Hi folks,

Historically, the RELEASE_NOTES (at least in recent releases) had been mostly technical information, but once again Robby Workman has covered the important technical details in CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT. Thanks! Probably the first thing to mention about the release of Slackware 13.0 is that it marks our first release with an official 64-bit port! Thanks to the hard work of Eric Hameleers, Slackware for x86 is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit (x86_64) editions. Eric did incredible work on the 64-bit port. The SlackBuild scripts were so much of an improvement over the originals from the 32-bit tree that they were imported over on the 32-bit side -- the only difference in the build trees is whether $ARCH is set to i486 or x86_64. These scripts are finding use in other ports too, like Stuart Winter's ARMedslack port to the ARM architecture (the ARM Versatile platform emulated by QEMU, and the Marvell SheevaPlug), and Mark Post's Slack/390 Linux Project for IBM S/390 G2 class systems and above. The goal of a unified source tree for these projects seems to be coming into focus. For more information about these Slackware ports, see http://armedslack.org and http://slack390.org. Getting back to the x86_64 port (nicknamed Slackware64), we also have to thank Fred Emmott who helped us solve a number of tricky problems having been there before -- without his help things like getting ncurses right so that the nVidia installer worked, and laying the groundwork for future multilib support would have been much more difficult. Thanks Fred!

About the only things to mention here are that Slackware requires a recent 2.6.x kernel (I believe 2.6.22.x is a minimum), but 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've used the well-tested and recently patched 2.6.29.6 kernel, but the 2.6.30.5 kernel is also available as packages in /testing. If you decide to give that a try, be sure to read the information about LILO in there.

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.

Another huge change in Slackware 13.0 is the move from KDE3 to KDE4. KDE4 has been out for about a year and a half now, and it has come a long way since KDE 4.0. The KDE 4.2.4 release included in Slackware 13.0 is a very fast and polished desktop. It looks great and achieves its goal of making the Linux operating system as nice a desktop OS as anything that is available at any price! With KDE3 pretty much winding down (probably there will not be further releases) and projects dropping KDE3 support in favor of KDE4, the time was right to make the move to KDE4 in Slackware. I'm using it on all of my own machines (including an Intel Atom with compositing enabled), and I've really fallen in love with it once I got used to it. The tools are integrated better with the desktop, Qt4 seems to be a faster and more stable platform, and nearly everything that was available for KDE3 has been ported to KDE4 and works great. Huge thanks to the KDE team for producing the great desktop environment they promised to deliver! As with any major rewrite, there are, however, still a few quirks, but these are few and the improvements have been coming fast. One of the issues we're aware of is that k3b hasn't been working as well as the KDE3 version for some people (it works fine here, but we have heard some reports), and there are some other KDE applications where people still prefer the old versions. To help with this, there are KDE3 compatibility packages that can be found in /extra/kde3-compat/. With these installed, most KDE3 programs will run. A KDE3 version of k3b is also included in that directory.

Xfce has been updated as well, and continues to be a great lightweight desktop that doesn't get in your way. You'll notice improvements in Xfce immediately upon starting it. 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 13.0 releases, 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 x86_64, help with networking improvements, documentation, LVM, the installer, and encrypted partition support, Piter Punk for udev and slackpkg work, Stuart Winter for help with linuxdoc-tools, Heinz Wiesinger for helping to clean up the Qt build script, and other stuff, Erik Jan Tromp for updating the populate_tftpboot.sh script in the PXE install to work with the new package formats, and instructing us on the correct use of umlaut \ö/, Amritpal Bath for coordinating torrents for the release, suggesting fixes and improvements, and trying to keep me sane (good luck), Robby Workman for docs, X, Xfce, wicd, his work with the team at slackbuilds.org, and helping to keep tons of other packages updated, mrgoblin for troubleshooting the installer and being on call to help in the middle of my night (handy having someone from .nz on the team!), and lots of fixes here and there, Karl Magnus Kolstoe for letting me know when I needed to sleep, NetrixTardis and element-x for helping with bandwidth and trackers for the release (and assorted testing and Q/A), Fred Emmott for so graciously assisting with obstacles we encountered porting to x86_64, 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 for putting up with development that began to stretch to every waking hour and deadlines being pushed back for one reason or another way too many times. We'll try to get a little more family time over the next month or so. Hi Briah!

Have fun! :-)



Pat Volkerding