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Tag: wine (Page 2 of 3)

(Wine-) Pipelight update – careful upgrade

December 23, 2014 / / 7 Comments

pipelight-logo After a long time of silence (but ongoing development as shown in their git repository) the Pipelight developers released a new stable pipelight a few weeks ago. I created Slackware packages for this (Slackware 14.0 and newer) but before you upgrade, please read the words of caution at the end of this post, they will save you some frustration.

The new pipelight is a bugfix release: after Google deprecated NPAPI plugins, the focus for Pipelight team has been better support for Firefox. As stated in the release notes, most of the remaining bugs should now be in Wine, not in pipelight. That has also lead to more focus on what used to be called “wine-compholio”. the team’s patch-set for wine that implements the Windows browser plugin support. The name “wine-compholio” has changed to “Wine Staging” which is now even used as the default wine version on Fedora. I am not willing to go that far, so there is still a separate wine-pipelight package that you have to install on Slackware in order to use my pipelight package.

Remember that you can always get the latest Windows plugin releases (an important feature in case of security fixes) without having to wait for me creating a new package. Just run the command “pipelight-plugin –update” as root. After doing that, the next time your browser loads the pipelight plugin, it will automatically download the newest version of your installed Windows plugin(s).

I know that some people are grumbling whenever someone develops a program for Linux that enables the use of Windows software (emulated or otherwise), such as wine or pipelight. The fact is, if you want to watch Netflix on your Slackware computer, and you do not want to install Google Chrome, then Mozilla Firefox combined with pipelight and MS SilverLight is still the only way to achieve this. Chromium does not support NPAPI either and the Widevine CDM can not be made to work as it does in Chrome. Also, software using Silverlight is still widespread in school systems. I will welcome the future implementation of EME in Firefox that will allow separate download and use of Content Decryption Modules (CDM) like Widevine which is used by Chrome for streaming Netflix. Then, Google Chrome nor pipelight/silverlight will be necessary any longer. Accepting that DRM is here to stay and can still be made compatible to Open Source and Free Choice is the start and I am glad that Mozilla thought hard and long about the apparent clash and came up with a sane solution.

Anyway, enough of the ranting.

In my original post about pipelight, you will find full installation and configuration instructions, as well as a troubleshooting section. That blog article is also referred to on the pipelight.net support page. Let me remind you that you need to go multilib if you want to use pipelight on 64-bit Slackware.

Package location (uploads expected later today, I thought it was more important to have this blog page up first):

A note of caution when upgrading to my pipelight-0.2.8 package:

This only applies to 64-bit Slackware!!!

I have made one important change to the file locations of the 64-bit pipelight package. The file “libpipelight.so” is a 64-bit shared library, but the previous 64-bit pipelight packages would install this file into “/usr/lib/pipelight/libpipelight.so”. That is not the correct location for 64-bit libraries, so the new package installs this file as “/usr/lib64/pipelight/libpipelight.so”.

This has the side effect that your pipelight stops working. The error message(if you start firefox in a terminal) will be something like “pluginInitOkay(): incompatible version of pluginloader.exe“. Don’t worry, you can remedy this.

These are the steps you have to take in order to fix this (it’s a one-time action):

As root user: remove all old copies of the library created by earlier pipelight versions:

# rm -r /usr/lib/pipelight

As your own user account, list all plugins you have currently enabled (copy that command’s output because you have to re-enable them in a later step):

$ pipelight-plugin --list-enabled

That command basically checks your “~/.mozilla/plugins/” directory for symlinks named “libpipelight*.so”. If you look inside that directory, you will notice that all these symlinks are pointing to the no longer existing location “/usr/lib/pipelight”. So, you first remove those symlinks:

$ pipelight-plugin --disable-all

And re-create them properly (still as your own user account):

$ pipelight-plugin --enable <your previously enabled plugin(s)>

That’s all. Have fun! Eric

 

New pipelight release, accompanied by wine-pipelight. And what about chromium?

June 5, 2014 / / 5 Comments

You are of course subscribed to my repository’s RSS feed and/or you are using slackpkg+ . Then you certainly noticed the update of Chromium to the new major version 35 two weeks ago. I really should have written about this update earlier, because Chromium 35 brings some unfortunate side effects to the table.

Chromium

chromium_iconChrome and Chromium were updated to version 35.0.1916.114, with “fixes for 23 security issues“. The most important fixes (for high-risk vulnerabilities) are:

  • [$3000][356653] High CVE-2014-1743: Use-after-free in styles. Credit to cloudfuzzer.
  • [$3000][359454] High CVE-2014-1744: Integer overflow in audio. Credit to Aaron Staple.
  • [$1000][346192] High CVE-2014-1745: Use-after-free in SVG. Credit to Atte Kettunen of OUSPG.
  • [$1000][364065] Medium CVE-2014-1746: Out-of-bounds read in media filters. Credit to Holger Fuhrmannek.
  • [$1000][330663] Medium CVE-2014-1747: UXSS with local MHTML file. Credit to packagesu.
  • [$500][331168] Medium CVE-2014-1748: UI spoofing with scrollbar. Credit to Jordan Milne.

