So you’ve patiently been waiting for the next Slackware release but eventually you’re considering making the move to Slackware-current. So what exactly is Slackware-current and what would be the pros and cons of switching from stable to -current.

My Raspberry Pi based hosting came to an abrupt end earlier this week as the RPi3 suddenly became unresponsive. Powering off and on the device resulted in an infinitive loop of I/O error messages. I’ve tried to recover the filesystem, but unfortunately my attempts proved to be unsuccessful.

To start the weekend off with a bang my Apache webserver failed to revive after the log rotation service had issued a restart. I’m hosting this website on a Raspberry Pi 3 so my first concern is always memory card corruption and data loss. Thankfully those fears turned out to be unfounded, but what actually went down?
From the httpd error_log:

I recently bought a new Raspberry Pi 3 and installed Slackware ARM current (hard float) on it. My goal was to compare the performance of the hard float port against Slackware ARM 14.2 (soft float), which is currently powering this RPi3 hosted website.

This website recently celebrated its second year of Raspberry Pi based hosting. It’s currently running on a RPi3 with Slackware ARM 14.2 (32-bit soft float). Somewhat to my surprise, the second year went by without a single glitch.

My office workstation recently went trough a Slackware release upgrade by following the excellent systemupgrade article from the Slackware Documentation Project. Personally I experienced a few snags along the way so I’ll add a few notes for future reference.

Just because Greg KH said that all users of the 4.4 kernel series must upgrade ;-) I’m happy to report that everything seems to be working as expected and have yet to notice any regressions.

In other “exciting” news: I’ve now been running this website on the RPi3 for 8 months without having a single “what just happened?” moment. Actually, the only reason why I’m still having a WordPress blog can be attributed to my amazement with the RPi3 actually being able to run this crap.

Dlackware is not your average “GNOME for Slackware” project but instead aims to take the slack out of Slackware. What you get in return is the latest in “enterprise” technology. Dlackware delivers a fully functional GNOME 3.22 desktop with PAM, Wayland and systemd.

With all the noise lately about Dirty COW (CVE-2016-5195) and the lack of patched kernels from Slackware’s “Benevolent Dictator for Life”, I decided it was time to roll up the sleeves and get it done. Since Slackware doesn’t have a “sophisticated” build system and all that grease, it’s a trivial matter to step up to the plate and take responsibility for your own system. I’ll be using “vanilla-kernelversion” as my tag for the kernel and initrd. Also notice that I build my kernels as a normal user.

As of Wednesday, August 24, 2016, Slackware ARM is out of retirement and ready to power your modern ARM devices. The Slackware ARM maintainer has made the decision to pick up development again and go ahead with a hard float port. It was announced three months ago that a hard float port was in the works, and today it’s powering my Raspberry Pi 2. Unfortunately the hard float release has been mostly ignored by the mainstream teach sites, but it’s definitely on top of my list. Get up to date with the latest development at arm.slackware.com.