Welcome to Slackware 15.0 ARM 32bit! ( This is largely the x86 announcement, edited to accommodate where the ARM port diverges. ) ============================================================================ BREAKING NEWS, SEBEKA MINNESOTA 2022-02-02: Well folks, in spite of the dire predictions of YouTube pundits, this morning the Slackhog emerged from its development den, did *not* see its shadow, and Slackware 15.0 has been officially released - another six weeks (or years) of the development treadmill averted. Supported Hardware Models -------------------------- Slackware ARM 32bit directly supports the following Hardware Models: * Banana Pi (original and Pro) ("M3" is not supported) (The original Banana Pi is also named 'BPI-M1') * Orange Pi (A20) v1.2 * Orange Pi Plus (H3) v1.1 * Orange Pi Plus 2E (H3) v1.1 * Orange Pi PC (H3) v1.2 The TrimSlice Pro is no longer supported because it finally died:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7pKgPCClhY Background on Slackware development ----------------------------------- This has been an interesting development cycle (in the "may you live in interesting times" sense). Anyone who has followed Linux development over the years has seen the new technology and a slow but steady drift away from the more UNIX-like structure. The challenge this time around was to adopt as much of the good stuff out there as we could without changing the character of the operating system. Keep it familiar, but make it modern. And boy did we have our work cut out for us. We adopted PAM (finally) as projects we needed dropped support for pure shadow passwords. We switched from ConsoleKit2 to elogind, making it much easier to support software that targets that Other Init System and bringing us up-to-date with the XDG standards. We added support for PipeWire as an alternate to PulseAudio, and for Wayland sessions in addition to X11. Dropped Qt4 and moved entirely to Qt5. Brought in Rust and Python 3. Added many, many new libraries to the system to help support all the various additions. We've upgraded to two of the finest desktop environments available today: Xfce 4.16, a fast and lightweight but visually appealing and easy to use desktop environment, and the KDE Plasma 5 graphical workspaces environment, version 5.23.5 (the Plasma 25th Anniversary Edition). This also supports running under Wayland or X11. We still love Sendmail, but have moved it into the /extra directory and made Postfix the default mail handler. The old imapd and ipop3d have been retired and replaced by the much more featureful Dovecot IMAP and POP3 server. The Slackware pkgtools (package management utilities) saw quite a bit of development as well. File locking was implemented to prevent parallel installs or upgrades from colliding, and the amount of data written to storage minimized in order to avoid extra writes on SSD devices. We made it a priority throughout the development cycle to ensure that nothing failed to build. All the sources have been tested and found to build properly. Special thanks to nobodino for spearheading this effort. There's really just way too many upgrades to list them all here. For a complete list of included packages, see: ftp://ftp.arm.slackware.com/slackwarearm/slackwarearm-15.0/PACKAGES.TXT Downloading Slackware ARM 32bit 15.0: ------------------------------------ The full version of Slackware Linux 15.0 for ARM 32bit is available for download. The download and installation guides are to be found here: https://docs.slackware.com/slackwarearm:inst_sa32_rel_15.0 Helping support the Slackware ARM project ----------------------------------------- This project is made possible entirely through your support. Last year saw a vast amount of my 10-15 yr infrastructure hardware - an admixture of donated and recycled disks, servers, network equipment etc. die in quick succession; and with your support I was able to replace the components and add a couple of UPSs to get the project up and running again. So if you like what we're doing here, visit the sponsorship page: https://arm.slackware.com/sponsor/ As always, the continued development of the ARM port of Slackware is dependent upon Patrick Volkerding's Slackware, so please donate to that first as that's his income source. You'll find the details for that at the URL above. Have fun! :-) I hope you find Slackware to be useful, and thanks very much for your support of this project over the years. --- Patrick J. Volkerding Visit us on the web at: http://www.slackware.com ============================================================================ --- Stuart Winter Platform Architect & Developer - Slackware ARM / AArch64 09-Feb-2022