Slackware 14 Released
After five beta cycles, Slackware 14.0 arrives with many improvements and enhancements. The latest version offers two desktop environments: Xfce 4.10.0 and KDE 4.8.5.
According to the website, these desktops utilize udev, udisks, and udisks2, as well as many specifications from freedesktop.org. These allow admins to grant use of hardware devices according to users’ group membership, thus enabling use of USB flash sticks, portable hard drives, CD and DVD media, etc., without requiring sudo, the mount, or umount command.
Slackware uses the 3.2.29 kernel, with performance features such as journaling filesystems, SCSI, and ATA RAID volume support, SATA support, software RAID, LVM, and encrypted filesystems. Kernel support for X DRI (the Direct Rendering Interface) brings high-speed hardware accelerated 3D graphics to Linux.
Slackware has two Linux kernel options: huge and generic. The huge kernel contains built-in support for just about every driver in the Linux kernel. In the generic kernel, nearly every driver is built as a module. Slackware’s Linux kernels come in both SMP and non-SMP types. The SMP kernel supports multiple processors, multi-core CPUs, HyperThreading, and other optimizations. The developers recommend using the SMP kernel – even on single processor machines if it will run on them. Note that on 64-bit machines, all kernels are SMP capable. You can read the long list of changes and additions at: http://www.slackware.com/announce/14.0.php. Slackware Linux 14.0 is available for download from the central Slackware FTP site.
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Is This the Year of Linux?
Another major organization has decided to kick Windows and Office to the curb, in favor of Linux.
-
Linux Mint 20 Reaches EOL
With Linux Mint 20 at its end of life, the time has arrived to upgrade to Linux Mint 22.
-
TuxCare Announces Support for AlmaLinux 9.2
Thanks to TuxCare, AlmaLinux 9.2 (and soon version 9.6) now enjoys years of ongoing patching and compliance.
-
Go-Based Botnet Attacking IoT Devices
Using an SSH credential brute-force attack, the Go-based PumaBot is exploiting IoT devices everywhere.
-
Plasma 6.5 Promises Better Memory Optimization
With the stable Plasma 6.4 on the horizon, KDE has a few new tricks up its sleeve for Plasma 6.5.
-
KaOS 2025.05 Officially Qt5 Free
If you're a fan of independent Linux distributions, the team behind KaOS is proud to announce the latest iteration that includes kernel 6.14 and KDE's Plasma 6.3.5.
-
Linux Kernel 6.15 Now Available
The latest Linux kernel is now available with several new features/improvements and the usual bug fixes.
-
Microsoft Makes Surprising WSL Announcement
In a move that might surprise some users, Microsoft has made Windows Subsystem for Linux open source.
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.