Free as in Freedom, Slack as in Slackware
December 24, 2009
And so, this is Christmas! :-) And a lot of new (slack) links to the Slack World (in no particular order):
- Slackware Chile (in Spanish ;-)
- Opennix binary Slackware packages by Mike living in Northern California
- Depfinder by George Vlahavas is a tool that finds dependencies of Slackware packages
- Intro to Slackware Package Management, by mfillpot, published by Linux.com on Thursday, 03 December 2009
- Setting up a Wireless Network with Slackware 12 by Armin Meyer-Larsen. Other Slackware-related writeups by the author can be found here.
- SlackForum.DE (in German)
- pkgsrc-on-slack by ole.andre.rodlie is an "Instant pkgsrc framework for Slackware"
- Another list of links to Slackware-related resources, by LinuxQuestions
Happy Slacking in 2010! New links are to follow soon :-)
November 15, 2009
There are a few more entries in our collection of Slackware-related links. First, this is a series of posts by a UK-based IT specialist who calls himself Zordrak. Among them, a HOWTO on setting up an OpenLDAP server in Slackware-13.0 seems to be especially worth mentioning.
One more link points to a writeup by Donnie Tevault "Easy Update and Package Management for Slackware 13". This can be a helpful reading for Slackware novices.
Last but definitely not least, we have added a separate link to a HOWTO on configuring a network in Slackware by Eric Hameleers. To the best of our knowledge, the subject hasn't been covered in such detail elsewhere. Have a good read!
October 25, 2009
Nobody doubts writing a review of a scientific article or book needs a certain level of expertise on the subject. Modern Linux distributions are complicated things, not anyhow simpler than at least some branches of science. Still, we have all seen so-called reviews that roughly follow the following scheme: "Something went wrong in my fed0buntu, and I decided to try the brand new release of Slackware Linux. Oh, Gosh! It still uses an ncurses-based installation! Oh! It assumes I know how to use cfdisk! Oh! Oh! It lacks my favourite game and when I tried to install it from this_site I found Slackware has no dependency tracking! The developers must fix this immediately, otherwise nobody will ever want to use this crap in the 21st century!"
Luckily, there are also real reviews. In our opinion, good examples of well-written reviews are provided by Robby Pedric. Here one can find his review of Slackware-13.0, and here is an older review of Slack-12.2. Both are added to our Slack Links.
Another addition to our collection of Slackware-related links is Salix, a desktop-oriented distro that is, according to the developers, fully compatible with Slackware. Salix occupies one CD but has a rich repository. The installation program is based on that of Slack but differs from it in a number of items. In particular, one cannot choose separate packages but has a choice of three pre-selected sets: "Core", "Basic", and "Full". The Core set provides a console environment. The Basic one provides Xfce with Firefox and a few other essential programs as well as gslapt. The Full mode provides installation of a richer set of GUI applications, including OpenOffice. By default, Salix starts a graphical login manager with the root login being prohibited. Thus, a user other than root is suggested to be created during installation.
Salix provides a repository, which includes packages that do not ship with Slackware but should work in it. One final thing to mention is that Salix supports dependency checking. This can probably attract some Linux novices. All in all, Salix has made a good impression on us and we wish its developers good luck!
September 13, 2009
Two interesting Slackware-related writeups attracted our attention last week. The first one is written by Daniel Armstrong and covers the subject of installing Slackware-13.0 on Asus EEE netbooks. The howto covers installation from a USB stick and creating an encrypted file system. It can be found here. Another writeup is dedicated to adding miscellaneous multimedia software to Slack. It was written by Darrell Anderson and can be found here. The text dates back to July and thus refers to Slackware-12.2 but is mostly applicable to release 13.0, too.
September 4, 2009
Linux Magazine has published an interview with Eric Hameleers (aka Alien BOB): "Why you should try Slackware?" We thank Christophe for letting us know about this great reading!
August 30, 2009
We sincerely congratulate all slackers with the long-awaited release of Slackware 13.0! Here is the official announcement, and here are the release notes, a must-read for everybody willing to install the brand new release :-) And don't forget to check SlackBuilds if you are going to build a package not included in the release. Here is the list of updates the guys prepared especially for Slack-13.0. Thanks men!!
We would also like to attract attention of reades/users of Slack to a post by Henrik Carlqvist, in which he presented a script he used to patch kernels in Slackware 12.0 and 12.1. The patch closes a hole found recently in almost all versions of the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels.
July 15, 2009
Many of us are eagerly waiting for the next release of Slackware to appear really soon now. Meanwhile, there is something to read. First, we suggest The story of how I found Slackware Linux, or ``Once You Go Slack, You Never Go Back,'' by Trent Isaacson. Besides this articles, one can find many interesting writeups by Trent related to Slackware and Linux in general in his blog.
Another blog that we have added to Slack Links is called … Slackware Blog :-) It is maintained by Ismail Demiral. The blog contains a number of short howtos and is definitely worth looking at. We thank Christophe for letting us know about it.
Are you a new Slackware user or do you want to recall being one? In either case, The beginner's guide to Slackware Linux by Mike Saunders is a writeup that can be handy. Enjoy!
June 21, 2009
It seems we are approaching the great day when another version of Slackware is released :-) Personally, I am very curious whether it will employ the 2.6.30 kernel or not. This kernel seems to have a whole lot of changes.
A minor advice for those who haven't tried the latest updates of the X system yet. It might be useful to add the following lines to xorg.conf before you start X:
Section "ServerFlags" Option "AllowEmptyInput" "false" EndSection
Otherwise there's a chance you will find yourself with both the keyboard and the mouse being switched off.
