Slackware 14 Released
After five beta cycles, Slackware 14.0 arrives with many improvements and enhancements. The latest version offers two desktop environments: Xfce 4.10.0 and KDE 4.8.5.
According to the website, these desktops utilize udev, udisks, and udisks2, as well as many specifications from freedesktop.org. These allow admins to grant use of hardware devices according to users’ group membership, thus enabling use of USB flash sticks, portable hard drives, CD and DVD media, etc., without requiring sudo, the mount, or umount command.
Slackware uses the 3.2.29 kernel, with performance features such as journaling filesystems, SCSI, and ATA RAID volume support, SATA support, software RAID, LVM, and encrypted filesystems. Kernel support for X DRI (the Direct Rendering Interface) brings high-speed hardware accelerated 3D graphics to Linux.
Slackware has two Linux kernel options: huge and generic. The huge kernel contains built-in support for just about every driver in the Linux kernel. In the generic kernel, nearly every driver is built as a module. Slackware’s Linux kernels come in both SMP and non-SMP types. The SMP kernel supports multiple processors, multi-core CPUs, HyperThreading, and other optimizations. The developers recommend using the SMP kernel – even on single processor machines if it will run on them. Note that on 64-bit machines, all kernels are SMP capable. You can read the long list of changes and additions at: http://www.slackware.com/announce/14.0.php. Slackware Linux 14.0 is available for download from the central Slackware FTP site.
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