Alien Pastures

Last week was another busy working week at the office, but I still managed to update some of my packages.I also prepared sources and scripts for the just-released KDE 4.11-beta but I am not going to build those packages yet. I will probably wait for the first release candidate. There are almost 30 new packages due to the splitting of the bigger source tarballs for  kdeadmin, kdenetwork, kdesdk and kdetoys into smaller sub-packages. That meant, writing almost 30 new slack-desc files and updating the module definitions. If anyone is interested enough to want to compile this him- or herself, let me know and I will upload the sources to my ktown repository.

Speaking of repositories, you surely noticed that my packages for the various Slackware releases and architectures are all organized by program name, not by Slackware release/architecture. This makes it difficult for some repository search engines (like http://www.slackabduction.com/sse/, http://slakfinder.org/, http://slackfind.net/en/) to add my repositories to their database. Some time ago I created two “shadow” repositories to overcome their problems. In http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/sbrepos/ (mirrored from the master repo on slackware.com) and http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_sbrepos/ I have re-organized all packages by Slackware release and architecture. These two shadow repositories are using hard links to the original repositories so that they almost do not take up any additional space in the filesystem if you download them with a tool which can preserve hard-links (like rsync’s “-H” option). I hope these repository search engines will start using the shadow repository information. For instance, all packages I have for Slackware64 14.0 can be found under http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/sbrepos/14.0/x86_64/

What package updates came out of the hat this week?

Flashplayer-plugin

Another Adobe security bulletin apsb13-16, mentions a vulnerability CVE-2013-3343 in the Flashplayer plugin for webbrowsers. I built new packages for the version 11.2.202.291 which closes the hole.

Ffmpeg

I updated my packages to version 1.2. Actually I had built these packages a while ago but had forgotten to upload them to my repository.

Calibre and python-lxml

The newest release of Calibre, the e-book management and library software, is able to read and convert Microsoft DOCX files. In order to achieve that, it needs a version of the Python lxml library which I did not use yet. I discovered this by accident (because the Calibre site does not mention the correct version as minimum version dependency). You will need the version 3.2.1 of the python-lxml package. I also updated the internally used version of lxml in my Slackware 13.37 package (you may recall that the Slackware 13.37 package has Qt4, Python 3.7.5 and a lot of supporting libraries compiled into the package because Slackware’s versions are too old).

Qbittorrent and libtorrent-rasterbar

There was a new release of the qbittorrent software a few months ago which I had not yet packaged. Qbittorrent is my favourite Bittorrent software and an update was long overdue. The libtorrent-rasterbar library on which qbittorrent depends, was updated as well.

Have fun! Eric

After so many “critical bugfix releases” that have plagued Java during the past year, it is nice to see some real hard work being made available to the public. The IcedTea developers have been preparing their first major release since 2.3.0 of August last year. Today, icedtea-2.4.0 was announced on the mailing list and on the blog of release manager Andrew John Hughes . The list of enhancements and new features is way too long to copy here, it’s best to go check out that blog post. There are a lot of bug fixes as expected, but there were no vulnerabilities that needed patching this time. A lot of effort has gone into the CACAO and JamVM alternative virtual machines for Java.

You will probably be surprised to see the jump in the update number for the OpenJDK package which is built using the new IcedTea. A finalized Update 40 of OpenJDK7 is scheduled for Augist this year, and some of the new features still have to be added to the source tree. But the IcedTea developers decided that making a new major release of their software available a few months earlier was for the better, considering the huge number of improvements and fixes that will result in a solid Java 7u40 release already.

On to the packages (and thanks Andrew for showing your appreciation for Slackware)!

My packages for OpenJDK have been compiled on Slackware 13.37 (and are useable on 13.37 as well as 14.0 and -current!). Get them preferably from a mirror site (faster downloads):

• http://alien.slackbook.org/slackbuilds/openjdk/ , the primary location (bandwidth-capped)
• http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/openjdk/ , my own fast US mirror
• http://slackware.org.uk/people/alien/slackbuilds/openjdk/ , fast UK mirror, needs a day to get in sync

Further packages that are recommended/required:

• Optional: If you want a Java browser-plugin you must install icedtea-web (OpenJDK itself does not contain such a plugin).
• Required: The rhino package is a dependency of the openjdk/openjre package. It contains the JavaScript engine for OpenJDK.

Note that you should only install one of the two packages, either openjdk or openjre, do not install both at the same time or things will break! The openjdk package contains the jre (java runtime) as well as the java development kit.

Eric

Packaging a new KDE Software Compilation is verging on boring – believe it or not.

The KDE developers are so unbelievably focused on quality and co-ordination that preparing packages for the new release is a matter of checking the “kde-packagers” mailing list for messages about updated dependencies, adjusting the build scripts (disabling obsolete patches, bumping version numbers) and starting the build on a fresh clean virtual machine. It usually does not take more than a single pass to build all the packages for incremental releases.

