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Slackware 12.0 released
Slackware 12.0 has been released.
"Well folks, it's that time to announce a new stable Slackware
release again. So, without further ado, announcing Slackware version 12.0!
Since we've moved to supporting the 2.6 kernel series exclusively (and
fine-tuned the system to get the most out of it), we feel that Slackware
12.0 has many improvements over our last release (Slackware 11.0) and is a
must-have upgrade for any Slackware user."
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Slackware 12.0 released Posted Jul 3, 2007 9:09 UTC (Tue) by juhl (subscriber, #33245) [Link] Yet another fantastic Slackware release.I've been running -current all the way from Slackware 11.0 and today pulled it the lst bit up to Slackware 12.0, also did a fresh 12.0 install on a seperate box and it just flies. This is without a doubt the best Slackware release ever (except perhaps for Slackware 3.2, that one was awesome at the time). The finest Linux distribution around hits another homerun. Many thanks to Pat and everyone else involved.
Slackware 12.0 released Posted Jul 3, 2007 18:17 UTC (Tue) by peace (guest, #10016) [Link] What makes Slack the finest around? Slack was the first distro I used but have since settled on apt based distros. Why would someone choose Slack over deb or ubuntu?
curious
Slackware 12.0 released Posted Jul 3, 2007 18:55 UTC (Tue) by asamardzic (guest, #27161) [Link] It's matter of taste, and Slackware is probably not the finest Linux distribution around for every user, but I guess for old-school Unix kind of guy it certainly is; and "old-school Unix" is, on my opinion, key for understanding what's "finest" about Slackware.
Why I like Slackware Posted Jul 3, 2007 18:55 UTC (Tue) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] I like Slackware because (1) it is so incredibly unencumbered by all the bloat I've noticed in other distros; (2) it is a "generic" distro in that it doesn't make big modifications to the individual packages - Slackware isn't trying to push its own agenda--at least not nearly so much so as other distros; and (3) (most importantly) everything just works (and really fast, also!). I've experience using Redhat (versions 5.1, 6, 8, and 9), RHEL version 4 (at work), Fedora 2/3/4, SuSE 7, 8.x, and 9.x, Mandrake (briefly, before it became Mandriva), Gentoo 2006.1, and Ubuntu (I believe version 6.06). Gentoo crashed during install; Ubuntu flubbed up GRUB and wouldn't boot after install (I have an unusual disk configuration); I was unimpressed with Mandrake, and I got sick of all the bloat RH, Fedora, and SuSE/SUSE (or whatever it's called these days) had that slowed down my (otherwise decently fast) computer. Many thanks to Pat V. and the Slackware volunteers for creating a wonderful Linux distribution that's a pleasure to use.
Why I like Slackware Posted Jul 4, 2007 2:44 UTC (Wed) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link] Full ack, Slackware rules :-)
Alex
Slackware 12.0 released Posted Jul 4, 2007 0:13 UTC (Wed) by JoeF (guest, #4486) [Link] Why would someone choose Slack over deb or ubuntu?
Hmm, unlike Debian, Slack doesn't push their own ideas on how config files should be organized onto the user.
Slackware 12.0 released Posted Jul 4, 2007 23:07 UTC (Wed) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] Is it so hard to install apache2-mpm-worker? ;)
Slackware 12.0 released Posted Jul 7, 2007 19:53 UTC (Sat) by muwlgr (guest, #35359) [Link] mpm-worker is not compatible with PHP, and there is a good reason for that.
Read this, e.g.: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/php5/+bug/12296 :
"... the current opinion of upstream is that PHP's Thread Safety Resource Manager is so poorly-written, it should be completely removed, and NEVER used in production. Their recommendation for users of threaded webservers is currently to use CGI or FastCGI.
After enabling ZTS on Debian's PHP builds and triaging a bunch of bug reports over the last few weeks, while I'm not convinced ZTS is complete evil, it does seem fairly obvious that it's poorly-maintained and not ready for prime-time."
Slackware 12.0 released Posted Jul 4, 2007 5:40 UTC (Wed) by juhl (subscriber, #33245) [Link] > What makes Slack the finest around? Slack was the first distro I used but> have since settled on apt based distros. Why would someone choose Slack > over deb or ubuntu?
Just to mention a few things. Slack is simple and straightforward, damn fast, puts the admin in control of his/her box, doesn't try to hide what's "under the hood" with fancy config tools, just exposes the config file of each app. Slackwares packages don't do dependency tracking (yes, that's a good thing!). Every package tracks upstream closely, little if no custom patching.
