It happened faster than I had thought, considering the slow pace at which slackware-current has been evolving these past months. But there is a massive flurry of activity and Patrick Volkerding has pushed lots of updates to the development branch of Slackware lately. Quite interesting was the addition of the elilo and gnu-efi packages of course, which indicate future support in Slackware for UEFI-based hardware (UEFI being the sucessor to the good old BIOS). Slackware already supported GPT partition tables (successor of the good old MBR) so this looks promising for buyers of “Secure Boot” computers. Don’t forget to wipe that awful Windows 8 first! It would not make any sense to keep it on a computer if you can install Slackware on it in its place.
But anyway, that was a side-step. I actually wanted to talk about the update of KDE Software Compilation. Slackware-current has now KDE SC 4.10, essentially the same packages that I am offering on my ktown repository, with the same patches and using the same KDE.SlackBuild framework, but then built on Slackware-current as opposed to my Slackware 14 based build. Hooray!
I guess some of you who are running slackware-current, have been wondering how you can most elegantly upgrade from the “alien” packages to the official Slackware KDE packages plus dependencies. Well, here is how I did it today, using slackpkg:
- Edit your “/etc/slackpkg/blacklist” and comment the line out that says “[0-9]+alien“. This will allow slackpkg to touch my packages (those that have the “alien” build tag) Note that this should still keep your multilib packages blacklisted, because those have a build tag that ends on “compat32” and for which you have the line “[0-9]+compat32” in the blacklist. Note that the exceptions are the multilib gcc and glibc packages!
- Run “slackpkg update” to refresh slackpkg’s knowledge of the Slackware version you are running
- Run “slackpkg install-new” to install any new packages like elilo and gnu-efi which were recently added
- Run “slackpkg upgrade-all”, and carefully check the list of package upgrades which slackpkg proposes. This step will upgrade KDE and iots dependencies, making the switch from my packages to the official Slackware versions. Make sure that you DE-select the gcc and glibc packages if you are running a multilib 64-bit Slackware-current!
- Edit “/etc/slackpkg/blacklist” again, and remove the comment in front of the line “[0-9]+alien“.
- Now run “slackpkg clean-system” and carefully inspect the list of packages which slackpkg offers to remove from your computer. Only leave packages selected which you want to get rid of! De-select all other packages (usually those would be 3rd-party packages you want to keep)
- Do a final check for remaining KDE packages you may have missed. Run the following two commands to check for left-over Slackware original KDE 4.8.5 packages and my own KDE 4.10 packages – and remove packages which you see listed: “ls /var/log/packages/*4.8.5*” and “ls /var/log/packages/*4.10.0*alien“
That’s it! Reboot the computer and enjoy KDE 4.10!
Remember, if you just upgraded to KDE 4.10 and experience weird problems in the Plasma workspace, this can be related to KDE caches of an older release. Log out of KDE, and run the following commands to get rid of old cache data – don’t worry, these directories will be automatically re-created and re-populated (The “$USER” environment variable is actually your login username):
$ rm -r /tmp/kde-$USER/
$ rm -r /tmp/ksocket-$USER/
$ rm -r /var/tmp/kdecache-$USER/
Cheers, Eric
Adobe issued a security bulletin for their Adobe Flash Player. On APSB13-04 two CVE’s are mentioned – CVE-2013-0633 and CVE-2013-0634. Of those two, CVE-2013-0634 is the vulnerability which affects Linux users, because it is being exploited “in the wild” in attacks delivered via malicious Flash (SWF) content hosted on websites that target Flash Player in Firefox.
Recent comments