Updates to Slackware’s development tree
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
Thanks for those updates. crda & iw are very useful.
I havent yet tried the initrd generator script.
I asked indirectly in the LQ forum but didnt get a reply, so i will try here too.
Any idea when will xorg be updated?
The changes since 1.4.x series, assuming it will be updated to 1.6.x, are rather groundbraking.
OMG!! this is too fast from the last huge update on the current tree…
I think Slackware 13 will be available even sooner than we think.
Well, I recently updated to slacware-current everything works fine, I just have a question, what kind of animal is this Tuz?
It really scare me 😐
Thanks, Eric. Great job 🙂
Tuz is a Tasmanian Devil disguised as a penguin 🙂 Linus explained on his own blog (http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-logo.html) how he decided to change the kernel logo temporarily in order to promote the “save the tasmanian devil” campaign.
Eric
Too many changes in so short a time. ) But thanks for the update, I very much liked.
Thanks for sharing this link, but unfortunately it seems to be down… Does anybody have a mirror or another source? Please reply to my post if you do!
I would appreciate if a staff member here at http://www.linuxquestions.org could post it.
Thanks,
John