My mirror server taper.alienbase.nl is temporarily down.

This server is in fact a virtual machine and the physical host is being moved to another data center. I am not the host server’s owner, it is a donation made by a generous Slackware user that allows me to operate the virtual server using a big bandwidth connection.

Thanks again to the anonymous donor. I know his identity of course, but he wants to remain anonymous. I was not even allowed to mention his company name on the web site…

I’ll bring the mirror server back up as soon as possible, but it will all depend on the logistics of moving the physical hardware and contract negotiations.

Eric

If you want to compile this yourself, then remember what I said in my post about the 3.5.2 release: “update … Slackware 13.37 with all the patches which were released by Pat. This includes a spiced-up version of Seamonkey“. All you need to install additionally are packages for Apache Ant and the Archive:Zip Perl module. None of this is necessary if you just want to use my package for LibreOffice.

LibreOffice Math (Formula)

In comments to the LO 3.5.2 blog article, both ngc891 and Willy Sudiarto Raharjo informed me that the LibreOffice Math program did not work in my 3.5.2 packages. If you tried to run “lomath” or “libreoffice–math”, then the Writer would start instead. I looked into this, and found out that several older versions of my LibreOffice packages also did not contain a working LibreOffice Math! I dissected my package and compared it to other distro’s packages. That is how I discovered that my packages were missing one critical file, which (for unknown reasons) is not getting installed by the “make install” routine. Therefore I added a check in the SlackBuild script which copies that “math.xcd” file into the package if it appears to be missing. And now, it works! In the LibreOffice main window, the “Formula” button is no longer greyed-out.

You can find the packages for Slackware 13.37 (and -current) in the usual locations (all of the mirrors below also offer rsync access):

• http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ (master site)
• http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/
• http://slackware.org.uk/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/
• http://scw.net.br/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/
• http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-libreoffice/
• http://alien.slackbook.org/slackbuilds/libreoffice/

One word of caution!

I wrote this in my previous post as well, but if you did not upgrade from 3.4 yet and this is the first time you are going to upgrade to a 3.5 release, it is important that you follow these instructions first in order to keep your existing configuration, customization and extensions.

Between 3.4.x and 3.5.0, LibreOffice changed the location of its configuration directory (again). Originally using ~/.ooo (a heritage from OpenOffice.org) it switched to ~/.libreoffice which will probably be where you will find your custom settings stored. The 3.5 releases however, use ~/.config/libreoffice . The best thing to do is move your current configuration directory to the new location, so that LibreOffice keeps working as expected:

$ mv ~/.libreoffice ~/.config/libreoffice

If you had already started the new LibreOffice program and noticed that you seem to have lost all your configuration settings, then you will have to stop LibreOffice, delete the fresh and almost empty ~/.config/libreoffice directory and then perform the directory move as shown above.

Cheers, Eric

The upgrade will be trivial. Slackware-current was enhanced very recently with KDE 4.8.2 and all the software updates which that move required. Apart from the 4.8.3 release sources, I only had to compile a newer version of libbluedevil and bluedevil, and even those two will be updated in Slackware too, very soon (perhaps Pat already pulled the trigger).

Get my packages here; the official Slackware packages will remain at version 4.8.2, while Pat and the team concentrate on other parts of the distro.

• http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.8.3/ (the master repository), rsync URI: rsync://alien.slackbook.org/alien/ktown/4.8.3/
• http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.8.3/ (my fast mirror), rsync URI: rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.8.3/
• http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.8.3/ (willysr’s Indonesian mirror), rsync URI: rsync://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.8.3/
• http://scw.net.br/alien-ktown/4.8.3/ (a mirror maintained by Herbert Alexander Faleiros), rsync URI: rsync://rsync.scw.net.br/alien-ktown/4.8.3/

The accompanying README file contains detailed installation/upgrade instructions. Do not fail to follow those instructions!

Have fun! Eric

The update to the ChangeLog.txt makes up almost 20% of the full ChangeLog length so far! Finally we have a beefy update to -current. It’s playtime for those who had not used my own unofficial “ktown” builds yet.

Note that Slackware’s version of Calligra (the successor to Koffice) is now at the official stable release, version 2.4. My own package was still a release candidate.