I also updated the accompanying package for chromium-pepperflash-plugin (extracted from the official Chrome binaries) to 13.0.0.214. This is a security update.

The version 35 of Chromium has a major side effect that many people are not going to like. The support for browser plugins that use Mozilla’s NPAPI protocol to communicate with the browser has been removed and only Google’s own PPAPI protocol is supported as of now (MS Windows users still have a bit of time before the same happens to their Chrome browser – removal of NPAPI support in Windows is scheduled for the end of 2014). This step was of course announced long time ago and many reminders were posted, but if you need Java support in your browser, or want to watch Netflix using pipelight, then you are out of luck. PPAPI versions for these browser plugins do not exist and in the case of pipelight, are very hard to create.

You’re forced to switch (back) to Firefox in these cases.

Pipelight

pipelight-logo Speaking of Pipelight… there was a new pipelight release a couple of days back, and this is accompanied by a new web site: pipelight.net. These guys really like writing their own CMS-es! The source code to the new CMS is available on github by the way. With the new release of pipelight you’ll get more supported browser plugins, security updates for all relevant plugins such as Flash, and many bug fixes. Also, for people with an AMD graphics card the good news is that hardware acceleration is now supported and enabled by default.Also note that I have enabled support for WoW64 (meaning that apart from the regular 32-bit applications, 64-bit Windows plugins are also supported on Slackware 64-bit)

Luckily this all still works on Slackware-current’s kernel – there were fears that 32-bit Wine applications would stop working on the 3.14.4 and newer kernels.

Remember that you can always get the latest Windows plugin releases (an important feature in case of security fixes) without having to wait for me creating a new package. Just run the command “pipelight-plugin –update” as root. After doing that, the next time your browser loads the pipelight plugin, it will automatically download the newest version of your installed Windows plugin(s).

Together with this pipelight release, the pipelight developers released their latest “wine-compholio patches“, a set of patches for the official Wine sources which are needed for proper Windows plugin support in your Linux browser. Naturally I created new wine-pipelight packages for you, based on Wine 1.7.19.

In my original post about pipelight, you will find full installation and configuration instructions, as well as a troubleshooting section. That blog article is also referred to on the pipelight.net support page.

Package location:

 

Have fun! Eric

How to make UPC Horizon TV work in Linux

April 17, 2014 / / 3 Comments

pipelight-logo
In an earlier article I have explained how you can use pipelight to run a Windows-based browser plugin seamlessly in your Linux browser. This solution makes use of a modified Wine under the hood. This way, you can for instance display web sites using Microsoft’s SilverLight technology (many dutch schools use a proprietary SilverLight based pupil management system), or use the Windows Flash Player which is much more up to date than Adobe’s plugin for Firefox.

The pipelight plugin loader also supports the Widevine content decryption module, which is used to decrypt a DRM-protected Flash video stream. Widevine is used by UPC‘s service to subscribers to watch television channels on your computer: Horizon TV. I pride myself to be the initiator for getting widevine support added to pipelight because I am a UPC subscriber, but when it actually got added, I found out that I could not make it work with Horizon TV. Bummer!

After a lot of frustration I accidentally stumbled across a thread on the UPC community forum, where cause of the issue was explained and the solution was provided.

The widevine plugin as installed by pipelight is actually too new! In order to make Horizon TV work in a Linux browser, you need an older version of the Widevine DLL. That older version is still available for download, but to be safe I made a copy.

These are the steps you need to perform to make it work: Download the Widevine plugin for Firefox (an XPI file); unzip it in order to extract the DLL file it contains; and then copy the DLL file into the wine-pipelight prefix where Widevine has been installed – this will overwrite the newer (but non-functional) version of the DLL with the older (but working) version.

$ wget https://dl.google.com/widevine/6.0.0.6678/WidevineMediaOptimizer_Win.xpi
$ unzip  WidevineMediaOptimizer_Win.xpi plugins/npwidevinemediaoptimizer.dll
$ cp -p plugins/npwidevinemediaoptimizer.dll \
    ~/.wine-pipelight/drive_c/windows/system32/

Thanks to Theo Band for the instructions! With these three commands, I was able to watch television in my Slackware Firefox browser.

upc_horizon_tv

Hope this helps some of you. Eric

 

Chromium, LibreOffice, Pipelight, Flashplayer updates

February 25, 2014 / / 9 Comments

If you are subscribed to my repository’s RSS feed or if you are using slackpkg+ to keep your Slackware system updated, you will already have noticed and are probably already using the new packages – for the rest of you, here is the harvest of last week.

Chromium

chromium_iconChrome and Chromium were updated to version 33.0, bringing fixes for 28 security issues. The new version number is 33.0.1750.117 to be exact.

