Softpedia >Linux >Linux Distributions >Slackware >  Changelog

Slackware Changelog

What's new in Slackware 14.2

Jul 2, 2016
  • Runs the 4.4.14 version of the Linux kernel from ftp.kernel.org. The 4.4.x series is well-tested, offers good performance, and will be getting long term support from kernel.org. For people interested in running the latest Linux kernel, we've also put configuration files for Linux 4.6 in /testing.
  • System binaries are linked with the GNU C Library, version 2.23. This version of glibc also has excellent compatibility with existing binaries.
  • X11 based on the X.Org Foundation's modular X Window System. This is X11R7.7 with many improvements in terms of performance and hardware support.
  • Installs gcc-5.3.0 as the default C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran-77/95/2003/2008, and Ada 95/2005/2012 compiler.
  • Also includes LLVM and Clang, an alternate compiler for C, C++, Objective-C and Objective-C++.
  • The x86_64 version of Slackware 14.2 supports installation and booting on machines using UEFI firmware.
  • Support for NetworkManager for simple configuration of wired and wireless network connections, including mobile broadband, IPv6, VPN, and more. Roam seamlessly between known networks, and quickly set up new connections. We've retained full support for the traditional Slackware networking scripts and for the wicd network manager, offering choice and flexibility to all levels of users.
  • Support for fully encrypted network connections with OpenSSL, OpenSSH, OpenVPN, and GnuPG.
  • Apache (httpd) 2.4.20 web server with Dynamic Shared Object support, SSL, and PHP 5.6.23.
  • USB2, USB3, IEEE 1394 (FireWire), and ACPI support, as well as legacy PCMCIA and Cardbus support. This makes Slackware a great operating system for your laptop.
  • The udev (eudev) dynamic device management system for Linux 4.x. This locates and configures most hardware automatically as it is added (or removed) from the system, loading kernel modules as needed. It works along with the kernel's tmpfs filesystem to create access nodes in the /dev directory.
  • New development tools, including Perl 5.22.2, Python 2.7.11, Ruby 2.2.5, Subversion 1.9.4, git-2.9.0, mercurial-3.8.2, graphical tools like Qt designer and KDevelop, and much more.
  • Updated versions of the Slackware package management tools make it easy to add, remove, upgrade, and make your own Slackware packages. Package tracking makes it easy to upgrade from Slackware 14.1 to Slackware 14.2 (see UPGRADE.TXT and CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT). The slackpkg tool can also help update from an older version of Slackware to a newer one, and keep your Slackware system up to date. In addition, the slacktrack utility will help you build and maintain your own packages.
  • Web browsers galore! Includes KDE's Konqueror 4.14.13, SeaMonkey 2.40 (this is the replacement for the Mozilla Suite), Mozilla Firefox ESR 45.2.0, as well as the Thunderbird 45.1.1 email and news client with advanced junk mail filtering. A script is also available in /extra to repackage Google Chrome as a native Slackware package (Chrome is only available for x86_64).
  • The KDE Software Compilation 4.14.21 (KDE 4.14.3 with kdelibs-4.14.21), a complete desktop environment. This includes the Calligra productivity suite (previously known as KOffice), networking tools, GUI development with KDevelop, multimedia tools (including the Amarok music player and K3B disc burning software), the Konqueror web browser and file manager, dozens of games and utilities, international language support, and more.
  • A collection of GTK+ based applications including pidgin-2.10.12, gimp-2.8.16, gkrellm-2.3.7, hexchat-2.12.1, xsane-0.999, and pan-0.139.
  • A repository of extra software packages compiled and ready to run in the /extra directory. Many more improved and upgraded packages than we can list here.

New in Slackware 14.2 Beta 1 (Jan 14, 2016)

  • After upgrading to BlueZ 5 recently, everything seemed to be working great, but then it was pointed out that Bluetooth audio was no longer working. The reason was that the newer BlueZ branch had dropped ALSA support and now required PulseAudio. So with some trepidation, we began investigating adding PulseAudio to Slackware. Going back to BlueZ 4 wasn't an option with various dependent projects either having dropped support for it, or considering doing so. After several iterations here refining the foundation packages and recompiling and tweaking other packages to use PulseAudio, it's working well and you'll likely not notice much of a change. But if you're using Bluetooth audio, or needing to direct audio through HDMI, you'll probably find it a lot easier to accomplish that. Also, enjoy a shiny new LTS 4.4.0 kernel.

