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Slackware 15.0 RC1

Published on 2021-08-16 at 20:39:39 by  Georgi Sotirov

For all of us that are still waiting for the next major Slackware release the waiting continues as this morning Slackware 15.0 Release Candidate 1 was announced on the ChangeLog. In the new release GCC was bumped to 11.2.0, but GLibC would remain at 2.33, because of a "risky change of moving all functions into the main library" and an "inconvenient change of renaming the library files. From now on "most things" should be considered "frozen" and only some "remaining blocker bugs" would be focused on.

So, keep waiting for Slackware 15.0 "to reach the standard of excellence demanded from a Slackware release" ;-)

Slackware 15.0 beta

Published on 2021-04-13 at 21:16:40 by  Georgi Sotirov

After just one alpha release two months ago the beta of Slackware 15.0 was announced in the ChangeLog yesterday. This release comes on April 12, which is the International Day of Human Space Flight and this year it's also a round anniversary - 60 years since then. I'm slacker and I'm also interested in astronomy and space exploration, so it doubled the fun for me :-)

There were no build regressions with the upgraded to 10.3 GCC compiler, but there is no fix "for the illegal instruction issue with 32-bit mariadb" yet, which seems like the only blocking problem before the stable release unless of course other issues arise.

Hopefully the new major and stable release is coming, but when it would arrive knows only one man and you know who ;-)

Stay tuned until then and of course test the new beta!

Slackware 15.0 alpha1

Published on 2021-02-16 at 22:15:01 by  Georgi Sotirov

Yesterday, something interesting appeared in the ChangeLog - the first alpha of Slackware 15.0 was announced. Apparently we'll have a new major release this year. GLibC was upgraded to 2.33, which triggered a mass rebuild (of about 1550 packages). The alpha release includes updated Rust compiler, but it is not yet used by Firefox and Thunderbird, which would hopefully happen in future.

Stay tuned for more "scheduled upgrades" that would move the new release closer to beta.

Cheers!

SlackPack.EU is back

Published on 2020-12-13 at 19:18:23 by  Georgi Sotirov

As I announced back in December 2016-th I bought the SlackPack.EU domain for the site. However, at the end of 2017-th I forgot to renew it and unfortunately I lost it as someone else had managed to register it meanwhile. As I was recently renewing my other domains I noticed that the domain is free for registration again, so I acted quickly to return it back.

The domain is active since several days, but I had not had the time to re-configure it and I had some problems with rewriting the home page URL as the site would remain accessible from it's original address, which is sotirov-bg.net/slackpack/.

Cheers!

Waiting for Slackware 15

Published on 2020-05-24 at 19:39:12 by  Georgi Sotirov

Would this be the year for Slackware 15? I really hope so, because I'm not building packages for -current (since it's moving constantly) and it became harder to build new packages for Slackware 14.2, which is already almost 4 years old (released 2016-07-01). This is quite long for a modern operating system, because software releases now move faster than ever. As I wrote back in 2018 there were already big enough (and long awaited) changes for a new release in -current, but then came the financial woes for Patrick and I started supporting the distribution also financially in a hope that it would continue to exist and manage new releases. I also encouraged others to become patrons).

Of course, we'll have to wait some more until the new release is fully ready. However, I already started preparing for the new release. I've recently bought a second hand Dell PowerEdge R330 and moved my build server over it. I'm pleased with its performance so far and I hope it would allow me to build more packages more quickly in future. I'll have to think about build automation, but this requires also usage of a modern version control system. So, in February and March I managed to migrate all my build scripts from CVS (see my old and no longer used CVS repository) to Git and GitHub (see my SlackBuilds, but beware these are not self-sufficient - you'll need slack-package.conf file, which I still haven't found the time to migrate). I also manage to add some packages that I should have built long ago like xrdp and today open-vm-tools. I hope I'll add even more packages, because Slackware 15 should include some of the packages I'm currently building, so I won't have to build these anymore.

So until we're waiting for Slackware 15 stay safe and keep going with what makes you happy!

Become a patron of Slackware and Patrick

Published on 2019-09-10 at 21:19:33 by  Georgi Sotirov

As I wrote last year, Slackware's founder Patrick Volkerding is struggling financially since he stopped receiving money from Slackware's store a few years back. It was discussed that he should probably open a Patreon account and start receiving monthly donations for his work on the Slackware project. Well, it's a fact now as Patrick himself confirmed on LinuxQuestions a month ago.

I'm catching a little bit later, because I was busy myself putting some updates on the site planned since long ago, but I've become a patron yesterday. And I suggest you become one as well if you love the distribution and are still using it. Slackware is the oldest active Linux distribution and your support would keep it running. I personally hope that this would finally bring Slackware 15 out, because I have postponed many package upgrades since Slackware 14.2 is really old now being released more than 3 years ago.

Please, consider becoming a Slackware patron (the account is slackwarelinux), because your support would be important no matter how much you could afford, so the distribution continues to be maintained.

