Alien Pastures

Comment from aiden
Posted: July 31, 2012 at 18:25

Thanks for creating this space, and for being such a force for the Slackware community.

Comment from aiden
Posted: July 31, 2012 at 22:57

Okay, so the good news is that Handbrake 0.9.8 works perfectly. The bad news is it doesn’t contain any features, only bug fixes. And according to the devs, the current trunk won’t be released as the official build until next year – https://forum.handbrake.fr/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=24951. Is there any way I could get you to build the 4883svn nightly (https://trac.handbrake.fr/browser/trunk?rev=4883)?

Comment from cesarion76
Posted: August 1, 2012 at 03:53

hi, just noticed the handbreak package in “restricted_slackbuilds” is still version 0.9.5 in 32/64 versions.

Do I get all the features if I get the regular pkg from slackware.com server?

best regards

Comment from alienbob
Posted: August 1, 2012 at 11:07

O… I forgot that I had to place the packages in restricted_slackbuilds due to the lame and faac encoders… I will set that right tonight and update the repositories.

Actually, it is easy for you to build your own package from a SVN trunk checkout. I will stick to the official releases but you can grab the SlackBuild and edit it so that it has these two lines:

VERSION=${VERSION:-r4883}
RELREV=${RELREV:-”"}

Which causes the script to checkout revision 4883 from trunk and build a package for that.

Eric

Comment from aiden
Posted: August 1, 2012 at 16:23

Thanks Bob. Unfortunately it’s not going to be that simple, because sourceforge.net only has the official releases. It looks like the only way to grab a nightly for a build is to use a subversion repository call, which is failing badly for me when I try it.

Comment from aiden
Posted: August 1, 2012 at 16:55

Hm… I reread your post, and understand my confusion now. The current .build file contains no references to SVN, so it defaulted to sourceforge.

Comment from aiden
Posted: August 2, 2012 at 00:42

Well, after a lengthy process of finding all the dependencies necessary for a compile in unRAID, I have a working executable. I’m not 100% of the best way to make it into a package, though. I ran “make install” in the build directory and that has me going for now, but is there a simple way to make the .build file?

Comment from cesarion76
Posted: August 2, 2012 at 03:57

Hi Eric, slackpkg won’t blacklist last multilib update

Mon Jul 30 20:12:24 UTC 2012
current/gcc-4.7.1_multilib-x86_64-1fix1_alien.txz: Rebuilt.
current/gcc-g++-4.7.1_multilib-x86_64-1fix1_alien.txz: Rebuilt.
current/gcc-gfortran-4.7.1_multilib-x86_64-1fix1_alien.txz: Rebuilt. Fixed the
64-bit libgfortranbegin.a library which got overwritten by the 32-bit
version. Thanks to hiptobecubic for reporting this.
current/gcc-gnat-4.7.1_multilib-x86_64-1fix1_alien.txz: Rebuilt.
current/gcc-go-4.7.1_multilib-x86_64-1fix1_alien.txz: Rebuilt.
current/gcc-java-4.7.1_multilib-x86_64-1fix1_alien.txz: Rebuilt.
current/gcc-objc-4.7.1_multilib-x86_64-1fix1_alien.txz: Rebuilt.

I had to add:

“[0-9]+fix1_alien” to /etc/slackpkg/blacklist so they don’t get replace by slackware’s native pkg

best regards

Comment from alienbob
Posted: August 2, 2012 at 08:59

Hi cesarion76

I think I may have to rename the packages so that they end on “fix1_1alien” instead of “1fix1_alien” because having to add yet another line to the blacklist file of slackpkg is not an elegant solution. Thanks for mentioning it.

Cheers, Eric

Comment from alienbob
Posted: August 2, 2012 at 09:01

aiden, I am a bit confused as to what you are trying. A “.build” file? Could you not just use the hints I gave 6 comments back and run the edited handbrake.SlackBuild with changed variable definitions? That will checkout a trunk snapshot and build that for you.

Eric

Comment from aiden
Posted: August 2, 2012 at 16:44

Bob, yes I tried that first, of course. But I got an “invalid scheme” error. So instead I went down the road of manually checking it out and compiling it locally based on Handbrake’s wiki instructions. What I would like to do is make a package out of that binary so I can post it on the unRAID forums for other users to download. I appreciate your patience, because I’m clearly a novice at these things.

Comment from alienbob
Posted: August 2, 2012 at 21:14

I never saw an “invalid scheme” error. Perhaps if you can post a full log of your failed compilation on http://pastebon.com/ then I could have a look at it.

