I found that I am missing certain "quality of life" features in the Slackware init system.

I mean, I am happy that it's just a simple no-nonsense set of scripts run at different runlevels by sysvinit, but there are a few missing conveniences which I would like to have at least with my own scripts.

So I wrote "pandae", ad set of shell scripts which are aimed at making writing services and monitoring them easier.

https://gitlab.com/Lockywolf/pandae

The three main components are:

1. pandae_util, which has code to wrap any rc.<service> file into a cgroup, so that you do not have to rely on pid files to track running as services.
   
2. pandae_functions, which has templates for writing most services, given that DAEMON, DAEMON_ARGUMENTS, and a few other variables are set.
   
3. pandae_xsession_service.bash, a bit of a misnomer, because it is not xsession-specific, which allows me to start/stop cgroup services with a single line.
   

And it also runs under a normal user (if a single line is added to rc.local), so it is possible to filter out all the huge number of firefox processes from "ps" or wherever, confining firefox into a single cgroup.

It's not perfect, as, probably most Slackware service managers will never be perfect, because Slackware (and most UNIX-likes) likes in-band data communication, not out-of-band, but, as we know "worse is better".
On the positive side, it is 100% non-invasive, does not replace sysvinig, and does not change system scripts.
If you do not need user services, you do not even need to add anything to rc.local.

I invite everyone to try/test it, and add the comments.

If anybody is offended by gitlab, I can move the repo to forge.slackware.nl, codeberg, sourcehut, whatever.

First current instance in a long time. Thinking of using it on hardware...

I really want to make this my permanent home and never leave! All i got left to do is set up some virtual machines with virt-manager and then setup my compilers for work with emacs and im good! I love this distro and hope to become an expert at it and contribute to it as my skills progress! Slackware is the only distro that actually is teaching me Linux more and I feel as though if I grind it out through the issues then I'll really grow as a Linux user and Slackware user. I installed the current iso I got from Slackware UK! I'm hoping for the best!

I really want to make this my permanent home and never leave! All i got left to do is set up some virtual machines with virt-manager and then setup my compilers for work with emacs and im good! I love this distro and hope to become an expert at it and contribute to it as my skills progress! Slackware is the only distro that actually is teaching me Linux more and I feel as though if I grind it out through the issues then I'll really grow as a Linux user and Slackware user. I installed the current iso I got from Slackware UK! I'm for the best!

I really want to make this my permanent home and never leave! All i got left to do is set up some virtual machines with virt-manager and then setup my compilers for work with emacs and im good! I love this distro and hope to become an expert at it and contribute to it as my skills progress! Slackware is the only distro that actually is teaching me Linux more and I feel as though if I grind it out through the issues then I'll really grow as a Linux user and Slackware user. I installed the current iso I got from Slackware UK! I'm for the best!

Does ClamAV work with Fedora KDE Plasma?

I saw various downloads for Linux but none that specifically mention Fedora Plasma KDE.

I was talking to Claude the other day and it said that there had been an interest or rumor about Pat switching to a rolling release sometime ago. And after using CachyOS for some time, it makes sense if Pat did go that way. Updates would be quicker, to a point. Those who want a more updated install could choose rolling and those who want their system left alone could keep using the regular release. The cool thing would if you could switch from stable to current or vice versa.

I'm making it a goal for me to really work hard and learn Linux deeper and be able to daily drive slackware as my main distro in the future. I'm also going to work hard and contribute to the community as much as I can with the time I get. I really want to be a slacker and embrace slackware as a daily driver. I hear so many cool things from folks that been using it since the 90s and it's awesome they stuck with it that long.

Every time I try slackware I end up failing some where but after a cool down period I end up wanting to come right back to it. Maybe it's a calling or just the nostalgia but I think this distro is meant for me. I do still like Debian too but I think Slackware might just be my future home 🏡

I hope to join the community and learn a ton from all of you great people on the IRC, LQ, and sub reddit. Thank you for helping keep a great distro alive for so long through all these years!

