Slackware 15.0 release notes. Wed Feb 2 18:39:59 CST 2022 Good hello folks, nice to see you here again. :-) Historically, the RELEASE_NOTES had been mostly technical information, but once again Robby Workman has covered the important technical details in CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT. Thanks! We've actually built over 400 different Linux kernel versions over the years it took to finally declare Slackware 15.0 stable (by contrast, we tested 34 kernel versions while working on Slackware 14.2). We finally ended up on kernel version 5.15.19 after Greg Kroah-Hartman confirmed that it would get long-term support until at least October 2023 (and quite probably for longer than that). As usual, the kernel is provided in two flavors, generic and huge. The huge kernel contains enough built-in drivers that in most cases an initrd is not needed to boot the system. The generic kernels require the use of an initrd to load the kernel modules needed to mount the root filesystem. Using a generic kernel will save some memory and possibly avoid a few boot time warnings. I'd strongly recommend using a generic kernel for the best kernel module compatibility as well. It's easier to do that than in previous releases - the installer now makes an initrd for you, and the new geninitrd utility will rebuild the initrd automatically for the latest kernel packages you've installed on the system. On the 32-bit side, there are both SMP (multiple processor capable) and non-SMP (single processor) kernels. The non-SMP kernel is mostly intended for machines that can't run the SMP kernel, which is anything older than a Pentium III, and some models of the Pentium M that don't support PAE (although it seems that these might support PAE but just lack the CPU flags to advertise it -- try booting with the "forcepae" kernel option). On 32-bit, it is highly recommended to use the SMP kernel if your machine is able to boot with it (even if you have only a single core) because the optimization and memory handling options should yield better performance. If you'd like to try out the latest kernel branch, you'll find .config files for Linux 5.16 in the /testing/source/ directory. Slackware 15.0 has support for systems running UEFI firmware (x86_64 Slackware edition only). Packages that help support UEFI include elilo, GRUB 2, and efibootmgr, and all of the installation media supports booting under UEFI, as do the USB boot sticks generated during installation. At this point there is no support for running the system under Secure Boot, but a dedicated user could add their own Machine Owner Key, sign their kernels, modules, and bootloader, and then use shim to start the bootloader. We'll be looking into supporting this officially in the next release. Documentation for installing on UEFI machines is provided in a README_UEFI.TXT found in the top-level Slackware directory. The Slackware ISO images have been processed using an isohybrid format which allows them to be burned to DVD, *or* to be written to a USB stick, which can then be booted and used as the install source. This works on machines running both regular BIOS as well as UEFI. Need more build scripts? Something that you wanted wasn't included in Slackware? Well, then check out slackbuilds.org. Several of the team members work on the scripts there along with many other dedicated volunteers. There's a community driven site for Slackware documentation, http://docs.slackware.com -- check it out, and join in to share your knowledge! Thanks to the rest of the Slackware team (and other contributors) for the great help -- Eric Hameleers for his massive efforts on getting KDE Plasma 5 ready and continuing to maintain it even as the development cycle ran much longer than expected. Eric, I know I came close to wearing out your patience, so thanks for sticking it out and for all your other help with extra packages, multilib support, docs.slackware.com, and everything else you do for Slackware. Everyone be sure to follow Eric's blog at: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/ Thanks to Robby Workman for help on tons of stuff... especially Xfce but also tons of miscellaneous updates, the CHANGES_AND_HINTS file and other documentation, managing various project infrastructure including helping to obtain servers, getting them all set up, finding hosting, etc. Thanks to our friends at OnyxLight Communications who helped us out with hosting (and hardware, too!) for our development server. Onyxlight closed down during the pandemic, unfortunately. I hope they're all doing well. Thanks to PiterPunk for his work on maintaining slackpkg and various bugfixes. Thanks to Darren "Tadgy" Austin for rewriting the netconfig utility adding support for IPv6, VLANs, link aggregation and more. Thanks to Stuart Winter for more updates to linuxdoc-tools, slacktrack, and for all kinds of fixes throughout the installer and system (he finds my bugs all the time while porting packages to ARM for the Slackware ARM port: https://arm.slackware.com), Vincent Batts for making Slackware PAM support a reality, Heinz Wiesinger for working on KDE / Plasma and Qt, LLVM, MariaDB, OpenCL, and really just all kinds of stuff, Erik Jan Tromp for help with the pkgtools rewrite and support for parallel compression/decompression testing and benchmarking. Willy Sudiarto Raharjo for work on slackbuilds.org, MATE, sbopkg, and more. Matteo "ponce" Bernardini for countless bugfixes and all the work getting slackbuilds.org ready for this new release. Honorable mentions also go to long-time contributors and friends of the project including Karl Magnus Kolstø, NetrixTardis, Alan Hicks, mrgoblin, and Mark Post. Special thanks to everyone else who reported bugs (and/or provided fixes) or helped collaborate on this release in any way. The Slackware community stepped up in all kinds of ways this time around, especially all my friends on the LinuxQuestions.org Slackware forum. Special thanks and sorry to everyone I forgot. Thanks also to my family for putting up with all of this. ;-) IN MEMORIAM ----------- Sadly, we lost a couple of good friends during this development cycle and this release is dedicated to them. Erik "alphageek" Jan Tromp passed away in 2020 after a long illness. He was a long-time member of the Slackware core team doing a ton of stuff behind the scenes and a master of lesser-known programming languages like Tcl. :-) For a long time he lived closer to me geographically than anyone else on the core team, but unfortunately with an international border between us we never did meet in person. But he was there in chat every day and was a good friend to everyone on the team. He is greatly missed. Sorry I didn't get 15.0 out in time for you to see it... My old friend Brett Person also passed away in 2020. Without Brett, it's possible that there wouldn't be any Slackware as we know it - he's the one who encouraged me to upload it to FTP back in 1993 and served as Slackware's original beta-tester. He was long considered a co-founder of this project. I knew Brett since the days of the Beggar's Banquet BBS in Fargo back in the 80's. When the Slackware Project moved to Walnut Creek CDROM, Brett was hired as well, and we spent many hours on the road and sitting next to each other representing Slackware at various trade shows. Brett seemed to know all kinds of computer luminaries and was an amazing storyteller, always with his smooth radio voice. Gonna miss you too, pal. To everyone out there still reading this, thanks. :-) Hope to see you again the next time we do this. Cheers, Pat Volkerding