Sorry to do this here, but I know there are a couple people that seem
to have their fingers on the pulse of Slackware news and development.
I saw that 10.2 went beta a little while ago
http://linux.softpedia.com/get/System/Operating-Systems/Linux-Distributions/Slackware-425.shtml
- any news on a stable release date?  I just got a new (well, used
technically) laptop and I hate it when I throw Linux on it only to see
a new distro released weeks later.

I'm not thrilled about the switch to KDE, I've been using dropline
gnome for slackware, but I've heard that Freerock Gnome
http://gsb.freerock.org/ is probably a better way to go since it
doesn't install PAM and replace Xorg.  Any thoughts?

Josh