The die-hards rejoice, cynics think “ain’t it dead yet” and hopefully lots of fresh Linux lovers will be attracted by the announcement in the ChangeLog.txt of the availability of Slackware 14.1 RC1 (announcement copied in full):
Mon Oct 14 22:09:17 UTC 2013
And with this batch of updates and fixes (clearing the rest of the
important stuff from the TODO list), we have arrived at Slackware 14.1
release candidate 1! Please test and report any remaining issues.
UEFI (with the exception of Secure Boot, which will have to wait until
we have real hardware) should be fully implemented in the installer now,
which will detect and warn about common problems, set up the EFI System
Partition under /boot/efi, and install ELILO and a UEFI boot entry
automatically. There’s a new README_UEFI.TXT file with detailed
instructions for installing 64-bit Slackware on UEFI (32-bit won’t
support native UEFI due to the mismatch between 64-bit UEFI firmware and
a 32-bit kernel, so Legacy BIOS will be the only way to install 32-bit
Slackware on UEFI). Several useful netfilter and networking utilities
have been added (thanks to Robby Workman and /dev/rob0 for these).
With this batch of updates, everything should be considered frozen
(including the kernel) unless there’s a good reason to change something.
Enjoy! See you all for the release, hopefully soon. 🙂
Although Slackware looks like it is becoming ever more marginalized in the DistroWatch page hit ranking, that site did publish a short news update about our release candidate. Thanks!
The DVD ISO images (32-bit and 64-bit) which I create (automatically) for Slackware-current after every update to the ChangeLog.txt are mentioned too in that Distrowatch news blurb, so there’s hope that more people will download one of those (slightly over 2GB in size) and give Slackware a try. And with support for UEFI there are suddenly a lot more computers where Slackware can be installed.
Personally, I think that Slackware 14.1 is going to be another stellar release. It has been maturing a lot: the development cycle has been longer than ever, mostly due to the fact that Patrick wanted UEFI support to work with minimal fussing. And that is hard to achieve when you do not own UEFI hardware. Advantage of all this maturing is that a lot of sofware has been added to the distro, and many existing packages have been upgraded during the past few weeks.
Enjoy this Release Candidate. I am running it (with my own KDE 4.11.2 packages) and is is super solid – as can be expected.
If you are running Slackware 14.0 (or even 13.37 still) and are considering a move to 14.1 after its release, now is the time to check our article about upgrading your system to a new release on the Slackware Documentation Wiki. Be prepared!
Cheers, Eric
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