Eric

Comment from gbdj
Posted: August 21, 2012 at 17:50

Hi. Are there any difficulties in building recent qemu-kvm-1.1.1 for slack 13.1 or 0.14 packages just left from old SlackBuild version?
Thank you

Comment from Colint
Posted: September 10, 2012 at 07:43

Thanks Eric for the kde 4.9.1, it has helped me out a lot.

Comment from Krisz
Posted: September 27, 2012 at 09:53

Hello Erik!

Could you please create a package for virt-manager? Or create a howto how we can install it? I found some howtos on the net for slackware and virt-manager, but I was unable to make it.

Thank you.
Krisz

Comment from alienbob
Posted: September 27, 2012 at 14:34

Hi Krisz

I have been looking at virt-manager, especially for the VNC viewer features, and it is possible that I will create packages and/or write an article about it, when I get some free time.

Eric

Comment from willian
Posted: October 3, 2012 at 17:11

Alien, everyone would like to know how is your perfect Slackware installation, from beginning to end, partitioning, filesystem, packages, tweaks and also a screenshot of your computer, this can be an upcoming article.

Comment from alienbob
Posted: October 3, 2012 at 18:05

Hi willian

My own computers are not all that interesting to talk about. They are functional but not shiny. I add only a few packages to a full Slackware install, depending on the needs (my laptop for work has some other stuff than the desktop I share with the family).
Even the background on this laptop is the standard KDE bakground…

Eric

Comment from Duodecimo
Posted: October 15, 2012 at 11:32

Hi Eric
First of all I wish to thank you for the amazing packages you place and all the contribution you do for slackware.
In your post about LibreOffice, you mentioned somewhere that packages under 13.37 might work for 14.0.
I wonder if I should try it for lame and others, in the restricted packages, or wine, in the regular ones, and even for packages for older versions, like xawtv for 12.0 (I have multilib installed).
I am using slackware 14.0.
cheers!

Comment from alienbob
Posted: October 15, 2012 at 14:41

Hi Duodecimo.

The golden rule for binary packages is, if they are not available for the Slackware release you are currently using, try a package for an older release. Often that will just work (but not always). If I find a package for Slackware 13.37 which fails on Slackware 14 then I will specifically compile a new package for Slackware 14.

So, yes, you can use the “older” packages for lame and wine. If you encounter any issues, like library linking errors. let me know so that I can compile a new package!

With sources it is different. You will find that often, the source for an older version of software will no longer compile on a newer Linux distribution. That is typically caused by updates to the gcc and glibc packages which introduce new library calls and interfaces which were not available at the time the older software was written. For successful compilation you would have to find patches or even use a newer version of the source. At the same time, a binary which was compiled from that old source, on an older Slackware release, will usually still work without issues on the new Slackware.

Eric

Comment from MartinOwaR
Posted: October 16, 2012 at 16:17

Hello Eric.

Just to report that qemu-kvm 1.2.0 does not work on 14.0 (missing libgnutls.so.26). I had to recompile it in order to make it to function.

Comment from alienbob
Posted: October 16, 2012 at 21:20

Hi MartinOwaR

Thanks for mentioning this. I have just finished uploading some fresh qemu-kvm and vde packages, built on Slackware 14.

Cheers, Eric

Comment from Jean-Francois Blavier
Posted: October 17, 2012 at 21:35

Hi Eric,

Just a note to let you know about the release of IcedTea 2.3.3, see http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/distro-pkg-dev/2012-October/020571.html

And, once again, many thanks for all the work you do on Slackware!!

Cheers, Jean-Francois

Comment from alienbob
Posted: October 18, 2012 at 11:49

Hi Jean-Francois

The new openjdk packages have been built already, and I will upload them soon. A blog article will have to wait until tonight.

Cheers, Eric

Comment from Jean-Francois Blavier
Posted: October 19, 2012 at 18:06

Hi Eric,

Thanks for the openjdk upgrade. I installed the new package and it works great!

Cheers, Jean-Francois

Comment from Donald R Laster Jr
Posted: October 21, 2012 at 22:25

Just saying thanks for all of the work you have done. I use Slackware for my own network and for work related things. And the work you and the others do is appreciated.

Comment from neonwarf
Posted: November 18, 2012 at 04:26

thanx.

Comment from Troc
Posted: December 13, 2012 at 13:06

Thanks for the packages and updates. They work flawlessly ! Amazing stuff.

Comment from JJ
Posted: December 29, 2012 at 01:59

Hi Eric, the the *.info for your http://alien.slackbook.org/AST/ tool is out of date for SBo. The new .info file is updated to add a REQUIRES line, and removed APPROVED per http://slackbuilds.org/guidelines/

Comment from alienbob
Posted: December 29, 2012 at 02:28

Hi JJ,

You are right, I fixed the .info generator. Thanks for notifying me.