Slackware 12.0 released Posted Jul 6, 2007 0:11 UTC (Fri) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link] > Every package tracks upstream closely, little if no custom patching.
Which means that even though there's no package dependency stuff, grabbing source code and typing "./configure && make && sudo make install" will usually just work too.
I've been a fan since 4.0, and I can't quite put my finger on why I stay with it. It just feels nice, like an comfy old sweater that magically keeps up with new fashions and never frays or unravels. It doesn't look down on me for liking the command line, either, which is always nice.
Slackware 12.0 released Posted Jul 4, 2007 19:16 UTC (Wed) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link] I moved from Slackware to Redhat and finally to Debian in around 1999 (my first debian install was slink-and-a-half).
My problem with Slack and Redhat is that they got to the point where they were unusable, and I was forced to reinstall. I don't computers should work that way, where you install and then they slowly disintegrate upgrade to upgrade until they're rendered useless.
With Debian, it's possible to maintain a system interminably in a pretty low-entropy state. That doesn't mean it's simple, you do have to be careful and clean things up from time to time, but it's very doable.
My current desktop, that I'm sitting in front of now, started out life as Potato. Now it's running Lenny. It's gone through five hard drives (I keep full backups) and four computers in that time (started out as a 233mhz Pentium II, then a 950mhz Athlon, then a loaner 750mhz Athlon when the former died, now a 1ghz PIII) In all that time, it's only been installed once. It still works great. I still put new software on it occasionally, and remove old stuff. Every upgrade has been pretty near flawless, even in testing.
Slackware 12.0 released Posted Jul 4, 2007 22:17 UTC (Wed) by juhl (subscriber, #33245) [Link] In my opinion, Slack is no more difficult to keep up-to-date than any other distro - in fact I'd say it's sometimes easier since you don't have to fight package dependencies all the time.My main workstation started out as a Slackware 4.0 install and is currently at a completely up-to-date Slackware 12.0. Ok, I must admit that the 4.0 --> 7.0 upgrade was "interesting", but from then on it has been smooth sailing. Why is it that you feel Slackware installs disintegrate over time?
Slackware 12.0 released Posted Jul 7, 2007 11:41 UTC (Sat) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link] "In my opinion, Slack is no more difficult to keep up-to-date than any other distro - in fact I'd say it's sometimes easier since you don't have to fight package dependencies all the time."
That's also the downside of Slackware. E.g. recently many packages have been split. With a "dependency-aware" system like dpkg + APT, such splits will be handled automatically. With Slackware it will continue to work, but with your old packages, at some point you have to replace the larger packages by split packages manually.
I have pretty much used Slackware exclusively since 1994 until 2003. Since then I have pretty much moved on to NetBSD/Debian/CentOS. I don't care too much about compiling everything manually anymore, I lost the time to do that. It's nice to be able to yum/apt-get install a high-quality package when you need it.
Of course, each to his/her hown. The point isn't that there is one perfect distro.
Slackware 12.0 released Posted Jul 5, 2007 8:19 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] That's the thing I ran into with Debian.
It's not so much apt-get that does anything magical, it's the time and effort that the Debian project puts into making a large number of quality software packages.
When running stable you don't have to worry about a new Samba version breaking your configuration file or some part of LAMP updated that breaks some server side script or whatever. This is the same as you get with Slackware.
But what is extra is that Debian also does a pretty decent job of making sure that upgrades between releases are nice. When you upgrade between different versions things generally go well.
With Slackware it's ok as long as you stick with the packages that are provided by Slackware, but once you venture off on your own with compiling software and such then you loose a lot of the benifit of having a quality distribution. Over a period of a year or two you end up with a fairly large number of custom libraries and applications that you just don't know will survive the upgrades. Plus you have to go through all the recompile again to upgrade those packages and it's 100% up to you to stay on top of security patches and other such things. This is less of a problem with Debian just because the massive amount of packages aviable that there is usually very little reason to have to run much software compiled from source.
In other words Debian allows me to be more lazy.
I do like slackware a lot though. It's great how it's stable and how it stays out of your way. With Debian apt-get and the packages rule your computer, you sacrifice a lot of control and it was hard for me to deal with that after moving from Slackware to Debian.
Slackware 12.0 released Posted Jul 5, 2007 3:13 UTC (Thu) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] Does anyone know if sqlite support was included for the new Python 2.5.1 in Slack 12? I can't find any mention of it if it's there...and there's nothing sqlite-related in the source directories. This would seem to be a bad thing, considering sqlite support is now in the standard library...
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