Slackware64 -current made public!
 

Posted 2009-05-19
http://www.slackware.com/

History is made......Slackware just keeps getting more and more relevant!

Wow... awesome.

Thank you Pat, Alien_bob and rworkman, and the others who worked on this!

Can't wait to test this baby out!

Wicked-cool! Thank you, Mr. Volkerding, Eric, Robby, and the entire Slackware team! :cool:

Eric is the man for this one.

Eric is the man for this one. :-)

Yes, yes, yes. Thanks for sharing. Love you all guys!

Which mirror has 64-current in place? I just can't to wait to rsync but I will not pull from ftp.slackware.com directly;)

One more question, is there any packages in 32bit-current but not in 64bit-current?

when will this port be available for download?

Give the mirrors a couple of days to pull it in.

I have to wait anyway else I have to pay for the data.

Schweeeeeeeeeeeeettt!!!

Fantastic!!

I just tried to "jump the gun" a little and do an ftp install from:
ftp://slackware.mirrors.tds.net/pub/...t/slackware64/
but it didn't work.

Now how an I supposed to sleep?

They were pretty secret about it. I hadn't heard that it was being worked on.

Absolutely Outstanding!
Thank you very much!

BTW, is it multi-lib or "pure 64"?
:)

Awesome! Thank you Slackware team!

I "think" it's multi-lib.
It has kde3-compat in /extra.
My guess is that it will be similar to Slamd64 which is an outstanding system.

disturbed1:
THANKS-A-BUNCH!!

I got it rollin' in now.

EDIT:
Lets not forget to hit the Slack Store.

It is my understanding that Slackware64 will not ship with 32 bit libraries but will allow for such libraries to be installed after the fact.

Thanks alienBOB for your work on this and making it possible.
And thanks to the rest of the slackware team for your hard work.
Now i'm only waiting for my favorite mirror to sync :)

There's a bit of new stuff in extra/ as well.

PACKAGE NAME: mplayerplug-in-3.55-x86_64-1.txz
PACKAGE LOCATION: ./extra/mplayerplug-in
PACKAGE SIZE (compressed): 180 K
PACKAGE SIZE (uncompressed): 1900 K

PACKAGE NAME: partitionmanager-1.0.0_BETA1-x86_64-1.txz
PACKAGE LOCATION: ./extra/partitionmanager
PACKAGE SIZE (compressed): 1512 K
PACKAGE SIZE (uncompressed): 3400 K
PACKAGE DESCRIPTION:

PACKAGE NAME: recordmydesktop-0.3.8.1-x86_64-2.txz
PACKAGE LOCATION: ./extra/recordmydesktop
PACKAGE SIZE (compressed): 132 K
PACKAGE SIZE (uncompressed): 660 K
PACKAGE DESCRIPTION:

PACKAGE NAME: tightvnc-1.3.9-x86_64-1.txz
PACKAGE LOCATION: ./extra/tightvnc
PACKAGE SIZE (compressed): 748 K
PACKAGE SIZE (uncompressed): 2230 K
PACKAGE DESCRIPTION:

PACKAGE NAME: yasm-0.8.0-x86_64-1.txz
PACKAGE LOCATION: ./extra/yasm
PACKAGE SIZE (compressed): 640 K
PACKAGE SIZE (uncompressed): 4130 K
PACKAGE DESCRIPTION:

Flash plugin is there as well, just not in PACKAGES.TXT

This one work:
rsync -avz -h --progress --del rsync://www.linux.cz/pub/linux/slackware/slackware64-current .

This is pretty sweet. I'm checking out alternatives for my currently broken Arch installation and 64-bit Slack would be quite nice option if it has 32-libs too.

Still have to wait for the Xorg updates to get newer intel driver though, the 2.4 driver just won't work properly.
And I'm not too keen to update whole Xorg by myself to get newer driver.

Anyway, great work on the 64-bit Slack :)

ftp.slackware.no is already synced for those located in the Nordic countries :-)

/me installing slackware64 on the staging server right now - this calls for "home office" today :D

That's great news, many many thanks to everyone who made it possible! Slackware would be falling behind a bit if this happened later, I'm very glad that Slackware will also be the king of the next-generation systems :).

I also want to thank the developers of the unofficial 64-bit ports (such as Slamd64 that I use) for their great effort. They saved the lives of the impatient ones :D and I'm sure their experiences helped make the official switch much smoother.

Yee-Haw! An official 64 bit Slackware at last.

Not that I really need it now but I will be using it with official release if not sooner.

Edited to add profuse thanks to Pat and the team.

Wow! Awesome news!
I'm on Slamd64 at the moment... but I'll definitely be switching now an *official* Slackware 64 is here!
I'm guessing if you need 32 bit libraries (for Google Earth, wine, etc...) it will work fine just installing the 'l' series from Slackware 32?

