More than five years since the last release, the release of the Slackware 15.0 distribution has been published. The project has been developing since 1993 and is the oldest of the existing distributions. An installation image (3.5 GB) is available for download, which is prepared for the i586 and x86_64 architectures. To get acquainted with the distribution kit without installation, a Live assembly (4.3 GB) is available. A selection 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 was able to maintain its originality and simplicity in organizing work. The lack of complexity and the simple initialization system in the style of classic BSD systems make the distribution an interesting solution for learning how Unix-like systems work, experimenting and getting to know Linux. The main reason for the long life of the distribution is the inexhaustible enthusiasm of Patrick Volkerding, who has been the leader and main developer of the project for almost 30 years.
When developing the new release, the main focus was on providing new technologies and up-to-date versions of programs without violating the identity and characteristics of the distribution. The main goal was to make the distribution more modern, but at the same time maintain the usual way of working in Slackware. Key changes:
- Switching to using the PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module) subsystem for authentication and enabling PAM in the shadow-utils package used to store passwords in the /etc/shadow file.
- To manage user sessions, instead of ConsoleKit2, elogind is used, a variant of logind that is not tied to systemd, which greatly simplifies the supply of graphical environments tied to certain init systems and improved support for XDG standards.
- Added support for the PipeWire media server and made it possible to use it instead of PulseAudio.
- Implemented support for a graphical session based on the Wayland protocol, which can be used in KDE in addition to the session based on the X server.
- Added new versions of Xfce 4.16 and KDE Plasma 5.23.5 user environments. Packages with LXDE and Lumina are available through SlackBuild.
- The Linux kernel has been updated to the 5.15 branch. Support for initrd file generation has been added to the installer, and the geninitrd utility has been added to the distribution kit to automatically build initrd for the installed Linux kernel. Modular kernel "generic" is recommended for use by default, but support for the monolithic kernel "huge" is retained, into which a set of drivers necessary for booting without initrd is compiled.
- For 32-bit systems, two kernel builds are proposed - with SMP and for single-processor systems without SMP support (it can be used on very old computers with processors older than Pentium III and some Pentium M models that do not support PAE).
- The distribution of Qt4 has been discontinued, the distribution kit has completely switched to Qt5.
- Migrated to Python 3. Added packages for Rust development.
- By default, Postfix is ββenabled to run the mail server, and Sendmail packages have been moved to the /extra section. Instead of imapd and ipop3d, Dovecot is involved.
- The pkgtools package management tool adds support for locking to prevent concurrent operations from running simultaneously, and reduces disk writes for better performance on SSDs.
- The script "make_world.sh" is included in the composition, which allows you to automatically rebuild the entire system from source texts. Also added a new set of scripts for rebuilding the installer and kernel packages.
- Updated package versions 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. 3.24, gtk 2.11.1, freetype 4.15.5, samba 3.6.4, postfix 5.34.0, perl 2.4.52, apache httpd 8.8, openssh 7.4.27, php 3.9.10, python 3.0.3, ruby ββ2.35.1, git XNUMX. and so on.
Source: opennet.ru