I was on vacation for a while, then after my return I mainly focused on getting the new Audacity packages successfully built. In the meantime, Google was not idling and released version 105.0.5195.125 of the Chromium sourcecode.
There’s 11 vulnerability fixes in this release, some of them rated high enough that it is again recommended to upgrade your browser as soon as possible.
I did not forget the un-googled variant of course for which the same recommendation is valid.
The 64bit packages for chromium and chromium-ungoogled (Slackware 14.2 and newer) can already be downloaded from my repository and its main mirrors. You’ll have to wait a bit for the 32bit packages, they are compiling at the moment. Thanks to Google developers who I assume mostly run 64bit Ubuntu, the 32bit compilation of Chromium sources quite frequently meets with issues that need time to resolve.
Two years ago I added version 2.4.1 of the Audacity multi-track audio recorder to my ‘Digital Audio Workstation’ (DAW) software collection in celebration of its 20th birthday. A lot happened in between then and now.
Not just new releases of Audacity, but also a couple of forks of the code happened. Which gave us projects like Audacium, as well as Tenacity, which was superseded again by Saucedacity.
The reason for these forks was the addition of telemetry (i.e. background-sending of application performance data to the developers) to the Audacity source code after the project was acquired by the Muse Group who are responsible for developing MuseScore among others. The same telemetry functionality was already present in MuseScore.
Note that in both Audacity and MuseScore you have to manually and explicitly enable telemetry! It is disabled by default.
In the past years I have provided a couple of 2.x and 3.x releases of Audacity as packages for Slackware, but stopped with updates last year when the developers switched to a ‘software manager’ to build their internal dependencies: conan. On SlackBuilds.org you can find an ancient 0.x release of it based on Python2, but the program has evolved since, uses Python3 now and it requires a truckload of other Python packages to work. Killing a fly with an elephant, and what was wrong with cmake?
But then my friend ppr:kut of the Slackware team asked me if I could rebuild my Audacity package because its wxWidgets-based user interface was using GTK+2 and that does not work well with HiDPI displays. The wxWidgets graphical toolkit can use GTK+3 as well, and could I please switch from GTK+2 to GTK+3 in Audacity.
I decided to look into his request and recompile my audacity-3.0.2 package, found out that it was not trivial to switch the GUI to GTK+3 widgets, kept looking and before you know it, down the rabbit-hole I went.
When I emerged from the rabbit-hole it was with a series of new and updated packages. I had decided not to use conan, which meant I had to provide all of Audacity’s dependencies myself (which conan would have added to the audacity binaries, just like autotools and cmake did for the older releases).
I noticed that I had to build a newer wxGTK3 for Audacity, and that led to a cascade of package updates and additions before eventually everything compiled and ran again. Apart from Audacity, some of the other graphical audio programs that needed a rebuild or upgrade are: Cecilia, Mixxx, and MuseScore.
This is today’s ChangeLog entry for my repository. A lot less new packages now than in the case where I would have caved in and gone with conan:
+--------------------------+
Wed Sep 21 20:17:50 UTC 2022
audacity: updated to 3.1.3 (Slackware 15.0 and -current).
Note the hugely changed dependency list! Most of the previously internal
dependencies are now provided as external packages, some are new in my repo.
Depends on: jack2, ladspa_sdk, libsbsms, lilv, lv2, portaudio, portmidi,
portsmf, serd, sord, soundtouch, soxr, sratom, suil, twolame, vamp-plugin-sdk
and wxGTK3.
cecilia5: rebuilt against wxpython 4.2.0 (Slackware 15.0 and -current).
Depends on python-numpy, python-pyo, wxpython.
daw_base: added boca, freac, libsbsms, portsmf, python-attrdict, smooth,
soundfont-unison, speex, twolame and uriparser to the DAW template.
erlang-otp: rebuilt against newer wxGTK3 (Slackware 15.0 and -current).
Depends on wxGTK3.
libsbsms: added v2.3.0 - a library for high quality time and pitch scale
modification. Package for Slackware 15.0 and -current.
lv2: updated to 1.18.10 (Slackware 15.0 and -current).
New dependency: sord.
mixxx: update to 2.3.3 was needed to compile against PortMidi 2.x.
Depends on chromaprint, faad2, hidapi, libmodplug, libmp4v2, lilv, lv2,
portmidi, portaudio, protobuf, rubberband, vamp-plugin-sdk.
Package for Slackware 15.0 and -current.
musescore: rebuilt against PortMidi 2.0.3 (Slackware 15.0 and -current).
Depends on jack2, portaudio, portmidi.
portaudio: updated to 190700_20210406 (Slackware 15.0 and -current).
Depends on jack2.
portmidi: updated to 2.0.3, now that the maintainer is active again.
All programs that depend on portmidi need to be recompiled against this
new release. The pmdefaults program is not packaged anymore, as per advice
from the maintainer.
Package for Slackware 15.0 and -current.
portsmf: added v234 - a library for reading and writing Standard MIDI Files.
Package for Slackware 15.0 and -current.
python-attrdict: added v2.0.1 - a dict with attribute-style access.
Package for Slackware 15.0 and -current.
python-pygame: updated to 2.1.2 (Slackware 15.0 and -current).
Depends on portmidi.
python-pyo: rebuilt against PortMidi 2.0.3 (Slackware 15.0 and -current).
Depends on portaudio, portmidi, liblo, and jack2.
serd: updated to 0.30.16 (Slackware 15.0 and -current).
sord: updated to 0.16.14 (Slackware 15.0 and -current).
Depends on serd.
sratom: updated to 0.6.14 (Slackware 15.0 and -current).
