Just came back from a short stay in Brittany, France where we stayed in a mobile home. Lots of sun, and lots of sleep to catch up on while being there!

While I was gone enjoying some freedom, interesting things happened in computerland. Slackware’s development reached the “Slackware 14 Beta 1” mark (see the “Sun Jul 22 22:38:36 UTC 2012” entry in the current ChangeLog). And the VideoLAN developers released an update to the VLC player. I am sure that there were other things that will grip me when I read them, but I have not been home long enough to notice 🙂 In the meantime, you may want to read about a man and his software which I do not care to see getting a grip on Slackware: systemd and slackware’s future … just to keep you focused on what’s good and what’s evil.

First Slackware of course.

The “Beta 1” update was pretty huge, as it involved the introduction of XFCE 4.10 and all the dependencies that required. The changes of “Wed Jul 25 02:02:40 UTC 2012” have fixed some of the expected fall-out which results from big and intrusive updates in slackware-current. It should be safe for all you beta testers out there to play with this Beta. But please make sure that you start with upgrading the “slackpkg” package and then run “slackpkg update” again!

I took the opportunity to refresh my set of pre-converted multilib packages for slackware64-current, and added “l/libffi” to the “massconvert32.sh” script (part of my own compat32-tools package) since people were noticing an error about missing libffi during the boot of a multilib slackware64-current system.

Then VLC.

I quickly built new packages for the 2.0.3 release which I have already uploaded. This is not a spectacular update, mostly beneficial to OS/X users and also refreshing a lot of UI translations. Note that I maintain the usual split in “restricted” and “unrestricted” functionality: the packages which I host on slackware.com are not able to encode MP3 and AAC audio (that version of my VLC package is of course perfectly able to play back those audio formats) due to software patent restrictions which apply in the US. For un-crippled packages you should head over to any mirror which carries the “restricted_slackbuilds” repository, like http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/ .

Have fun!

Eric

 

Edit: I forgot to mention that I also uploaded a new version of Calibre – the weekly update cycle was broken because of my holidays. If you use an “old” version of Calibre and do not want it to quit every week when it checks for updates and finds a new version, you can simply disable that check for new releases.