Cheers, Eric

Comment from chris
Posted: January 5, 2013 at 15:30

just wanted to say thank you for all your work.

Comment from drago
Posted: February 6, 2013 at 16:34

Hello!
Want to write howto page in docs.slackware .com, registerd, log in, try to “add page”, and got
You are here: start » howtos » misc » sb_live_5.1
Permission Denied

Sorry, you don’t have enough rights to continue. Perhaps you forgot to login?

what we can do?

Comment from OlPhart
Posted: February 8, 2013 at 11:04

alienbob – Got one heck of a question for you. I’ve been tinkering, building a new system and in the name of keeping my wife happy, decided to take a stab at getting handbrake-gtk installed. So far, your build script is the only one I’ve found for the gui. Getting handbrake installed went without a hitch using a build script from elsewhere. But running your build script is causing my system to reboot.

What the heck? Reboot while building software? There’s something really strange going on. Any ideas? Is your build dependent on multi-lib or something that I’m not providing?

Any insight would be more than welcomed.

BTW, loved the calibre build. Nice work.

Comment from alienbob
Posted: February 8, 2013 at 11:20

Hi OlPhart

My handbrake.SlackBuild does not need multilib or anything else. I run that script on a “virgin” Slackware in order to compile a package.
If your computer reboots during compilation then that might indicate an overheating issue. Software does not make your computer reboot just like that.
Is there anything in the message log right before the reboot occurs? Can you try to monitor the case- and CPU-core temperatures during the compilation?

Cheers, Eric

Comment from OlPhart
Posted: February 8, 2013 at 14:30

Thanks Eric ,

Temps are good. Don’t know what is going on but it’s certainly not temps that are doing it. Very abrupt reboot, no warning. Seems to occur at some point during ffmpeg build.

At the time I was getting the reboots I had been exec’ing the build script rather than sourcing.

When I try to source the script I get a rather cryptic kernel crash that freezes the system. Appears to be some sort of cpu related memory segmentation issue.

That said, the thought occured to me that a “virgin” build may be the answer. When I get the chance I’ll try a clean build and see how it goes.

When I get the chance to try a “clean” build I’ll get back to you and let you know how things go.

In the meantime, I’m off to shovel 6″ of fresh heavy wet snow.

Thanks,
Drew.

Comment from Cultist
Posted: February 9, 2013 at 07:02

I brought this up in #slackbuilds a while back but thought I’d post it here because I wasn’t able to catch you online at the same time I was.

I wanted to suggest that –enable-libvorbis be added to your restricted ffmpeg slackbuild. While ffmpeg does use libvorbis internally, certain applications which rely on ffmpeg to transcode (Amarok’s transcoding dialog that it gives you when you put music on a portable player being the first one that comes to mind) appear to require –enable-libvorbis to have been passed during compilation in order to transcode to ogg.

I manually add it myself when I compile ffmpeg and it does not appear to cause any problems, and does not require any additional work for the user since libvorbis is included in a stock Slackware installation.

Anyway, just my suggestion. Thanks!

Comment from alienbob
Posted: February 9, 2013 at 17:45

Cultist,

I will use “–enable-libvorbis” in future builds of my ffmpeg package. No problem at all.

Eric

Pingback from Steam – Titans Attack – Slackware 14 64bit – no sound
Posted: March 2, 2013 at 13:08

[...] Attacks game. Contact me in private (my "@slackware.com" email address or by posting to http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/your-feedback/) if you have issues with getting Minecraft going because I think that is off-topic for this thread. [...]

Comment from slodki
Posted: March 11, 2013 at 23:00

Upgrading KDE to 4.10.x removed some important plasmoid SDK tools, not packaged into kde-workspace anymore (plasmaengineexplorer, plasmoidviewer etc.). Now they are included into Plasmate (http://dot.kde.org/2013/03/05/plasmate-10-plasma-workspaces-sdk). Could you try to build Plasmate slackware package?

Thank you for all your work
Tom

Comment from jen johnson
Posted: March 19, 2013 at 05:02

thank you.
Mr. slack_dragon

Comment from guilleg
Posted: March 24, 2013 at 20:06

no requests. thank you for all!!

or maybe…..more tutorials to know the same as you know

Comment from Michelino Chionchio
Posted: March 29, 2013 at 18:08

Just one question: You have to replay mysql with mariadb in compat32 stuff, have you?
Best regards

Comment from alienbob
Posted: March 29, 2013 at 22:44

Hi Michelino

Yes, I should have done that earlier.
Fixed and uploaded.