Depends on lv2, sord.
suil: updated to 0.10.18 (Slackware 15.0 and -current).
Depends on lv2.
twolame: added v0.4.0 - an optimized MP2 encoder.
Package for Slackware 15.0 and -current.
wxGTK3: updated to 3.2.1 (Slackware 15.0 and -current).
Note that I switched the package from containing static to dynamic libraries.
This was needed to compile audacity.
wxpython: updated to 4.2.0 (Slackware 15.0 and -current).
Removed dependencies: wxGTK3, python-pathlib2. New dep: python-attrdict.
The Audacity interface looks a bit different indeed. Tell me how it works for you! It’s not just a version bump; I switched from all-internal libraries to a mass of external libraries (dependencies) and I have not done extensive checking of all its functionality. I just hope it is not painfully broken.
When you install this package, please take good note (see above) of all the new dependencies that you will also need to install from my repository, for instance using my main URL http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/ (also available via rsync protocol: rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/).
A “pro tip” for easy upgrade/installation:
If you use slackpkg together with the slackpkg+ extension, you can download an updated DAW template here: http://www.slackware.com/~alien/tools/templates/daw.template containing a full list of all my DAW packages. Copy this template file into “/etc/slackpkg/templates/” and use the command “slackpkg update; slackpkg install-template daw; slackpkg upgrade-all” to get all those new packages installed effortlessly, and obtain all the upgrades as well.
LibreOffice Community Edition 7.4.1 was released today and I already have the packages in my repository for Slackware 15.0 and -current. The Document Foundation blog post has all the details, let me do a verbatim copy of the most striking features in the 7.4 releases:
GENERAL
Support for WebP images and EMZ/WMZ files
Help pages for the ScriptForge scripting library
Search field for the Extension Manager
Performance and compatibility improvements
WRITER
Better change tracking in the footnote area
Edited lists show original numbers in change tracking
New typographic settings for hyphenation
CALC
Support for 16,384 columns in spreadsheets
Extra functions in drop-down AutoSum widget
New menu item to search for sheet names
IMPRESS
New support for document themes
Note that I compile these packages on Slackware 15.0. If you install them on Slackware -current you will also need to download ‘icu4c-compat‘ and boost-compat from my repository and install them. They are two compatibility packages containing older versions of the icu4c and boost libraries, in particular the versions that are part of Slackware 15.0 but no longer part of -current.
Only a few days after Google released Chrome 105 (by means of the 105.0.5195.52 sourcecode) they have pushed an update to 105.0.5195.102.
This update fixes a single bug, but it is a critical one (CVE-2022-3075) for which a zero-day exploit is actively abused by malicious third parties. It’s highly recommended to upgrade your Chromium (regular as well as un-googled) browser to the latest version.
I have already uploaded packages for chromium (64bit and 32bit) and chromium-ungoogled (64bit) version 105.0.5195.102. They’ll work on Slackware 14.2 and newer. The 32bit chromium-ungoogled package will follow in a few hours, no thanks to compiler segfault during the nightly build of this package.
Sam Aaron worked long and hard towards a new major release of his Sonic Pi software, and kept us informed about his coding journey on Twitter. Eventually a 4.0.0 version saw the light of day, 17 months after the final 3.x version (3.3.1) came out. Sam writes really informative release notes, I encourage you to check them out on his release page. Lots of enhancements and fixes to be enjoyed.
You don’t know what I am talking about?
You’ve probably missed my last year’s blog post then.
Sam Aaron is a musician and a programmer, holding a PhD in Computer Science. He develops a really cool program called Sonic Pi, meant to educate people in making music and learning how to code at the same time.
Sonic Pi uses the engine of Supercollider, which is another live coding platform. But Sonic Pi makes the art of live coding – performing on stage or just having a blast creating music on your computer – very low-threshold. Out of the box, when you start the program, its GUI will show complete and working coding examples, a tutorial, and an intuitive interface to start producing music straight away:
I have created packages for sonic-pi 4.1.0, the latest release, and I guess I am the first to create 32bit packages for a Linux platform, since I had to teach the “vcpkg” program that 32bit Linux is actually a thing. You could have guessed it… vcpkg is a cross-platform library manager created by Microsoft (!!!) which Sonic Pi uses to compile the libraries it needs.
I’ll see if I can create a patch for 32bit Linux support and send it to them.
Anyway, a month ago Sam Aaron gave a lecture at Lambda Days 2022 in Poland, about Sonic Pi, and here is a link to a recording of that lecture. You’ll learn more by watching that video, than by reading my blog posts about it.
The new packages (for Slackware 15.0 and -current) can be downloaded from all the usual places, for instance my slackware.com primary site, or the fast NL, UK or US mirrors.
I hope you are going to give Sonic Pi a try and that I’ll hear from you in the comments section below if you came up with a cool piece of audio.
And because Sonic Pi is contained in my Slackware Live DAW edition, I have also generated a new ISO for the Digital Audio Workstation. Get the “slackware64-live-daw-current.iso” ISO file, and copy it to a Ventoy USB stick or use the “iso2usb.sh” script to create a persistent USB stick.
This live environment should allow you to run Sonic Pi out of the box even if you have no idea how to configure the JACK audio server.
Have fun! Eric
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I was on vacation for a while, then after my return I mainly focused on getting the new Audacity packages successfully built. In the meantime, Google was not idling and released version 105.0.5195.125 of the Chromium sourcecode.
LibreOffice Community Edition 7.4.1 was released today and I already have the packages in my repository for Slackware 15.0 and -current. The 
And because Sonic Pi is contained in my