Packages: 2530, Size: 10.02 GB

News for 2018

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!