Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Review: Slackware Linux 15.0

Filed under
Reviews
Slack

Slackware Linux is the world's oldest surviving Linux distribution. The distribution is a slow moving project, often with several years between releases. The gap between Slackware 14.2 and the latest 15.0 release was about five and a half years, for example.

Slackware has a well deserved reputation for stability and for having a simple technical design. A design which frequently ignores modern approaches to system management. Slackware still uses a text-based system installer, has 90s-era approaches to package management, and prefers editing text files over graphical tools when it comes time to adjust most configuration settings. The distribution's official media does not offer a live desktop environment, though there is a community branch which provides live media for people who wish to test the distribution on their hardware. The project's official release announcement acknowledges this slow-to-change style, noting Slackware is just now adopting PAM authentication (something most other Linux distributions have used since the 1990s) and continues to use the classic SysV init software instead of systemd: "We adopted PAM (finally) as projects we needed dropped support for pure shadow passwords. We switched from ConsoleKit2 to elogind, making it much easier to support software that targets that Other Init System and bringing us up-to-date with the XDG standards. We added support for PipeWire as an alternate to PulseAudio, and for Wayland sessions in addition to X11."

In other words, while Slackware runs a lot of modern software such as KDE Plasma 5.15, version 5.15 of the Linux kernel, and PipeWire the underlying style and approach are still very much the same as they were 25 years ago.

Slackware 15.0 is available for 32-bit and 64-bit builds of the x86 architecture. There is also an ARM branch of the project, though install media for it was not available on release day. The 64-bit (x86_64) build is a 3.6GB download.

The Slackware media boots to a text screen where we can select kernel options. This is followed by a second text screen where we are given the chance to select a keyboard map. The install media then drops us at a console login prompt where we can sign in as root without a password. Above the login prompt is a helpful message letting us know we will need to format the disk and set up at least one partition, then run the setup command in order to get started.

Read more

Slackware Linux 15 with FDE on UEFI laptop

  • Slackware Linux 15 with FDE on UEFI laptop

    Slackware Linux was my first Linux distribution. I can’t recall if it was 1.x or 2.x. Anyway, I’ve always loved that distrib. Since Slackware 15.0 has recently been released and I’ve not been using Linux as a desktop since decades, let’s experiment with it.

    I’ll install it on my ThinkPad T460s using Full Disk Encryption.

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.