Alien Pastures

Question to the readers of this blog who are also users of my SlackBuild scripts…

Who would be interested to see 64bit versions of the packages I have in my repository? Currently I have built and tested “x86_64” packages for ffmpeg, flashplayer-plugin, fontforge, gcc34, mozilla-nss, mplayer, mplayerplug-in, qemu, recordmydesktop, sshfs-fuse, tightvnc, vlc and yasm. Some are simply re-using my unmodified SlackBuild scripts but some were painful to get right on x86_64.

I am a bit hesitant to add them to the repository, (1) because there is no 64bit Slackware and (2) it would mean again higher storage requirements which force me to remove packages for Slackware 11 and older.

The packages will work on slamd64, and probably on bluewhite64 too. I kept the lib64 approach dictated by the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (fhs) which is what slamd64 uses as well.

I would appreciate if you leave a comment- whatever your opinion.

Cheers, Eric

And out of the clear sky, a message appeared:

Well folks, it's that time to announce a new stable Slackware
release again.
So, without further ado, announcing Slackware version 12.2! 

This release cycle was a relatively short one, and is intended as the final version which ships with KDE3. Still, the changes are numerous, as you can find out on the official announcement page. All major applications have been updated to their latest stable versions, and with X.Org we have gone as far as we could without compromising system stability. No PAM, folks :-) and don’t count on that appearing any time soon.

The ISO images for 12.2 can be obtained through bittorrent and some of the Slackware mirrors will by now also have these ISO images for download. Still, I ask everyone who can spare the money and wishes Slackware a long life, to buy a DVD or CD set at the Store, or make a donation there. They have cool t-shirts too!

Our community site slackbuilds.org was expanded with a quality-tested repository of SlackBuild scripts that work flawlessly on Slackware 12.2. Again, we were able to open the expanded respository at the same time Slackware 12.2 was released :-) Many thanks to all the contributors who helped us verifying their scripts… our collection has grown tremendously.

A heartfelt touch to the release event: Pat pulled the trigger that made Slackware 12.2 go live at exactly midnight, december 11th (local dutch time). This moment marked the birthday of my father, who passed away earlier this year.

I hope you all enjoy the new Slackware. If you find any weirdness or think you ran into a bug, please visit the Slackware forum at LinuxQuestions.org and post your problems or findings there. Several members of the Slackware team frequent that place.

Cheers, Eric

The Slackware ChangeLog.txt is full of frenzied activity these days. It may be obvious that the next official release is just around the corner. I was taken by surprise when I saw the ChangeLog entry of Mon Dec 8 22:31:55 CST 2008:

isolinux/initrd.img:  Added missing mount.nfs.
       Added INSSMB, an installer script to use a Samba source.
       Thanks to Eric Hameleers.

I had not expected to see the Samba network installation choice appear in this release… I wrote this fairly recently and it was targeted to be added only after 12.2 was officially released. Anyway, it is nice to see it appear now. All you need to use it, is a Samba share (using a Samba or even a Windows server) that does not require authentication.

This is how that looks when you are installing Slackware 12.2:

Slackware 12.2 network install options

Hope you all like it! It will certainly make life easier for those who only have a Windows server to store the Slackware directory tree on.

A related note:

At the same time, we (the http://slackbuilds.org admin team) are working hard behind the screens to get all the SlackBuild scripts in our “12.1″ repository validated for the new 12.2 release. We have asked all maintainers to test their own contributions when possible, and for those who do not have a slackware-current system available, we will do the validation ourselves. The http://slackbuilds.org web site is already prepared, so the update should be fast and painless.

Cheers, Eric

You may not have noticed yet, but the submission page at SlackBuilds.org (aka SBo) has changed:

Pending the release of Slackware 12.2, the site admins have temporarily disabled the submission form in order to prepare things on our end for 12.2.

This does not mean that a Slackware 12.2 is imminent. Only Patrick knows when the next release of Slackware will become available. But, it may be obvious that slackware-current is reaching a point where further change can be considered as polishing and fine-tuning.

The SlackBuilds.org repository has grown tremendously, and we need to give the script maintainers some time to test their submissions on the next Slackware. What we now have available in the slackware-current package tree is good enough to start testing and debugging the repository scripts.

Subsequently, the admins need to prepare the site’s database for Slackware 12.2 and make sure that only those submissions are tagged “verified for 12.2″ of which we are sure they have been tested and reported OK. This will take some time as well, and we are proud of the fact that we managed to launch our updated SBo repository within hours from the Slackware 12.0 and 12.1 releases :-) We want to continue this track record.

I want to thank all SlackBuild maintainers for their submissions, and all users of the SBo site for their trust. When we started this project I never expected that it would see the popularity it has now.

Be sure to check out Chess Griffin’s “sbopkg” script which is an easy to use front-end to our SlackBuild script repository.
Have fun! Eric

Sjoerd at Greenpeace

Sjoerd Jongens met with an accident in the early morning of wednesday november 12th, 2008. He suffered severe head injuries - possibly caused by a stroke which resulted in a fall off his bike.

