Wed Feb 2 22:22:22 UTC 2022slackware-15.020220202222222

Slackware 15.0 x86_64 stable is released!

Another too-long development cycle is behind us after we bit off more than
we could chew and then had to shine it up to a high-gloss finish. Hopefully
we've managed to get the tricky parts out of the way so that we'll be able
to see a 15.1 incremental update after a far shorter development cycle.
Certainly the development infrastructure has been streamlined here and things
should be easier moving forward. My thanks to the rest of the Slackware team,
all the upstream developers who have given us such great building materials,
the folks on LinuxQuestions.org and elsewhere for all the help with testing,
great suggestions, and countless bug fixes, and to everyone who helped
support this project so that the release could finally see the light of day.
I couldn't have done any of this without your help, and I'm grateful to all
of you. Thanks!

For more information, check out the RELEASE_NOTES, CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT,
and ANNOUNCE.15.0.

Have fun!  :-)

1 files changed, 124 insertions, 103 deletions

diff --git a/RELEASE_NOTES b/RELEASE_NOTES
index b302330a..be88e18e 100644
--- a/RELEASE_NOTES
+++ b/RELEASE_NOTES
@@ -1,108 +1,129 @@
+Slackware 15.0 release notes. Wed Feb  2 18:39:59 CST 2022
 
-Slackware 14.2 release notes.  Thu Jun 30 22:37:15 UTC 2016
-
-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!
-
-    After jumping ahead through various Linux kernel branches over
-the course of this development cycle, we ended up on the 4.4.x
-branch and decided to stick with it.  Greg Kroah-Hartman's
-announcement back in October that the 4.4 series would be getting
-a long-term support for two years helped to cement this decision
-and should be good news for anyone wanting to keep a maintained
-stable kernel on their system.  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 (although it seems that these might support PAE
-but just lack the CPU flags to advertise it -- try booting with the
-"forcepae" kernel option).  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 the latest kernel branch, you'll find
-.config files for Linux 4.6 in the /testing/source/ directory.
-
-    Slackware 14.2 has support for systems running UEFI firmware (x86_64
-Slackware edition only).  Packages that help support UEFI include elilo,
-GRUB 2, and efibootmgr, and all of the installation media supports
-booting under UEFI, as do the USB boot sticks generated during
-installation.  At this point there is no support for running the system
-under Secure Boot, but a dedicated user could add their own Machine Owner
-Key, sign their kernels, modules, and bootloader, and then use shim to
-start the bootloader.  Documentation for installing on UEFI machines is
-provided in a README_UEFI.TXT found in the top-level Slackware directory.
-
-    Slackware ISO images (both the ones available online as well as
-the discs sent out from the Slackware store) have been processed using
-isohybrid.  This allows them to be written to a USB stick, which can
-then be booted and used as the install source.  This works on machines
-running both regular BIOS as well as UEFI.
-
-    Slackware 14.2 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.
-
-    Although Slackware does not ship the GNOME desktop, we can recommend
-a couple of places to look if you're interested in trying to add it to
-your system.  The Dropline project ( http://www.droplinegnome.net ) will
-be putting together a set of packages for running GNOME 3.20.1 on
-Slackware.  There's also the MATE desktop, which is a fork of GNOME 2.x.
-SlackBuild scripts are available to compile MATE packages for Slackware
-from http://mateslackbuilds.github.io - thanks to Chess Griffin and
-Willy Sudiarto Raharjo for making this option available.
-
-    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 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, eudev, 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
+Good hello folks, nice to see you here again. :-)
+
+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!
+
+We've actually built over 400 different Linux kernel versions over the years
+it took to finally declare Slackware 15.0 stable (by contrast, we tested 34
+kernel versions while working on Slackware 14.2). We finally ended up on kernel
+version 5.15.19 after Greg Kroah-Hartman confirmed that it would get long-term
+support until at least October 2023 (and quite probably for longer than that).
+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.
+I'd strongly recommend using a generic kernel for the best kernel module
+compatibility as well. It's easier to do that than in previous releases - the
+installer now makes an initrd for you, and the new geninitrd utility will
+rebuild the initrd automatically for the latest kernel packages you've
+installed on the system.
+
+On the 32-bit side, 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 (although
+it seems that these might support PAE but just lack the CPU flags to advertise
+it -- try booting with the "forcepae" kernel option). 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 the latest kernel branch, you'll find .config files
+for Linux 5.16 in the /testing/source/ directory.
+
+Slackware 15.0 has support for systems running UEFI firmware (x86_64 Slackware
+edition only). Packages that help support UEFI include elilo, GRUB 2, and
+efibootmgr, and all of the installation media supports booting under UEFI, as
+do the USB boot sticks generated during installation. At this point there is
+no support for running the system under Secure Boot, but a dedicated user
+could add their own Machine Owner Key, sign their kernels, modules, and
+bootloader, and then use shim to start the bootloader. We'll be looking into
+supporting this officially in the next release. Documentation for installing
+on UEFI machines is provided in a README_UEFI.TXT found in the top-level
+Slackware directory.
+
+The Slackware ISO images have been processed using an isohybrid format which
+allows them to be burned to DVD, *or* to be written to a USB stick, which can
+then be booted and used as the install source.  This works on machines running
+both regular BIOS as well as UEFI.
+
+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 along with many other dedicated volunteers.
+
+There's a 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 Slackware team (and other contributors) for the
+great help -- Eric Hameleers for his massive efforts on getting KDE Plasma 5
+ready and continuing to maintain it even as the development cycle ran much
+longer than expected. Eric, I know I came close to wearing out your patience,
+so thanks for sticking it out and for all your other help with extra packages,
+multilib support, docs.slackware.com, and everything else you do for Slackware.
+Everyone be sure to follow Eric's blog at: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/
+Thanks to Robby Workman for help on tons of stuff... especially Xfce but also
+tons of miscellaneous updates, the CHANGES_AND_HINTS file and other
+documentation, managing various project infrastructure including helping to
+obtain servers, getting them all set up, finding hosting, etc. Thanks to our
+friends at OnyxLight Communications who helped us out with hosting (and
+hardware, too!) for our development server. Onyxlight closed down during the
+pandemic, unfortunately. I hope they're all doing well. Thanks to PiterPunk
+for his work on maintaining slackpkg and various bugfixes. Thanks to Darren
+"Tadgy" Austin for rewriting the netconfig utility adding support for IPv6,
+VLANs, link aggregation and more. Thanks to 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/), Vincent
-Batts for keeping Ruby working well and other miscellaneous fixes,
-Heinz Wiesinger for working on PHP, MariaDB (especially!), icu4c, LLVM, and
-lots of other stuff, Amritpal Bath for various bugfixes and helping with
-release torrents, mrgoblin for testing RAID, bluetooth, and being a master
-of regex.  Other very honorable mentions go to Alan Hicks, Erik Jan Tromp,
-Karl Magnus Kolstø, Mark Post, 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 another great 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 Andrea and Briah, too!
-
-Have fun!
+to ARM for the Slackware ARM port: https://arm.slackware.com), Vincent Batts
+for making Slackware PAM support a reality, Heinz Wiesinger for working on KDE
+/ Plasma and Qt, LLVM, MariaDB, OpenCL, and really just all kinds of stuff,
+Erik Jan Tromp for help with the pkgtools rewrite and support for parallel
+compression/decompression testing and benchmarking. Willy Sudiarto Raharjo
+for work on slackbuilds.org, MATE, sbopkg, and more. Matteo "ponce" Bernardini
+for countless bugfixes and all the work getting slackbuilds.org ready for this
+new release. Honorable mentions also go to long-time contributors and friends
+of the project including Karl Magnus Kolstø, NetrixTardis, Alan Hicks,
+mrgoblin, and Mark Post. Special thanks to everyone else who reported bugs
+(and/or provided fixes) or helped collaborate on this release in any way.
+The Slackware community stepped up in all kinds of ways this time around,
+especially all my friends on the LinuxQuestions.org Slackware forum.
+Special thanks and sorry to everyone I forgot.
+Thanks also to my family for putting up with all of this. ;-)
 
