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A Look at Slackware Linux 10.2

Slackware Linux 10.2 was released on 14 September 2005. Looking through the release notes, it is clear that Slackware 10.2 is not particularly heavy on exciting new features, which, in itself, can perhaps be considered the most obvious selling point of this distribution. In fact, with Slackware, it often seems that Patrick Volkerding tries hard to avoid adding anything that might disturb the peace and add an element of unpredictability, together with potential bugs. With the Native POSIX Thread Library (NPTL), Slackware took the most conservative approach among the Linux distributions, requiring three years to introduce NPTL into the product. NPTL, besides the newly added support for SATA controllers and other hardware, is probably the biggest new feature of Slackware 10.2.

The above paragraph summarizes why Slackware, which had as much as 90% market share of all Linux installations in the mid-nineties, has slowly and painfully become a niche distribution, catering mostly to die-hard Linux geeks. A good case in point is the kernel in Slackware 10.2. Although the default kernel is version 2.4.31, version 2.6.13 is also provided in the /testing directory for the more adventurous users. This kernel can be selected during installation. Once you do that, however, the system will boot into the new kernel without loading any kernel modules, disregarding any hardware detection that might have taken place during the installation. Users are then left to their own devices (no pun intended) to set up and load any kernel modules they might require.

The situation is somewhat better if the user chooses one of the standard binary kernels - either the bare one, or one of the specially prepared kernels with support for certain less common hardware. This type of installation will result in a functional system, with kernel modules for sound cards, USB devices, and network cards loaded and working properly. But the installer does nothing to set up the graphical part of the system; although it provides a functional xorg.conf file with a VESA driver and a decent screen resolution and color depth, it does not extract information from the graphics card, let alone create a proper configuration file with the parameters supported by the card. Configuring X, together with adding non-root users, is a manual task left entirely to the person performing the installation.

Virtually all major distributions available today do an excellent job setting up not only graphics cards and monitors - even more exotic devices, such as scanners, wireless cards or digital cameras, can often be detected and configured without any user intervention. Of course, any such interference with the kernel might introduce bugs and even serious instability, and this is something that Slackware is trying to avoid at all costs. As such, there is little wonder that Slackware is considered to be one of the most stable and bug-free distributions - without taking any risks and without introducing even remotely troublesome code into the product, Slackware is indeed rock solid. And if a user decides to load a kernel module and things go wrong, then it's the user's problem, not Slackware's.

The above attitude means that Slackware is a great product for deployment on servers, but much less exciting as an operating system on workstations - at least until the distribution is painfully set up to support all the peripherals. Even so, some users might be disappointed with the new Slackware release, which, for the first time in years, ships without the GNOME desktop. Although not everybody likes GNOME, there are useful GTK+ and GNOME applications that many might choose to run while logged into KDE or one of the other available desktops. Those users will now have to get GNOME from independent sources, perhaps from Freerock GNOME or GWARE, thus adding a layer of complexity to the process of security updates. And if you think about using the popular Dropline GNOME packages on Slackware, then think again - due to the project's insistence of adding PAM and replacing large system packages, Patrick Volkerding does not recommend it as a suitable option.

Security and system updates provide further cases in point to illustrate how much more convenient most modern distributions have become over the last few years. Although Slackware issues security advisories and provides timely security updates, the process of patching holes is as cumbersome as ever - it entails downloading the updated package manually, then checking its signature, before firing up Slackware's pkgtool to upgrade the vulnerable package. Similarly, a highly manual method awaits any user who decides to upgrade from an older version of Slackware Linux to a newer one - a complicated 10-step process that starts with dropping to runlevel 1, then updating glibc, pkgtool and sed before proceeding with the rest of the software and before bravely refreshing all the configuration files and clean up the resulting mess. Suddenly, you wish that you were running Ubuntu, which can be upgraded with a single command, or SUSE, where a similar task can be achieved from within a nice graphical application.

Before I get reminded about it - yes, I know that Slackware can be extended to include various third-party tools and applications that make security and system upgrades so much more convenient. It also enjoys a large number of community sites that package extra software for Slackware. With their help, Slackware can indeed be extended into a more complete and user-friendly distribution that can do anything that other modern distributions do out of the box. But will it be still Slackware? Or will it be a new distribution where only the base is Slackware, while the reminder is a mix of third-party tools and applications where stability and security are no longer guaranteed?

