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 It was still mostly OK, but there were things that were out of date.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.

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.