Slackware

As of November 2015, there have been no announcements from the Slackware team on when any versions of Slackware from 13.0 and up will be EOL.

Slackware is also available for the IBM S/390 architecture in the form of Slack/390 and for the ARM architecture under Slackware ARM (originally known as 'ARMedslack').

Use Slackware family tree DistroWatch shows a decreasing but still substantial interest regarding Slackware.

Currently, there is no official method to track the usage or number of installs of Slackware.

For custom installations or 3rd-party packages, Slackware relies on the user to ensure that the system has all the supporting system libraries and programs required by the program.

Furthermore, Slackware made a switchover from the IDE to the libata subsystem, changing the nomenclature of device nodes for almost all types of disk drives.

Hardware architectures Historically, Slackware concentrated solely on the IA-32 architecture and releases were available as 32-bit only.

In lieu of this, several community-based projects began offering complete GNOME distributions for Slackware such as Ximian and LinuxSalute.

It was originally developed by Piter Punk as an unofficial way to keep Slackware up-to-date.

Name The name "Slackware" stems from the fact that the distribution started as a private side project with no intended commitment.

Repositories Third-party projects may include more recent versions of software or software not provided by Slackware Linux.

Since version 13.0, the Slackware team seems to have core members.

Slackware ISO images for the CD set and the DVD can also be downloaded via BitTorrent or from various FTP and HTTP mirrors.

Slackware packages are tarballs compressed using various methods.

Support Currently, Slackware has no officially stated support term policy.

This build process is nearly identical to the way Slackware's official packages are built.

While slapt-get does provide a framework for dependency resolution, it does not provide dependency resolution for packages included within the Slackware distribution.