Alien Pastures

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 [...]

Mozilla upgraded its Firefox browser to version 5.0. Slackware followed by packaging it for Slackware -current and offering it as a patch (it fixes some security holes) to the old 4.0.1 version in Slackware 13.37. Infected by Google Chrome’s release strategy, it seems like the Mozilla developers now think that jumping to new version numbers [...]

Pffffff…. In a few days’ time, there were new releases of major and highly visible pieces of software: VLC, LibreOffice and KDE. I so happen to package all of these as “unofficial” additions to Slackware. I had a few hectic days (well, nights) preparing binaries, testing, rebuilding and writing changelogs and blog posts. I think [...]

This was an intense ride. Ever since the community around OpenOffice.org decided to free this productivity suite from its new guardian Oracle, it was clear that working together is the true driving force behind innovation. The continued development of the same software but with a new name “LibreOffice” took several leaps and bounds by incorporating [...]

I am beginning to feel the lack of computing power in my attic… There is a pending KDE 4.5.0 release, which needs to be built for slackware-current. Then there is also VLC 1.1.2 which was released a few days ago… and those packages need to be built for Slackware 13.1 (so that they can join [...]

The press has seen a lot of commotion lately about HTML5 and its out-of-the-box video support through the new < video > tag. Ogg Video – being the open source and royalty-free container used for the HTML5 video tag – is not favoured by the big players with commercial interests in web standards and content. [...]

I run this blog without the illusion that it will make me any money. But I know there are many people trying to make a good amount of cash by maintaining a “popular” blog. What defines popular? Having a lot of “backlinks” i.e. other sites refferring to (linking to) your blog is a measure of [...]

Are you one of these people who puts Slackware on a computer and then immediately follows up with the installation of another media player than Xine? Well, I am one of these people. I have been using MPLayer a lot – it builds relatively easily and because it uses Windows codec DLL’s it supports a [...]