New in Slackware 14.1 (Nov 8, 2013)

  • Runs the 3.10.17 version of the Linux kernel from ftp.kernel.org. The 3.10.x series is well-tested, offers good performance, and will be getting long term support from kernel.org. For people interested in running the previous long term support kernel series, we've provided sample configuration files for Linux 3.4.66 under the /testing directory. And, to make it easier for people who want to compile the latest Linux kernel, we've also put configuration files for Linux 3.12 in /testing.
  • System binaries are linked with the GNU C Library, version 2.17. This version of glibc also has excellent compatibility with existing binaries.
  • X11 based on the X.Org Foundation's modular X Window System. This is X11R7.7, a new release, with many improvements in terms of performance and hardware support.
  • Installs gcc-4.8.2 as the default C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran-77/95/2003/2008, and Ada 95/2005/2012 compiler.
  • Also includes LLVM and Clang, an alternate compiler for C, C++, Objective-C and Objective-C++.
  • The x86_64 version of Slackware 14.1 supports installation and booting on machines using UEFI firmware.
  • Support for NetworkManager for simple configuration of wired and wireless network connections, including mobile broadband, IPv6, VPN, and more. Roam seamlessly between known networks, and quickly set up new connections. We've retained full support for the traditional Slackware networking scripts and for the wicd network manager, offering choice and flexibility to all levels of users.
  • Support for fully encrypted network connections with OpenSSL, OpenSSH, OpenVPN, and GnuPG.
  • Apache (httpd) 2.4.6 web server with Dynamic Shared Object support, SSL, and PHP 5.4.20.
  • USB, IEEE 1394 (FireWire), and ACPI support, as well as legacy PCMCIA and Cardbus support. This makes Slackware a great operating system for your laptop.
  • The udev dynamic device management system for Linux 3.x. This locates and configures most hardware automatically as it is added (or removed) from the system, loading kernel modules as needed. It works along with the kernel's devtmpfs filesystem to create access nodes in the /dev directory.
  • New development tools, including Perl 5.18.1, Python 2.7.5, Ruby 1.9.3-p448, Subversion 1.7.13, git-1.8.4, mercurial-2.7.2, graphical tools like Qt designer and KDevelop, and much more.
  • Updated versions of the Slackware package management tools make it easy to add, remove, upgrade, and make your own Slackware packages. Package tracking makes it easy to upgrade from Slackware 14.0 to Slackware 14.1 (see UPGRADE.TXT and CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT). The slackpkg tool can also help update from an older version of Slackware to a newer one, and keep your Slackware system up to date. In addition, the slacktrack utility will help you build and maintain your own packages.
  • Web browsers galore! Includes KDE's Konqueror 4.10.5, SeaMonkey 2.21 (this is the replacement for the Mozilla Suite), Mozilla Firefox ESR 24.1, as well as the Thunderbird 24.1 email and news client with advanced junk mail filtering. A script is also available in /extra to repackage Google Chrome as a native Slackware package.
  • The KDE Software Compilation 4.10.5, a complete desktop environment. This includes the Calligra productivity suite (previously known as KOffice), networking tools, GUI development with KDevelop, multimedia tools (including the Amarok music player and K3B disc burning software), the Konqueror web browser and file manager, dozens of games and utilities, international language support, and more.
  • A collection of GTK+ based applications including pidgin-2.10.7, gimp-2.8.6 (with many improvements including a single window mode), gkrellm-2.3.5, xchat-2.8.8, xsane-0.998, and pan-0.139.
  • A repository of extra software packages compiled and ready to run in the /extra directory.

New in Slackware 14.0 RC5 (Sep 20, 2012)

  • Everything is in place and ready to release at this point, and unless there's some kind of showstopper found (which doesn't seem too likely after all the testing that's happened), the release can be expected soon. After careful consideration and a considerable amount of internal testing I did relent to give the kernel one more bump to 3.2.29, so of course 3.2.30 was released a couple of hours ago. But that's not a showstopper, and it seems to be time to get off the never-ending kernel upgrade treadmill until the next cycle begins. Speaking of kernels, I added sample .configs for all the 3.x kernel branches in /testing. So test away, and if there are any new problems (or old ones that we missed), let us know soon!

