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Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

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Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#71
post #33
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slightly easier than Arch. Just install everything when it asks you to. You can ignore the kdei disk set if you speak English (and have no plans to run KDE in, say, Urdu), and the kde disk set if you do not need KDE altogether. Since there is no dependency resolution, when you install from SlackBuilds.org (Slackware's AUR, more or less), you have to install each package's dependencies as well. These are listed in the…

I just wish slack had something comparable to mkinitcpio that arch has, which makes it much easier to set up an initial ramdisk for an encrypted root partition.

README_CRYPT.TXT in the root of the distribution[0] describes how to do this, step by step, including the relevant theory so you know what you're doing. After all of that it shows you the /usr/share/mkinitrd/mkinitrd_command_generator.sh command which you can use to generate the command that you need to build the initrd. Quoting from the docs:

    The mkinitrd package in Slackware 14.0 (and on) ships with a script called
    'mkinitrd_command_generator.sh'.  If you run this script, it will analyze
    your Slackware configuration and make a smart suggestion about the 'mkinitrd'
    command you have to type in order to create an initrd.gz with all the bells
    & whistles.  The script will recognize your kernel version, root partition
    and filesystem, it will find out if you are using LUKS and/or LVM and will
    determine what kernel modules your initrd needs to mount the root filesystem.
    The following command will save you the headache of figuring this out all
    by yourself:

      # /usr/share/mkinitrd/mkinitrd_command_generator.sh -r

    It should emit a string like this (your system will probably give different
    parameter values):

    mkinitrd -c -k 3.14.10-smp -m ext3 -f ext3 -r /dev/cryptvg/root -C /dev/sdx2 -L
The administrator of that machine can examine the output of that command and determine if it is correct after reading the theory about how the initrd needs to be built. If it is, it's a simple one liner, but if not, it's simple enough to either write a wrapper script or copy the script to /usr/local/sbin/mkinitrd_command_generator.sh and make the necessary changes.

[0] ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware64-current/README_CRYPT.TXT

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To get systemd working you need PAM, and Slackware has yet to ship a release with PAM enabled.

There's no PAM in CoreOS, which uses systemd.

And this is why discussing anything systemd is such a pain.

Apparently you can forgo systemd_pam (a poor naming choice, given the following) if you do not use logind. And logind is used for seat and session tracking, something CoreOS likely have no need for as it is meant to handle containerized servers.

Yet all this is in systemd the project, because systemd is the swiss army knife of Linux user space.

So yes, Slackware would likely need to adopt PAM if they want to adopt systemd.

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#73
post #54

I really want the best for Slackware. I used to be a slacker 1996-2006 and grinded my Linux teeth on it. It escapes me why they don't want to innovate at all with a proper modern package manager. Also they need to remake their website and with that create a decent forum and a decent wiki just like Arch has perfectly done. Nowadays I don't care at all about knowing every corner of my system. I have applications to man…

I'm a bit skeptical about the word "modern" these days. slackpkg is a good package manager and does everything you need to keep your system up-to-date. From the slackware website: "Slackware is designed around the idea that the system should be a complete installation kept updated with any official patches. This avoids the mess of dependencies that some other Linux based GNU systems face." Why remake the website? The…

But... slackpkg is not part of Slackware, its a third party tool.

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#74
post #45
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if your goal is to provide veracity to your claim, then posting a German article on an English forum isn't very useful.

Google translate... We have the technology, just not the sense to use it :-(

> just not the sense to use it :-(

A) I know 3 ancient languages and have degrees in them undergrad and grad. Google Translate German is minimally okay at best. The most important aspects of languages are not words but sentence structure. That is lost on Google Translation BUT... what I can see is this guy is just raging about a missing dependency in the repos of a library last built in 2010 (5 years old). NOT AN RPM ISSUE.

2) Oh and who the RPM file format has since devised please ?! What's that supposed to be? If the alien invaders drive you crazy, so they can not exterminate mankind? Holy shit. By contrast, even the Debian stuff is obvious and self-explanatory! And self-documenting all. As a .deb works, one can find out with file and home remedies, you do not even need a hex editor."

C) This guy is clueless he says Gnome handles this better then RPM? What does a Desktop Environment have to do with RPM? Does he equate Gnome with Debian/Ubuntu and thinks Gnome is Deb?

"Does "deltarpm". Say, is that a joke here? Even Rotz Gnome checked before building if its dependencies are fulfilled!"

D) The guy saying the standard has different versions? It was the official standard of the Linux Foundation. http://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/lsb.shtml

"First there are RPM directly two strands, RPM and RPM 4 5, and both claim to be the "official" RPM. Lolwut?"

E) Why would anyone need a hex editor for when looking at RPM its plain text?

If you can't find anything on the issue in several languages it isn't an issue. RPM is a stable good technology that people randomly out of what need to put down without knowingly what they are talking about.

