Slack Live 1.1.0, Licensing History, Reviving PCs
The top story in Linux news today was the release of Slackware Linux 1.1.0 featuring the latest Slackware-current and Plasma 5.6.5. Elsewhere, Christopher Tozzi penned a history of Open Source licenses and the Free Software Foundation published their first in a series of licensing resource guides. Douglas DeMaio blogged some of the latest news from Tumbleweed and Swapnil Bhartiya rounded up the best lightweight distros for your older PC.
Eric Hameleers announced the release of Slackware Live Edition 1.1.0 based on Slackware-current dated Wednesday morning. Slackware-current received several updates since our last report including upgraded GParted, Vim, CUPS, and Git. Slackware Live 1.1.0 shipped with KDE Plasma 5.6.5 and features a few new boot options. See the announcement for a full list of mirrors. Hameleers also released KDE Frameworks 5.23.0, Plasma 5.6.5 and Applications 16.04.2 packages for stock Slackware-current.
Christopher Tozzi today posted an article discussing the birth and early adoption of Open Source licenses including Linus Torvalds' decision to use the GPL for Linux. The GPL had been released in 1989 and became the license for Linux with version 0.12 in 1992. In related news, the Free Software Foundation today posted a quick guide to the GPLv3 with resources and further reading. This is the first of a series.
Bryan Lunduke recently wrote, "Expecting every company, community or organization to spend time and money supporting these repositories indefinitely is just plain crazy. The core problem isn’t that an organization doesn’t have the resources to keep a repository online. The problem is in the package repository model itself."
He explained that every system relying upon a repository of software is "rapidly approaching [its] end of life." Perhaps the company or project disbands and you're left with a system that no longer receives updates and, worse, sooner or later the software repositories disappear. He makes a couple of suggestions before advocating something similar to Appimage - "where you can download and run a single file that contains the software and all of its dependencies." Lunduke article coincidently hit around the same time Canonical's universal Snap announcement that more than one wrote is the new way software will be delivered in Linux.
In other news:
* Give New Life to Old PCs with Linux
* Linux Lite 3.0 Is a Powerhouse Distro in Disguise
* Windows 10 killed it; Linux saved it: A netbook saved