Cheers, Eric

Comment from mickski
Posted: April 1, 2013 at 09:15

Just found your modified inet1 files for bridging. Once again AB does the hard work so I don’t have to. Thank you, your a star.

Comment from alienbob
Posted: April 1, 2013 at 12:12

Hi mickski

Those bridge modifications for rc.inet1 were merged into Slackware 14. Are you running an older version still?

Eric

Comment from mickski
Posted: April 2, 2013 at 21:49

Hey Bob
yeah still on 13.37, running kde 4.10.1 + lo 4 thanks to some slackbuilds I found somewhere . It really would be easier to just upgrade.
Couldn’t agree more about the awful weather.
Cheers

Comment from P431i7o
Posted: April 17, 2013 at 13:39

Hi Eric, I wonder if you have reached to compile wvdial and wvstreams on your arm port. Because now I’m having problems on my raspberry-pi trying tu use wvdial.
An error about:
getcontext open parenthesis &get_stack_return closes parenthesis == 0.

The error is not in the compile time, is in execution time. I didn’t have any problems compiling from the sources provide by slackbuilds.

Searching in google point out that this is and old problem,since 2009 and so on, but I have not read anything about some that fixed the problem.

Comment from alienbob
Posted: April 17, 2013 at 14:17

Hi P431i7o

I have not yet compiled any slackbuilds.org package… just sticking to the official Slackware packages for now.
Perhaps this is your solution: http://lists.linuxtogo.org/pipermail/openembedded-devel/2011-February/030055.html

Eric

Eric

Comment from Mário
Posted: May 3, 2013 at 16:58

Hi, Is there any easy way to make VLC link to libva installed in the system?

What do I need to change in the slackbuild?

Comment from alienbob
Posted: May 3, 2013 at 22:16

If you want to link to the system libva, then do not let the vlc.SlackBuild script enter the routine that builds an internal static copy of libva.

Eric

Comment from JKWood
Posted: May 3, 2013 at 23:33

Hi Eric,

It appears there’s something weird going on with your Slackware mirror (taper). Whenever I try to check for updates in the patches directory with slackpkg, it reports no packages to be upgraded. However, switching to the slackbuilds.org mirror fixed the problem.

Also see: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/slackpkg-says-no-pkgs-to-update-after-installing-14-0-but-there-are-pkgs-in-patches-4175451800/

Comment from alienbob
Posted: May 4, 2013 at 19:54

Hi JKWood

There was a small omission in my rsync_slackware_patches.sh script, some additional files were not being synced (FILELIST.TXT and CHECKSUMS.md5* in the main Slackware directory are updated whenever there are new patches).
I uploaded a fixed script and also ran that script on taper, so that the Slackware repositories there should work with slackpkg again.

Thanks for mentioning,

Eric

Comment from Q5sys
Posted: May 7, 2013 at 03:05

I just wanted to send you a small note to let you know how much I appreciate everything you do for the slackware community, and your continual efforts to make Slackware the most amazing distro available.
Your work is always impeccable, and I hope to someday be able to give back to the community as much as you have generously given over and over again.

Comment from raymundo augusto filho
Posted: May 13, 2013 at 21:52

Hi Bob.

I need help. I want to install Cairo Dock in slackware 12.0 and not locate binary packages. you know where I can find them?

Thank you.

Comment from alienbob
Posted: May 14, 2013 at 09:58

Hi raymundo

I do not think you will find many binary 3rd party packages for Slackware 12.0 on the Internet. Most people only release for Slackware 14.0.
A SlackBuild for ciro-dock was added to http://slackbuilds.org/ for Slackware version 13.1. I have no idea if cairo-dock will work on an old Slackware like 12.0.

Eric

Comment from raymundo augusto filho
Posted: May 15, 2013 at 02:46

Thank you Bob.

Comment from dolphin77
Posted: May 16, 2013 at 10:14

Hi, Eric.

Appreciate all your hard work on Slackware and your repositories for that. Not sure if you use SSD disks. But for those who uses SSD disks and running encrypted LVM setup, there is a need to add option –allow-discards for the cryptsetup lusOpen commad in the init file for initrd.

Would appreciate if you update that.

Thank you in advance.

Comment from alienbob
Posted: May 16, 2013 at 10:53

Hi dolphin77

Using “–allow-discards” has a potential negative security impact (see the cryptsetup man page). I guess that if you want to use this parameter because you installed Slackware on an encrypted SSD, you will have to add that parameter yourself to the init script inside the initrd. Slackware’s mkinitrd command won’t overwrite /boot/initrd-tree-init unless you specidy “-c” to (re)create the initrd from scratch.