Last but not least: we have one more link in our list of Slack Links. This time, it is QTGZManager, a Qt4 frontend to pkgtool by Alexandre Albuquerque Arnt. Thanks, Alexandre!
May 24, 2009
Installation of a Linux distro is a situation when one appropriate pic is worth a dozen words. This point of view is probably shared by Grant Coady, who has recently installed the brand new 64-bit version of Slackware, and shared his experience in a series of screenshot. You can find it here. Thanks Grant!
May 18, 2009
Everybody have probably noticed that Slackware left traditional gzipped packages for packages compressed with xz, an utility that grew up from the Tukaani project. We were curious how the new tool works during installation. The answer is "perfectly". Installation of the -current branch goes fast and smoothly. Interestingly, the installer now suggests ext4 as the default file system.
We have tried a number of programs included in -current. The only minor issue we have found thus far relates to mc. It cannot save its settings unless one creates the ~/.mc directory beforehand.
For those who would like to upgrade to -current from the 12.2 release, Distrowatch.com has published brief notes on the procedure using slackroll, a Python script by Ricardo Garcia.
Another Slackware-related news that is probably worth mentioning is a new desktop-focused distribution based on Slack. Its name is Kongoni, which means "Gnu" in the Shona language. Kongoni originates from the land of a strange distro the name of which is sometimes translated as "Slackware is too hard for me" ;-) It uses the ports system for downloading sources and building packages and comes in two flavours: one for 32-bit, another for 64-bit systems. Kongoni only includes software released under licenses approved by the FSF.
April 27, 2009
A few new links are added to our Slack Links :-) First, we have got to know about a rich collection of SlackBuild scripts maintained by Martijn Dekker. The scripts we have tried thus far worked like a charm. Whenever possible, they present an `all-in-one' solution: the scripts perform downloading of the source files if necessary, slack-desc are included in the scripts, etc. Another nice feature of the scripts is that they do not need root privileges due to employing fakeroot. We highly recommend everybody to try build scripts written by Martijn Dekker.
Another bit of news came from Jesper Juhl who had found our list and kindly let us know about Slackware-related articles he wrote in the past. As Jesper points out, the writeups are mostly interesting from the historical perspective but the FAQ and an introductory material on pkgtools can still be quite useful for new users. Thanks, Jesper! We are looking forward for your new writeups!
Last but not least, Daniël de Kok has announced on AOLS that he doesn't use Slackware any more (alas!) but there is an active team, that translated his Slackware Linux Basics to Brazilian Portuguese. Thanks Daniël, and good luck in your new life!
March 29, 2009
A couple of new links were added to Slack Links. The first one is aliens2slack, is a set of two scripts by Helmut Hullen and an older script by Tony Borras. The scripts convert Debian and RPM packages to Slackware ones. A good feature of debian2slack, included in the package is that it not only converts a .deb file into a .tgz one, which isn't a problem by itself, but also creates slack-desc, doinst.sh and takes care about configuration files that should not be overwritten during installation of the created package.
Another new item is Arktur, a Slackware-based school server used in more than 2000 schools in Germany and abroad. Happy Tuxing, dear scholars! :-)
March 22, 2009
St. Patrick's Day Parade took place in Moscow today. We use the occasion to send our sincere greetings to Patrick the Man :-)
We are also publishing Slack Notes on Slack-12.2, which were waiting for their time for two months :-) Comments are welcome!
March 15, 2009
On March, 9, a huge update of the -current branch was performed probably taking us much closer to Slackware-13.0 :-) Patrick updated dozens and dozens of packages and the kernel. Now, the -current branch has the 2.6.28.7 kernel, new kernel headers, compilers, a number of updated and new applications and libraries. Last but not least, KDE-3 is replaced with KDE-4.
I couldn't stand and updated slack-12.2 to -current. This wasn't hard to decide since I've been running the 2.6.28.7 kernel for quite a while already, as well as self-compiled versions of a number of updated apps. The upgrade went smoothly but a few minor issues. The biggest problem related to making a HP LaserJet 1160 work. To do this, I had to recompile hplip. Besides this, I restored a2ps from Slack-12.2 because I failed to figure out how to make booklets and similar stuff with the updated version (4.14). One final issue to mention is that a number of older apps cannot be compiled with the new compilers (GCC-4.3.3). All other updated packages I have checked thus far work just fine.
I take the chance to attract your attention to a number of new Slack Links: AST ("Alien's SlackBuild Toolkit") by Eric Hameleers and two Slackware-based distributions: Damn Vulnerable Linux and Parslinux.
[Mikhail]
February 9, 2009
Distrowatch has cited a post on a new Slackware-related resource called Slackfind. From the project site:
Slackfind is a nonprofit project which stores metadata and provides search tools for slackware-packages across various repositories. The project idea has been taken from rpmfind.net, a similar project for rpm-based distributions.
Interestingly, the project is hosted in Irkutsk, a town in the heart of Siberia. It is also remarkable for us that on January 14, 2007, we wrote discussing various resources of SlackBuild scripts: "I seems the Slackware community could benefit much of a searchable database of such projects."
January 18, 2009
Distrowatch.com has recently published an interview with Paul Sherman, the leading developer of Absolute Linux, a lightweight desktop-oriented derivative of Slackware. In particular, Paul Sherman says: "I choose Slackware and made it as lightweight as possible so that Absolute could be installed on commodity hardware. Nothing is as fast and stable as Slackware Linux." Amen.