There has been a long and tedious debate among slackers over whether the distribution should stick with KDE4 or move to Plasma 5. According to Slackware’s KDE maintainer Eric Hameleers, a decision has been made and Slackware 15.0 will ship Plasma 5.

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.

So the annual “Slackware needs PAM and Kerberos” thread is going strong over at linuxquestions.org at the moment. This particular topic always seem to awaken a collective inferiority complex within the Slackware community, where users are aggressively refuting any claim that Slackware is not a viable choice for business use (you can do anything with some lines of bash right?…). At the opposite side you have users arguing that Slackware has become a niche hobbyist distribution due to its reluctance to implement mainstream technologies.

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.

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.

Configuring and using a generic kernel on EFI-based platforms with ELILO is pretty much an identical exercise to using LILO with legacy systems. Slackware provides you with a mkinitrd generator script to assist in making an initrd image to boot your system.

When I began writing this review there had been 921 days since the last stable Slackware release. The apparent dormant state of development raised a few questions about the health of the distribution, but as usual the rumors of Slackware’s decline was greatly exaggerated.

SimpleScreenRecorder (ssr) is a feature-rich screen recorder for Linux that supports X11 and OpenGL. SimpleScreenRecorder is available as a SlackBuild script from slackbuilds.org, but by only installing the listed dependency, namely FFmpeg, you’ll end up with a rather limited set of supported codecs.

Due to a city wide power outage I lost just short of 300 days of uptime on the RPi2. The RPi2 did boot back up when the power returned, but since I had received a new IP address I needed to make a DNS update before the server was reachable again. That’s obviously the downside of running a server on a dynamic IP space, but hey it doesn’t cost me a cent. I have a 300 seconds TTL (Time To Live) on my blog.paranoidpenguin.net A record so I think it’s good enough for a hobby project.