Real investigative work is usually waiting around the corner only when jumping to a new major release (re-designing KDE.SlackBuild for the new modular build, almost two years back was a good example of that).

And today’s release of KDE SC 4.10.4 is no different – the packages were built without issues soon after I got hold of the sources. Now that the sources are available for public download, I have uploaded my Slackware 14 packages to the servers.

Note that these are built for – and should be used only on – Slackware 14.

I assume it will not take long for Pat to add KDE 4.10.4 to Slackware-current. So if you are running our development version of Slackware, just wait for Pat and do not install my packages – they will have issues on -current.

KDE’s Dolphin File Manager

What to expect of KDE 4.10.4?

As with every incremental KDE release, this brings you “bugfixes and translation updates” and no new functionality. The over 50 recorded bugfixes include improvements to the Personal Information Management suite Kontact, the File Manager Dolphin, and others, according to the KDE 4.10.4 fix set.

How to upgrade to KDE 4.10.4?

You will find all the installation/upgrade instructions that you need in the accompanying README file. That README also contains basic information for KDE recompilation using the provided SlackBuild script. Please note that if you are not yet running one of my KDE builds, you should upgrade from a (preferably) full installation of Slackware 14. I had some feedback from Slackware users who installed Slackware 14, excluded the whole “KDE” package series from that installation, and then installed my KDE packages on top. That way, you will be missing a lot of packages, several of them essential to the proper functioning of KDE! If you skipped the whole KDE series and install my KDE packages, you still need to get these from a Slackware 14 package tree (the essentials are highlighted in blue):

amarok
k3b
kaudiocreator
kdevelop-pg-qt
kplayer
polkit-kde-agent-1
polkit-kde-kcmodules-1
wicd-kde

You are strongly advised to read and follow these installation/upgrade instructions!

Where to find packages?

Download locations are listed below (you will find the sources in ./source/4.10.4/ and packages in ./14.0/4.10.4/ subdirectories). Using a mirror is preferred because you get more bandwidth from a mirror and it’s friendlier to the owners of the master server!

• http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/ (the master repository), rsync URI: rsync://alien.slackbook.org/alien/ktown/
• http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/ (my fast US mirror), rsync URI: rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/
• http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/ (willysr’s Indonesian mirror), rsync URI: rsync://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/
• http://slackware.org.uk/people/alien-kde/ (fast UK based mirror, run by Darren Austin), rsync URI: rsync://slackware.org.uk/people/alien-kde/

Have fun! Eric

I was a bit too busy and tired to write something on my blog during the past week, but now that it is weekend again, there is room for some updates.

Flash Player Plugin

There was yet another security update for Adobe’s Flashplayer Plugin. I updated my package to the latest version. Note that if you are using my Steam Client package, you will probably have installed the flashplayer-plugin in order to see all the news in the Steam Store. If you are on a 64-bit Slackware platform with multilib, you should not just update the 64-bit flashplayer-plugin but also convert the 32-bit package into a “compat32″ version and upgrade the 32-bit package you will already have installed for Steam:

# convertpkg-compat32 -i flashplayer-plugin-11.2.202.285-i386-1alien.txz
# upgradepkg --install-new /tmp/flashplayer-plugin-compat32-11.2.202.285-x86_64-1aliencompat32.txz

KDE

The kdelibs package in my ktown repository (KDE 4.10.3) has been patched to prevent application crashes. Coincidentally this patch has also been applied to the kdelibs package in slackware-current.

Slackware Dependencies

A nice and fast tool to discover and query dependencies between Slackware packages is sbbdep which stands for “Slack Build Binary Dependencies”. Its author, a4z, released version 0.2.0 last week. I use this tool to assist me when determining the build order of packages for my ARM port.

ARM Port

Speaking of which, there is an interesting thread going on on LinuxQuestions, regarding ARMedslack and the Raspberry Pi. Someone who goes by the nick “Ahau” and comments on my blog from time to time, is working on a hard-float port to the armv6 hardware platform – the heart of the Raspberry Pi. He is using my ARM source tree for this, has given me good feedback which resulted in bug fixes, and his ultimate goal is to create a new ARM version of Porteus. The most recent part of the LQ discussion centered around my decision to split the libtinfo library (terminfo) out of the libncurses(w) library. This is the ncurses developers’ intention for the future, however it causes issues when compiling software which is not querying the system properly and assuming that only libncurses(w) is required for linking.

I had nearly decided to revert my decision and integrate libtinfo again into libncurses(w) when ponce pointed out a patch which I had already seen in Fedora’s ncurses package source. Perhaps I will apply that patch to my ncurses package because it seems to resolve all the linking issues we have been running into lately.

LibreOffice ARM?

And more good news – it took two days of compiling because I forgot to enable distcc, but I managed to create LibreOffice packages for my ARM port, using the SlackBuild script with which I already compiled LibreOffice 4.0.3 for x86 and x86_64 platforms last week (I needed one additional patch to work around the newer boost-1.53 which I have in my ARM tree). I have not had the chance to install the packages and run the LO Writer to see if I created working binaries… but the build log did not show errors which is promising!

