Saturday, August 29, 2009

Slackware 13.0 is released!

After one of the most intensive periods of development in Slackware's history, the long awaited stable release of Slackware 13.0 is ready. This release brings with it many major changes since Slackware 12.2, including a completely reworked collection of X packages (a configuration file for X is no longer needed in most cases), major upgrades to the desktop environments (KDE version 4.2.4 and Xfce version 4.6.1), a new .txz package format with much better compression, and other upgrades all around -- to the development system, network services, libraries, and major applications like Firefox and Thunderbird. We think you'll agree that this version of Slackware was worth the wait. Also, this is the first release of Slackware with native support for the 64-bit x86_64 architecture! Major kudos to Eric Hameleers for all of his work, especially on the 64-bit port.

More details may by found in the official announcement and in the release notes.

Please consider supporting the Slackware project by picking up a copy of the Slackware 13.0 release from the Slackware Store. The discs are off to replication, but we're accepting pre-orders for the official 6 CD set and the DVD. The CD set is the 32-bit x86 release, while the DVD is a special edition dual-sided disc with the 32-bit x86 release on one side and the 64-bit x86_64 release on the other. And, we still have T-shirts and other Slackware stuff there, so have a look around. Thanks to our subscribers and supporters for keeping Slackware going all these years.

Thanks are again due to the Slackware crew, the developers of slackbuilds.org, the community on linuxquestions.org, Slackware IRC channels, and everyone else who helped out with this release.

Have fun, and enjoy the new stable release!

Pat and the Slackware crew

Source: http://www.slackware.com

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Enabling color support of "ls" in Bash

I have noticed that executing ls command in "Terminal" and "Xterm" does not give me colorful output as in "Konsole". To get colorful output in these X terminals in bash, add below lines to your ~/.bashrc file and restart X terminal.

# enable color support of ls and add handy aliases
if [ "$TERM" != "dumb" ]; then
eval "`dircolors -b`"
alias ls='ls --color=auto'
alias dir='ls --color=auto --format=vertical'
alias vdir='ls --color=auto --format=long'

fi

To enable the same function for your root shell, add above lines to /root/.bashrc file.