Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: July 2011

Dumping google toolbar

July 30, 2011 / / 8 Comments

Well, I guess it is time to dump good old Google Toolbar.

In a previous post of mine, I showed you how to allow Firefox to keep using the Google Toolbar even though it lists as “unsupported” since firefox-5. But this is not a long-term option of course – at some point the plugin will become incompatible because it is no longer being developed and it will de-stabilize my browser.

So I was thinking, what are the reasons why I wanted to stick with the Google toolbar for so long? The plugin has some great features which I really don’t want to miss. Let me list them here, along with ways to get the same or similar functionality in Firefox but without using the Google Toolbar.

  1. Search through my search history. I guess this is is the feature I use most. Of course, Firefox keeps an accessible history of the URLs you visited, but re-using previous search phrases is something different. The Google Toolbar showed your entire search history in a neat dropdown. But this functionality is also present in Firefox’s own search field… I just never knew. If you type a single space character into the search entry field, then Firefox will display a dropdown with all your previous search phrases.
  2. Translate web pages. Using this a lot as well, to find out what those damn Russians are telling about Slackware… but there are other plugins that add the same functionality to your right-click context menu in Firefox. One that seems to get the best reviews because of its feature set is gTranslate. One disadvantage compared to the googlebar is, that it does not give me the option to translate a complete web page, it is limited to translating selected bits of text.
  3. Bookmark sync. When you work on many different computers and want your bookmarks available everywhere, then Google Toolbar woould let you. However, Firefox has its own “sync” functionality since version 4 which allows you to sync your bookmarks, history and other stuff to a central server, much like Google does too. And if you do not want to rely on 3rd party servers you can always setup your own private bookmark server like I did, using SiteBar. A killer feature of SiteBar is that it has ACLs (access control lists) allowing users of the service to share (parts of) their bookmarks with other users or groups.
  4. Use highlighted text to search in Google. It is so convenient to just highlight a piece of text and then right-click to use that text as a search phrase in Google. It is a must-have feature for me, but luckily there is an add-on called Context Search which will even expand the list of selectable search engines to beyond just Google.

Well that was not all that many reasons for needing the Google Toolbar, but even then: their value is high because of the way they allow me to be more productive and efficient in my work. I guess I will have to give the alternatives a try and see if I can live without the Google Toolbar. Realizing that I have to, I can only say “so long, and thanks for all the fish” to the people who have been developing this plugin over the years.

While I am at it, I think I am also going to try out Right-Click-Link (opening URLs in a new tab that are listed in a page as plain text), which seem to be useful as well.

Eric

Some package updates for KDE 4.6.5

July 26, 2011 / / 13 Comments

My KDE 4.6.5 post from a few weeks back had a few comments about a non-working kcalc. Also, the KDE release team updated all the language tarballs for KDE 4.6.5 – after first renewing the broken ‘nl’ sources apparently the other language sources had issues too.

So, I rebuilt all the KDEI packages (the language packs) using the new sources. And I rebuilt the kdeutils package using several patches for kcalc.

Go get them. If you had the aforementioned issues they might be solved by these updated packages.

For instance at http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.6.5/ or http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.6.5/ .

Eric

Back from holiday

July 25, 2011 / / 8 Comments

I enjoyed two weeks of camping with my family, in Brittany (France).

If you want to know what the view looked like…

From Photostream

Of course there was a lot more to see. We hunt old ruins with our camera! Brittany is full of chapels, monasteries, and the boulders everyone knows from places like Carnac.

When I got back home, the first packages I needed to push out were VLC because 1.1.11 plugs two vulnerabilities, and the new beta of flashplayer 11 because finally Adobe seems to have merged the development of the 64-bit version with the “mainline” 32-bit plugin. They are both essentially the same version now, 11 beta 1 (build date 071311?). The plugin itself reports that it has version 11.0.1.60.

