Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Day: February 13, 2016

LibreOffice 5.1.0 for slackware-current

February 13, 2016 / / 20 Comments

libreoffce_logoLibreoffice 5.1.0 was announced last week on the Document Foundation blog.

The Document Foundation statement about this release: “LibreOffice 5.1 represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites, and as such is targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users. For enterprise class deployments, TDF maintains the more mature 5.0.x branch (soon at 5.0.5)“.

Which is why I make this new 5.1.0 release available only on Slackware’s own bleeding edge: slackware-current.

lo5103_about

Some of the highlights of LibreOffice 5.1 as taken from the release notes:

  • User Interface: LibreOffice 5.1’s user interface has been completely reorganized, to provide faster and more convenient access to its most used features. A new menu has been added to each of the applications: Style (Writer), Sheet (Calc) and Slide (Impress and Draw). In addition, several icons and menu commands have been repositioned based on user preferences.
  • Interoperability: Compatibility with proprietary document formats has been improved, as a part of the ongoing effort for a better interoperability with other productivity software. In addition, filters have been added for Apple Keynote 6, Microsoft Write and Gnumeric files.
  • Spreadsheet Functions: Calc’s formula engine has been improved with features addressing restrictions in table structured references and sticky column/row anchors, interoperability with OOXML spreadsheets and compatibility with ODF 1.2.

Packages can be obtained from these mirror sites and probably others too (if you have a fast, uptodate and reliable mirror outside the US or UK I’d like to hear from you):

Cheers! Eric

VLC 2.2.2 media player Weatherwax is here

February 13, 2016 / / 31 Comments

largeVLCVLC development has been fairly invisible during the last year. It took ten months since the previous 2.2.1 release to produce a new egg. Here it is finally: the next stable release. The version 2.2.2 “fixes numerous security issues, notably in the MP4, RealRtsp and Sparkle modules, but also important crashes for the MXF, ADPCM, Telextext, Skins and Qt modules. It also improves our codec support by adding new formats and providing faster decompression. More than 100 fixes for issues reported for 2.2.1” according to the release notes.

It always takes a while to compile new VLC packages; not just because I build 8 of them (two Slackware releases, two architectures and restricted/unrestricted versions) but because updates to the internal support libraries have their own little challenges when you try to compile them. Anyway, I have the packages now, and made them available here:

Rsync access is offered by the mirror server: rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/ .

For BluRay support, read a previous article for hints about the aacs keys that you’ll need.

I have not had time to do some thorough testing of the new release, but I surely hope that playback of H.264 video has improved. Because of the large amount of visual artifacts resulting from fast-forwarding video’s I mostly switched to mplayer for video playback on my computer.

My usual warning about patents: versions that can not only DEcode but also ENcode mp3 and aac audio can be found in my alternative repository where I keep the packages containing code that might violate stupid US software patents.

Have fun! Eric

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