My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: March 2014

More Chromium, LibreOffice and Flash updates

That sounds a heck of a lot like another post I wrote recently on this blog…  a little more than two weeks ago. The big guys made a move again, and this is what you get from me as a result.

Chromium

chromium_iconChromium (and of course Chrome) were updated to version 33.0.1750.149, with 7 security fixes. The Chrome binaries are equipped with an updated Flash Player plugin (12.0.0.77 which is also a security upgrade, see below).  These are the highlighted fixes (aka the biggest bounties paid):

  • [$4000][344881High CVE-2014-1700: Use-after-free in speech. Credit to Chamal de Silva.
  • [$3000][342618High CVE-2014-1701: UXSS in events. Credit to aidanhs.
  • [$1000][333058High CVE-2014-1702: Use-after-free in web database. Credit to Collin Payne.

You will find the chromium packages (Slackware 14.1 and -current) here:

I also provide updated packages for chromium-pepperflash-plugin with the Fpash plugin binary taken from the official Chrome distribution.

LibreOffice

LibreOffice 4.2.2 (codenamed ‘Fresh’) packages for Slackware 14.1 and -current are ready too. The official announcement  considers LibreOffice 4.2.2 to be “the most feature rich version of the software, and is suited for early adopters willing to leverage a larger number of innovations“. However, the announcement continues with “For enterprise deployments, The Document Foundation suggests the more reliable LibreOffice 4.1.5 “Stable”.” Of course I have LibreOffice 4.1.5 packages, they are built on Slackware 14.0 and work well on Slackware 14.1 and -current. It’s your choice!

Package locations:

Linux Flash Player

As mentioned above in the Chromium section, Adobe released security updates of their Flash Player for all platforms. The Adobe security bulletin shows 11.2.202.346 as the new version for native Linux. Package location:

 

Note: a new version of pipelight has not yet been released, but if you want your Wine-installed Windows Flash player to be secure and safe as well, you can run the following command (as root – not as your normal user account like I wrongly advised before):

# pipelight-plugin --update

which will update the “/usr/share/pipelight/install-dependency” script. Next time you open a web page which loads pipelight, it will automatically upgrade your Windows Flash player in the wine-pipelight directory to the latest version.

Have fun! Eric

Barracuda’s Copy cloud storage

copy-clientA while ago I posted a blurb (well… not here but on Google+) about Barracuda‘s  cloud-based backup service analogous to Dropbox. Copy.com is an interesting contender in the playing field of cloudbackup. This is what the company has to say about data protection and security: “Because Copy is the product of network security and backup giant Barracuda, your files are stored on servers we control and manage, not with a 3rd party like most cloud storage services. For increased security, your data is protected by multiple layers of encryption, including top-secret grade AES 256, both during transfer and while at rest on Barracuda’s enterprise-class cloud storage“.

It’s up to you how seriously you take that claim, but let me just give this advice: if you trust your most sensitive files to the cloud, apply your own encryption first! For example, I have a TrueCrypt container in my cloud storage which contains everything private I have on my computers. This encrypted container is replicated to all my computers as well as to the cloud, providing sufficient backup safety and still keeping my data hidden from secret snoopers without supercomputers.

The site advertises that they use a data-deduplication mechanism, therefore I doubt that your files will be stored in such a way that the NSA is unable to access them… still, it’s a lot of storage for a safety copy of your photos. I guess I’ll take their claims at face value.

Back to Copy: this is a free storage solution, although there are business subscriptions. New free accounts get 15 GB cloud storage for free, and that is quite a bit. When you refer someone else to start using this service, both sides get an additional free 5 GB storage. Click on the link below to get your 20 GB for free, it gives me an additional 5 GB too.

Bonus referral link: https://copy.com/?r=zWvkFg

They have an interesting twist to the concept of file-sharing. WIth Dropbox, you can share part of your own dropbox with other Dropbox users. That shared space will count in the quota calculations of everyone who takes part in the share. So for instance, if you have a free 10 GB dropbox quota you will not be able to add your friend’s shared folder if that folder is larger than 10 GB. With Copy on the other hand, the calculation is different. If you share an amount of data with others, then the used quota is divided among the sharers. So, if you are sharing 10 GB with 4 of your friends, everyone in your group of 5 will not be taxed for 10 GB, but only for 10/5 = 2 GB of quota usage. That is nice.

