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Slackware-Based Slackel 7.4 Released with Linux Kernel 5.10 LTS, Full Portability
Submitted by Marius Nestor on Friday 1st of January 2021 05:37:16 PM Filed under
Coming six months after Slackel 7.3, the Slackel 7.4 release is now available in a lightweight form with the Openbox window manager by default. KDE Plasma and MATE editions may follow in the next days or weeks, but for now let's have a look at the general changes that apply to all of them.
First and foremost, Slackel is now powered by the latest and greatest Linux 5.10 LTS kernel series, which means top-notch hardware support. Slackel 7.4 includes the recently released Linux kernel 5.10.4 by default, and also comes with all the latest updates from Slackware’s ‘Current’ tree for the best possible Slackware Linux experience.
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Today, Plasma5 replaces KDE4 in Slackware
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 8th of December 2020 04:12:30 AM Filed under

Finally. It’s the major step towards a first Beta release of Slackware 15.0!
Pat used this past weekend to merge the ‘vtown’ packages in the Slackware-current testing area into the core distro. The result is a ChangeLog.txt entry that is 680 lines long… lots of package removals due to KDE4 having been replaced with Plasma5.
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Slackware-Based SlackEX Linux Now Ships with Latest Enlightenment Desktop
Submitted by Marius Nestor on Saturday 14th of November 2020 06:58:50 PM Filed under
Based on Slackware 14.2, the new SlackEX Linux release drops the lightweight Xfce desktop environment for the even more lighter and beautiful Enlightenment desktop environment/window manager. In fact, SlackEX appears to be the only live system that uses the latest Enlightenment release, version 0.24.2.
But that's not all that' new in the latest SlackEX Linux release, which is now powered by the Linux 5.9 kernel series. This not only means better hardware support, but it also means you won't find another Slackware-based live system running Linux kernel 5.9.
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Ktown becomes Vtown
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 6th of November 2020 12:56:50 AM Filed under

So it is finally happening.
On US Election Day 2020, Pat Volkerding added “vtown” into the ‘testing’ directory of Slackware-current.
The “vtown” in Slackware is essentially my ‘ktown’ repository containing KDE Plasma5 plus its dependencies, with a few exceptions, a number of my packages removed, some caveats and a couple of renamed packages.
A lot of useful information from early adopters can already be found on linuxquestions.org in the dedicated thread about vtown.
One of the benefits of this testing version of Plasma5 in Slackware is the merging of several Slackware and ktown packages.
Mostly because I needed to provide Qt5-supporting versions of existing Slackware packages, I needed different names for the ‘ktown’ versions that I was going to provide. I could not risk that people would end up with old Slackware Qt4 based packages which would break Plasma5.
So to avoid clashing with packages like “plasma-nm”, “attica”, “baloo”, “kscreen” etc… I had to use alternative package names like “plasma5-nm”, “attica-framework”, “baloo5”, “kscreen2” and several (actually, many) more.
Here is the full list of my packages that got merged back into packages with the original Slackware names...
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Distros: Absolute64, OpenMandriva, and Ubuntu
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 3rd of November 2020 10:45:20 PM Filed under




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Absolute64-20201103 released
Based on Slackware64-current.
Keeping up with wholesale library changes (especially python) and kernels, etc...
(Will there ever be a Slackware 15?)
Edited some utilities to adjust to new libs.
Tighten up the UI/mime/icons. -
Progress on OMLx 4.2
Work continues on OMLx 4.2. It is anticipated that Beta release should be happening in the next week or two.
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Accessibility audit of Vanilla framework | Ubuntu
The team behind the Vanilla Framework has a background in development, UX and Visual Design. We all care about accessibility, but none of us is an accessibility expert.
We were interested in evaluating how well the framework complies with accessibility standards. We decided to start with an internal audit, fix any issues we find, then look for a third-party service to evaluate the framework from the perspective of real-world users with disabilities
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The Earliest Linux Distros: Before Mainstream Distros Became So Popular
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Sunday 1st of November 2020 08:59:21 PM Filed under


In here we have tried to explore how the idea of popular distros such as Red Hat, Debian, Slackware, SUSE, Ubuntu and many others came into being after the first Linux kernel became available.
As Linux was initially released in the form of a kernel in 1991, the distros we know today was made possible with the help of numerous collaborators throughout the world with the creation of shells, libraries, compilers and related packages to make it a complete Operating System.
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LibreOffice 6.4.5 finally for Slackware 14.2
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Friday 14th of August 2020 05:52:18 PM Filed under

The Document Foundation recently released version 7.0.0 of their Libre Office suite of applications. The packages for Slackware-current can be found in my repository. But the situation for Slackware 14.2 used to be different – I got stuck after LibreOffice 6.2 because the newer source releases (6.3 and onwards) require versions of system software that our stable Slackware 14.2 platform does not offer.
From time to time during the last year, when there was time and the build box was not compiling packages, I messed around with the libreoffice.SlackBuild script in futile attempts to compile recent versions of LibreOffice on Slackware 14.2. I failed all the time.
Until last week. After I had uploaded the new KDE Plasma5 packages to ‘ktown‘, I had an epiphany and decided to use a new approach. What I did was: question all the historic stuff in the SlackBuild script that got added whenever I needed to work around compilation failures; and accept that the compilation needs newer versions of software than Slackware 14.2 offers. The first statement meant that I disabled patches and variable declarations that messed with compiler and linker; and for the second statement I stuck to a single guideline: the end product, if I were able to compile a package successfully, has to run out of the box on Slackware 14.2 without the need to update any of the core Slackware packages.
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Porteus 5.0-rc2 Released: Slackware-Based Fast And Portable Linux Distro
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Monday 10th of August 2020 05:02:24 AM Filed under

More than a year later, the Dev team of Porteus Linux has finally announced the second release candidate (RC-2) for its upcoming version 5.0. This means you can now try the new testing version Porteus 5.0-rc2.
For those who don’t know, Porteus is based on one of the oldest Linux distros, Slackware. It was also formerly known as Slax remix when it started as a community remix of Slax OS.
Porteus aims to provide a portable, fast, and light operating system that you can boot directly in less than 15 seconds (in the case of LXDE desktop) from CD, USB flash drive, hard drive, or other bootable storage media.
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KDE Plasma 5 August 2020 release for Slackware
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Friday 31st of July 2020 11:59:43 PM Filed under

New Plasma5 packages for Slackware-current are ready for download & installation. I skipped July (holiday season) and so here is KDE-5_20.08 aka my August 2020 release. Be sure to read the upgrade instructions very carefully to prevent breakage, because starting with my June batch the goal is to remove Slackware’s ConsoleKit2 and replace it with elogind!.
It would not harm if you (re-)read my previous blog article about Plasma5, “Replacing ConsoleKit2 with elogind – first steps“. It has a lot more detail about the reasons for this move as well as guidance on using the Wayland Window Manager (as a test) instead of regular X.Org. Note that Wayland sessions still need a lot of maturing and X.Org will remain Slackware’s default choice.
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Slackel 7.3 Mate beta1
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 4th of July 2020 10:25:44 PM Filed under
Slackel 7.3 Mate beta1 has been released. Slackel is based on Slackware and Salix.
Includes the Linux kernel 5.4.50, Mate-1.22.1 and latest updates from Slackware's 'Current' tree.
Added support to do a real installation to an external usb stick or usb ssd or usb hard disk.
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