Patrick Volkerding has been busy again. See the Slackware ChangeLog.txt for a series of big updates!

There’s a new kernel. Slackware tries to stick to the 2.6.35.xx “long term support” kernels for the next release. The new kernel along with updated mesa and xf86-video-ati packages should make the owners of Ati graphics hardware happy. And my Lenovo T400 laptop with its Intel graphics feels better using this version of mesa too (no freezes in X.Org anymore). Other updates in today’s batch are primarily security fixes (quite alot actually), and fixes for software bugs.

The real reason for this post is of course the fact that there were updates to glibc and gcc. As you know, people running a multilib 64-bit Slackware-current need to install multilib versions of glibc and gcc or they lose the ability to run and compile 32-bit programs. I have new multilib versions of glibc (2.13) and gcc (rebuilt 4.5.2) packages for you.

Check out http://slackware.com/~alien/multilib/current/ if you want to download these packages.

You will also find a subdirectory “slackware64-compat32“. That directory contains all packages that are generated by the massconvert32.sh script. In other words, everything you need (along with my gcc/glibc and compat32-tools packages) to turn your Slackware64-current into a multilib system. The choice is yours: either you download and install/upgrade the packages in the “slackware-compat32” directory which I converted for you, or you run the “massconvert32.sh” script to convert these packages from the Slackware originals and install those.

If you are new to this, and want to know what the difference is between 64-bit Slackware and a multilib system, I have written detailed installation/upgrade instructions in a Wiki article at http://alien.slackbook.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=slackware:multilib .

Good luck! Eric