Yes folks, 'tis the season to announce a new release of Slackware. With a shiny new kernel, many package updates, and the newly added ability to install from a Samba share, we bring to you the latest in the stable Slackware 12.x series.

There are those who say that Slackware Linux doesn’t really have a package manager. BAH! I say. It has two package management systems, actually.

No Linux distribution can bundle every package that users might want, so most distros host software repositories from which users can download and install additional applications. Sbopkg is a new ncurses-based utility that helps users build packages from SlackBuilds.org and seamlessly integrates the repository with the operating system.

Package management in OpenSUSE in recent years has had its share of challenges. In OpenSUSE 10.1, the package management was an epic trainwreck. Package management in OpenSUSE 10.3 is as good as that was bad. There are various types of speed improvements. Some of them huge. There is some caching of the repository package info. Progress bars so the user knows what’s going on.

Kongoni GNU/Linux is a Slackware-based, desktop-oriented GNU/Linux distribution and live CD. Its main features include a graphical installer, a Kongoni Integrated Setup System (KISS), and an easy-to-use Ports Installation GUI (PIG). The distribution's package management borrows its main concepts from BSD ports, with an intuitive graphical package installer

I thought of this interesting question the other day while messing around with Slackware 9.0 which was one of the last versions of Slackware to come on a single disk. The goal was to try to take a Slackware 9.0 install to the most recent stable and it was almost accomplished.

Fedora's Pirut is a useful tool for basic software installation and package searches. However, if you really want to take control of package management, you need to get back to basics with yum. Just as, on Debian systems, dpkg is the back end underlying apt-get and graphical tools such as Synaptic, so on RPM systems, yum is the hidden power behind Pirut and the Pup updater.

openSUSE 10.3 is set to contain a new, significantly improved and more mature package management stack by default. ZMD, the package management component causing problems in SUSE Linux 10.1 and to a lesser extent in openSUSE 10.2, has been completely removed and is now replaced by the new libzypp and its tools.

The Slackware team released version 13 of its venerable Linux distribution, now supporting 64-bit computers. Slackware 13 provides "completely reworked" X packages, upgrades to KDE 4.2.4 and Xfce 4.6.1 desktops, a new .txz package format, and support for Ext4 and the GRUB bootloader, says the project.