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
-
EU Sovereign Tech Fund Gains Traction
OpenForum Europe recently released a report regarding a sovereign tech fund with backing from several significant entities.
-
FreeBSD Promises a Full Desktop Installer
FreeBSD has lacked an option to include a full desktop environment during installation.
-
Linux Hits an Important Milestone
If you pay attention to the news in the Linux-sphere, you've probably heard that the open source operating system recently crashed through a ceiling no one thought possible.
-
Plasma Bigscreen Returns
A developer discovered that the Plasma Bigscreen feature had been sitting untouched, so he decided to do something about it.
-
CachyOS Now Lets Users Choose Their Shell
Imagine getting the opportunity to select which shell you want during the installation of your favorite Linux distribution. That's now a thing.
-
Wayland 1.24 Released with Fixes and New Features
Wayland continues to move forward, while X11 slowly vanishes into the shadows, and the latest release includes plenty of improvements.
-
Bugs Found in sudo
Two critical flaws allow users to gain access to root privileges.
-
Fedora Continues 32-Bit Support
In a move that should come as a relief to some portions of the Linux community, Fedora will continue supporting 32-bit architecture.
-
Linux Kernel 6.17 Drops bcachefs
After a clash over some late fixes and disagreements between bcachefs's lead developer and Linus Torvalds, bachefs is out.
-
ONLYOFFICE v9 Embraces AI
Like nearly all office suites on the market (except LibreOffice), ONLYOFFICE has decided to go the AI route.