machine. Dual booting provides a well-established solution. Still, there is another way to accomplish the task. Namely, to run a virtual machine. In his new article, Grant Coady shares his experience of running the latest VMware Server.
Enjoy!
April 28, 2007
Have you found a moment to relax and have a little rest? Go read Debain WrEtch: review of an UnAmerican Linux system at Linux.com. Well, it's not about Slack but I think it's still fun :-)
[Mikhail]
April 14, 2007
Dear fellow slackers,
We are continuing our Persona Grata series. This time, our guest is Robby Workman, one of the founders and maintainers of the SlackBuilds.org project, an active member of the Slackware community, and just a nice person. An interview with Robby Workman can be found here.
Enjoy!
March 27, 2007
In early March, Grant Coady became a happy owner of a brand new 64-bit PC. Definitely, he couldn't stand trying 64-bit forks of Slackware. Here one can find a brief diary of the first few days of Grant's life in the slack 64-bit world.
Enjoy!
[Mikhail]
P.S. Slack Links have been updated recently!
February 17, 2007
"chroot - run command or interactive shell with special root directory" (man chroot) This doesn't sound very inspiring, does it? Go read A How To on Creating a chroot Environment by Tom Newsom and you will find chroot to be one of the most exciting commands in your Linux box.
[Mikhail]
February 11, 2007
Some time ago, we, the editors, got to know about a couple of "Slackware Francophone" sites. Unfortunately, nobody of us reads French. Loki Harfagr has kindly agreed to review them for us and ... for you. :-) Here is a review of SlackFR.org. Thank you, Loki!
[Editors]
January 17, 2007
We are very glad to let you know that one more person has joined the Slack World team. This is Tom Newsom, a Slackware user since 1993! Tom begins his participation in the project with A quickie on how to set up a Linux to MS VPN, and one can expect more Tom's HOWTOs to appear in the future.
Kurt H Maier has kindly attracted our attention to develia.org, a nice Slackware-related web site maintained by Giacomo Lozito. Develia.org is "a public archive containing software and libraries of various types, everything optimized for i686 architecture and intended to work properly on systems updated to slackware-current." Develia.org also hosts a number of software projects and documentation for UNIX-like systems.
The site lead us to the discovery of PKGsummon, a GTK+-2-based program for the management of Slackware Linux tarballs. According to the author, PKGsummon allows one to rapidly compare the versions of installed packages with those available on ftp mirrors, and to browse contents of the packages installed on system.
[Editors]
January 14, 2007
The last week was full of Slackware-related "discoveries" :-) First, I found a number of great Brazilian sites dedicated to Slackware. Unfortunately for me, they are mostly in Portuguese but I think they are worth looking at even in case you don't know this language. The first one to mention is slack.sarava.org. The site contains a great repository of Slackware packages and build scripts (as well as those for Slamd64 and Slackintosh). The project also maintains Simplepkg, "a non-intrusive package management system running on top of pkgtool." Two other sites that I found to be interesting are Slacklife and Slackware Zine.
Besides this, I found CruxPorts4Slack, a project that allows one to use the ports system of Crux in Slackware. The project is maintained by one of the develovers of DeLi Linux.
Finally, I have found one more repository of Slackware build scripts. This one is maintained by Marc Poiroud. I seems the Slackware community could benefit much of a searchable database of such projects.
Grant Coady has recently updated his junkview project. A number of new features are added, a minor bug is fixed.
The last news for today is an article published by Science News. The article is devoted to digital "fingerprints", and how tiny differences in the ways people type, browse web sites, and write messages can reveal their identities.
[Mikhail]
January 7, 2007
The New Year holidays is a good time to read long-postponed articles and books :-) I'll briefly comment on a number of web resources and articles I studied with pleasure.
American Mathematical Society publishes Monthly Essays on Mathematical Topics. I have found a couple of essays related to the Internet. These are Mathematics and Internet Security by Joe Malkevitch and How Google Finds Your Needle in the Web's Haystack by David Austin. The essays are written clearly and do not require any knowledge of higher mathematics.
Two articles on simple Samba setups on Slackware 11 appeared in November. These were Simple Samba Slackware Setup by adam k, the maintainer of Foogazi, and Quick and dirty Samba setup by Joel Nahrgang.
G-Loaded! is another Linux- and open-source-related journal. It both publishes original articles and provides links to articles by other authors. Among writeups that attracted my attention were articles on auto-closing SSH tunnels and a few possible ways of using netcat, and a (linked) article on how Skype&Co. get round firewalls published by heise Security. [Update: Nat-traverse seems to implement the same idea as the one used by Skype thus allowing one to establish connections between NAT-ed machines.]
Don't forget to check Slack Links. A number of new links have been added recently!
[Mikhail]