And that's really what Slackware Linux is today: a base system with the Linux kernel, GNU, pkgtool and a fairly bare collection of the most common open source applications. As such, it gets very high marks for being an extremely clean, stable, reliable and secure operating system. On the other hand, it scores very low in terms of user-friendliness, hardware setup, upgrade convenience and features. A perfect system for many web or file servers, for the geeks who need to have total control, and for those who wish to build a new distribution on top of it.

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New Releases

Slackware 10.2 is released

Release 10.2 of Slackware Linux has been announced. "Slackware 10.2 includes the Linux 2.4.31 kernel, with Linux 2.6.13 available in the /testing directory. For the first time, a 2.6 kernel with support for SCSI, RAID, and SATA is offered as a boot option in the installer (called "test26.s"). Slackware 10.2 also sports a new revision of glibc (2.3.5) with NPTL support for improved thread performance when using a kernel with NPTL support, the latest KDE 3.4.2 and XFce 4.2.2 desktop environments, updated development tools, and new additions like SASL support in sendmail, the Subversion version control system, the Firefox browser, and the Thunderbird email and news client."

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Preview of Linux DCC 3.0 Released (LinuxElectrons)

LinuxElectrons covers the preview release of DCC 3.0. "DCC 3.0 PR1 supports the i386, ia64, and amd64 architectures and is available in the form of an APT repository and an installable ISO image. The APT repository is designed to serve as the basis of Debian-based distributions that wish to base on standard Debian "sarge" and provide LSB 3.0 compliance. The installable ISO image is designed to serve as a minimal reference DCC-based distribution that can be used as the basis for experimentation, testing, and certification and includes the DCC 3.0 as well as the necessary infrastructure to make DCC 3.0 installable (debian-installer framework and bootloaders)."

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Distribution News

Giving Desktop/LX users a Mandriva Club discount

Mandriva purchased the technology assets from Lycoris earlier this year.  As part of this agreement, Mandriva wishes to give a special discount on Club memberships to Desktop/LX users. Click below for details.

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DebCentral.org launches users group for Debian based distributions

The DebCentral team has announced the official launch of DebCentral.org, the first online community dedicated to both Debian GNU/Linux, and the many derivative distributions it has spawned. "DebCentral's goal is to provide a place where users of any Debian based or derivative distributions can come together for news, support, collaboration, and to exchange views and information with each other. We are aiming to provide a place that is welcoming to users, administrators, and developers of all levels. No matter if you have just recently moved to a Debian style distro, or you are a highly experienced guru, you will be more than welcome at DebCentral.org."

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Debian Project news

In Bits from the New Maintainer Front Desk provides a look at changes to the New Maintainer process. "We have effectively put applicants on hold (or even removed their application) if they haven't contributed to Debian yet. This is now an official policy and we will check for this directly after an application is received from now on."

DVD videos of the Debconf5 sessions (plus Debian Day and some extras) are now available in PAL format. NTSC format discs and downloadable images will be coming soon.

If you have been having problems getting recently released security updates, you may just have to be patient. "The recently released security update of XFree86 in DSA 816 for sarge and woody has caused the host security.debian.org to saturate its 100MBit/s network connection entirely. Due to the large number of X packages, the gross size of these packages and the high number of users who need to install the update, the server is busy sending out updates which exhaust its total outgoing bandwidth."

There has been ongoing discussion of an architecture-specific release criteria. Some architectures will need to re-qualify to be included with 'etch'.

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Order SUSE Linux 10 now

SUSE Linux 10.0 begins shipping on September 30, 2005. Place your order before October 1, and Novell will pay the shipping.

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New Distributions

AspisOS Linux

AspisOS Linux is targeted for SBCs (Single Board Computers) or dedicated desktop PCs that will function as wireless access points. It's optimized for size and security. Version 0.0.1 was released September 16, 2005.

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Distribution Newsletters

Debian Weekly News

The September 20 issue of the Debian Weekly News is out. This week's topics include a look at volunteer participation, the removal of non-free documentation, overload problems on the security update server, and more.

