Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: 1337

Go go! New stable release of Slackware is available: 13.37

April 28, 2011 / / 15 Comments

It took way too long to my liking, but I should not complain, it was a lot of fun helping to create it. Eleven months after the previous stable release here we have the next installment of Slackware Linux. The additional polishing in the past three months certainly paid off with regard to stability and features.

From the ChangeLog.txt:

Mon Apr 25 13:37:00 UTC 2011
Slackware 13.37 stable is released!

Read all about it in the official announcement or check out the ANNOUNCE.TXT directly.

Slackware is forever free to download with no strings attached, but if you like the product and want to see it survive then I recommended that you consider buying a copy of the DVD or CD-set. It really helps funding the development of the distro (and I am not getting any money out of that). It is not mandatory of course. The ISOs are available for free, and Bittorrent is the fastest way to get them: http://www.slackware.com/getslack/torrents.php. Slackware comes with two Bittorrent clients such as the graphical ktorrent (part of KDE) and the console-based bittorrent (not installed by default but available in the /extra directory). You can find further rsync/http/ftp download links for the ISO images on this page (mind you that not every mirror carries ISO images): http://alphageek.dyndns.org/linux/slackware-mirrors/

I have my own fast mirror too (also available through rsync):

Alphageek’s “sligdo files” are a very fast way of creating byte-exact copies of the official ISOs in case you already have a local mirror-copy of the full Slackware 13.37 tree. The ISOs you create with sligdo (http://alphageek.noip.me/linux/sligdo/) will pass the GPG verification test. He should have those sligdo files ready for download in time. If not, I have copies here: http://alien.slackbook.org/sligdo/ .

If you want to know more about how to create a Slackware USB installer if your computer does not have a CD or DVD drive, read this older article of mine: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/installing-slackware-using-usb-thumb-drive/ – or for the Windows users: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/welcome-windows-user/

If you install or upgrade to the 64-bit version of Slackware 13.37 and want to have a system which is capable of running 32-bit software too (Slackware64 itself is a pure 64-bit distro), then you can make your Slackware64 multilib capable. Read all about the multilib process (which is painless, fairly easy and straight-forward): http://alien.slackbook.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=slackware:multilib

In the spirit of an Easter release (which is right behind us now) I also managed to sneak in an Easter Egg (with Pat’s approval). Tell me if you managed to find what I added to Slackware 13.37 in secret. Drat! Pat spilled it in the announcement on the website…

Have fun! Eric

Edit 01-jun-2-16: Alphageek’s URL changed from http://alphageek.dyndns.org/linux/sligdo/ to http://alphageek.noip.me/linux/sligdo/ .

Slackware has the answer to all

March 27, 2011 / / 8 Comments

… perhaps even to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Just kidding of course. From today’s ChangeLog.txt for Slackware “current“:

?Sun Mar 27 08:28:47 UTC 2011
There have been quite a few changes so we will have one more release
candidate:  Slackware 13.37 RC 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716.
Very close now!  But we'll likely hold out for 2.6.37.6.

Well there you have it. The answer you all have been looking for, all that time! 😉

The list of changes is again pretty long. It shows that “declaring a Release Candidate” has a good reason. People ask from time to time, why these release candidates? Thy are nothing similar to what the bigger distros use in their progression towards a stable release. Things like “feature freeze” and “show stopper bugs” are used in Slackware development too, but you won’t see those mentioned in the ChangeLog. They are not relating one-to-one to any of the Release Candidates. Instead, the first call of a Slackware Release Candidate causes many people to try and install Slackware-current for the first time in a development cycle. Not many people are anxious to use a development release, especially since all of us keep repeating “when you are running -current, we expect that you know what you are doing, and that you are able to fix a suddenly broken system by yourself (with the help of the community)“. The Release Candidates are a sign of stability for those people. And we need all of you to help with the final stage of development! All these new people testing the pre-release result in many bugs found and forgotten features requested, and this causes a surge in the stabilization process which makes Slackware the rock solid distro we all know.

Multilib fans (slackware64), pay attention!

A new kernel again (2.6.37.5) and as the ChangeLog.txt says, there will likely be one more before the final release of Slackware 13.37. This means, you get a recompiled multilib version of glibc from me – and there will be another recompile if we see yet another kernel update.

Grab the updated multilib glibc packages from the usual locations:

Enjoy! Eric

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