See also Patreon account for Patrick Volkerding’s Slackware.

Please, donate to Slackware and Patrick

Published on 2018-08-01 at 22:10:15 by  Georgi Sotirov

As it become clear last week, Slackware's creator and maintainer Patrick Volkerding, is having financial woes after Slackware's Store stopped paying him money. The man is practically broke not being able to do home and car repairs, take care of his health and keep doing the Slackware project, which requires new hardware and spare time.

I never really liked the store and I now have the reason to hate it. I remember trying to buy something in the past. I placed the order, but then received nothing. Apparently, they didn't deliver to Bulgaria, which is fine, because I could always burn CDs or DVDs, print T-shirts, etc. Anyway, this really wasn't my way for supporting Slackware.

In the thread Donating to Slackware on LinuxQuestions a lot has been written in the past 10 days and I would save myself from suggesting how Slackware should be managed, how money should be raised, etc. The most important is that there is now an official way to donate money electronically, which is via Patrick's personal PayPal account. The other official way (if you are in the US) is to send money via the post. So to summarize the official ways for donating to Slackware and Patrick are:

If you use or used Slackware, if you like the distribution or if you are just a normal human please, consider donating to the project and help the man that build it and continues to develop it although in difficult financial situation. I hope more ways for supporting the project would be made available in future and published on slackware.com, so that even more people could become aware and participate.

Please, support Slackware!

Slackware Linux turned 25 years old!

Published on 2018-07-17 at 19:21:20 by  Georgi Sotirov

On 1993-07-16 at 17:21:20 PST Patrick Volkerding released Slackware Linux 1.00, which was the first stable version (a pre-1.0 beta was released in April). So today we mark the 25-th anniversary of the distribution! Thus Slackware in still in the exclusive club of Debian and RadHat Linux as the oldest Linux distributions that are still active today (and it actually predates them).

In a quarter of century Slackware had released over 40 stable versions. Here below you'll find a list of them, based on official announcements, readmes and change logs:

Today, Slackware Linux is still valued for its stability and ease of use, which has always been the top priorities for the distribution. The distribution is regularly being updated with new software (although we're still waiting the next stable release), but it remains faithful to its traditions that are rooted in Unix. Like this Slackware continues to provide simplicity and ease of use while still providing the power and flexibility for being used like personal desktop, development workstation or server (or all together like in my case). For me Slackware is more than just a distribution, because through SlackPack, I'm feeling the distribution a big part of my professional life.

I started using Slackware in the university about 20 years ago and I would most probably continue using it until it's supported, because I'm quite used with it in first place, but also because for more than 13 years now I'm trying to extend the distribution with packages through SlackPack. Building packages is a tough job that requires you to stay informed (i.e. subscribe to hundreds of mail lists and other announcement channels), spare time and resources for preparing build scripts and other files, compile and test (i.e. have dedicated development environments - I run different Slackware versions as virtual machines on VMware ESXi hypervisor) and sometimes be a developer to fix failing builds, apply patches, etc.

Happy birthday Slackware! Live Long and Prosper!

More visibility to security fixes

Published on 2018-05-18 at 21:58:28 by  Georgi Sotirov

Security is more and more important nowadays and I'm regularly building packages upgrades that represent secuirity fixes. However, unless you follow the ChangeLog.txt file in the repostory you won't be able to understand whether the upgrades offered on SlackPack are addressing security issues or not. I have decided since some time to provide more visibitliy to security fixes on the site and I finally managed to do so.

The packages that are security fixes would be highlighted with red background in different places on the site in the following ways:

  • in Latest packages on main page;
  • in all the searches;
  • on packages details page:
    • a red box would appear at the top explaineding the special status of the package, suggesting to be installed as soon as possible (only latest builds). There are links to ChangeLog.txt file and the repository (from primary FTP);
    • in Package history and Other formats tables security fixes would be highlighted;
  • uppon registration packages would me marked as security fix or not.

I hope that like this you'll have more information about the pacakges that are security fixes, so you could prioritize your upgrades. I have always tried to provide pacakge upgrades as soon as possible and in the case where these address secirity issues, I try to build on the same day of upstrem release for which I'm following several houndreds of mailing lists, so now these would have better visibility on the site as well.

Stay secure!

Paramiko 2.2, Cryptography 1.8 and MySQL Workbench

Published on 2017-06-18 at 22:23:24 by  Georgi Sotirov

Like last December I have again omitted some new requirements for Paramiko 2.2 and Cryptography 1.8, so the functionality for SSH connections in MySQL Workbench was unfortunatelly broken again. Apparently, Parmiko 2.2.0 requires bcrypt and PyNaCl modules and in Cryptography 1.8 the module PyASN1 was replaced with asn1crypto. Since I'm trying to provide all the necesary dependncies I had to add 3 new packages to the SlackPack repository, so the depdency tree for Paramiko has effectively become:

Thus it's now necesary to install 3 Python pacakges more just for having SSH connections working in MySQL Workbench, but this should be handled by automtic tools.

Be happy!