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.