Get the packages for vlc and flashplayer-plugin at the usual location: http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/ (the version of vlc without the patent restrictions that can encode mp3 and aac (instead of just being able to decode these formats) to be found as usual at http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/)

More packages to come, but that needs more preparation before I can start. I need to build a patched KDE 4.6.5 package for kdeutils, and all of the KDEI source tarballs seem to have been re-generated by the KDE release team while I was on holiday.

Have fun! Eric

KDE Software Compilation 4.6.5

July 7, 2011 / / 30 Comments

The last of the 4.6 series has arrived, and I thought it would be good to compile it for Slackware-current so that Pat Volkerding can concentrate on Slackware’s core:

Please check the official announcement of the KDE Software Compilation 4.6.5 – and then proceed to download my packages for Slackware.

I had hopes that version 4.6.5 of the KDE SC would be added to Slackware but Pat is busy, and I did not want to wait. No problem! Remember, you have to be running Slackware 13.37 (32bit or 64bit) or (preferably) slackware-current in order to use these packages. They were built on slackware-current. Note that between 13.37 and -current, there was an incompatible perl upgrade which may cause some of the KDE 4.6.5 “language bindings” to fail on Slackware 13.37 (causing for instance plasmoids to break if those were programmed in perl).

Please read the accompanying README file for installation and upgrade instructions!

This is the fifth incremental release in the 4.6 series, meaning it’s mostly bugfixes and translation enhancements.

Some of the highlights of my new set of KDE packages:

  • Packages for the stable release 4.6.1 of kdepim and kdepim-runtime are included.
  • No updated dependencies since KDE 4.6.4 if you have that installed already.
  • Updated dependencies with regard to the stable Slackware 13.37 are: PyQt, QScintilla, akonadi, attica, ebook-tools, hunspell, libdbusmenu-qt,sip, soprano, system-config-printer, virtuoso-ose.
  • Not part of Slackware 13.37 at all (yet): grantlee, libatasmart, libbluedevil, libssh, sg3_utils, udisks.
  • And bluedevil was added – not a dependency as such, but rather additional functionality for your KDE desktop. Bluedevil is the new KDE bluetooth stack, based on the BlueZ libraries already present in Slackware. I added its package to the “kde” directory. It integrates a lot better into KDE than the GTK application “blueman” which is now primarily meant to be used with the non-KDE desktop environments.

The KDE 4.6.5 packages for Slackware 13.37 & current should be available for download from my “ktown” repository by now (the Indonesian mirror may need a bit of time to sync up):

Have fun! Eric

LibreOffice 3.4.1 … almost production-ready

July 6, 2011 / / 5 Comments

Inbetween moving my office to another building (no not at home… at the customer site where I work as helpdesk controller / 3rd line UNIX support person and whatnot) my server has been compiling new LibreOffice packages for Slackware 13.37. A little while ago you could get my “stable” version 3.3.3 packages and today it is time for the “unstable” version 3.4.1. The LibreOffice developers expect that the next release (3.4.2) will be stable enough that it can be called “production-ready” so that 3.4 can finally replace 3.3 on the average user’s desktop. Remember that libreoffice-3.4 is a major move away from the old SUN/Oracle OpenOffice.org codebase with a lot of enhancements and cleanups – hence it took a while to get the new/polished code in a decent state.

As always, the primary location for my packages is at the slackware URL: http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/

Otherwise (and because they have bigger download speeds to offer), use one of the mirrors like:

and grab those packages (the mirrors may take a little while to get updated).

The 3.4.1 release’s announcement page states that it “can be safely deployed for production needs by most users” but adds the warning “Large enterprises deploying LibreOffice on desktop PCs, are still recommended to deploy LibreOffice 3.3.3“. The page sports a nice timeline showing that a new 3.3.x version should appear only after the release of 3.4.2. So take your pick… I guess that you should be safe with 3.4.1.

However, if the LO folks will declare the upcoming 3.4.2 as “unfit for the enterprise” then it is likely that I will compile one more set of LibreOffice 3.3.x packages – and on Slackware 13.1.

Have fun!
Eric

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