Slackware 14.2 Beta Released, Now Uses PulseAudio

Patrick Volkerding is kicking off 2016 by announcing the first beta release of Slackware 14.2.

First off, Slackware 14.2 has finally begun using PulseAudio. Years after other Linux distributions switched to PulseAudio, the day has come for Slackware since they upgraded to BlueZ 5. With BlueZ 5, the ALSA support has been dropped and now presents a hard dependency on PulseAudio. From there, the project basically had to make the switch.

Patrick noted, "After several iterations here refining the foundation packages and recompiling and tweaking other packages to use PulseAudio, it's working well and you'll likely not notice much of a change. But if you're using Bluetooth audio, or needing to direct audio through HDMI, you'll probably find it a lot easier to accomplish that. Best of all, we're finally a modern, relevant Linux distro! ;-)"

Slckware 14.2 Beta ships with the Linux 4.4 LTS kernel, many new packages were added, the AMDGPU X.Org driver is now present, GCC 5.3 is now the default compiler, eudev has replaced udev, and there are many other changes. Slackware continues to ignore systemd.

More details on the Slackware 14.2 beta can be found via Slackware.com.