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News from July, 2016

Slackware 14.2 Released!

Published on 2016-07-02 at 10:55:14 by  Georgi Sotirov

After the long wait finally Slackware 14.2 was released to public (see official announcemnt and release notes). As the first new stable release in almost 3 years it comes with many improvements, which bring the latest technology on top of the stability and security that we've all come to expect from the oldest GNU/Linux distribution still in active maintenance.

The new release comes with updates to Xfce and KDE desktop environments both using eudev, udisks and udisks2. This allows the system administrator to grant use of various hardware devices based on group membership that makes using various USB plug and play devices easily without requiring sudo, mount and unmount.

Slackware 14.2 comes with kernel 4.4.14 that brings advanced performance features such as journaling file systems (e.g. ext4, jfs, btrfs, xfs), SCSI and ATA RAID volume support, SATA support, Software RAID, LVM, and encrypted file systems. The support for X DRI brings high-speed hardware accelerated 3D graphics.

Here below are the highlights of Slackware 14.2's dvanced features:

  • Base system:
    • Linux Kernel 4.4.14 LTS;
    • GNU C Library 2.23;
    • udev replaced by eudev (no systemd for now);
  • Servers:
    • Sendmail 8.15.2 and impad 2.20;
    • Apache 2.4.20 (with PHP 5.6.23);
    • ProFTPD 1.3.5b and vsftpd 3.0.3;
    • Samba 4.4.4;
    • MariaDB 10.0.26;
    • Bind 9.10.4, dhcp 4.3.4, net-snmp 5.7.3, ntp 4.2.8p8 and more;
  • Development:
    • GNU's Compiler Collection 5.3.0 as default compilers, LLVM and Clang also available;
    • Perl 5.22.2, Python 2.7.11 and Ruby 2.2.5;
    • Subversion 1.9.4, Git 2.9.0 and Mercurial 3.8.2
    • Qt designer, KDevelop 4.7.2 and more;
  • GUI:
    • X.Org's X11R7.7 modular X Window System;
    • The KDE Software Compilation 4.14.21 (KDE 4.14.3 with kdelibs 4.14.21);
    • Xfce 4.12.1;
    • Konqueror 4.14.13, SeaMonkey 2.40, Firefox ESR 45.2.0, Thunderbird 45.1.1 and Chrome as extra for x86_64;
    • GTK+ applications such as Pidgin 2.10.12, Gimp 2.8.16, Gkrellm 2.3.7 and more;

There are about 100 new packages and many were improved and upgraded. Upgrading from 14.1 should be relatively easy and step-by-step instructions are provided in file UPGRADE.TXT, but check CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT as well.

You could download Slackware 14.2 as torrent or from the official mirrors. Live images of Slackware 14.2 and -current are available from Eric Hameleers (AlienBOB)'s site.

I was waiting for this release, so I could build some new packages requiring newer libs and tools, so enjoy the stable release and stay tunned for more!

Sources: Slackware.com and Slashdot.org.