After more than five years since the last release, the distribution Slackware 15.0 has been published. The project has been evolving since 1993 and is the oldest currently existing distribution. An installation image (3.5 GB) is available for download, prepared for i586 and x86_64 architectures. A Live version (4.3 GB) is available for exploring the distribution without installation. A collection of additional packages with programs not included in the standard distribution can be found in the slackbuilds.org repository.
Despite its considerable age, the distribution has managed to retain its uniqueness and simplicity in organizing work. The absence of complexities and the straightforward initialization system reminiscent of classic BSD systems make this distribution an interesting solution for learning about Unix-like systems, conducting experiments, and getting acquainted with Linux. The main reason for the distribution's longevity is the unwavering enthusiasm of Patrick Volkerding, who has been the leader and primary developer of the project for nearly 30 years.
In developing the new release, the main focus was on providing new technologies and up-to-date versions of programs without compromising the uniqueness and characteristics of the distribution. The primary goal was to make the distribution more modern while preserving the familiar working environment in Slackware. Key changes include:
- Switching to the use of the PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module) subsystem for authentication and involving PAM in the shadow-utils package used to store passwords in the file /etc/shadow.
- To manage user sessions, elogind, a version of logind not tied to systemd, has been used instead of ConsoleKit2, which has significantly simplified the delivery of graphical environments tied to specific initialization systems and improved support for XDG standards.
- Added multimedia support server via PipeWire, allowing its use instead of PulseAudio.
- Support for a graphical session based on the Wayland protocol has been implemented, which can be used in KDE in addition to the X-server based session.
- New versions of the user environments Xfce 4.16 and KDE Plasma 5.23.5 have been added. Packages for LXDE and Lumina are available through SlackBuild.
- The Linux kernel has been updated to branch 5.15. The installer now includes support for generating the initrd file, and the distribution has added the geninitrd utility for automatic initrd assembly for the installed Linux kernel. The 'generic' kernel modular build is recommended for default use, but support for the 'huge' monolithic kernel, which includes the necessary drivers for booting without initrd, has been preserved.
- For 32-bit systems, two kernel builds are offered — with SMP support and for single-processor systems without SMP support (which can be used on very old computers with processors older than Pentium III and certain models of Pentium M that do not support PAE).
- Qt4 support has been discontinued, and the distribution has fully transitioned to Qt5.
- Migration to Python 3 has been completed. Packages for Rust language development have been included.
- By default, Postfix is used to ensure the operation of the mail server, and packages with Sendmail have been moved to the /extra section. Dovecot is now used instead of imapd and ipop3d.
- The pkgtools package management toolkit has implemented support for locks to prevent simultaneous execution of competing operations, and the intensity of write operations to disk has been reduced for better SSD performance.
- Included is the script 'make_world.sh', which allows for the automatic rebuilding of the entire system from source files. A new set of scripts for rebuilding the installer and kernel packages has also been added.
- Package versions have been updated, including mesa 21.3.3, KDE Gear 21.12.1, sqlite 3.37.2, mercurial 6.0.1, pipewire 0.3.43, pulseaudio 15.0, mdadm 4.2, wpa_supplicant 2.9, xorg-server 1.20.14, gimp 2.10.30, gtk 3.24, freetype 2.11.1, samba 4.15.5, postfix 3.6.4, perl 5.34.0, apache httpd 2.4.52, openssh 8.8, php 7.4.27, python 3.9.10, ruby 3.0.3, git 2.35.1, and others.
Source: opennet.ru
