Alien Pastures

KDE 4.7.2 fixes In the past week, fixes have been posted to the KDE packagers mailing list, asking us to apply those to our packages. Both fixes are important enough that I updated my kdelibs and kdepim-runtime packages. There is a fix for kdelibs of which Sebastian Trueg states “Hi packagers, sadly I introduced a [...]

Hi! A number of big packages are coming up fairly soon. There will be a new LibreOffice (3.4, a major release), and VLC as well will probably have another release shortly. Also, I should be working on KDE 4.6.3. I am looking at ways to make this manageable for me. Compiling LibreOffice packages takes forever, [...]

The sources of KDE Software Compilation 4.4.90 (which is  in fact Release Candidate 1 of the upcoming KDE 4.5) have been available on KDE’s ftp server for some days now. There is still no official announcement from KDE team about this RC1 but it will without doubt appear soon on kde.org after the weekend. In [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Some time ago I posted a blurb about “AST”, which is my “Alien’s SlackBuild Toolkit”. It is a web-based application for people who want to build a package for Slackware and don’t feel comfortable writing a build script. AST will ask you a few questions and then produces a SlackBuild script and slack-desc file which [...]

I realize that I have not been updating my SlackBuilds repository at http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/ all that much lately. That does not mean that I stopped caring! On the contrary, I’d say. Apart from several small-ish updates to articles in my Wiki (thanks for the feedback which enables me to improve the existing pages!) I have been [...]

The Slackware ChangeLog.txt is full of frenzied activity these days. It may be obvious that the next official release is just around the corner. I was taken by surprise when I saw the ChangeLog entry of Mon Dec 8 22:31:55 CST 2008: isolinux/initrd.img: Added missing mount.nfs. Added INSSMB, an installer script to use a Samba [...]

You may not have noticed yet, but the submission page at SlackBuilds.org (aka SBo) has changed: Pending the release of Slackware 12.2, the site admins have temporarily disabled the submission form in order to prepare things on our end for 12.2. This does not mean that a Slackware 12.2 is imminent. Only Patrick knows when [...]

You probably know that I have produced quite a bit of SlackBuild scripts so far. All these scripts are similar because they are built from my template script. A template that changes over time of course. It is part of what I call Alien’s SlackBuild Toolkit or AST for short. AST consists of several scripts [...]