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.

MATE 1.8 has been released in source code form by its developers about 3 weeks ago and I have been working on packages for Salix for about as long. The good news is that I think I’m almost done! So, expect MATE 1.8 packages to hit the repos sometime in the following days. We didn’t have any MATE release for Salix 14.0, but it looks like we are going to have one for 14.

We’ve been working on this for a while and were hoping to have it ready by the time 14.1 is released and it seems that we managed to make it! You can now find the new guide linked from our main website. The startup guide was left with no updates since the 13.37 release, so it was getting a bit old. It was still mostly OK, but there were things that were out of date.

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.