Slackware 14.0 release notes. Wed Sep 19 21:47:07 UTC 2012 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! Linux has finally moved past 2.6.x versions (yay!) and already has several different maintained 3.x branches. After extensive testing, we chose to ship this release with a kernel from the 3.2 branch (3.2.29), which Ben Hutchings says will be maintained on kernel.org for an indefinite amount of time (probably at least 2 more years), making it a good choice for a production release. As usual, the kernel is provided in two flavors, generic and huge. The huge kernel contains enough built-in drivers that in most cases an initrd is not needed to boot the system. The generic kernels require the use of an initrd to load the kernel modules needed to mount the root filesystem. Using a generic kernel will save some memory and possibly avoid a few boot time warnings. On the 32-bit side of things, there are both SMP (multiple processor capable) and non-SMP (single processor) kernels. The non-SMP kernel is mostly intended for machines that can't run the SMP kernel, which is anything older than a Pentium III, and some models of the Pentium M that don't support PAE. On 32-bit, it is highly recommended to use the SMP kernel if your machine is able to boot with it (even if you have only a single core) because the optimization and memory handling options should yield better performance. If you'd like to try out some of the newer kernel branches, you'll find .config files for Linux 3.4.11, 3.5.4, and 3.6-rc4 in the /testing/source/ directory. Slackware 14.0 contains updated versions of both KDE and Xfce, and both of these have been split as much as possible into their component packages rather than larger bundles. This not only makes it easier to remove software that you don't need, but also makes it easier to maintain on our end. If something needs a patch, it's a whole lot easier to issue a patch for only the affected item. This saves storage space on the archive sites, and your time and bandwidth downloading the updates. 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. There's a new community driven site for Slackware documentation, http://docs.slackware.com -- check it out, and join in to share your knowledge! 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 (especially getting docs.slackware.com up and running), and all the extra packages like multilib compilers (read more here: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/), Robby Workman for following X.Org, udev, NetworkManager, 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, Piter Punk for slackpkg work, Stuart Winter for more updates to linuxdoc-tools, slacktrack, 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 Slackware ARM port: http://www.armedslack.org/), Mark Post for his assistance porting our website to a newer PHP, Vincent Batts for keeping Ruby working well and other miscellaneous fixes, Heinz Wiesinger for working on PHP, mysql, icu4c, LLVM, and lots of other stuff, 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 Alan Hicks, Erik Jan Tromp, Karl Magnus Kolstø, 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). Special thanks to the folks who mailed in bug reports (and fixes) and helped collaborate on this release. This was a stellar release cycle for community participation, especially on the LinuxQuestions.org Slackware forum. Thanks for the help, for keeping this project fun, and making it possible for us to keep up with the rapid pace of Linux development. Thanks to Honeypi and Doodle, too! Have fun! Pat Volkerding --- Help keep the lights on @slackware! Shop at http://store.slackware.com