My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Slackware 14 release candidate 3 plus multilib updates

Slackware 14 is getting ever closer upon us. Yesterday, the third release candidate was made public:

Fri Aug 24 20:08:37 UTC 2012
This is Slackware 14.0 release candidate 3, and is hopefully the last stop
on our long road to a stable Slackware release soon.  After hearing that
the 3.4.x kernel series will have long term support, I tested 3.4.9 hoping
that it would prove stable enough to use that as the release kernel, but
there are problems with an oops in kernel/time/clocksource.c every few boots.
Given that the 3.2.x series has been very stable, it seems prudent to stick
with that for release, and 3.2.28 is going to be the release kernel.  So,
one more round of testing.  Let me know if there are any problems.  Thanks!

I had not paid good attention, so it took me a few seconds to realize that a rebuild of the glibc package was mentioned there. So, I proceeded with updating my QEMU virtual machine of slackware64-current and rebuilt my multilib versions of the glibc packages:

Sat Aug 25 07:47:10 UTC 2012
current/glibc-2.15-x86_64-5alien.txz:  Rebuilt.
current/glibc-i18n-2.15-x86_64-5alien.txz:  Rebuilt.
current/glibc-profile-2.15-x86_64-5alien.txz:  Rebuilt.
current/glibc-solibs-2.15-x86_64-5alien.txz:  Rebuilt.
current/glibc-zoneinfo-2012e_2012e-noarch-5alien.txz:  Rebuilt.
  Upgraded to tzcode2012e and tzdata2012e.
current/compat32-tools-2.2-noarch-2alien.tgz:  Improved handling of qt package
  in comvertpkg-compat32 (makes the resulting package a lot smaller by weeding
  out unneeded stuff). Thanks to Sebastien BALLET.

Get them here as usual – I suppose that by now you’re able to find the mirror sites?

I also refreshed the set of converted 32-bit packages in the “slackware64-compat32” subdirectory, so if you are lazy and don’t want to run the “massconvert32.sh” script you can just download and install/upgrade those.

The fact that I was not paying close enough attention was caused largely by the Slackware Documentation Project, which we kick-started a little over a week ago. In that week, there was an enormous amount of activities and judging by the “recent updates” page, people are still enthusiastic about it. I must say, not everybody was happy with the way I crafted the project – but hey! You could have started this project yourself in the last 19 years! Nobody was stopping you!

I did not want to wait for someone else and gave form and direction to my own ideas about a good multi-language documentation site. Enjoy it, contribute to it, make it so extraordinary that even non-Slackers will want to read it. It does not have to be difficult.

Eric

SlackDocs logo courtesy of V. T.Eric Layton

14 Comments

  1. escaflown

    Thanks Eric!

  2. V. T. Eric Layton

    Nice logo. 😉

  3. stereo

    Nice work, thanks buddy 🙂

  4. alienbob

    I should have mentioned the logo’s credits Eric… I have updated the article. Apologies.

    Eric

  5. V. T. Eric Layton

    Don’t be silly, man. That logo belongs to Pat V. I just tweaked it a bit. I’m glad you liked it enough to use it somewhere.

    ~Eric L.

  6. toudi

    the Slackware installation section of the docs could use some info if Slackware is optimized to work with SSDs and if not a howto would be great 🙂
    and also a poll with a list of howtos so people can vote which ones they find most useful 🙂
    thanks to that howto creators would be able to judge which ones do first 🙂

  7. alienbob

    Since this is a Wiki, ideas can be converted into articles real easy…

    We are only live for a week now, do not expect us to have a Wiki the size of ArchWiki in this short amount if time.

    But we _do_ welcome people who can contribute with a howto page.

    Eric

  8. weput

    I just updated my -current netbook and I have to say it feel smoother with the 3.2.28-smp

    Slackware might be the only distro that improves performance when upgrading packates… 😀

  9. big_bass

    I want to say thank you very much for all your well documented and useful scripts ! I used for the first time yesterday your usb installer for slackware 14rc3

    Thank you, Thank you 😀
    Joe

    *It had a very small glitch that was easy to fix that I wanted to bring to your attention it was caused by the java symlink in extra

    the below script is just to show that all that needs to be done is exclude the java link ……

    ………………………………………..

    #I used different drives so note the changes looking at sdb
    # I downloded slackware-current-install-dvd.iso
    # to /mnt/sda3/

    #download the slackware 14 iso the dvd version

    I did this for 32 bit but it should be fine for both
    #http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=07409

    mkdir -p /mnt/iso
    mount -o loop /mnt/sda3/slackware-current-install-dvd.iso /mnt/iso/

    mkdir -p /root/USB-BOOT
    cp /mnt/iso/usb-and-pxe-installers/* /root/USB-BOOT
    cd /root/USB-BOOT
    chmod a+x usbimg2disk.sh

    # I modified the script here because the java symlink borks the full installer
    # this is the auto fix. Both options work now small install and full installer
    sed -i ‘244 a\
    –exclude=extra/java \\’ /root/USB-BOOT/usbimg2disk.sh

    # if you get this message and you will on Porteus
    #*** This script requires that the ‘floppy’ (mtools) package is installed
    # install it here floppy-5.4-i486-3.txz
    #http://mirror.switch.ch/ftp/pool/2/mirror/slackware/slackware-13.37/slackware/a/floppy-5.4-i386-3.txz

    # this will install the image to USB then make it bootable please adjust your drives!
    #./usbimg2disk.sh -i /root/USB-BOOT/usbboot.img -o /dev/sdb

    This will make the full installer this will take some time
    #./usbimg2disk.sh -f -s /mnt/iso/ -o /dev/sdb
    ………………………………………………………………….

  10. alienbob

    @big_bass

    I did not find any errors when I ran the usbimg2disk.sh script, and it produced a nice bootable USB stick for me.
    What OS did you use to run the script on? Where was the Slackware package directory located? Did you save the error output so that I can have a look at it?

    Eric

  11. big_bass

    Hey alienbob

    I am happy that you wrote the script and it does work correctly I was only offering some feedback to what I experienced using your script

    I received this message in the output symlink has no
    ………………………………………………………….
    referent: “/mnt/iso/extra/java”
    IO error encountered — skipping file deletion
    …………………………………………………………..

    this is why I excluded the java link
    however I ran the script again without modifying anything to verify
    that it will build the complete USB correctly
    I had thought the script was hanging there
    but all the built was fine

    to avoid that –warning– message
    I excluded the java link

    Thank you all installed correctly
    and I will be following your blog
    Joe

    BTW I was using Porteus as my OS while running the script and all worked perfectly — minus the warning message

  12. big_bass

    Hey alienbob
    here is a better report
    http://pastebin.com/2b6nMmiv

    I ran it again to get a full report

    Joe

  13. alienbob

    Hi big_bass

    Do you by any chance ise a slackware-current DVD where the “source” directories have been excluded to create a smaller DVD ISO image?

    In that case, the extra/java symlink is pointing into nowhere which will result in exactly that rsync error message “symlink has no referent:”.

    Not a fault of the script per se. Excluding that symlink will indeed solve the issue for you.

    Eric

  14. big_bass

    Hey alienbob

    I checked the md5 sums and they weren’t the same I had no source folder !
    I had a bad iso download 🙁

    I was reading over your usbinstaller script
    what a pleasure to read very clear and well commented
    Thank you for taking the time to comment
    I am downloading rc4 now 😀

    Joe

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