Slackware 12.0 RC1 Is Out for Testing

Patrick Volkerding, founder and maintainer of the Slackware Linux distribution, has just announced the release of a 12.0 RC version for Slackware. Slackware Linux is one of the earliest distributions and also the oldest currently being maintained. Slackware has a policy of incorporating only stable releases of applications, standing mainly for design stability and simplicity.

The 12.0 release client is now available for testing purposes and it comes with many updates, beside the numerous major additions.

Highlights:

- a 2.6 kernel (version 2.6.21.5) compiled with GCC 4 (version 4.1.2)
- modular X.Org 7.2 with Xgl and Compiz support
- KDE 3.5.7
- Xfce 4.4.1
- alsa-oss upgraded to 1.0.14
- mozilla firefox upgraded to 2.0.0.4
- fixed uncompressed man pages


The 12.0 RC version features Apache 2.2 with upgraded php-5.2.3. According to php.net, the 5.2.3 release continues to improve the security and the stability of the 5.X branch as well as addressing two regressions introduced by the previous 5.2 releases. These regressions relate to the timeout handling over non-blocking SSL connections and the lack of HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA in certain conditions.

The Linux kernel sources in /usr/src/linux/ can now be easily transformed from SMP to non-SMP without having to recompile them. Patrick Volkerding recommends the use of the SMP kernel even in a single processor machine if it can thus run. The non-SMP kernels should be used only in machines that are not at least a Pentium-Pro, or that don't properly run the SMP kernel.

Once with the change in the kernel version there also came suggestions to maintain both branches, the one following 2.4 and the one with 2.6. However, according to Patrick, the solution which is about to be taken concerning the 2.4.x will focus on a better maintenance of Slackware 11.0 rather than simply security updates. Meanwhile, 2.4.x compatibility features will be steadily eliminated in -current to focus on the best possible 2.6.x support.