A Display Manager is the application that provides a graphic user interface (GUI) that is displayed at the end of the boot process and lets the user authenticate themselves by providing their username and password, before entering their preferred X11 session, for example Xfce, KDE, fluxbox, etc. Up until Salix 14.2, we’ve been using a very old version of GDM as the default display manager. Actually we’ve been using the same major version of GDM, which is 2.

Unfortunately, we’re having a huge problem with spammers in our forums. Most of the users that register are actually spammers. This has been going on for a while too. About a year ago (or maybe more than that? I’m not sure), we moved to using Google’s “I am not a robot” checkbox reCAPTCHA. This is supposed to be the best countermeasure against bots. Before doing that, spammers were also a big problem.

I wanted to do this for a long time. The old blog site at blogspot was always supposed to be something temporary. It lasted five years… I never really liked the look of the old blog site that much. And there weren’t that many options to customize it in the first place. The WYSIWYG editor was ugly and difficult to work with. And it was hard to prepare content and post it later.

You might have noticed that just before the Salix Xfce 14.2RC1 release a new repository, named extra-14.2 has appeared in our servers. This has been enabled by default in the 14.2RC1 and 14.2RC2 releases and will be also available in the final 14.2 release. This new repository is present for both i486 and x86_64 architectures and its purpose it to include packages built from SlackBuilds found at slackbuilds.org. At this moment, it’s not that full, only about 20 packages are included in it.

We have been mirroring the slackbuilds.org (SBo) repository and at the same time applying slight changes to it for some time now. These changes are essential to Salix, for a few reasons. First of all, the SBo maintainers have decided that they will only list SlackBuild dependencies only if these are not part of a Slackware full installation. While this may be a decision that is fine for Slackware itself, since they don’t offer any kind of support for users doing anything other than a full Slackware installation, it’s generally not good for Salix, since a Salix installation of any edition, is slimmer than a full Slackware installation, by far.