Slackware 12.0 Stable Release Is Now Available

The much-waited stable Slackware version is now ready to run on your machine. Coming with numerous improvements, compared to the previous releases, among which I could mention the migration to the 2.6 kernel series, the 12.0 version is a "must-have upgrade for any Slackware user", quoting its developer.

Slackware 12.0 also comes with two desktop environments: Xfce 4.4.1 (fast, light and easy to use) and KDE 3.5.7 (the latest version of the award-winning K Desktop Environment). There are also many other new enhancements and features brought in by this version, such as SCSI and ATA RAID volume support, SATA support, Software RAID, LVM (the Logical Volume Manager, and encrypted filesystems. The kernel support for the X DRI (Direct Rendering Interface) should now significantly improve the speed hardware accelerated 3D graphics to Linux. The SMP kernel supports multiple processors, multi-core CPUs, HyperThreading, and about every other optimization available, as the developer says in the changelog.

Highlights of this release include:

� The kernel is patched with Speakup to support speech synthesizers;
� System binaries are linked with the GNU C Library, version 2.5;
� GCC 4.1.2 is the default C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran-77/95, and Ada 95 compiler;
� Support for fully encrypted network connections with OpenSSL, OpenSSH, OpenVPN, and GnuPG was added;
� Apache (httpd) 2.2.4 web server with Dynamic Shared Object support, SSL, and PHP 5.2.3;
� PCMCIA, CardBus, USB, IEE1394 (FireWire) and ACPI support new development tools, including Perl 5.8.8, Python 2.5.1;
� Ruby 1.8.6, Subversion 1.4.4, git 1.5.2.2, mercurial 0.9.4, graphical tools like Qt designer and KDevelop;
� An impressive browser series: KDE's Konqueror 3.5.7, SeaMonkey 1.1.2 (this is the replacement for the Mozilla Suite), and the immensely popular Firefox 2.0.0.4, as well as the Thunderbird 2.0.0.4 email and news client with advanced junk mail filtering;
� Some useful GTK+ based applications, including: Pidgin 2.0.2, Gimp 2.2.15, GKrellM 2.2.10, gXine 0.5.11, XChat 2.8.2, XSane 0.994, and Pan News Reader 0.131.

For more information about this release, please consult the official release announcement.

You can download Slackware 12.0 right now from Softpedia.