Alien Pastures

I wrote about it – deeply nested inside the comments section of a previous post – but it needs its own place in a separate post:
KDE SC 4.4.1 (first maintenance release for the 4.4 series ) has been made available and the Slackware packages can be found at http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.4.1/
Again, I have made 32-bit as [...]

Am I hearing sighs of relief yet?
Today, Pat Volkerding pushed out the work that has been accumulating for slackware-current behind the scenes during the past four weeks (make take a little while to reach the mirrors).
This triggered some updates to the multilib and KDE 4.4 packages which I maintain, so if you run Slackware64-multilib [...]

A few weeks back Laurent Parenteau asked me to contribute a post to his series “Meet the Linux family” on the blog “Software Development with Linux“. Well here it is: http://laurentparenteau.com/blog/2010/02/meet-the-linux-family-eric-hameleers/ . Nothing spectacular, but just enough controversy (I hope… I wrote “Steve Balmer” and “Eric Raymond” on the same page) to make it interesting [...]

I have always really hated the Git Version Control System (or VCS).
I am pretty comfortable working with other products like RCS, CVS and Subversion (SVN). I am not a developer, so my main use for a VCS is a to allow me to keep track of the changes in my SlackBuild scripts or my [...]

Now that almost four weeks have passed since the last update of Slackware’s “-current ChangeLog” I am seeing posts from people who (1) start getting worried and (2) are speculating that a new stable release is imminent.
Let me re-assure you: there is a lot of behind-the-scenes work going on. Some of the updates require the [...]

The KDE community has announced the immediate availability of the KDE Software Compilation 4.4.0 (“KDE SC” is the new name of what used to be called just “KDE“). In preparation for this event, the kde.org website was re-vamped yesterday to reflect their “shift in marketing and promotion vocabulary”. Looks shiny and new! Also, I [...]

I had installed VirtualBox a while ago on my laptop running my Slackware64 test environment, so I could experiment with the program a bit. Then I forgot all about it.
Today, I upgraded to the latest set of slackware64-current packages, including the new 2.6.32.7 kernel and when I rebooted to that new kernel, I saw [...]

A bit of history… I realized that just a year ago, KDE 4.2.rc1 got added to Slackware’s “/testing” area.
With all the recent posts on this blog about KDE4 and me telling people how nice I think this version of KDE is, I realize that “liking” is a very personal expression of feelings. A feeling shared [...]

For those running the 64-bit version of Slackware, I keep making available multilib versions of Slackware’s 64-bit gcc and glibc packages. Yesterday, gcc in slackware-current was updated to version 4.4.3, so here they are.
You can get them here: http://slackware.com/~alien/multilib/13.1/ (The “13.1″ may or may not be the version of the next Slackware release, I just [...]

The KDE team are getting closer to the 4.4 release of the KDE Software Compilation (“KDE SC” is the new name of what used to be called just “KDE“).
The second release candidate has been released today (the release was delayed for several days). For Slackware Linux I have prepared 32-bit and 64-bit packages with [...]