Today, a lot of changes found their way into slackware-current.  Slackware’s development speed shows leaps and bounds   The newest set of updates is nearly as long as last month when Slackware added KDE4 to mainstream. The kernel packages have now arrived at 2.6.29.1 which is the most recent kernel available to date.  The KDE series is now at 4.2.2, which is a bug fix release to the previous 4.2.1. We also updated a lot of the KDE dependencies.

New packages which were added: jasper (provides jpeg2000 support in Okular), crda and iw (user-space support for wireless drivers in the new kernel, useful for people in non-US countries).  M2Crypt, libnl and libmcrypt are other newcomers (and the php package has now been compiled with mcrypt support, this was a much asked-for feature).  An interesting addition is xz.  This compression tool based on Lasse Collin’s LZMA offers better compression than bzip2 and much faster de-compression than bzip2.

The curl package was recompiled with support for a set of CA root certificates. This provides a fix for the errors people would get if they used curl to download stuff from secure (aka https://) web sites.  The mkinitrd package was enhanced with the mkinitrd_command_generator.sh script (written by PiterPUNK and me) which makes it very easy to build an initrd.gz image for your kernel. It can also write an update for your /etc/lilo.conf file. Just run:

sh /usr/share/mkinitrd/mkinitrd_command_generator.sh -h

to see what it can do.

Again, there were changes which did not make their way into the official ChangeLog.txt announcement…

I will not give full disclosure and let you find out for yourself. The changes are in the Slackware installer. One will be quite obvious from the start (just look at the messages during the final stage of the boot), the second will only become apparent for those of you who perform NFS installs and the third is not even visible – consider it an easter egg (tested only by me thusfar I believe). It adds yet another possible package source when installing Slackware.

Have fun with this new installment of slackware-current! And don’t get scared when you boot your updated computer and see the new kernel logo: a small animal (Tuz) which replaces the familiar penguin (Tux) for the duration of the 2.6.29.x kernel releases…

Eric