Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: September 2009

Alien’s SlackBuild Toolkit

September 25, 2009 / / 5 Comments

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 will usually need only small final adjustments.

The SlackBuild script it produced was derived on the template I use for my own scripts (see http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/). Since my previous blog post, I have received feedback from users who wanted to have more choice in the template to use for their scripts.

So, I sat down at the drawing board and expanded AST. The result is that you can now choose from three templates. The default template is still my own, called “web“. The two others are “sbo” which is based on the slackbuilds.org template script, and “bare” which is modeled after the scripts being used in Slackware.

I hope you like it – feedback always welcome.

Have fun! Eric

No mouse in X after installing multilib?

September 14, 2009 / / 2 Comments

Perhaps you run the 64-bit Slackware 13.0. If so, did you by any chance install my 32bit multilib packages on top, and then ran the slackpkg command after that?

There was a bug in my multilib conversion script convertpkg-compat32 (all versions before “10alien“). The compat32-tools package which I have uploaded today contains a fixed version (11alien).

If you have run slackpkg after installing my set of multilib packages and then instructed slackpkg to install the *.new files that it finds, you would end up with empty /etc/rc.d/rc.hald , /etc/rc.d/rc.messagebus and /etc/rc.d/rc.mysqld scripts thanks to this bug.

These empty startup scripts cause hal and dbus not to start when the computer boots (and neither does mysql, but that is not relevant to this little mouse tale). This will perhaps not have an immediately obvious effect, but if you start X, you will have no mouse and no keyboard because X.Org uses hal to probe for and configure your hardware peripherals.

The fix is to upgrade to my latest compat32-tools package, and then reinstall the original Slackware64 hal, dbus and mysqld packages:

upgradepkg --reinstall a/dbus-1.2.14-x86_64-1.txz
upgradepkg --reinstall l/hal-0.5.11-x86_64-6.txz
upgradepkg --reinstall ap/mysql-5.0.84-x86_64-1.txz

Make sure you install the *.new files  which you will find in /etc/rc.d/ , thereby overwriting the empty files !!!

Apologies for the inconvenience this may have caused. Apart from a new compat32-tools package I have also uploaded clean, re-created *-compat32 packages (created by the massconvert32.sh script, using the original 32-bit Slackware packages).

Eric

Using the Wiimote as a pointing device

September 7, 2009 / / 2 Comments

t-dose-square

What does a Nintendo wireless controller have to do with Slackware?

Well… you’d be surprised!

On october 4th I am running a presentation about “A history of Slackware development” as part of T-DOSE (fyi: T-DOSE is a free and yearly event held in The Netherlands to promote use and development of Open Source Software). One of the other speakers is Dag Wieers, a former IBM collegue and a big name in the RPM and Redhat world. Dag is going to present his software “wiipresent” and when I read that, my curiosity was triggered. I own a Nintendo Wii (or rather, my son does) and I am interested in things that you can do with it apart from playing cool games.

Wiipresent is a small linux program that connects your computer to a Wiimote (the Wii’s wireless controller) over a bluetooth link and enables you to use the controller as a pointing device. Of course Dag is going to bring a Wiimote to the conference, but so am I 😉

Wiipresent  turned out to be extremely easy to use and the variety of buttons and the diirectional cross on the controller are all functional. The cool thing is that it uses the tilt function of the Wiimote to move the mouse pointer across your screen. So, by waving the Wiimote I can steer and control my KDE desktop, and the directional cross will be useful when I give my presentation – it allows me to move forward and backward through the slides.

And since bluetooth is used instead of infrared, I can walk around without the need to point that Wiimote to the big screen.

And this all from a program that was born as a demonstrational hack at another conference. I created some packages for Slackware 13.0 (both 32bit and 64bit) which you can obtain from my repository as usual: wiipresent and libwiimote (a required supporting library).

Have fun trying it out! Eric

Edit 09-oct-2009:

I have uploaded a PDF of my T-Dose presentation (as well as the original Tex plus bitmap files used to create that PDF). They are available at http://slackware.com/~alien/tdose2009/ .

Interviewed by Linux Magazine

September 2, 2009 / / 4 Comments

I guess it will be OK to do a bit of PR for my own sake here – I am usually quite modest 😉

Linux Magazine published an interview with yours truly by Christopher Smart – aptly called “Why you should try Slackware” (I actually liked the working title better: “The swiss army knife of Linux gets 64 bits“). Christopher runs “The Distribution Channel” on the front page of Linux Magazine’s online edition.

The interview focuses on the story behind new 64bit port that was released with Slackware 13.0 but I also get the chance to try and explain why I stick with this distro through thick and thin. If there had not been a deadline and if I had not managed to almost fall asleep at the keyboard while finishing the reply text, I could have gone on a lot longer…

Due to the secretive nature of the development of Slackware’s 64bit port (we wanted to make a splash when it finally landed on the public servers), I had a hard time not to tell people outside the core team about my ideas and get feedback on my assumptions.  The interview shows a bit of this struggle. I hope you like reading it.

Cheers, Eric

Multilib Slackware64

September 1, 2009 / / 5 Comments

By now, the world will be well aware that there was a new release of Slackware Linux last week. Yes, Slackware 13.0 is there… just when I was enjoying a quiet holiday at the french coast. A pity that the release date slipped past the start of my vacation, I always enjoy the virtual “party” when Pat decides to throw the switch.

This also marks the birth of the first stable official release of 64bit Slackware, aka Slackware for the x86_64 architecture, aka Slackware64.  This is a pure-64bit Slackware in the sense that it is unable to compile or run 32bit binaries out of the box. But we took great care to make Slackware64 ready for multilib.  A multilib Linux system has full support for compiling and running both 64bit and 32bit binaries. Pat Volkerding made a decision not to add full multilib capability to Slackware64 initially. Perhaps that will change in future releases.

In the meantime, it is really not hard to add a full multilib layer to Slackware64. The first step would be to build/install multilib versions of gcc and glibc. Then, you have to add 32bit versions of the supporting libraries that your 32bit software will need to run (think of qt, gtk, cups, …. you name it).

Perhaps the mention of “build/install multilib” scared you off?  To make it easy for you, I published a set of pre-built packages that you can install using “upgradepkg –install-new” (gcc and glibc need to be upgraded, the remainder are new packages). You can find those packages at http://www.slackware.com/~alien/multilib/ .

To accompany these packages I wrote an article for my Wiki explaining the steps you need to go through.  If you care to give me feedback on my multilib solution, you can do so on the article’s discussion area: http://alien.slackbook.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=wiki:talk:slackware:multilib .

After completing the intructions, you will have a Slackware system that is capable of building and/or running (among others) Wine, Skype, Citrix client. And many more of course!

Note: if you use slackpkg or another semi-automated package manager, you will have to add the gcc and glibc packages to the update blacklist. If you fail to do so, your package manager will automatically “upgrade” the new multilib gcc and glibc packages to their original pure64 Slackware versions…

Enjoy!

Cheers, Eric

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