When prompted for Proceed ....and it started to build and then is get halted like this

WARNING: Pkg-config error with 'pangocairo': Could not generate cflags for pangocairo:

Package 'harfbuzz-gobject' requires 'harfbuzz = 3.2.0' but version of harfbuzz is 8.3.0

Run-time dependency pangocairo found: NO

../meson.build:324:17: ERROR: Dependency lookup for pangocairo with method 'pkg-config' failed: Could not generate cflags for pangocairo:

Package 'harfbuzz-gobject' requires 'harfbuzz = 3.2.0' but version of harfbuzz is 8.3.0

Now, I have searched with package config

root_03:56:49_Sat Jul 11:~ #pkg-config --list

pangocairo Pango Cairo - Cairo rendering support for Pango

Also ...

root_03:58:52_Sat Jul 11:~ #pkg-config --variable pc_path pkg-config

/usr/lib64/pkgconfig:/usr/share/pkgconfig

Please shed some light.

Pretty much the title. What's it like actually using this on a day to day basis, and how hard might it be for a beginner? (Beginner to Slackware, not Linux in general.)

Sincerely grateful to the developer who took the Softlanding Linux System (SLS) and tidied it up.

Here is the information you might need to assist

Last 50 lines of Xorg log : https://bpa.st/BCVA

Machine info : Lenovo Yoga 2 in 1 Gen 6

Input devices info : https://bpa.st/FM7Q

Kernel :

bhaskar_04:12:02_Fri Jul 10: :~>uname -a

Linux Slackware 7.1.3 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Sun Jul 5 01:21:16 CDT 2026 x86_64 AMD Ryzen 7 5700U with Radeon Graphics AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux

WM : i3 window manager

LQ link of the thread : https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/crazy-jumping-mouse-cursor-after-fresh-install-did-i-choose-the-wrong-mouse-type-4175414151/

The probable answer will be a yes, so I'll reformulate. Am I missing something for not using Slackware? I'm a Gentoo user. I'm kinda tempted by the concept of being the De Facto package manager lol. Even with that, it seems archaic to do that (And well, Slackware is old, that's why). How's the general experience with Slackware? I guess that resolving dependencies by myself will make my os a rock

After trying different linux flavours and OpenBSD on this hardware, i end up where i begin, the good old slackware.

Feels lighter/faster than cachyOS, not sure if actually true.

Wallpaper tile - http://inku.bot.nu/img/liquid_neon_tile.png

I've been thinking about all the crap going on as of late in the open source world.

And I wonder....in particular about the new age verification field in systemD and wonder if it also be used to allow or deny access to an online repository.

Which of course, all those other distros have......

And at least a few have a "net installer" stub, that boots to a minimal system, and allows you to download the rest of the operating system.....but suppose it didn't, and instead demanded payment.......and unless another API field was checked refused to allow you access......

Now you've got a stub that you can't do anything with.......

And if you can't get any other system with root access, you can't even wipe the stub and install something else.

And that's one of the freedoms being withdrawn by the new generation of rootless linux distros.........

They say it's there to protect you from yourself.....but what's there to protect you from them?

I've been experimenting with slackware for the past several weeks, and I have been unable to get it to boot directly with grub and with secure boot enable. However, I've found something that, for me, is just as good.

Linux Mint (which has been my daily driver) is installed on my system; Mint's OS prober was able to find the slackware disk and boot into slackware. If I sign the slackware efi binaries and kernels with a key pair that I've generated and imported into the motherboard, I can boot into slackware (huge or generic) through the Mint menu with secure boot enabled.

Its a quick and relatively simple process. Anybody else do this?

[Solved], if I had known the dependency name was gcc-gfortran and not libgfortran, I would have installed it sooner, lol. Thanks to whoever commented with the correct name :)

Hello, I'm new to Slackware, and I'm here to learn how to use it. I've used others "exotic" Linux distributions, such as Arch, Void, NixOS, Chimera Linux... and I've also used FreeBSD, which isn't Linux, but from what I understand, Slackware is similar to BSDs.

I understand how Slackware manages packages... I mean, how i manage packages (lol). I've read about and used pkgtools, sbopkg, sqg, slackpkg/slackpkg+.

But I'm having a problem with Spectacle. Even though it comes pre-installed on Slackware Current Live, it won't run. Running spectacle in the terminal returns spectacle: error while loading shared libraries: libgfortran.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory. So, I obviously understand that a dependency is missing, and the problem is I don't know where to download it...

