I’ve had a few chats lately, either through email, in our forums and in IRC about the kernels that we’re including with our 32-bit releases and I thought it would be best if I explained things a bit. First of all, 32-bit Slackware ships with two different kernels. The first one, which is the most used of the two is an i686 optimized, PAE enabled, SMP capable kernel. The second one is an i486 optimized, non-PAE, non-SMP capable kernel.

We had a real problem with ktsuss/gksu while developing for 14.1. It seems that newer versions of the shadow package, and certainly the one that is included in Slackware 14.1, don’t allow su to be executed in any other way except directly from a terminal. That means that su cannot be executed as a subprocess from inside ktsuss or the original gksu anymore and these become effectively useless. This is a critical issue for us, because if we don’t fix it, almost nothing in the System part of the menu would actually work.

That is a question that I had in my mind for a while. At some point I had also done the actual counting, so I had an idea, but I never wrote anything down. There are many people that believe that a derivative distribution only just leeches their parent distribution, maybe changing the default wallpaper or a couple of settings here and there and making a release. I know for a fact that some people that have never tried Salix (or have tried Salix but never Slackware itself) even think the same for Salix.

As many might have noticed, we now have a new main website design! Since the Salix project was started, the main website was actually a part of our wiki, which is using the MediaWiki engine. That had one main advantage, which at that time seemed enough to justify that choice; we would use a single CMS to manage both our wiki and our main page. So, we created a custom MediaWiki theme that would look good as a main project page and as a wiki.