Slackware ARM v14.1 (32-bit soft float) is now End of Life. Please upgrade to v14.2 (32-bit soft float) for continued security updates.
Hello
The 32-bit hard float port is complete and available now in the "current" branch!
Thanks to everyone who has donated - much appreciated form of recognition and encouragement (particularly last week when I hit tool chain problems).
The community support (RPi for example) won't be available immediately, so you'll need to have patience whilst those people update their images, documentation and so on.
Have fun!
Thanks, Stuart
Hello
The 32-bit hard float port is almost complete. I'll probably push it out to the FTP site in September unless the auto builder completes within the next couple of weeks, and I'm satisfied with the tests.
The plan is to maintain in the same fashion as the soft float port: a small set of "officially supported" devices (currently it's what the soft float port had, minus kirkwood (so Trimslice, Banana Pi and QEMU)), and the community will continue to support "Device du jour".
OS maintenance will be the same as the soft float port: the last stable release plus between 4-6 months support for the previous stable release (so for example 14.1 would be maintained for 4-6 months after 14.2 is released), ad infinitum.
I'll probably add support for new devices that look like nice toys as time and money permits: I have Orange PI One (Allwinner A20 - same SoC as the Banana Pi) and Orange Pi H3 versions that the OrangePi company sent as samples. I started playing with the A20 version today, and once the H3 support hits the mainstream kernel, I'll look in to that.
I have some plans to further automate the build and maintenance process so that I can continue to maintain it, but more efficiently than with the soft float port.
The OS is built for armv7 minimum target. The main C flags are:
-march=armv7-a -mfpu=vfpv3-d16 -mfloat-abi=hard
If you would like to donate to this project, please sponsor it.
Thanks, Stuart
The Slackware ARM -current tree has been removed to make way for the 32-bit hardware floating point port.
The new port has already been boot strapped and was installed using the regular Slackware installer, and the OS booted on only the 2nd attempt. Almost all of the packages have been built already in the initial build pass, with minimal changes required from the body of work that comprises the soft float port.
I have spent some time improving the automation around the build process to allow me to continue working on the project, and the build systems are natively (with distcc) churning through several passes of building each package in a multi stage build approach.
Wed Jul 20 14:43:12 UTC 2016
*** Building package d/ruby [ 206 of 715 ( build pass 1 of 5 ) ] ***
Failed count : 12 (1%) [ recently: n/iptables , n/iftop , n/ebtables , n/autofs , n/NetworkManager ]
Success count: 193 (26%) [ recently: d/yasm , d/swig , d/subversion , d/strace , d/scons ]
I hope to release it to the public within the next couple of months.
Slackware ARM (soft float) 14.2 is released!
After a long development cycle (including many betas and release candidates to get everything just exactly perfect) we're pleased to announce the availability of the new stable release. You'll find updates throughout the system, with the latest development tools and recent versions of applications, window managers, desktop environments, and utilities. The Linux kernel is updated to version 4.4.14 (part of the 4.4.x kernel series that will be getting long-term support from the kernel developers). We've brought together the best of these and other modern components and worked our magic on them. If you've used Slackware before, you'll find the system feels like home.
Need help? Check out our documentation site, docs.slackware.com. Stop by and share your knowledge!
Thanks to all of those who were involved - including the Slackware core team and the community that has come together around Slackware ARM. Thanks also to all of those of you who have helped extensively on some tricky problems in previous releases, upon and from which 14.2 has evolved.
Thanks to those who have contributed to the Slackware ARM Community.
Slackware ARM 14.2 is available immediately.
To download the release, see the Get Slack page. The mini root filesystem for v14.2 is also available immediately for machines for which the regular Slackware installer is unavailable.If you use Slackware on x86/x86_64 and would also like to support the parent project, please help support the project through subscriptions to the DVD/CD media, and by purchasing goodies from the Slackware store.
Slackware ARM also accepts donations directly through PayPal donations.