Slackware 11.0 release notes.
Today is Prickle-Prickle, the 55th day of Bureaucracy in the YOLD 3172
Sun Oct 1 23:28:27 CDT 2006, The Moon is Waxing Gibbous (68% of Full).
Hi folks,
Here we go with another release of Slackware! As usual, there are
a few things that merit special mention so that they won't be traps for
the unprepared. Also, be sure to see the CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT file
for more information.
This version of Slackware contains a glibc built with NPTL (Native
POSIX Thread Library) and TLS (Thread Local Storage) support. There's
a lot more information about that in the README.NPTL file. If you're
using a 2.6 kernel that supports NPTL, you'll get better performance
out of any software that uses threads. In general there will be no
need to recompile anything to get this boost; anything that links to
the pthread library will use the NPTL version of glibc in /lib/tls if
the kernel can support it. The new glibc requires a TLS capable
version of ldconfig, and a side-effect of that is that if you try to
upgrade the glibc packages on a mounted filesystem using installpkg's
ROOT= flag, it's not going to work properly unless the machine you are
running from has a TLS capable ldconfig. So, if you want to do that,
either upgrade your own glibc packages first, or chroot to the mounted
partition and then upgrade the packages there. Most people won't have
to worry about this -- it only affects upgrades done with the
ROOT=/someplace flag, not installs from the CD or upgrades done
according to the UPGRADE.TXT instructions.
As you can see, Slackware 11.0 is still using a 2.4 kernel
(2.4.33.3) for the default system kernel. The 2.4.33.3 kernel has been
rock-solid here, and it seemed best to put out one more release of
Slackware with support for 2.4 before heading full-force into 2.6
territory because a lot of people will want to run the 2.4 kernel on
production machines for a long time to come, and some of the changes to
the system that will be needed to fully embrace all of 2.6's features
aren't necessarily 2.4 kernel-friendly. The next version of Slackware
may drop support for 2.4.x unless LinuxThreads support can be
maintained in glibc.
The 2.6 kernel series shows a great deal of improvment since the
last release (I'm running it on my gateway machine), but it's still
undergoing heavy development and the stability of any given release can
be hit-or-miss. Things are improving rapidly in that regard though,
and Greg Kroah-Hartman, Adrian Bunk, Chris Wright, and some other folks
have been helping by producing stable branches (2.6.x.y) after each new
major release of a 2.6.x kernel. Anyway, since there is hardware out
there that requires a 2.6 kernel in order to install, this release of
Slackware has both 2.6.17.13 and a 2.6.18 kernels integrated into the
installer. To install using one of these, after booting the first
disc, enter huge26.s at the boot prompt for the supported 2.6.17.13
kernel (which also supports installing via NFS), or test26.s to use the
2.6.18 kernel from /testing. These kernels have compiled-in support
for essentially all of the hard drive controllers and filesystems that
are supported by the 2.6.x kernel series, and should be helpful for
people with new SATA controllers or other hardware that 2.4.33.3
doesn't support. This kernel doesn't have any built in network support
and is primarily intended for installing from local media (although
huge26.s will support an NFS installation if you run the 'network'
script to load your network module, and you're installing from CD or
DVD). After the packages have installed and you've reached the menu
where you are prompted to select a kernel to install, BE CERTAIN to
install huge26.s or test26.s (whichever one you used to install) or
there's a chance that your machine will be unable to boot with the
stock sata.i kernel that you'll end up with.
Also, the kernel module packages for 2.6.x are not part of the
standard installation, so if you install using huge26.s or test26.s
kernel you'll have to install the corresponding kernel-modules package
when you're done. They can be found under /extra/linux-2.6.17.13/ (or
ISO number two under /extra/linux-2.6.17.13), or
/testing/packages/linux-2.6.18/ (or ISO number four under
/testing-2.6.18/packages/linux-2.6.18). You might also consider
installing the other packages there and building an initrd according to
the instructions in README.initrd if you'd like to be running a slimmer
kernel without a lot of unneeded drivers taking up RAM, or better yet,
visit ftp.kernel.org in /pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/ and grab the latest
version of the 2.6 kernel to build your own. It'll probably have some
important fixes. Note that the 2.6 kernels do not have an
"alsa-driver" package, but if you remove that package then you'll have
to upgrade to the kernel-headers package for your 2.6 kernel in order
to have the /usr/include/sound/ ALSA headers. These have not been
extensively tested, and you may be better off sticking with the
kernel-headers for 2.4.33.3 (which are what glibc was compiled against)
and the alsa-driver package compiled for 2.4.33.3.
The GNOME desktop is not shipped as a part of Slackware, and
continued maintenance of GNOME for Slackware has been adopted by a
couple of outside projects:
http://gsb.sf.net
http://gware.sf.net
If you're looking for a GNOME distribution for Slackware, I can
recommend either of these as being extremely well built and more
comprehensive than any GNOME series that was previously included. If
you're a GNOME fan, check them out. I think you'll be pleased.
The network setup script /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 has been extensively
rewritten and supports many new options in rc.inet1.conf. Thanks to
Eric Hameleers for doing some great work with this, rc.wireless, and
other parts of the networking setup. See the comments in rc.inet1.conf
for information about the new options. One that didn't get listed yet
that I'll mention here is support for IP aliasing. This sort of thing
should work now for setting static IP aliases: IFNAME[2]="eth0:1"
Have fun! :-)
Pat Volkerding <volkerdi@slackware.com>