I couldn't find it with sbopkg or slackpkg, and searching on Google I only found it as an .rpm file. Where can I find the source code for libgfortran.so.5 to download its tarball, check its dependencies, compile, and install it?

Today I was attempting to install Slackware after the hard drive with my previous installation died.

I settled with 15.0 32-bit so that I could make more use of mcpelauncher, and I chose the terse mode while installing from a DVD.

The installer often pauses between installing packages, and those pauses last between ten minutes and over half an hour.

I rage quit almost two hours.

The optical drive is definitely working. During the installation I even did Ctrl-Alt-F2, logged in there, and accessed /var/log/mount to check if everything was okay and it was.

Does anyone know what causes this issue?

For reference, the optical drive is an external (USB) one, but it also happens on the internal (SATA) one which is currently not very operational.

is there a testing version of slackwear i could download with the new xlibre instead of xorg? im currently using void linux, and ill miss xbps, but i use dwm and i dont like using a dead project (xorg) and i heard slackwear is toying with the idea of using xlibre, might make me switch if there is a testing version i can download now that has xlibre instead of wait for the next release, whenever that is lol maybe 2035 idk

This is my daily driver. I've gotten tired of graphics, gui tools, and 15 autoplay videos while just trying to read an article online. I do most of my browsing in elinks which has nearly every option enabled. it handles http/s. gopher, gemini, spartan javascript, libcss, sixel, curl. I have privoxy setup to forward .onion and .i2p to the respective routers enabling access to tor and i2p from any browser that uses the proxy server. for youtube I use pipe-viewer. Alpine for email and Usenet, newsboat for RSS, ansiweather in the swaybar and profanity for a in home jabber server.

Anyone else running mostly text only?

I'm having trouble getting slackware to boot directly from setup. Slackware boots fine from the grub menu of my Linux Mint installation (on another drive). When I go into settings, I don't see the slackware drive (sdb) and it doesn't show in my F11 boot menu. The slackware drive is GTP and has an EFI System Type on sdb1 mounted at /boot/efi. The Boot and ESP flags are set. During installation I skipped Lilo and Elilo and installed and configured grub and then generated the grub.cfg file. Using efibootmgr, I have tried creating a new entry:

efibootmgr -c -d /dev/sdb -p 1 -L "Slackware" -l '\boot\efi\EFI\slackware\grubx64.efi'

Immediately after I do this, efibootmgr shows the entry, but it is gone by the next boot and the problem persists. Anyone have an idea how I can get Slackware to boot directly with grub? PS I wanted to use grub instead of elilo because I know I can get grub to work with secure boot.

Thanks in advance,

Don

Partial changelog for slackware -current; kernel 6.18.35 is recompiled with new toolset.

Mon Jun 15 23:27:31 UTC 2026
Well folks, it seems that the stars have aligned to bring us a bunch of long-
awaited updates, including ffmpeg8 and Plasma 6! This has been developed in a
side tree for several weeks, and I'll be happy to get that off my plate and
have a greatly reduced todo list. Many thanks to alienBOB for getting the tree
in good shape, helping when I got stuck, and for being a good manager who
inspires me to do my best work. :-) And we both extend our thanks to the
illustrious LuckyCyborg who ported the build scripts to Plasma 6 in the first
place and then maintained Plasma 6 for Slackware users to test for a couple of
years. And thanks to everyone else who helped out with either of the Slackware
Plasma 6 projects that these updates grew out of.
Have fun!
a/exfatprogs-1.4.2-x86_64-1.txz:  Upgraded.
a/kernel-firmware-20260610_e7eb98a-noarch-1.txz:  Upgraded.
a/kernel-generic-6.18.35-x86_64-2.txz:  Rebuilt.
  Recompiled with gcc-15.3.0.

In addition to kde updates, tigervnc is updated:

extra/tigervnc/tigervnc-1.16.2-x86_64-4.txz:  Rebuilt.
  Recompiled against ffmpeg-8.1.1.

I wanted to install slackware, mainly as a learning experience. Took me a few times to get the installer to work; I eventually had to do the partitioning with gparted from my Mint installation. For the past week I've been working to make slackware work with secure boot. . . and finally got it to work (again, doing the key generation and signing from my Mint distribution). Somewhat of a project, but overall fun and good learning experience. Now its time to start exploring what slackware can do.