-Pat Volkerding <volkerdi@slackware.com>
 
+IN MEMORIAM
+-----------
+
+Sadly, we lost a couple of good friends during this development cycle and
+this release is dedicated to them.
+
+Erik "alphageek" Jan Tromp passed away in 2020 after a long illness. He was
+a long-time member of the Slackware core team doing a ton of stuff behind
+the scenes and a master of lesser-known programming languages like Tcl. :-)
+For a long time he lived closer to me geographically than anyone else on
+the core team, but unfortunately with an international border between us
+we never did meet in person. But he was there in chat every day and was a
+good friend to everyone on the team. He is greatly missed. Sorry I didn't
+get 15.0 out in time for you to see it...
+
+My old friend Brett Person also passed away in 2020. Without Brett, it's
+possible that there wouldn't be any Slackware as we know it - he's the one
+who encouraged me to upload it to FTP back in 1993 and served as Slackware's
+original beta-tester. He was long considered a co-founder of this project.
+I knew Brett since the days of the Beggar's Banquet BBS in Fargo back in
+the 80's. When the Slackware Project moved to Walnut Creek CDROM, Brett was
+hired as well, and we spent many hours on the road and sitting next to each
+other representing Slackware at various trade shows. Brett seemed to know
+all kinds of computer luminaries and was an amazing storyteller, always
+with his smooth radio voice. Gonna miss you too, pal.
+
+
+To everyone out there still reading this, thanks. :-)
+Hope to see you again the next time we do this.
+
+Cheers,
+
+Pat Volkerding <volkerdi@slackware.com>