Slack v. 10

[Chris]

This is so bloody frustrating - udev was a major change to, well, the structure of Linux itself, and the general attitude behind it seemed to be, 'damn the torpedoes, we're doing this anyway because it'll be good for you'. Quite frankly, I've been unhappy with the way the kernel's been going for some time now and am seriously considering moving back over to fBSD as a result.

Agreed. The 2.5 was a TOTAL bust and I haven't seen much from 2.6 that would lead me to believe it won't eventually be considered the same. I have been playing with OpenBSD at work quite a bit. Not sure how happy I am with it from a Desktop OS perspective though.

I was surprised to see 10 released as soon as it was. No major kernel upgrade (as default) and was only rc1 for about a week with no rc2. Almost seems like Patrick decided to release something just because it had been a long time since the last release.

[converge]

You should be able to use the binary nVida drivers.

actually, the driver source can be achieved by suppl ying --extract-only at the command prompt, if for some reason you really want the source. default support is not included with the kernel because of the license that nVidia maintains.

[skroo]

Agreed. The 2.5 was a TOTAL bust and I haven't seen much from 2.6 that would lead me to believe it won't eventually be considered the same. I have been playing with OpenBSD at work quite a bit. Not sure how happy I am with it from a Desktop OS perspective though.

I have to admit that I pretty much avoided 2.5 after some unpleasant experiences involving filesystem support around about 2.5.9, IIRC.

The things that made me happier about 2.6:

- prism54 support from 2.6.5 on. The patched 2.4 / 2.6 versions never really worked well for me.

- Better Intel 8xx chipset support. Important, since 2 of the 3 P4-era machines I have are 845/830 (IIRC) based.

- Improvements in display adapter support, specifically for mobile Radeons (read: my laptop).

- ALSA in the kernel, but that's a moot point since udev still doesn't create things like /dev/dsp, /dev/audio, or /dev/mixer despite the module successfully being loaded.

And that's about it, really. My servers are still 2.4.26, and I have no plans to move them beyond that for the foreseeable future.

I was surprised to see 10 released as soon as it was. No major kernel upgrade (as default) and was only rc1 for about a week with no rc2. Almost seems like Patrick decided to release something just because it had been a long time since the last release.

Yep. The one nice thing about 10 was that it summarised a year's worth of essential software updates into two CDs - previously, I'd been doing periodic wgets of slackware-current on the mirrors just to have all-in-one CD updates for recovery, update, and reinstall purposes. Quite frankly, I had been hoping for a 2.6-clean install option, kind of like happened with 8.0 where you had the option to do either a 2.2- or 2.4-based install. It says a lot that the Slack team still considers 2.6.7 only fit to be in testing and not production.

[TheCotMan]

My servers are still 2.4.26, and I have no plans to move them beyond that for the foreseeable future.

From my own experience, I generally do not upgrade to the next major release of a Linux kernel on my servers until the sub-version move into the double-digits. This helps to avoid the frenzied pace of new kernel versions in the early stages, and the reboots which are associated with them. No matter how many times I build a new kernel on a remote server, there is a cost in personal stress for each reboot.

However, for laptops, I often consider upgrading sooner, to gain experience with new major releases for later server upgrades, and to use the features of the newer kernels.

[skroo]

the setup adds your other partition to lilo and even sets up a line in fstab so for example it will mount ntfs as /fat-c read only of course.

I'll check when I get home, but I believe this was introduced in either 9 or 9.1.

Red Hat linux was for awhile considered the most Windows user friendly distribution because partly it set up Windows in Grub, so people could boot back and forth to ask their questions.

Agreed. However, a large part of the reason why RedHat was also considered the most user-friendly distro was because it hid the actual workings of Linux behind KDE and a mess of scripts. It behaved enough like Windows on the surface that it wasn't scary, but didn't require actually knowing much about how the OS worked in order to be able to use it. Similar obfuscation could also be found in RPM.

I think Patrick has a good idea doing this but at the same time, its going to bring completely stupid people who want answers handed to them on a silver platter. So brace for the newbies migrating to Slackware folks, its going to be one hell of a controversy.

As long as Slackware doesn't try to bias itself too heavily towards the 'I'm running Linux on the Desktop, aren't I clever' crowd, it'll probably remain relatively unmolested. It does still retain the aura of being the 'expert' distro, so this should help to still keep the weenie population away.

[Chris]

I am pretty positive it wasn't introduced in either 9 or 9.1, this is a new thing.

Other new things in this Slackware Release is x.org, which for now isn't really that much of a difference since you can use your old XF86Config file and just rename it.

It was definitely in 9.1, can't remember for sure about 9.0.