Desktop Environments other than KDE or XFCE

Long ago, I created a package for razor-qt which is a minimal (lightweight may be the better word) desktop environment based on Qt. In other words, it looks beautiful (by not using GTK) and does not have the sluggishness people complain about when they run that other Qt based desktop environment (KDE). I was thinking about what I would have to add to a filesystem image for the ARM ChromeBook which I should finally get ready and distribute… I do have KDE packages, but KDE felt like just a bit overweight for the ChromeBook. I do not really like XFCE (don’t get me wrong, technically and functionally it’s not bad at all, but GTK does not have any visual appeal to me) and therefore I felt compelled to re-visit razor-qt.

Razor-qt does not come with its own window manager, instead it allows you to pick one of the available window managers it finds on your computer when it starts for the first time. Razor-qt will work well with KDE’s window manager KWin, but it works best with OpenBox. And since that is not part of Slackware, I added an openbox package as well to my repository (which was the moment that I found out I had never released my original razor-qt package… no idea how I could have forgotten that).

I decided that I am going to build armv7hl packages for razor-qt and openbox so that the ChromeBook has a nice and fast, good-looking desktop environment next to XFCE. They will be uploaded to my separate “alien” subdirectory of the ARM package tree, where I will upload the LibreOffice packages as well.

KDE Display Manager

The KDE Desktop Environment is transitioning to Plasma Workspaces 2. Two changes are worth mentioning because they will have a big impact: Many “user-interface centric” applications will be re-written in QML (Qt Modeling Language). More importantly, the X.Org display server of old will be abandoned for the Wayland protocol server. Wayland gives you a 3D-enabled display server from the start, instead of the current practice of running a 3D compositor (KWin, compiz) as an extension under the 2D X.Org display server. Future support of Wayland requires a rewrite of KWin (KDE’s window manager) but also forced a decision to say goodbye to the KDE Display Manager (KDM) which is the graphical login program which greets you when you boot Slackware in Runlevel 4. A blog post by Aaron Seigo gives a lot of insight in the process that preceeded this decision.

It looks like SDDM (Simple Desktop Display Manager) is a contender for replacing KDM in a future release of KDE. Initially, SDDM had a hard dependency on PAM, but thankfully the developer is friendly towards Slackware. After a short discussion on Google+ he created a preliminary “pam-less” version which I tested. Those tests went OK and the changes were added to the main source. So it is with pleasure that I announce the package which I added to my repository. You can already try it out, if you just add a couple of lines to Slackware’s “/etc/rc.d/rc.4″ script. Directly below the line that says:

echo "Starting up X11 session manager..."

you add:

# ----8<----------------------------------------------------------------
# Use Simple Display Desktop Manager
 if [ -x /usr/bin/sddm ]; then
 exec /usr/bin/sddm
 fi
# ----8<----------------------------------------------------------------

Enjoy!

Eric

LibreOffice 4.0.3

Yesterdaty I noticed the LibreOffice 4.0.3 release.by chance, and built Slackware 14 packages for it right away (they work on -current just as well).Noteworthy statement in these release notes is “LibreOffice 4.0.3 is another important step in the process of improving the quality and stability of the bleeding edge version of the suite, and facilitating migrations to free software by governments and enterprises“.

Relating to that statement, a personal rant is about to burst.

Because there is another interesting tidbit in those release notes: “another large migration to LibreOffice has been announced, as the government of Spain’s autonomous region of Extremadura has just begun the switch to free software of desktop PCs and expects the majority of its 40,000 PCs to be migrated by the end of 2013. Extremadura estimates that the move to open source – including LibreOffice – will help save 30 million Euro per year.“. I remember that the decision by the Extremadura government (this is a county in Spain with low industrialisation and therefore not rich) to move completely to Open Source was made more than 6 years ago. Cool to read about this achievement. I wish the dutch government had more focus on adopting Open Source and Open Standards… so far it has been an eternal uphill battle against the minions of Microsoft. I know, because I have been involved in several pilots, proposals and projects over the past 10 years.

Anyway, I am open to discussion about this, you dutchies and others!

Back to the topic of using LibreOffice on our cool Slackware platform. Get the packages from my 14.0 package repository while they are hot! If you are still running Slackware 13.37 you should stick with LibreOffice 3.6.6 for which I also have packages.

They are also available from several mirrors. Remember, the mirror sites usually have a bigger bandwidth available than the master site! If you are a mirror administrator, and want to be added to the list, contact me.

Here is the shortlist:

• http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ (my own US mirror)
• http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-libreoffice/ (Indonesia)
• http://alien.slackbook.org/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ (US)
• http://slackware.org.uk/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ (UK)

You can subscribe to the repository’s RSS feed if you want to be the first to know when new packages are uploaded.

Cheers, Eric