Enough said about this stupid blog post:

"My goodness. And I know otherwise perfectly sane people who swear on CentOS! Update: Maybe I should say, as I so imagine a package management tool. My request would be that always works. Python zerschossen? Perl is not installed? glibc update failed in the middle? The package manager needs to go and can still be saved. And it must be small enough to fit with metadata in 5 MB. Must also without OpenSSL and curl and wget can work, at least in an emergency. Of the systems that I've seen so far, I like best pacman (Arch Linux). But there is something else."

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#75
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit skeptical about the word "modern" these days. slackpkg is a good package manager and does everything you need to keep your system up-to-date. From the slackware website: "Slackware is designed around the idea that the system should be a complete installation kept updated with any official patches. This avoids the mess of dependencies that some other Linux based GNU systems face." Why remake the website? The…

But... slackpkg is not part of Slackware, its a third party tool.

So? Large majority code running in any distro was developed by third parties. This means nothing. It's a part of Slackware.

It was announced in Tue Sep 16 11:20:30 PDT 2003 that it's a part of 'extra' repository. So, not installed by default, but it's there.

Announcent on Fri Nov 21 13:51:57 CST 2008 says it was moved from extra/ to ap/, meaning installed by default on all except the most stripped down installs.

Also, there's nothing special in using third party tools as package managers, they all use slackwares pkg tools under the hood. Think (aptslackpkg, dpkg -i installpkg, dpkg -r removepkg, etc etc etc).

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#76
post #74
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google translate... We have the technology, just not the sense to use it :-(

> just not the sense to use it :-( A) I know 3 ancient languages and have degrees in them undergrad and grad. Google Translate German is minimally okay at best. The most important aspects of languages are not words but sentence structure. That is lost on Google Translation BUT... what I can see is this guy is just raging about a missing dependency in the repos of a library last built in 2010 (5 years old). NOT AN RPM…

Sure down vote BUT defend your opposition to the point of this blog post that I pointed out. It is 100% not RPM issues that this person is talking about.

Okay so by the down votes I guess people prefer to think RPM is bad and won't take anything from anyone pointing out how it works and that the article used was full of holes by someone that doesn't understand package management.

I SAID STUPID: Ye sit is stupid to request a package manager that uses unsecured packages with disabled SSL and curl and wget to download packages and manage them so that any hacker could install any package it wants with a simple script.

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#77
post #74
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google translate... We have the technology, just not the sense to use it :-(

> just not the sense to use it :-( A) I know 3 ancient languages and have degrees in them undergrad and grad. Google Translate German is minimally okay at best. The most important aspects of languages are not words but sentence structure. That is lost on Google Translation BUT... what I can see is this guy is just raging about a missing dependency in the repos of a library last built in 2010 (5 years old). NOT AN RPM…

In all fairness, RPM really is a shitty package format [0]. It's a binary format with a lot of different versions, and any tool dealing with RPMs needs to be able to handle all those different versions. Compare that with nearly every other package format: a standard archive file with the package data and metadata stored within. This means that you need specialized tools to deal with RPM packages, whereas packages in other formats can be dealt with using standard archival and compression tools.

The situation could be a lot worse, for sure, but dealing with RPM packages is a pain in the ass compared to practically every other package format (programmatically speaking).

(I say this as the maintainer of a tool that converts RPMs to CRUX packages [1]).

[0]: http://rpm.org/max-rpm/s1-rpm-file-format-rpm-file-format.ht...

[1]: https://github.com/baguette/crux-ports/blob/master/rpm2pkg/r...

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#78
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit skeptical about the word "modern" these days. slackpkg is a good package manager and does everything you need to keep your system up-to-date. From the slackware website: "Slackware is designed around the idea that the system should be a complete installation kept updated with any official patches. This avoids the mess of dependencies that some other Linux based GNU systems face." Why remake the website? The…

It's not adequate sorry. I am not happy with mailing lists for community building. And I know of Linuxquestions.com forums, but that's not adequate either. Seriously, it would take 60 minutes to get this sorted, and 30 bucks yearly of hosting these forums.

So do it.

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

25 days ago you said Linux Mint solved all of your problems... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11150556

I'm not the commentator, but Mint is Ubuntu, except they've already done all of the grunt work to make it useful (like making codecs available and prettifying it up). At least 2 years ago when I ran it exclusively, it was accurately described as Ubuntu-based, not Ubuntu, just like Ubuntu is Debian-based, not Debian. But the similarities are (or at least were) much closer between it and Ubuntu than Ubuntu and Debian.…

Thank you. No difference worth making is precisely why I didn't make it.

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not adequate sorry. I am not happy with mailing lists for community building. And I know of Linuxquestions.com forums, but that's not adequate either. Seriously, it would take 60 minutes to get this sorted, and 30 bucks yearly of hosting these forums.

What are mailing lists and forums missing for you? What killer features do you think that the Slackware team need to implement beyond what they currently have? I ask in all sincerity because you haven't mentioned it in your post.

The community. As a user and potential contributor, I need that.

Also I am sounding like a downer... I'm sorry about that. My strong opinions can often be too much, and I get that because they might sound negative. I am saying the things as a long time Slack user that gave up.

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