My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: multilib (Page 1 of 9)

Slackware introduces PAM into its core

Remember the date! On May 18th of 2020, PAM got added to the Slackware-current core. In case that makes you worry, wonder or causes you to ponder leaving Slackware behind, don’t let this change scare you. PAM has come a long way, it is safe and in Slackware, it is not getting in your way. You won’t have to change a single thing to your computer except installing three new packages (slackpkg install-new) before you reboot. Adding PAM should finally remove the self-imposed writer’s block in Patrick’s mind and open the path to long-awaited renewals in the KDE and XFCE areas.
Ever since these packages were added to /testing, I have been using PAM on my own desktop and laptop, both running Slackware64-current with KDE Plasma5 on top, and the desktop computer also running on Nvidia’s binary drivers. Not a single issue was found here.
Read the announcement:

Mon May 18 19:17:21 UTC 2020
Greetings! After three months in /testing, the PAM merge into the main tree
is now complete. When updating, be sure to install the new pam, cracklib, and
libpwquality packages or you may find yourself locked out of your machine.
Otherwise, these changes should be completely transparent and you shouldn’t
notice any obvious operational differences. Be careful if you make any changes
in /etc/pam.d/ – leaving an extra console logged in while testing PAM config
changes is a recommended standard procedure. Thanks again to Robby Workman,
Vincent Batts, Phantom X, and ivandi for help implementing this. It’s not
done yet and there will be more fine-tuning of the config files, but now we
can move on to build some other updates. Enjoy!

I have already updated my own repositories that are touched by PAM:

  • KTOWN
    The ‘latest’ and ‘testing’ repositories are now identical and contain the PAM-ified packages.
    It won’t matter which of the two you had configured, you’ll get the PAM-fied packages regardless. If you already were using the PAM from Slackware’s testing combined with my ktown ‘testing’ repository, then there’s nothing you have to change.
    If you did not use PAM before, you will have to do a reinstall of the following ‘ktown’ packages which are the only ones that want to use PAM: kscreenlocker, plasma-workspace and sddm-qt5. And don’t forget to install the new kwallet-pam package.
  • MULTILIB
    I have added ‘compat32’ versions of cracklib, libpwquality and pam, the three packages that got added to Slackware-current today.

And for completeness’ sake, I have also updated the “icu4c-compat” package in my regular repository, just like I did for “boost-compat” last week. Note that these two “compat” packages have no relation to the multilib “compat32” packages!
The boost-compat, icu4c-compat and poppler-compat packages in my regular repository contain older versions of the boost/icu4c/poppler libraries and some of your 3rd party packages (libreoffice!!!) may still need them until their packager does a recompile.

Enjoy! Eric

GCC 9.1.0_multilib for Slackware-current

The GCC compiler suite in slackware-current got a major version bump last week in a dual update (the second update added the new ‘gcc-gdc’ package).
GCC version went up from 8.3.0 to 9.1.0.

I just uploaded the multilib version of the GCC packages, including that ‘gcc-gdc‘ package containing the new ‘D’ compiler.
The set of ‘*compat32’ packages was also refreshed with the latest 32bit binaries from Slackware 14.2 and -current.

Grab the packages from my server or from any mirror (those will have a few hours delay until they catch up).

Have fun, Eric

Updates for LibreOffice and multilib, more to come

libreoffce_logoBecause of recent updates in slackware-current (in this case, the boost package) the LibreOffice in my own repository stopped working. Library conflict. Don’t you love the life on the bleeding edge 😉

By coïncidence, the Document Foundation had just released a new version of their LibreOffice sources, so instead of recompiling the old 5.4.3 packages I could grab the new 5.4.4 release and turn those sources into Slackware packages (Slackware 14.2 and -current). The next major release 6.0 is just around the corner but I am not going to wait for that.
You can get the new packages from my repository – like https://slackware.nl/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ .

Also, I updated the multilib repository with the latest updates in slackware-current (the new l/Mako, a/lzlib and a/plzip are now also available in a “compat32” version).
Remember to also install the new packages, not just upgrade the existing ones! If you have a local mirror, that means using “upgradepkg –install-new” and if you use slackpkg with slackpkg+, you need to do “slackpkg update; slackpkg install multilib ; slackpkg upgrade-all”. That “slackpkg install multilib” takes care of installing any package you are still missing.

Work on a new Plasma5 package set is also well underway. The 64bit -current bit is done so I know I have my sources and scripts in order, and I am generating a new PLASMA5 Live ISO for testing. Stay tuned.

Some thoughts on the recent updates in Slackware-current

 Last week, a new LTS kernel (4.9.26), new glibc (2.25) and a new gcc compiler suite (7.1.0) landed in Slackware-current. Note that gcc no longer contains the Java compiler (gcj): subsequently Slackware’s gcc-java package has been removed from slackware-current.
We are at the head of the herd again folks. There is not yet any other distro that ships with the gcc-7 compiler by default. This will certainly pose some challenges for people who compile their stuff themselves – the SBo team warned their community about scripts that require patches to compile against gcc-7.

I have my set of challenges myself too… until now, I have not been able to compile the multilib versions of the gcc compiler suite. That’s infuriating, I can tell you. Specifically, I have issues with brig, gnat, go and objc compilers; the 7.1.0 versions of c and c++ compilers are just fine. I hope to resolve this soon-ish… until then, you will have to wait for new multilib compilers. If you really need a gcc 7.1.0 compiler (for instance, to compile a kernel module) I suggest that you (temporarily) switch to Slackware-current’s gcc 7.1.0 packages. Running your multilib system is of course not affected by this – gcc is only needed to compile stuff. I will probably release glibc-2.25_multilib packages ahead of the problematic gcc multilib packages to give you at least something.

Another interesting addition is lame. After the last Fraunhofer MP3 patent expired on 16 April 2017, the doors were opened to enable MP3 encoding support in Slackware. Several packages have been recompiled to take advantage of the new MP3 encoding capability (cdrdao, sox, ffmpeg, MPlayer, audacious-plugins) and the gstreamer packages were updated for good measure.

I have added ‘lame’ to the ‘massconvert32.sh‘ script of my compat32-tools package and updated the set of “compat32” packages in my multilib repository.

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