Slackware 13.1 release notes. Wed May 19 04:40:19 UTC 2010 Hi folks, 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! If you are upgrading an existing installation, don't miss the section on the LIBATA SWITCHOVER. I'll mention a few technical items here. Slackware's userspace does require a recent 2.6.x kernel (I believe 2.6.27.x is a minimum for udev), and as usual unless your needs are specific you're probably better off running the included kernels that we've tested things against. The best kernel to run (even on a one CPU/core machine) is the generic SMP one, but that needs an initrd, so be sure to read the instructions in /boot after installing with a huge* kernel if you plan to switch. We have chosen to use the 2.6.33.4 kernel after testing the 2.6.33.x kernel branch extensively. I would not suggest trying to run without udev. Consider it the userspace portion of the kernel. It *is* possible, but if you must do that you'll have to tweak a couple things here and there. The specifics are left as an exercise for the advanced user. Wait, an advanced user would just use udev. Really, it works and makes things a lot easier. Slackware 13.1 contains version 4.4.3 of the KDE Software Compilation. In the nearly 8 months since the release of Slackware 13.0, the KDE team made some huge improvements, including better handling of netbook screen resolutions, a new authentication framework based on standards from freedesktop.org, and a new tabbing feature that allows applications to be grouped in a tabbed interface. You'll notice a snappier feel, helped also by the improved performance of Qt version 4.6.2. Several Xfce components have been updated as well. Xfce continues to be a great lightweight desktop that doesn't get in your way. If you haven't looked at this great desktop environment lately, you might want to give it another try. Thanks to Robby for tracking the Xfce development closely and making sure everything was just exactly right in the Slackware Xfce packages. If you prefer GNOME, there are teams online producing GNOME for Slackware. Here are a few places to look: http://gnomeslackbuild.org http://www.droplinegnome.net/ http://www.gware.org/ If any of these replaces some system components, using them voids your warranty. ;-) But it should work, *if* you absolutely must have GNOME. I'd suggest Xfce instead if you want a GTK+ based desktop. If you do want to use GNOME, remember that there may be some updates needed after 13.1 is released, so it might be best not to rush into it. Thanks to these teams for making the GNOME desktop a viable option for Slackware users. 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. Thanks to the rest of the team (and other contributors) for the great help -- Eric Hameleers for major work on the KDE SC packages, init scripts, installer, documentation, and all the extra packages like multilib compilers (read more here: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/), Robby Workman for following X.Org, udev, wicd, xfce, and tons of other projects, building and testing all that stuff, writing documentation, his work with the team at slackbuilds.org, and lots of package upgrades (like the switch to the bluez4 bluetooth stack), Piter Punk for udev and slackpkg work, updating the shadow password system, writing the initial patch for polkit to use a shadow authentication backend so we could consider using KDE 4.4.3, and making tap-to-click work with Synaptics touchpads out-of-the-box, Stuart Winter for more updates to linuxdoc-tools, 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 ARMedslack port: http://www.armedslack.org/), Alan Hicks for testing the installer on Apple hardware, Vincent Batts for keeping Ruby working well and other miscellaneous fixes, Andrew Psaltis for work on the polkit/shadow patches, Heinz Wiesinger for Qt (and other) fixes, Amritpal Bath for various bugfixes and helping with release torrents, mrgoblin for testing RAID, bluetooth, and well, everything (and fixing a lot of it, too), other very honorable mentions go to Erik Jan Tromp, Mark Post, Karl Magnus Kolstoe, Fizban, Fred Emmott, and NetrixTardis, and anyone else I'm forgetting (including the other team members who contributed little fixes and suggestions here and there along with general moral support), and all the folks who emailed in bug reports (and especially fixes). Thanks for the technical assistance (*you* make this possible), and for keeping the project a good time. And, of course, thanks *much* to the upstream developers for such nice building materials. As always, thanks to my wife Andrea and daughter Briah (who is becoming a surprisingly good beta tester already!) Have fun! Pat Volkerding