The most important fixes (for high-risk vulnerabilities) are:

  • [$2000][334897] High CVE-2013-6652: Issue with relative paths in Windows sandbox named pipe policy. Credit to tyranid.
  • [$1000][331790] High CVE-2013-6653: Use-after-free related to web contents. Credit to Khalil Zhani.
  • [$3000][333176] High CVE-2013-6654: Bad cast in SVG. Credit to TheShow3511.
  • [$3000][293534] High CVE-2013-6655: Use-after-free in layout. Credit to cloudfuzzer.
  • [$500][331725] High CVE-2013-6656: Information leak in XSS auditor. Credit to NeexEmil.

I have packages ready for the new chromium (Slackware 14.0, 14.1 and -current):

In the same locations you will also find updated packages for chromium-pepperflash-plugin and chromium-pdf-plugin. Both these packages contain binaries taken from the official Chrome distribution: respectively an Adobe Flash player and a PDF reader plugin. The Flash player is a security update (new version of the Pepper Flash plugin is 12.0.0.70), just like the other Flash player plugins I will mention further down.

LibreOffice

LibreOffice 4.2.1 packages for Slackware 14.1 and -current are ready too. The first minor increment in the 4.2 series took only 3 weeks, solving over 100 bugs which were introduced because of the relatively large amount of new code that was added since the prior 4.1 series. You can read more in the ChangeLog for 4.2.1.

Note that I ship my LibreOffice 4.1 and 4.2 packages with additional “libreoffice-dict-<language>” packages, containing dictionary and spellchecker support! If you are still running Slackware 13.37 there’s LibreOffice 3.6.7 for which I also have packages, and users of Slackware 14.0 are served well with LibreOffice 4.1.4 (I will compile packages for 4.1.5 shortly).

Package locations:

Pipelight

pipelight-logo The new pipelight release brings updates and fixes. More Windows browser plugins are supported, but being able to view Netflix will still be the major benefit for many of its users. Note that the update will also bring you the newest Flash Player version (fixing several security issues as already pointed out when I wrote about Chrome’s PepperFlash update). Together with the newest pipelight, I also created new packages for its wine-pipelight dependency, bringing the version of Wine to 1.7.13.

Let me remind you that in my original post about pipelight, you will find full installation and configuration instructions, as well as a troubleshooting section.

Package location:

 

Linux Flash Player

Of course there is the normal¨ Flash Player plugin for Linux as well – it received an update from Adobe just like its Chrome and Windows pendants. That same Adobe security bulletin mentions that the new version of the Linux browser plugin is 11.2.202.341. Package location:

Have fun! Eric

Installing Diablo 3 on Slackware Linux

June 7, 2012 / / 18 Comments

Linux Today News has a headline “How to Install Diablo 3 on Linux” which points to the following article on SoftPedia: http://news.softpedia.com/news/How-to-Install-Diablo-3-on-Linux-273950.shtml .

I smiled for a bit, because I already have Diablo 3 running on my Slackware desktop for a few weeks now. And it did not take “PlayOnLinux” to do this.

  1. Install my wine  1.5.x and wine_gecko 1.5 packages. I have applied patches specifically to make the Diablo 3 installer work. Do not use my wine 1.4 package – that is the “stable” release which can probably play Diablo but can not install it.
  2. Run “winecfg” and configure wine to behave like a Windows 7 OS.
  3. Download the winetricks script, copy it to your /usr/local/bin directory and make it executable.
  4. Run “winetricks vcrun2008” in order to install the MS Visual C++ 2008 runtime  This will prevent application crashes when starting Diablo 3.
  5. Download the Diablo 3 setup from your Battle.Net account (assuming you already have an account and a Diablo 3 license). If you have a Diablo3 DVD then you mount that of course
  6. Run the setup using this example command (you may have downloaded another localization than enGB): “wine Diablo-III-Setup-enGB.exe” (if you have the DVD then you run the setup from the mounted directory).
  7. The setup will download about 8 GB of installation files and will then start the actual installation process.
  8. Once the installation has finished, you’ll see the big button “Play”. Click it to start the game.
  9. The game has been installed as a menu entry as well: below a top-level menu called “Wine”.

If you want to install Diablo into its own wine prefix (meaning it will get its own toplevel directory and thus cannot influence the functionality of other Windows programs you may have installed) then you need to add something like “WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine-diablo3/” in front of the above winedcfg and wine commands (you are free to pick any directory you like, mine is just an example); or just run “export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine-diablo3/” once before starting the first wine command. The desktop menu entries which are created by the Diablo setup will automatically be configured to also use a custom wine prefix.

Using the wine-1.5.5 which I patched and packaged I could install Diablo 3 and play for hours without a single glitch. Well done wine developers!

Very good troubleshooting information about running Diablo 3 on Linux using wine can be found in the Diablo 3 appdb page on winehq.

Cheers, Eric

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