The Slackware ChangeLog.txt is full of frenzied activity these days. It may be obvious that the next official release is just around the corner. I was taken by surprise when I saw the ChangeLog entry of Mon Dec 8 22:31:55 CST 2008:

isolinux/initrd.img:  Added missing mount.nfs.
       Added INSSMB, an installer script to use a Samba source.
       Thanks to Eric Hameleers.

I had not expected to see the Samba network installation choice appear in this release… I wrote this fairly recently and it was targeted to be added only after 12.2 was officially released. Anyway, it is nice to see it appear now. All you need to use it, is a Samba share (using a Samba or even a Windows server) that does not require authentication.

This is how that looks when you are installing Slackware 12.2:

Network install options

Slackware 12.2 network install options

Hope you all like it! It will certainly make life easier for those who only have a Windows server to store the Slackware directory tree on.

A related note:

At the same time, we (the http://slackbuilds.org admin team) are working hard behind the screens to get all the SlackBuild scripts in our “12.1” repository validated for the new 12.2 release. We have asked all maintainers to test their own contributions when possible, and for those who do not have a slackware-current system available, we will do the validation ourselves. The http://slackbuilds.org web site is already prepared, so the update should be fast and painless.

Cheers, Eric