Multilib support
 

This is the answer I received from Alan_Hicks on irc channel slackware@oftc

Wow, incredible ! This is astounding news ! Thank you very much to all the Slackware maintainers especially Alien Bob (Eric), I think you made a very good decision. I'll be trying it as soon as I can.

EDIT:
How come I didn't hear about this before tho ?

it was kept secret ?

Of course I *will* try it out on one of my test machines - I have a 30GB partition left for this.

But it will be just for testing for now, until we have some idea about compatibility with non-Slackware software.

How about Slackbuilds - will they build on Slackware64?
Any chance of marking them as "works on Slackware64"?

Anyone already installed it and did some benchmarking? :)

They work on slamd64, so they should work on slackware64. Now it kinda makes sense, I bet this was why they were fixing all the slackbuilds to work with 64-bit ... hmmm

Great work!
many thanks to Slackware team!

I'd also wondered why they'd changed the list of compile flags to include 64-bit, but now it makes sense :)

I'm using a slightly modified mirror-slackware-current.sh of Eric's to grab me a DVD iso to try out.

Take a look at the newer SlackBuilds.org template. Many already follow this template, or something close to it. Those that don't you can edit by hand. You'd have to change the arch for each SlackBuild for i486 to x86_64 anyways :)

Slackware64 is just like most 64bit distros. Slightly larger binaries, slightly larger RAM footprint, 10-30% speed up with multimedia apps that use 64bit code. The slightly larger footprint is just that - slightly - gimp-2.6.6-i486-1.txz 9.0 MB gimp-2.6.6-x86_64-1.txz 9.4 MB.

Normal desktop users won't notice much more than the psychosomatic speed gain. The speed comes from applications that can take advantage of SSE, SSE2 and other ASM optimizations. Mainly your multimedia encoding applications, Blender, POV Ray, CAD, and other big number crunchers. Some GCC compile times should be less as well. Compiling MPlayer, and Seamonkey seemed to take less time on 64bit, but I did not time it. Maybe later I will.

Another solid point for 64bit is the capability to handle large data arrays. Besides the normal server stuff (Mysql), even Pan is getting to the point of surpassing the capability of 32bit address space with large newsgroups. Some news providers carry 200-300 days of current binary retention, and over 1000 days text retention.

As far as negatives, if you depend on Wine, Wine64 is not currently stable, this would also include Google's apps that are just encased in a Wine wrapper (Google Earth, Picasa). Win32codecs for mplayer use 32bit Windows dll files. With a multi lib system you can run these in 32bit user space.

At least we now have 64bit Flash, and better 64bit JRE.

Slackware is best team i known!

Thank you!

You have no idea how hard that was with some of the discussions that went on here ;)

I can imagine, either way I wasn't very aware of it at all. There were some hints like stated above, but I thought they did that just to provide better support for the other 64-bit slackware-based distros, not for a secret slackware64. So, it worked quite well I think.

My thanks also.

Alien Bob's mirror-slackware-current.sh script works to download it if you modify this line SLACKRELEASE="slackware-${RELEASE}" by adding a 64 like this SLACKRELEASE="slackware64-${RELEASE}"

samac

This is excelent news, released just in time. I currently don't have the hardware to test it, but I'll code support for the 64-bit variant in slackroll as soon as I get home and receive some confirmations on how the tree is supposed to work.

Congratulations to the Slackware team and Eric Hameleers in particular!

Now we know why gaining 30-40% compression on packages was useful. :-)
Hope Fred Emmott won't be too pissed off...

Now, I know what I'm going to do the this week-end...

Thanks guys!!!

I'm very excited over this, I've been wanting to use Slackware again for a long time. Funny thing is, I just downloaded Slackware 32-bit & Slamd64 to try them out again. Now, I'm downloading the iso for Slackware 64 that someone put up on linuxtracker.org

Yeah, that's probably another clue.

I don't think Fred will be at all displeased, why should he be ? This is what he wanted, a 64-bit slackware which he implemented at first, and now it's official.

Awesome! :)
Very much appreciated.

If you keep track of the SlackBuilds or Changelog in current, you will get some clues. There are "x86_64" flags in SlackBuilds.(some even have "arm" flag, see source/x/scim/scim.SlackBuild) Sometime ago, grub patched for boot 64bit kernel. So...

I'm still going to use Blue White!!! J/K

What would be the best way to upgrade from a Slack-current system to a Slack64-current one?
Upgrade the packages in no particular order? glibc-so and pkgtools first? Install then remove?

Sorry I had to make sure of a few things, that I wasn't dreaming, and that I was not drunk. I am sober, though I guess the shock of the news has not quite hit yet. This is incredible news, and the fact that 32-bit Slackware will be maintained alongside the official 64 bit... Wow.







64-bit slackware?! NO WAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I can't believe it!!!!!!!!!!


aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhH!!!!!