Also note that Networkmanager was added to Slackware! So, what I had kept separately in a “testing” directory because I was not sure what Pat would want to do with it, is now being used in the distribution after all. Enabling NetworkManager is done like in my own instructions: make the rc script executable (Slackware will ship NM disabled by default) using the command “chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.networkmanager”, and add the NetworkManager plasmoid (widget) to your KDE desktop in order to configure it.

The good old way of using rc.inet1 to configure your network is still available of course, this will not change! Also, you can still use WICD instead if you prefer that. Users of XFCE will want to stick with WICD anyway, since Slackware does not have a graphical configuration tool for managing NM connections, apart from the KDE widget.

Upgrade instructions:

If you are currently running “alien” packages for KDE 4.8.2 and want to upgrade to the official packages in Slackware-current, then you’ll have to be prepared for some manual labour. But it may not be that hard after all, except when you have a lot of my other packages installed as well (like multilib versions of gcc/glibc and lots of “compat32″ packages).

1. If you are using slackpkg to maintain your Slackware,  then probably you have blacklisted all of my packages.In this case, temporarily remove or comment the line in “/etc/slackpkg/blacklist” that goes “[0-9]+alien”. Then use slackpkg to upgrade to slackware-current as usual, with this condition: do not blindly accept the list of packages to be upgraded, but review every single package shown by slackpkg as a candidate for upgrading. De-select every package which you want to keep! All the “alien” packages related to KDE and its dependencies must stay in a “selected” state. Then let slackpkg do its upgrade work and you’ll end up with a proper slackware-current.
2. If you want to upgrade using slackpkg but are not prepared to review lots of packages manually to see if they should be upgraded or left alone, then a very fast way of upgrading from my own to Slackware’s packages will be the following four commands followed by a regular upgrade using slackpkg (example paths are for 64-bit Slackware, so if you are running 32-bit Slackware then you have to ignore the “64″):

1. upgradepkg /path/to/local-mirror-of/slackware64-current/slackware64/a/*.t?z
2. upgradepkg /path/to/local-mirror-of/slackware64-current/slackware64/l/*.t?z
3. upgradepkg /path/to/local-mirror-of/slackware64-current/slackware64/kde/*.t?z
4. upgradepkg /path/to/local-mirror-of/slackware64-current/slackware64/kdei/*.t?z

Note that if you blindly ran these four commands and you are on a multilib system, you will have overwritten the multilib versions of the glibc packages with original (non-multilib) Slackware versions. You will have to download and upgrade to my multilib glibc packages again. Note that this will not break your Slackware installation… it merely disables the use of 32-bit software until you re-install my multilib glibc packages.

Have fun! Eric

There was no change when 3.5.1 came out, but thankfully we now have a new maintenance release, LibreOffice 3.5.2. Lo and behold, I could successfully compile packages, but the SlackBuild needed several updates because the build process changes quite dramatically between the various 3.x releases. The developer team is slowly getting rid of the old StarOffice heritage, and ultimately the dependency on Java for the compilation should be completely removed. We’re note yet there however.

What I did manage is to get rid of the requirement to install an xulrunner package in order to create the LibreOffice packages. I updated my virtual machine running Slackware 13.37 with all the patches which were released by Pat. This includes a spiced-up version of Seamonkey which originally got the updates in order to be able to compile OpenJDK, but it is also able to aid in the compilation of LibreOffice. All you need to add now are packages for  Apache Ant and the Archive:Zip Perl module.

You can find the packages for Slackware 13.37 (and -current) in the usual locations (all of the mirrors below also offer rsync access):

• http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ (master site)
• http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/
• http://slackware.org.uk/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/
• http://scw.net.br/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/
• http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-libreoffice/
• http://alien.slackbook.org/slackbuilds/libreoffice/

One word of caution!

LibreOffice changed the location of its configuration directory (again). Originally using ~/.ooo it switched to ~/.libreoffice which will probably be where you will find your custom settings stored. The 3.5 releases however, use ~/.config/libreoffice . The best thing to do is move your current configuration directory to the new location, so that LibreOffice keeps working as expected:

$ mv ~/.libreoffice ~/.config/libreoffice

If you had already started the new LibreOffice program, then you will have to delete the fresh and almost empty ~/.config/libreoffice directory first of course.

Cheers, Eric

The sources were made available to packagers some days earlier and that enabled me to update my scripts and start building on time.

I am running KDE 4.8.2 myself and so far, have not found issues. If you find any, be sure to discuss them on this blog page. I have packages ready for you to download & enjoy!