Or you can submit a patch to introduce a variable which can be used to specify additional non-default cryptsetup parameters.

Eric

Comment from dolphin77
Posted: May 16, 2013 at 11:28

Eric, thank you for prompt reply.

You are right, I didn’t think of possible security impact. Probably it is better to leave as is system wide. Anyway on-line trimming (mounting with discard option) is not a good choice. Thus it is better to boot up from external flash disk from time to time and manually mount encrypted partitions and to run fstrim manually.

Thanks.

Comment from Alek
Posted: May 18, 2013 at 14:39

Hello, Eric
both 32-bit and 64-bit packages of kajongg-4.10.3 game are broken – there’s no executables in them.
greetz, Alek

Comment from alienbob
Posted: May 18, 2013 at 15:31

Hi Alek

You are right. I checked the build logfile and it appears that Kajongg requires pyhon-twisted (a networking library) which again depends on zope-interface.
I do not think that zope will ever be integrated into Slackware, so I left a note for Pat to decide what to do about this.
Basically there are two options:
1) remove the kajongg package entirely from Slackware’s KDE package set
2) Force the installation of the kajongg binaries (after all they are only python scripts) and leave it to the Slackware user to install python-twisted and zope-interface from SlackBuilds.org (they are both present there already).

Eric

Comment from Antonio Spinelli
Posted: May 21, 2013 at 20:24

Thanks Eric, I’ll follow you forever!

Comment from William Park
Posted: May 25, 2013 at 03:46

Hi Eric,

I know that you’re concentrating on Samsung Chromebook. But, would your Arm port of Slackware run on BeagleBone Black ?
–William

Comment from alienbob
Posted: May 25, 2013 at 13:30

Hi William

Unfortunately I can only test on hardware that I actually own. However, my ARM packages will work on any armv7 hardware. It’s usually just the kernel which you have to create for a new piece of hardware, and that will at least give you a bootable Slackware system. After that, there will usually be tweaks to get X.Org and sound fully functional but that will straighten out itself in time.

You could try what I initially did for my ChromeBook: find a bootable SD card image for another distro, write that to an empty SD card, and then wipe the other distro’s filesystem. Then copy my mini root filesystem into the empty partition and see if that will boot your BeagleBone…
A mini rootfs is here: http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alienarm/rootfs/armv7hl/chromebook/ . That rootfs does not contain a kernel or kernel modules, try copying those from a working BeagleBone distro image.

Eric

Comment from Alexandre Jobin
Posted: May 30, 2013 at 02:16

hi alienbob!

any chance to see an update of your handbrake package to v0.9.9?

alex

Comment from dolphin77
Posted: June 7, 2013 at 14:37

Hi, Eric.

Want to report that something is wrong with your slackware64-current mirror. Looks like new files were added during sync, the old ones were not deleted.
See for example http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/slackware/slackware64-current/slackware64/kde/, where both kde-4.10.3 and kde-4.10.4 files are present.

Comment from alienbob
Posted: June 8, 2013 at 10:24

Hi dolphin77

Yeah, I guess that Pat uploaded his KDE packages around the time that I run my mirror script. Usually those two events are far apart.
I re-ran my mirror script and all is well again.

Cheers, Eric

Comment from alienbob
Posted: June 8, 2013 at 10:25

Hi Alexandre Jobin

Handbrake has been upgraded last week. It took some time to create a patch to make the compilation succeed.

Eric

Comment from César
Posted: June 18, 2013 at 21:43

Hi Erik, just installed calibre in slack 14.0 x86_64 multilib with all dependencies get this error.

$ calibre
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/bin/calibre”, line 20, in
sys.exit(main())
File “/usr/lib64/calibre/calibre/gui2/main.py”, line 415, in main
app, opts, args, actions = init_qt(args)
File “/usr/lib64/calibre/calibre/gui2/main.py”, line 85, in init_qt
from calibre.gui2.ui import Main
File “/usr/lib64/calibre/calibre/gui2/ui.py”, line 31, in
from calibre.gui2.widgets import ProgressIndicator
File “/usr/lib64/calibre/calibre/gui2/widgets.py”, line 21, in
from calibre.gui2.progress_indicator import ProgressIndicator as _ProgressIndicator
File “/usr/lib64/calibre/calibre/gui2/progress_indicator/__init__.py”, line 15, in
pi_error)
RuntimeError: Failed to load the Progress Indicator plugin: the sip module implements API v9.0 to v9.1 but the progress_indicator module requires API v8.1

Do I need to recompile in 14.0 or is something missing?

Thanx