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Fedora Weekly News

The Fedora Weekly News covers Release Notes, the revamped Fedora Project website, meeting minutes for Fedora Documentation, meeting minutes for Fedora Marketing, Fedora Legacy Documents Move into Fedora Wiki, Fedora Core 4 on Dell Inspiron 6000, and other topics.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of September 19, 2005 covers the first Gentoo council meeting, the European Gentoo developer conference planned for November 18 in Germany, a report from the open-source conference 2005 in Tokyo, and several other topics.

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Mandriva Community Newsletter #108

The Mandriva Community Newsletter has a new edition, with a look at Mandriva Linux 2006 Release Candidate 1, more eTraining courses, the Department of Mandriva Security is recruiting, and more.

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Red Hat Magazine

The September 2005 edition of Red Hat Magazine is out, with a look at Linux performance tuning; Computer worms, Red Hat, and you; and more.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 118

The DistroWatch Weekly for September 19, 2005 is out. "The major news of the past week was, of course, the release of Slackware Linux 10.2 - a distribution with a clear focus on simplicity, stability and reliability. Next on the release calendar: Mandriva Linux 2006 - with the second release candidate announced last week, we can't be too far off from the final release. Also in this issue: an explanation about the delay of KNOPPIX 4.0 CD edition, news about a live CD that uses Xen to boot a host operating system, and two free learning resources - one for OpenBSD and one for Linux. We also take a brief look at a new book for Xandros users - Linux Made Easy."

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Minor distribution updates

New primary Quantian mirror available

Quantian has announced (click below) a new mirror for http, ftp and rsync downloads.

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Package updates

Fedora updates

Updates for Fedora Core 4: mc (bug fixes), libwnck (upgrade to 2.10.3), dia (bug fix), qt (upstream patch fixes kmail folder selector), yum (bug fixes and features), pilot-link (update to 0.12.0-0.pre5 snapshots), selinux-policy-strict (update to match targeted released policy), tetex (bug fixes), pwlib (new upstream release), openh323 (new upstream release), gnomemeeting (update to 1.2.2), man-pages (bug fix), jpilot (rebuilt new version).

Updates for Fedora Core 3: gnupg (update to 1.2.7), mc (bug fixes), openmotif (fixed mrm initialization error), termcap (new termcap-description for rxvt-unicode-terminal-emulator), xorg-x11 (bug fix).

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Mandriva MDKA-2005:040

Mandriva has updated drakbt packages that reflect the new URLs for the Mandriva domain names.

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Trustix Secure Linux Bugfix Advisory TSL-2005-0048

Trustix has fixed various bugs in ltrace, mkbootdisk, mrtg, mtools, mysql, php, pptpd, sqlite3 and vim.

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Miscellaneous Articles

ISP Server Setup - OpenSUSE 10 RC 1 (HowtoForge)

Howto Forge has a detailed description of the steps needed to setup an OpenSUSE 10.0-based server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters (web server (SSL-capable), mail server (with SMTP-AUTH and TLS!), DNS server, FTP server, MySQL server, POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc.) and the ISPConfig control panel.

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Distribution reviews

First Look at Ubuntu 5.10 Preview (Mad Penguin)

Mad Penguin reviews Ubuntu 5.10 Preview. "Performance on the desktop was acceptable. I wouldn't say that Ubuntu was a screamer because I'd be lying to you, but it did perform well enough to warrant every day workstation/desktop duty. Applications were quick to respond and overall the system felt pretty snappy. The final version should prove to be quite a performer. This, combined with how easy it is to add/remove/update software (it's Debian after all) will seriously make it hard to beat."

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Opinion: Make mine a Lite, a MEPISLite (Linux-Watch)

Linux-Watch reviews MEPISLite 3.3.1-2. "MEPISLite is simply put together well. It is a smooth, clean Linux distribution. With many smaller distributions, you may get the feeling that you're working with a kit rather than an operating system. Now, that's fine for Linux gear-heads. But, if you just want to get work done on a slow machine, or introduce someone who's still using Windows 98 or ME to Linux, I haven't seen a better distribution than MEPISLite."

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Page editor: Rebecca Sobol
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