• http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.8.2/ (the master repository), rsync URI: rsync://alien.slackbook.org/alien/ktown/4.8.2/
• http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.8.2/ (my fast mirror), rsync URI: rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.8.2/
• http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.8.2/ (willysr’s Indonesian mirror), rsync URI: rsync://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.8.2/
• http://scw.net.br/alien-ktown/4.8.2/ (a mirror maintained by Herbert Alexander Faleiros), rsync URI: rsync://rsync.scw.net.br/alien-ktown/4.8.2/

As usual, my README file contains  detailed installation/upgrade instructions. Do not fail to follow those instructions!

I have updated quite a lot of the dependencies for this release, in particular qt, libdbusmenu-qt, sg3_utils, sip, PyQt, QScintilla, shared-desktop-ontologies, raptor2, rasqal, redland, grantlee, phonon, phonon-mplayer, soprano, akonadi. I also moved libktorrent back from the “deps” directory into KDE’s “extragear” because libktorrent depends on kdelibs and therefore should be considered as being a KDE component.

And there may even better news in the near future. Pat Volkerding grabbed my build scripts to create official KDE 4.8.2 packages for Slackware-current which hopefully will be showing up in the repositories soon. This means that finally with the update from 4.5.5 to 4.8.2 (and skipping all the 4.6 and 4.7 releases) Slackware again would have a real “current” KDE environment by default. Let’s all hope Pat does not get distracted by the hordes of fans demanding attention!

Have fun! Eric

Zoervleis is a stew, typically meant to do something useful with meat that would otherwise not be eaten: by marinating meat, usually horse’s meat, in vinegar for hours or even days, even the toughest meat can be made tender.

In my recipe below, I used pork steak. This does not have to marinate for hours like other types of meat (like beef). Instead, I prepared the stew a day in advance so that the meat can rest in the acid liquid overnight, effectively giving it the same tenderness. If you use beef or horsemeat (zoervleis is typically made with horsemeat) you need to marinate the meat for 12 to 24 hours in the same mix of vinegar, water, cloves, juniper berries and bay leaf which is used below to cook the stew.

Ingredients:

• 500 grams of meat, cut into 3cm chunks
• 3 large onions, sliced into (quarter) rings
• 3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
• butter
• pepper, salt to taste
• 25 cl vinegar
• 25 cl water
• 3 cloves
• 4 juniper berries
• 1 bay leaf
• 2 tbs (tablespoon) of muscovado (brown sugar)
• 2 tbs sweat-sour apple syrup (the “rinse appelstroop” from the province of Limburg)
• 1 slice of gingerbread (typical dutch “ontbijtkoek”)

Preparation:

For cooking a stew, you need an iron kettle with a thick bottom. This will ensure that the heat from the flame is distributed evenly and will allow you to simmer the meat on a small fire for a long time.

The night before you serve the zoervleis:

• Heat the butter until it stops bubbling (which means the watery components have evaporated) and begins to darken. Fry the meat for about 5 minutes until the chunks have a nice brown colour.
• Turn the heat down a bit and add the sliced onions and chopped garlic. For the next 5 minutes or so, stir the meat plus onions from time to time until the onions have turned a golden brown.
• Add pepper and salt to taste
• Add the cloves, juniper berries, bay leaf, vinegar and water (these are the ingredients which you can alternatively use as the marinade if the meat needs tenderizing before you start cooking. Note that the pork steak I used does not need marinating)
• Bring the mixture back to the boiling point, and then add the muscovado, apple syrup and gingerbread (these ingredients add the necessary sweet counterbalance to the sourness of the vinegar)
• Put the lid on the kettle, turn the flame down as low as you can, and leave to simmer for at least two hours

The next day:

• The zoervleis has rested in the acidic liquid overnight, which has allowed the meat to become tender and the aromas to mix. You’ll notice that the stew is no longer watery – the liquid is being bound by the other ingredients.
• Put a very low flame underneath the kettle and let the stew slowly heat up for an hour.
• Ready!

You serve zoervleis with apple sauce and pommes frites (french fries if you are american, or chips if you are british).

Instead of serving pommes frites, I cooked a few potatoes for about 10 minutes, let them cool down, cut them into slices of half a centimeter thick and fried those slices in a shallow pan in butter for another 15 minutes. Nice and crispy!

Enjoy this dish from my home county!

