Nothing unusual, it's just the Slackware way of doing things...

Story: My next project: Goodbye Debian, hello ... Fedora or OpenSUSE?Total Replies: 1
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garymax

Nov 06, 2008
1:49 PM EDT 		From the article:

Quoting:I almost never see new kernels for older Slackware releases. I don't know if that's because they are unnecessary, but with patched kernels rolling into Debian and Ubuntu fairly regularly, I wonder why Slackware does things differently.

I'd run "regular" Slackware, but I had quite a bit of trouble getting X configured, and I'd rather use GNOME than KDE. I know there are GNOME projects for Slackware, but what I'm trying to do is install something that works well, comes together easily and has lots of available packages.


First, Slackware comes with kernels that are "vanilla" so they are not patched very much--if at all. The fact that there are updates to the kernel in Debian and its derivatives is testimony to the fact that Debian-based kernels are heavily patched to accommodate the abstractional overhead present within the Debian family of software.

That is one of the benefits of running Slackware--you get clean kernels which you can patch to eternity and back if you desire. If you want a kernel for the older versions, you go to kernel.org and compile it yourself. Come to think of it, most Slackware users are mature users who know what they want and once their system is set up, they leave it alone and it runs forever. No need to constantly upgrade this or that.

Secondly, Gnome on slackware is provided by third parties but one of them--gnome.slackbuild not only gives one a clean gnome environment, it also provides a clean build environment so that you can build packages for gnome--just like the KDE side allows you to do.

Remember, Slackware gives you the tools. The user is expected to do the job of transforming the system into one that suites the user.

On the other hand, the more the distro does for the end user, the more updates and patches are needed to fix the layers of abstraction that are required to do this.
jdixon

Nov 06, 2008
2:33 PM EDT 		If you really want a newer kernel in Slackware, just download the latest kernel and use (from memory) the make oldconfig configuration option to configure it. Otherwise you compile and install as you would any custom kernel.

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