New in Slackware 14.0 Beta (Jul 23, 2012)

  • Howdy! Lots of shiny stuff here, including the long awaited Xfce 4.10!
  • Thanks to Robby Workman for the initial set of build scripts, and lots
  • of testing (plus some very helpful notes about things such as the proper
  • build order). I'm calling this a beta (finally!), and it's really very
  • close to what we expect to release. Test away.
  • BTW, Mercury leaves retrograde on August 8th, position 01:26 Leo. ;-)
  • a/aaa_elflibs-14.0-i486-3.txz: Rebuilt.
  • Fixed missing libz.so.1.
  • a/lvm2-2.02.96-i486-4.txz: Rebuilt.
  • Recompiled for udev-182.
  • a/sysvinit-scripts-2.0-noarch-3.txz: Rebuilt.
  • Show the date after setting the system clock.
  • Thanks to Darrell Anderson.
  • Shut down udev in rc.6. Thanks to Robby Workman.
  • In rc.S, determine the actual root partition and insert it into /etc/mtab
  • so that "/dev/root" isn't shown when booting a kernel without an initrd.
  • I should have fixed this years ago.
  • a/udev-182-i486-1.txz: Upgraded.
  • Well, udev in this devel cycle has certainly been interesting! A fair
  • number of odd bug reports have been coming in, and we hadn't really been
  • able to get a handle on the source of the issues. Quite some time ago
  • we started testing udev-182, and noticed that it caused some issues with
  • the persistent net and cd rules. There'd sometimes be two entries per
  • device, so a machine with a single Ethernet card might come up showing the
  • card as eth1, with two rules in 70-persistent-net.rules (eth0 and eth1).
  • We tested a lot of udev versions trying to determine where the problem
  • started, and it seemed to begin with version 176, the first one that
  • used libkmod rather than calling out to module-init-tools to load modules.
  • Asking upstream about it, they suggested that we just turn the generation
  • of persistent rules off. They'd already turned it off by default. "Make
  • 'em make rules!" seemed to be the answer, and since I remember well why
  • the autogeneration of net and CD rules came about, I wasn't really happy
  • with that answer. After deploying the "safe" upgrade to 175, we got a
  • couple of reports of this same issue happening (though none of us could
  • reproduce the issue with 175). Robby ended up making some patches to
  • the rule writing scripts for udev-182 that were able to stop the doubling
  • up of rules, but the devices themselves would still be misnumbered on the
  • first boot without rules, and would then be correct after a reboot.
  • Last week I sat down determined to figure out where the race condition
  • was. After endless reboots with various tests, I got the idea to put my
  • network modules on the initrd and have it shell out so that I could take
  • a look at them. What I found was that the rules were generated correctly
  • on the initrd. Well, that was a surprise, but I must have had some kind
  • of hunch to even try a test like that. On another hunch, I ran
  • "pstree -c -p | grep udevd" on the running system. Heh. There it was.
  • We had been running two copies of udevd, and they were fighting it out.
  • At some point along the line, udevd was changed. It used to be that if
  • you tried to start a second copy it wouldn't start, and would exit with
  • status 1, and our rc.udev script relied on this behavior. Fixing the
  • problem was considerably easier than finding it... rworkman and I made
  • some changes in rc.udev to check if udevd was already running instead
  • of expecting it to check for itself. Another change was required to
  • cause it to write out rules if they didn't exist already, and then to
  • read them back in (otherwise optical symlinks were still missing on first
  • boot without rules). There's still one issue that was also present with
  • udev-175, which is that a hotplugged optical drive won't get symlinks
  • unless it has been in at boot and had rules generated for it then.
  • Otherwise, things are looking considerably better. Firmware is loading
  • correctly, rules are autogenerated properly again, and several devices
  • that were missing in /dev have returned.
  • So, there's the story. Maybe more than you really wanted to know. ;-)
  • Thanks to rworkman for his help on this. Please report any new problems.
  • And if anyone knows how to get symlinks working for a hotplugged optical
  • drive like they did in udev-165, a fix would be most appreciated.
  • a/udisks2-1.98.0-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • ap/foomatic-filters-4.0.12-i486-1.txz: Upgraded.
  • ap/gutenprint-5.2.9-i486-1.txz: Upgraded.
  • ap/slackpkg-2.82.0-noarch-6.tgz: Rebuilt.
  • Support XFCE series. Note that slackpkg will upgrade itself, but it still
  • won't know about the XFCE series during that run, so you'll need to run it
  • a second time to install Xfce.
  • l/GConf-3.2.5-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • l/gcr-3.4.1-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • l/glade3-3.8.1-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • l/glib-networking-2.32.3-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • l/gnome-keyring-3.4.1-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • l/gsettings-desktop-schemas-3.4.2-noarch-1.txz: Added.
  • l/gvfs-1.12.3-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • l/js185-1.0.0-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • l/keybinder-0.3.0-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • l/libcanberra-0.29-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • l/libgnome-keyring-3.4.1-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • l/libproxy-0.4.7-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • l/libsoup-2.38.1-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • l/libtasn1-2.12-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • l/loudmouth-1.4.3-i486-3.txz: Rebuilt.
  • Rebuilt with --enable-debug=yes, which I hear disables debugging messages on
  • the console. Go figure. :-) Thanks to Youjie Zhou.
  • l/media-player-info-17-noarch-1.txz: Added.
  • l/mozilla-nss-3.13.5-i486-2.txz: Rebuilt.
  • Added nspr-config and nss-config.
  • Removed unneeded binaries in /usr/bin.
  • Removed config files in /usr/include/nspr/md.
  • l/sound-theme-freedesktop-0.7-noarch-1.txz: Added.
  • n/php-5.4.5-i486-1.txz: Upgraded.
  • Fixed potential overflow in _php_stream_scandir (CVE-2012-2688).
  • (Thanks to Jason Powell, Stas)
  • For more information, see:
  • http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2012-2688
  • (* Security fix *)
  • xap/network-manager-applet-0.9.4.1-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • xap/xfce-4.6.2-i486-5.txz: Removed.
  • xfce/Terminal-0.4.8-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • xfce/Thunar-1.4.0-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • xfce/exo-0.8.0-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • xfce/garcon-0.2.0-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • xfce/gtk-xfce-engine-3.0.0-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • xfce/libxfce4ui-4.10.0-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • xfce/libxfce4util-4.10.0-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • xfce/libxfcegui4-4.10.0-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • xfce/orage-4.8.3-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • xfce/thunar-volman-0.8.0-i486-1.txz: Upgraded.
  • xfce/tumbler-0.1.25-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • xfce/xfce4-appfinder-4.10.0-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • xfce/xfce4-clipman-plugin-1.2.3-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • xfce/xfce4-dev-tools-4.10.0-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • xfce/xfce4-mixer-4.8.0-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • xfce/xfce4-notifyd-0.2.2-i486-1.txz: Upgraded.
  • xfce/xfce4-panel-4.10.0-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • xfce/xfce4-power-manager-1.2.0-i486-1.txz: Upgraded.
  • xfce/xfce4-screenshooter-1.8.1-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • xfce/xfce4-session-4.10.0-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • xfce/xfce4-settings-4.10.0-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • xfce/xfce4-systemload-plugin-1.1.0-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • xfce/xfce4-taskmanager-1.0.0-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • xfce/xfce4-volumed-0.1.13-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • xfce/xfce4-weather-plugin-0.7.4-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • xfce/xfconf-4.10.0-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • xfce/xfdesktop-4.10.0-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • xfce/xfwm4-4.10.0-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • xfce/xfwm4-themes-4.10.0-i486-1.txz: Added.
  • isolinux/initrd.img: Rebuilt.
  • Support XFCE series.
  • usb-and-pxe-installers/usbboot.img: Rebuilt.
  • Support XFCE series.

