Slackware 14.0 release notes.  Wed Sep 19 21:47:07 UTC 2012

Hi folks,

    Historically, the RELEASE_NOTES had been mostly technical 
information, but once again Robby Workman has covered the important 
technical details in CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT.  Thanks!

    Linux has finally moved past 2.6.x versions (yay!) and already
has several different maintained 3.x branches.  After extensive
testing, we chose to ship this release with a kernel from the 3.2
branch (3.2.29), which Ben Hutchings says will be maintained on
kernel.org for an indefinite amount of time (probably at least 2 more
years), making it a good choice for a production release.  As usual,
the kernel is provided in two flavors, generic and huge.  The huge
kernel contains enough built-in drivers that in most cases an initrd
is not needed to boot the system.  The generic kernels require the
use of an initrd to load the kernel modules needed to mount the root
filesystem.  Using a generic kernel will save some memory and possibly
avoid a few boot time warnings.  On the 32-bit side of things, there
are both SMP (multiple processor capable) and non-SMP (single
processor) kernels.  The non-SMP kernel is mostly intended for machines
that can't run the SMP kernel, which is anything older than a Pentium
III, and some models of the Pentium M that don't support PAE.  On
32-bit, it is highly recommended to use the SMP kernel if your machine
is able to boot with it (even if you have only a single core) because
the optimization and memory handling options should yield better
performance.

    If you'd like to try out some of the newer kernel branches, you'll
find .config files for Linux 3.4.11, 3.5.4, and 3.6-rc4 in the
/testing/source/ directory.

    Slackware 14.0 contains updated versions of both KDE and Xfce, and
both of these have been split as much as possible into their component
packages rather than larger bundles.  This not only makes it easier to
remove software that you don't need, but also makes it easier to
maintain on our end.  If something needs a patch, it's a whole lot
easier to issue a patch for only the affected item.  This saves storage
space on the archive sites, and your time and bandwidth downloading
the updates.

    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.

    There's a new community driven site for Slackware documentation,
http://docs.slackware.com -- check it out, and join in to share your
knowledge!

    Thanks to the rest of the team (and other contributors) for the 
great help -- Eric Hameleers for major work on the KDE SC packages, init 
scripts, installer, documentation (especially getting docs.slackware.com
up and running), and all the extra packages like multilib compilers
(read more here: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/), Robby Workman for
following X.Org, udev, NetworkManager, wicd, Xfce, and tons of other
projects, building and testing all that stuff, writing documentation, his
work with the team at slackbuilds.org, and lots of package upgrades,
Piter Punk for slackpkg work, Stuart Winter for more updates to
linuxdoc-tools, slacktrack, and for all kinds of fixes throughout the
installer and system (he finds my bugs all the time while porting packages
to ARM for the Slackware ARM port: http://www.armedslack.org/), Mark Post
for his assistance porting our website to a newer PHP, Vincent Batts for
keeping Ruby working well and other miscellaneous fixes, Heinz Wiesinger
for working on PHP, mysql, icu4c, LLVM, and lots of other stuff,
Amritpal Bath for various bugfixes and helping with release torrents, 
mrgoblin for testing RAID, bluetooth, and well, everything (and fixing a 
lot of it, too), other very honorable mentions go to Alan Hicks,
Erik Jan Tromp, Karl Magnus Kolstø, Fred Emmott, and NetrixTardis,
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).  Special thanks to the folks who mailed in bug
reports (and fixes) and helped collaborate on this release.  This was
a stellar release cycle for community participation, especially on the
LinuxQuestions.org Slackware forum.  Thanks for the help, for keeping
this project fun, and making it possible for us to keep up with the
rapid pace of Linux development.  Thanks to Honeypi and Doodle, too!

Have fun!

Pat Volkerding <volkerdi@slackware.com>

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