Eric

Image taken from http://ah.nl/

Since there are no source tarballs available for download yet, I created those from the “2.0.1″ tag in the VLC repository and built my packages using those sources. When the official tarball becomes available, I will add that to my repository instead of the git checkout (the official source tarball will be smaller because it does not have all the git commit history).

All the internal libraries which I use for creating this VLC media playet package (ffmpeg, x264, libvpx, lame, etc…) were kept unchanged. The new VLC code (and the two securiry fixes) is what matters. There is one thing I did fix however. Thanks to an attentive Slackware user I fixed the missing support for the Open Sound System (OSS) Apparently my VLC 2.0.0 package (as opposed to the previous 1.1,x versions) was unable to use OSS for its sound output. It turns out that I had to enable support for OSS explicitly in the code. I verified that OSS is again available in the sound preferences of the player.

This is where you’ll find the packages:

• http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/vlc/ (only containing the versions that do not violate US patents).
• http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/ (alternative repository containing packages capable of AAC/MP3 encoding).

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

Using “xdg-open” you can improve the integration of Firefox into your Desktop Environment a lot:

1. Stop firefox if it is running
2. Delete or rename the mimetypes cache (where firefox keeps its file association settings):
   $ rm ~/.mozilla/firefox/<yourprofile>/mimeTypes.rdf
3. Start firefox again
4. Download any file if you had not done this before
5. Open that file from the “Tools > Downloads” menu (by right-clicking on it and selecting “Open“). When asked to choose the application for opening the fike, browse to “/usr/bin/xdg-open“. then check the checkbox to “Remember your choice“.

After you’ve configured Firefox like that, both the  “Open” and “Open containing folder” context menus will work. If you are running KDE (which was the subject of that discussion on LQ.org) you can then change the preferred programs through KDE’s “file associations” settings. Brilliant.

Have fun,

Eric

I was triggered by a linuxquestions.org post which pointed to another post on forum.kde.org called “Common questions on Akonadi and Nepomuk in KDE PIM“. The post contains a Q&A between one of the board admins and Christian Mollenkopf. This is its full text, copied verbatim (and reformatted for this post). I hope this helps some people who wonder why their PC is so busy indexing on every boot.

Q&A session with Christian Mollenkopf:

Starting from version 4.7, KDE PIM has integrated Nepomuk for many operations such as search, message tagging, and address auto-completion. This post answers some of the common questions related to the state of this integration.

Q. Will email which is encrypted be indexed in any form, or will it be ignored?
A. It will be ignored since the search index is not secure.

Q. Will the indexer attempt to match the contents of my address book against emails?
A. Yes, the extracted contacts should be merged by email address.

Q. What occurs when email is read or deleted using other clients on shared mail boxes (such as IMAP mail boxes)?
A. It’s either removed or re-indexed.

Q. If the IMAP server supports it, does Akonadi use the server’s search capabilities or index it using Nepomuk anyway?
A. The indexer is protocol agnostic, that is, it works regardless of the server type used, be it POP, IMAP, or local mailbox. If a supported item (a message) is in Akonadi, it’s indexed. If it is changed it’s reindexed, and if it is deleted it’s removed from the index. It doesn’t really matter where the item is coming from.

Q. The performance of mail indexing is slow, how can it be improved?
A. There are different ways to achieve that:

• Index only what you need. Right click on a folder, select Folder Properties, then the Maintenance tab, then “Disable fulltext indexing“: this will disable indexing for that specific folder;
• Turn off email indexing altogether by unchecking the relevant option in System Settings, Desktop Search (only available from 4.8 and later);
• Wait until initial indexing has completed. Indexing is completed when the akonadi_nepomuk_feederrc file in your KDEHOME/share/config directory (KDEHOME is usually .kde or .kde4) contains the following:

  [InitialIndexing]
IndexCompatLevel=3

• Locate the akonadi_nepomuk_feederrc file and change DisableIdleDetection to true:

  [akonadi_nepomuk_feeder]
DisableIdleDetection=true

  This will cause the feeder to keep on indexing regardless of idle status, increasing CPU usage significantly but on the long run reducing the time to complete indexing. As a matter of fact, the real performance issue is the initial indexing, as it can take very long (days with large mailboxes), and is restarted if interrupted (i.e. because of a restart, not by sleep-mode or alike). Once initial indexing is over, performance will be significantly better. The KDE PIM developers are aware of this problem and will work on a solution.

Eric