Alien Pastures

The release schedule could have told you in advance – here we have the first installment in the KDE 4.8 series! The Slackware KDE 4.8.0 packages are ready for your enjoyment.. A good primer on the how and why of the modularization of KDE, resulting in an abundance of smaller packages compared to the big [...]

There was a new maintenance release from the Document Foundation. We now have LibreOffice 3.4.5 and I spent the night (or rather, two virtual machines did the work while I slept) to produce packages for Slackware 13.37 and later. You can find the packages in the usual locations (all of the mirrors below also offer  [...]

I already wrote about it in an earlier post, that I was working on packages for OpenJDK. OpenJDK is an open-source implementation of the Java Platform, Standard Edition. In 2007, Sun delivered to its earlier promise to make Java open source and released the bulk of its code under a GPL license. Since then, high-profile [...]

I assume all of you had a safe year-ending? With all the fireworks, a finger or an eye is easily lost… I also assume that you are full of good intentions for the new year. I wish you all a prosperous and happy 2012, and I hope we will see a new shining release of [...]

The ffmpeg developers and their libav antipodes are engaged in a healthy battle. Ever since there was a fall-out and the ffmpeg developer community split in two (forking ffmpeg into “libav”), ffmpeg itself has seen many releases which tend to incorporate the good stuff from the other team as well as their own advancements. Last [...]

The KDE team has already released two betas of the upcoming KDE 4.8, but I am not so much in a hurry. First things first! There is the last update in the 4.7 series, which was released earlier today. The Slackware KDE 4.7.4 packages are ready and you can grab them if you like. For [...]

Some time ago I ran into this website promoting a very cheap computer the size of a credit card. The Raspberry Pi is being created by a charitable foundation. It is designed to “plug into a TV or be combined with a touch screen for a low cost tablet“. Typically its target is “teaching computer [...]

Those of you who use KDE as their desktop environment and also use my LibreOffice packages, will know that there are two major annoyances, related to KDE’s theming engine but ultimately caused by bugs in LibreOffice. Those annoyances are: Tooltips in LO applications show up as black text on black background, effectively rendering them useless. [...]

 The glibc packages in Slackware -current were updated to 2.14.1 a few days ago. Unfortunately, a couple of issues were reported, you will find them in this LinuxQuestions thread. Since I had to compile my multilib version of glibc still, I decided to wait a bit with releasing them, and that allowed me to find [...]

 Just released: Libreoffice 3.4.4. Please read the official announcement which tells us that “This is the fourth update to the stable version of LibreOffice. It contains only safe code fixes and translation updates, and is considered safe for production use“.   I have created some packages for you. Like the last time, there is the [...]