Slackware 12.1 release notes.

Today is Prickle-Prickle, the 36th day of Discord in the YOLD 3174
Sat Apr 19 22:14:22 CDT 2008 , The Moon is Full.

Hi folks,

    Since I've always written RELEASE_NOTES (at least in recent
releases) I feel like *something* should go here, but the fact is that
Robby about has everything covered in CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT.  Thanks!

    About the only things to mention here are that Slackware now
requires a recent 2.6.x kernel (I believe 2.6.18 is a minimum), but
as usual unless your needs are specific you're probably better off
running the included kernels that we've tested things against.
The best kernel to run (even on a one CPU/core machine) is the generic
SMP one, but that needs an initrd, so be sure to read the instructions
in /boot after installing with a huge* kernel if you plan to switch.
Since the initrd has been around since Slackware 11.0, hopefully most
Slackware users can take on this task easily and will not be "shocked
and appalled".

    I would not suggest trying to run without udev.  Consider it the
userspace portion of the kernel.  It *is* possible, but if you must
do that you'll have to tweak a couple things here and there.  The
specifics are left as an exercise for the advanced user.  Wait, an
advanced user would just use udev.  Really, it works and makes things
a lot easier.  The only real pitfalls are the network/optical rules
that are auto-generated at boot.  CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT mentions
these.

    NPTL glibc is the default now, so no special compile flags are
needed to compile with Native POSIX threads.  LinuxThreads are now
obsolete.  If you have old software that needs them, you can grab
old libraries from Slackware 11.0 and set them up in /lib/obsolete
and use LD_ variables to preload them and set a kernel assume.  A
bit of Google searching will bring up instructions on that easily.

    If you want GNOME, there are teams online supporting GNOME
for Slackware.  Here are a few places to look:

    http://www.gware.org/
    http://www.droplinegnome.net/
    http://gnomeslackbuild.org

If any of these replaces some system components, using them voids
your warranty.  ;-)  But it should work, *if* you absolutely must
have GNOME.  I'd suggest Xfce instead if you want a GTK+ based
desktop.  If you do want to use GNOME, remember that there may be
some updates needed after 12.1 releases, so it might be best not
to rush into it.

    Need more build scripts?  Something that you wanted wasn't
included in Slackware?  Well, then check out slackbuilds.org.
Several of the team members work on the scripts there.

    Thanks to the rest of the team for the great help -- Eric
Hameleers for help with networking improvements, documentation,
LVM, and encrypted partition support, Piter Punk for udev and
slackpkg work, Stuart Winter for help with linuxdoc-tools,
cleaning up the Qt build script, and other stuff, Erik Jan Tromp
for the etherboot floppy for starting a PXE install, Amritpal Bath
for helping with the release, suggesting fixes and improvements
(including keeping me sane), Robby Workman for docs, his work with
the team at slackbuilds.org (and a *lot* more), mrgoblin for
suggestions concerning all kinds of things, Karl Magnus Kolstoe
for figuring out the best way to divide the project content
across six CD images, and anyone else I'm forgetting (including
the other team members who contributed little fixes and
suggestions here and there along with general moral support), and
all the folks who emailed in bug reports (and especially fixes).
Thanks for the technical assistance (*you* make this possible),
and for keeping the project a good time.  And, of course, thanks
*much* to the upstream developers for such nice building materials.

Oh, and thanks to my wife Andrea for not smacking me with the
LART as release time drew close.  ;-)

This release is dedicated to our friend Fizban.  We hope to see
you online again sometime soon.

Have fun!  :-)

Pat Volkerding <volkerdi@slackware.com>