Sync clients are available for many platforms, Linux (32-bit and 64-bit) and Android included. It took a while to deliver on my promise to create a Slackware package for the Linux sync client, because I was not sure how I wanted to wrap the binaries. But finally here it is. I decided to call the package “copy-client” in analogy to my “dropbox-client” package.

A copy-client package for Slackware, 64-bit as well as 32-bit. Working on versions 13.37 and onwards (those are the Slackware versions I tried at least).

Have fun! Don’t forget to claim your 20 GB free storage using my referral link, and make me a happy camper.

Eric

KDE 4.12.3 for Slackware-current (and 14.1) plus some goodies

Sticking nicely to the well-known KDE Release Schedule, here are packages for the latest and greatest KDE Software Compilation.

The new release 4.12.3 is a further step towards stabilizing the 4.12 platform and comes with updates to Plasma Workspaces, which brings that to version 4.11.7. Incidentally I also updated the Plasma Workspaces (aka kde-workplace)  in the KDE package set which I maintain for Slackware 14.1 (the KDE SC 4.11.5 release will keep getting long-term updates to kde-workspace until this summer)

Principally, I am targeting Slackware-current with my bleeding-edge packages for KDE. However – as was the case with the previous KDE release, there is not all that much divergence between the stable release (Slackware 14.1) and the development tree (Slackware-current). That is why I built my packages for KDE  4.12.3, on Slackware 14.1 for maximum compatibility. They work fine on both platforms.

What’s new in my KDE 4.12.3 packages?

Apart from all-new versions for the core applications, I also updated the oxygen-gtk2 and plasma-nm (and libnm-qt, libmm-qt) packages. I was unable to compile the latest oxygen-gtk3 release because Slackware’s GTK+-3 package is too old.

There is one interesting addition! There is a new package called kdeconnect-kde. Together with the kdeconnect-android app for your smartphone or tablet (no iPhone, surely you don’t own one??) it “fuses” your KDE desktop with your mobile device.

kdeconnect-settings

Prominent features of KDE Connect are: battery status display, clipboard share, notifications sync, multimedia remote control, and all of that over secured network connections. Don’t forget to add the new “KDE Connect” widget to your system tray.

kdeconnect-applet

How to upgrade to KDE 4.12.3 ?

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.

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

Where to find packages for KDE 4.12.3 ?

Download locations are listed below (you will find the sources in ./source/4.12.3/ and packages in /current/4.12.3/ 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!

Have fun! Eric

Raspberry Pi and Broadcom: a birthday present

475px-Raspberry_Pi_Logo.svg Two years ago (on 29 february 2012), the Raspberry Pi Model B went on sale. More than 2.5 million Raspberry Pis have been sold to date! An amazing number, considering that the original goal was to equip british school kids with cheap hardware for Computer Science education.

Thanks to these enormous sales numbers, the Raspberry Pi Foundation (a not-for-profit organisation) was able to sponsor several Open Source projects writing code which can be used with the hardware (XBMC, libav and many others).

And now, two years later, there is a new surprise. The Raspberry Pi has been developed as “open” as possible, however there was a part of the hardware which was not open: the VideoCore IV 3d graphics core on the Broadcom application processor for which only a “binary blob” exists and which is addressed by a thin layer of Open Source graphics kerneldriver. This is not unusual – most if not all of today’s ARM-based mobile hardware has a closed-source graphics stack and no public register-level documentation of the hardware.

This is changing now! As announced on their blog, Broadcom has decided to open up their VideoCore IV 3d core to accompany the two-year anniversary of the Raspberry Pi. The code of the graphics stack has been open-sourced under a liberal 3-clause BSD license and  it’s accompanied by complete register-level documentation for the graphics engine. This is unique for the ARM hardware platform as far as I know.

If you are an experienced hacker/programmer, you may be up to the challenge posed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation: to port the open-sourced graphics stack (for the BCM21553) to the Raspberry Pi’s processor (BCM2835). And they will pay you a bounty of $10,000 if you are the first person to demonstrate satisfactorily that you can successfully run Quake III at a playable framerate on Raspberry Pi using your ported drivers.

How cool is that? Of course I hope it will be a Slackware hacker who will reap this reward.

Have fun! Eric

© 2024 Alien Pastures

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