SlackPack: Slackware packages

After the longest wait ever (of just over 5 years and 7 months) the next major release of Slackware - Slackware 15.0 - was born on 2022-02-02 at 22:22:22 UTC (you get the catch ;-)). There were one alpha, one beta and three RCs (see RC1, RC2 and RC3) in this long development cycle that came out in about a year time. It is a release I waited since 2020, because even then Slackware 14.2 was already old and though time for two years earlier for the changes already accumulated. However, I do understand the Slackware team in their best efforts to make it modern without changing the character of the operating system and against all the odds (see my requests for donation and for becoming a patron).

Well, Slackware 15.0 is here, so let's see what it offers:

• Base system:
  • Linux Kernel 5.5.19 LTS (with configs for building 5.16 kernels included in /testing directory);
  • GNU C Library 2.33;
  • PAM-based user authentication;
  • elogind (obsoleting ConsoleKit2);
  • pkgtools was developed as well (updated with file locking against collisions from parallel installs or upgrades. The amount of data written to storage was minimized to avoid extra writes on SSD devices. There is now also support for uninstall scripts through /install/douninst.sh);
• Networking:
  • Networking scripts now use iproute2, instead of net-tools and bridge-utils and friends. Previous functionality is still supported with the same configuration syntax. New functionality includes:
    • support for creation of virtual interfaces (e.g. tun/tap) and adding them to bridges;
    • support for binding additional IP addresses to virtual and/or real interfaces;
    • support for VLAN (802.1Q);
    • support for Link Aggregation (bonding);
    • support for IPv6 (SLAAC is disabled by default);
• Servers:
  • Postfix 3.6 (replacing Sendmail as MTA, which is still available in /extra directory);
  • Dovecot 2.3 (replacing old imapd as IMAP and ipop3d as POP3 daemons);
  • ProFTPD 1.3.7c (with mod_sftp and mod_facl support);
  • Apache httpd 2.4.52 (with HTTP/2 support);
  • Samba 4.15;
  • MariaDB 10.5.13;
  • Bind 9.16, dhcp 4.4.2, ntp 4.2.8p15 (now running as ntp:ntp) and more;
• Development:
  • GNU's Compiler Collection 11.2 and LLVM 13.0;
  • Perl 5.34;
  • PHP 7.4.27 by default (with 8.0 and 8.1 in /extra);
  • Python 3.9 (with pip and some basic modules like docutils, setuptools, CFFI, etc. Python 2 is still available, although strongly NOT recommended as it is not supported since more than two years ago);
  • Ruby 3.0.3 (with asciidoctor gem);
  • Rust 1.58.1 (new language);
  • Git 2.35.1 and Mercurial 6.0.1;
• Multimedia:
  • PipeWire 0.3.44 (as an alternative to PulseAudio);
  • FFmpeg 4.4.1;
  • SDL2 2.0.20 (with some core libraries like gfx, image, net, etc.);
• GUI:
  • X.Org 1.20;
  • Wayland 1.20 (in addition to X11);
  • KDE Plasma 5.23.5 and qt 5.15.3 (yeah!);
  • XFCE 4.16;
  • SeaMonkey 2.53, Firefox 91.5 ESR and Thunderbird 91.5;
  • GTK+ applications such as Pidgin 2.14.8, GIMP 2.10.30, etc.;

There are many (over 250) new packages among them FFmpeg 4.4, new libraries like opus, lame, libbluray, speex, id3lib, libwebp and various Python modules (e.g. idna and six), which I was previously building and publishing here for previous major releases. I will stop building these, but I would post another news specificity on this later. I'm already preparing my build infrastructure, so packages for Slackware 15.0 would start to pop up in the following days. My initial focus would be on basic tools and libraries and then MySQL, because I would like to finally bring 8.0 to Slackware stable.

Slackware 15.0 is a great new release, so download and start using it or go upgrade your installations!

Happy upgrading!

References and further readings:

• Slackware 15.0 Release Announcement
• Slackware 15.0 has been released on 2022-02-02

Updates:

• 2022-02-09: Added Networking changes, fixed several spelling errors.

Earlier today, RC3 the final release candidate for Slackware 15.0 was announced in the ChangeLog. The new major release is thus 99% frozen, so it is now mostly about regression or other bug reports before it goes stable. Hopefully, we have the whole 2022 for the new stable release in more than 5 and half years.

Yesterday, RC2 for Slackware 15.0 was announced in the ChangeLog, which promises a much harder freeze. We're still patiently waiting for the next stable release in more than 5 years...

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" ;-)

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!

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!

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!

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!

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.

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:

• Via PayPal (https://www.paypal.me/volkerdi);
• Via US Post (PO BOX 172, Sebeka, MN 56477).

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!