He did not awake from his coma. Sjoerd passed away in the night of that same wednesday.

I worked with Sjoerd for five years when I was a hired Linux consultant at Greenpeace International. Sjoerd was the driving force behind the design and maintenance of Greenpeace’s global network infrastructure. The Greenpeace archive has a nice timeline of this: http://archive.greenpeace.org/history.html He was a Linux enthousiast and a man of principles (easily mistaken for ‘grumpiness’ if you did not know him well enough). After I ended my assignment at Greenpeace we stayed in touch and had regular conversations about Linux, Greenpeace and Australia (the country where he intended to spend the last part of his life).

It is a sad day today. Sjoerd, it is awful to see you go like this. This page will remain so that you are remembered. The Greenpeace weblog honors him as well - go read it.

My thoughts are with his family.

Eric

What is the alien listening at - when it is the midnight hour?

Simple: I never know in advance.

At home I run a Slackware Linux server on which I have installed Icecast. Icecast is a Shoutcast-compatible (and Open Source) multimedia streaming server. In other words, my server outputs a continuous stream of music (exactly like Internet Radio stations work), which I can tune into with my desktop computer.

I have digitized a great deal of my music collection and Icecast enables me to listen to these songs - any mediaplayer that understands ShoutCast streams is able to tune in. On Linux I use XMMS, sometimes Audacious, but Amarok and even mpg123 work just as well. On the Windows computer in the living room I like WinAmp most.

Now, Icecast is nothing special, but I added a playlist manager which randomly selects songs from my collection (unless I select songs from the database myself). Every new song that plays over the speakers is a surprise :-)

And how does that playlist look in the management console?

…

I hope you find inspiration in this shortlist. Surely it shows my age :-)

Cheers, Eric

O yeah… about the title for this post. Me and my flatmates once held a big party in our student flat, and my choice of music was somewhat “off-beat”. We had covered part of the corridor wall with paper so that the guests had something to leave their comments on, and somebody wrote “Beter herrie dan kutmuziek“. Which translates to “Better to endure this freaking noise than having to listen to lousy music”. Not all of those present agreed but I owned the stereo! I still use the phrase as a slogan to describe my record collection.

Oh my!

I always liked the Nintendo DS for the innovation it brought to the console market. Nintendo has a unique grasp of what makes a game really good and enjoyable, and they continue to invent hardware which is a match to their games. Here at home we own a Gameboy Advance as well as a Wii console, but until now a DS-Lite has been lacking.

I was tempted to buy one, way back then, for the Linux that you can hack onto it. But Slackware development took enough of my time already, so the idea never became reality. And it never hurts to dream.

Now though, I came across this video:

It demonstrates a software synthesizer, the Korg DS-10, which has recently been released for the Nintendo DS. It is simply amazing what this program is able to do. I watched - and watched again (there is more video footage on YouTube) and found a positive review of the DS-10 on Ars Technica which confirmed the gut feeling I had after watching the demo.

Something that makes me want to buy the DS after all that time…

Eric

If you are using VLC 0.9.4 (my package here) you will probably have noticed that it is (for now) impossible to embed the video window into the main VLC window. The “embed video” preference setting has no effect.

Actually, this has been done intentionally by the developers. VLC seems to crash at unpredictable occasions when the video is embedded. This is a Qt4 issue that might be solved in Qt 4.3.0 according the people in #videolan on Freenode.

The code commit to disable the embedded video is here in case you want to revert it in your own build: http://git.videolan.org/gitweb.cgi?p=vlc.git;a=commit;h=fff7615fa9bf44f90ac5573eb2964bcb51e4ac3c and the ticket opened for this issue is http://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/2136. Yesterday a commit was made in the code to check for the availability of qt-4.3.0 at compile-time and re-enable embedded video in that case: http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc.git;a=commit;h=9c26b8e2a04468aa4b4a158f072d760a991932db.

I will try a rebuild of the VLC package with qt-4.3.0 statically linked when I have time. If anyone is faster than me, please let me know if it causes issues for you.

Eric

Today, I updated the Dokuwiki software that I use for my Wiki to the latest version, and installed a new version of the Monobook template as well. Also, no thanks to the spambots that were messing up the Wiki’s discussion pages, I installed a “captcha” plugin. You are now required to enter a few “hard to read characters” before you are allowed to edit any page. If the characters are indeed hard to read, you can playback an audio version (a voice reads the characters out loud one by one).

I believe that the upgrade worked well, but if any of you find something weird on the pages that you think should not be there, please drop me an email or reply to this post, and I will fix it.

Eric

I had a second banner picture cut out and (appropriately coloured with a blue hue) ready to use when I was setting up this blog. However I decided that the view from Greenpeace office (did anyone ever notice the text “save the whales” cut out in a steel plate there?) was nicer to look at.

I am going to use this brittanny cloud scape as the blog’s eye catcher for a while, but no worries: the winter view of the Hamburg harbor is still on disk.

If anyone prefers one over the other - let me know in a comment.

Cheers, Eric