Are new releases of Slackware newsworthy?

From the Slashdot RSS feed, I saw "Slackware 12.2 Released", and it made me wonder if this is actually newsworthy. Granted, Slackware was technically the first Linux distribution I ever installed. It came with a "Linux for Dummies" book I bought in 1997, when I was starting to become more interested in doing more with computers than basic every day tasks (email, web surfing, word processing, games). However, my experience with Slackware was short lived because I was still living at home, and my parents used AOL for Internet access.

Nowadays, it seems Slackware is revered by older users, but isn't used. To me, it falls into the same area as using the Eudora mail client, or until recently, Netscape web browser. It seems Ubuntu (and its variants) and Fedora dominate the Linux desktop, with a smattering of Debian users; and CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Ubuntu (somewhat surprising to me), with some Gentoo diehards, leading the Linux servers. I think this may be the least used "mainstream" *NIX distribution available. Except for nostalgia, what reasons do users install Slackware for?

Not that I'm discouraging further development of Slackware, or trying to insult their users. I'm just questioning their relevance in today's IT news, unless it's just a slow news day :)

Red Hat Satellite 5.2 released

In an earlier post, I mentioned I was unable to fit Red Hat Satellite or Fedora Spacewalk into our infrastructure. The previous version of Red Hat Satellite required Oracle 9i (we run 10g), and Spacewalk requires a derivative of RHEL/CentOS 5 (our standard is version 4). I saw this release today by Red Hat announcing Satellite version 5.2. It now supports Oracle 10g, and still runs on RHEL4 or RHEL5. Too bad everyone is hurting now and pulling the purse strings on their budgets. It would be tough for me to ask for a RHEL AS4 and a Satellite 5.2 license now.

I wonder how hard it would be to backport Spacewalk to RHEL4?

Is Usenet Dead?

I may have missed the countless articles, Slashdot posts, etc. (would anyone be surprised, or as one of my colleagues keeps saying to me, "OLD!"). For some reason (okay, I was looking up music album easter eggs), I came across a link to an alt.music group and made me think of the "good old days" when customers would ask UUNET to basically max out their T1/T3 with Usenet newsfeeds. I started digging around, and noticed aside from the occasional spam posts, newsgroups seem to be dead.

Did everything now go to Wikis, blogs, collaborative web groups (i.e. Yahoo! Groups), and BitTorrents (R.I.P. alt.binaries); and I just didn't notice?