New in Slackware 13.1 RC2 (May 19, 2010)

  • Upgraded to pidgin-2.7.0 and pidgin-encryption-3.1.
  • The msn_emoticon_msg function in slp.c in the MSN protocol plugin in libpurple in Pidgin before 2.7.0 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (application crash) via a custom emoticon in a malformed SLP message.
  • For more information, see: http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2010-1624

New in Slackware 12.2 (Dec 11, 2008)

  • 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 12.2 has many improvements over our last release (Slackware 12.1) and is a must-have upgrade for any Slackware user. Among the many program updates and distribution enhancements, you'll find two of the most advanced desktop environments available today: Xfce 4.4.3 and KDE 3.5.10. Slackware 12.2 uses the 2.6.27.7 kernel bringing you advanced performance features such as journaling filesystems, SCSI and ATA RAID volume support, SATA support, Software RAID, LVM (the Logical Volume Manager), and encrypted file systems.

New in Slackware 12.2 RC1 (Dec 3, 2008)

  • While there are still some documents that need updating and probably a few more tweaks and updates here and there, everything is mostly in place for the next stable release, Slackware Linux 12.2. The versions of major components like X.Org and the kernel can be considered frozen. Anything major that we haven't done yet will probably wait for the release after this next one. As Slackware 12.2 is only a 0.1 version bump, we're trying to focus on making it better without causing instability or losing compatibility with Slackware 12.1 wherever possible. Invasive changes like the new X.Org (that will require changes to xorg.conf) and merging KDE 4 should probably wait for Slackware 13.0. We will call this batch Slackware 12.2 release candidate one.