14 DAY TRIAL // After many months of hard work, two Betas and two RCs, Patrick J. Volkerding is extremely proud to announce today, July 2, 2016, the release and immediate availability for download of the final Slackware 14.2 Linux operating system.
Slackware Linux 14.2 arrives two and a half months after the mid-April debut of the second and last Release Candidate (RC) build, and it has now been declared stable and ready for deployment as your daily driver. Powered by the latest (at the moment of writing this article) long-term supported Linux 4.4.14 kernel, Slackware 14.2 ships with many up-to-date components and GNU/Linux technologies.
For example, the distro switched to GNU C Library 2.23, X.Org 7.7, GGC 5.3.0 as default compiler, LLVM/Clang support, Apache 2.4.20, PHP 5.6.23, Perl 5.22.2, Python 2.7.11, Ruby 2.2.5, Subversion 1.9.4, Git 2.9.0, Mercurial 3.8.2, KDE Software Compilation 4.14.21 desktop environment, and much more. Best of all, there's support for Linux kernel 4.6 in the /testing directory.
"We are sure you'll enjoy the many improvements. We've done our best to bring the latest technology to Slackware while still maintaining the stability and security that you have come to expect. Slackware is well known for its simplicity and the fact that we try to bring software to you in the condition that the authors intended," said Patrick J. Volkerding in today's announcement.
Slackware 14.2 is systemd-free
As we can see from the release notes, there's no sign of the next-generation systemd init system in Slackware 14.2. It looks like the operating system is using a combination of eudev, udisks, and udisks2, as well as several of freedesktop.org's specifications to allow system administrators grant use of different hardware devices like MP3 players, USB disks, CD-ROM/DVD-ROM units, and much more.
UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) support is available on the 64-bit (x86_64) version of Slackware 14.2, and the latest NetworkManager is here to offer users support for a broad range of network connection, including IPv6, VPN, mobile broadband, wired and wireless, and support for fully encrypted network connections thanks to technologies like OpenVPN, OpenSSH, OpenSSL, and GnuPG.
Last but not least, there are a host of open-source applications, among which we can mention SeaMonkey 2.40, Mozilla Firefox ESR 45.2.0, Mozilla Thunderbird 45.1.1, Pidgin 2.10.12, GIMP 2.8.16, HexChat 2.12.1, XSane 0.999, Pan 0.139, GKrellM 2.3.7, and lots of others in the /extra directory. Download Slackware 14.2 for 32-bit and 64-bit computers right now via our website.