Alien Pastures

As you may know I am using KDE for my daily work. However, I use XFCE from time to time – for example when I have to run a remote X session over XDMCP and want to keep a fluid feel to the desktop.
When I was working in XFCE yesterday I wanted to use VLC [...]

I am beginning to feel the lack of computing power in my attic…
There is a pending KDE 4.5.0 release, which needs to be built for slackware-current. Then there is also VLC 1.1.2 which was released a few days ago… and those packages need to be built for Slackware 13.1 (so that they can join [...]

Hi!
Just a quick message before I hit the bed,
I uploaded some Slackware packages for your consumption.

vlc – the new stable release 1.1.1 became available for download today and my packages are now ready to be grabbed at http://slackware.org.uk/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/ (this UK mirror hosts the packages with export restrictions – they contain mp3 and aac audio encoders) [...]

VideoLAN team has released version 1.1.0 of their VLC player.
This  release has many improvements over the previous 1.0.0 version of this “swiss army knife of media players“.
A detailed description of the changes can be found in the team’s announcement of the new release. You can also have a look at the supported features of the [...]

In past posts, I talked a bit about video decoding in VLC, particularly using the GPU (your graphics card’s processor) to decode frames instead of letting the software do all the work. My previous posts mostly revolved around the fact that this did not yet work in the release candidates of VLC 1.1.0 (which [...]

The VLC packages which I created to accompany the release of Slackware 13.1 support the playback of WebM video, the Google-sponsored new free video format.
What the VLC graphical interface can not yet do, is allow you to encode WebM video. Lucky for us, VLC has a command-line interface as well, with a humongous amount [...]

Just to add another message to the turmoil of cheering blog posts
Slackware 13.1 has been released today.
Read all about it in the official announcement or  read the ANNOUNCE.TXT directly.
As usual, it is recommended (but not mandatory) to buy a copy of the DVD or CD-set which helps funding the development of the distro [...]

The VideoLAN team have released version 1.0.6 of their VLC player. This version fixes several vulnerabilities which were found during development of the upcoming version 1.1.0.
I have built Slackware packages for vlc-1.0.6 (Slackware 13.0 32-bit and 64-bit) which you can find at the usual place, http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/vlc/. This is the release announcement in my repository’s [...]

VLMC
In the past week, I have been messing a bit with the VideoLAN Movie Creator (VLMC). This is a new project – not yet released in a stable version – from the VideoLAN developer community. It is meant to become “a free video editing software, offering features to realize semi-professional quality movies, but with [...]

Last week, an upgraded gcc compiler suite (version 4.4.2) was added to slackware-current . The new Gnu C compiler reveals software compilation issues in several programs that did not occur with the previous version of the Gnu C compiler. A nice summary of issues you may encounter when building software using the scripts at SlackBuilds.org [...]