After more than five years of the last release the release of the new version of the Slackware 15.0 distribution was announced, in which a large number of updates to various system components have been introduced, in addition to a series of changes and, above all, bug fixes.
For those new to Slackware, you should know that this It is a Linux distribution and whose project has been developed since 1993 and it is the oldest of the existing divisions.
Despite its considerable age, the distribution knew how to maintain its originality and simplicity in the organization of work. The lack of complexity and the simple initialization system in the style of classic BSD systems make the distribution an interesting solution to learn how Unix-like systems work, experiment and get to know Linux.
The main reason for the long life of the distribution is the inexhaustible enthusiasm of Patrick Volkerding, who has been the leader and main developer of the project for almost 30 years.
Top new features in Slackware 15.0
In this new version of Slackware 15.0 that is presented, the emain focus was to provide new technologies and updated versions of programs without violating the identity and characteristics of the distribution. The main goal was to make the distribution more modern, but at the same time keep the usual way of working in Slackware.
Initially we can find that the Linux kernel has been updated to the 5.15 branch, along with which se added support for generating initrd files to the installer and the geninitrd utility was added to automatically compile initrd for the installed Linux kernel. Using the modular "generic" kernel is recommended by default, but support is retained for the monolithic "huge" kernel, which compiles a set of drivers needed to boot without an initrd.
One of thes changes that stands out is to use the PAM subsystem (Pluggable Authentication Module) for authentication and enabling PAM in the shadow-utils package which is used to store passwords in the /etc/shadow file.
To manage user sessions, instead of ConsoleKit2 elogind is used a variant of logind that is not tied to systemd, which greatly simplifies the provision of graphical environments tied to certain init systems and improves support for XDG standards.
On the other hand, also it is noted that support for the PipeWire media server was added and it became possible to use it instead of PulseAudio.
Another change that stands out in Slackware 15.0 is the implemented support for a graphical session based on the Wayland protocol, which can be used in KDE in addition to an X-based session, plus the new versions of the Xfce 4.16 and KDE Plasma 5.23.5 user environments have been added and packages with LXDE are available and Lumina via SlackBuild.
For 32-bit systems, two kernel builds are proposed: with SMP and for single-processor systems without SMP support (can be used on very old computers with processors older than Pentium III and some Pentium M models that do not support PAE).
In addition to this, in this new version of the distribution, Qt4 has been discontinued, which has now changed completely to Qt5 and has also been migrated to Python 3 and packages for Rust development have been added.
By default Postfix is enabled to run the mail server and Sendmail packages have been moved to the /extra section. Instead of imapd and ipop3d, it's Dovecot.
It is also noted that the package management tool pkgtools adds support for locks to prevent concurrent operations run simultaneously and reduces disk write activity for better performance on SSDs.
The "make_world.sh" script is included, which allows you to automatically rebuild the entire system from source. Also added a new set of scripts to rebuild the installer and kernel packages.
Finally regarding the packages that were updated of the most important we can highlight: table 21.3.3, KDE Gear 21.12.1, pipewire 0.3.43, pulseaudio 15.0, wpa_supplicant 2.9, xorg-server 1.20.14, gimp 2.10.30, gtk 3.24, samba 4.15.5, among others.
If you want to know more about it, you can consult the details In the following link.
Get Slackware 15.0
For those who are interested in being able to obtain this new version The distribution should know that a 3.5 GB installation image is already available, which is prepared for the i586 and x86_64 architectures. In addition to this, it also offers a 4.3GB LiveCD.
You can get the images from the following link.