Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: March 2010

Upgrading the eeepc to 2.6.33

March 18, 2010 / / 14 Comments

Last week I finally took the time to upgrade my Asus Eeepc 1000H to the latest Slackware-current.

I had two issues after the upgrade, which were related to the new 2.6.33 kernel.

  1. My WPA-secured wireless connections would not last longer than a few seconds. After days of despair, I finally found out that the 2.6.33 kernel has a new driver for my wireless card, the “rt2800pci”. This driver is being loaded by default now. Slackware’s kernel also ships the “rt2860sta” driver which is part of the Linux “staging area” i.e. not considered fully stable. This is the driver which would be used with Slackware kernels before 2.6.33. It is in fact a very stable driver which never failed me before.
    By coincidence I saw that both modules were mentioned as supporting the Eeepc’s wireless card in the output of “lspci -v”. After I added the line “blacklist rt2800pci” to the file “/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf” and rebooted the Eeepc, I had fully functional and stable wireless connectivity again, now using the “rt2860sta” driver!
  2. My sound was gone, or at least working at a very very low volume… I could hear the KDE logout sound if I put my ear to the keyboard but that was about it. Getting normal sound output levels through my headphones was no problem at all, however.
    The ALSA troubleshooting guide for HDA Intel audio hardware pointed me in the right direction: not getting sound through the built-in speakers while the headphone output works well is quite common, and often caused by not raising the correct channel’s volume.
    It turned out that after the upgrade to the 2.6.33 kernel, I need to set the “speaker” channel’s output level to anything non-zero or else there would be no sound…

I have to mention one other piece of strangeness I experienced on my netbook:

It is an issue not related to Slackware-current but rather to my use of the new “netbook” interface of KDE 4.4’s plasma workspace manager. I toyed with the netbook interface a bit, because it lets you use the small screen more efficiently – by removing unnecessary stuff like window elements and task bars. One typical treat is that every application window in the plasma-netbook workspace runs full-screen exclusively – there is no “minimize” button but instead you have to use the application switcher in order to access other running applications’ windows. Unfortunately, when I switched back to the “normal” plasma workspace, the “minimize” buttons did not re-appear in the title bar!
I had to manually re-add this button through “system settings > appearance > windows > buttons” and drag the “minimize” button into the titlebar preview.

Just so you know.

Eric

KDE maintenance: 4.4.1 is out

March 3, 2010 / / 9 Comments

I wrote about it – deeply nested inside the comments section of a previous post – but it needs its own place in a separate post:

KDE SC 4.4.1 (first maintenance release for the 4.4 series ) has been made available and the Slackware packages can be found at http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.4.1/

Again, I have made 32-bit as well as 64-bit packages. The “dependencies” have not changed since KDE SC 4.4.0, so there is nothing new or changed in the /deps/ directory. Read the README in the topdirectory for full installation/upgrade instructions, or look for my older http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/its-been-released-kde-sc-4-4-0/ post.

Note that you have to be running Slackware-current (not older than 02-march-2010) or lots of things will break!

Also note that this fixes some issues with  the previous KDE 4.4.0 packages – some of those had not been rebuilt on 02-march-2010 which resulted in a broken keyboard layout configurator and kopete’s Windows Live plugin.

So, the upgrade is warmly recommended if you are running my 4.4.0 packages right now!

Eric

Some goodies to play with

March 2, 2010 / / 43 Comments

Am I hearing sighs of relief yet?

Today, Pat Volkerding pushed out the work that has been accumulating for slackware-current behind the scenes during the past four weeks (make take a little while to reach the mirrors).
This triggered some updates to the multilib and KDE 4.4 packages which I maintain, so if you run Slackware64-multilib and/or KDE 4.4.0 then be sure to check for instructions further down!

With a ChangeLog entry that runs more than 500 lines, I think this is the largest single update yet. But that was for a very good reason, because there were updates to large subsystems:

  • Kernel: woohoo we have 2.6.33 now – the latest & greatest.
  • X.Org: this went up to 7.5 (X server version is now 1.7.5) – you can’t get it newer than this. There is no nouveau driver for now, but it should not be so hard to add this yourself because all its dependencies should be met by slackware-current.
  • KDE: has been updated to 4.3.5 – the latest “politically correct” version which is available… No PolicyKit for us yet.
  • The GTK ecosystem has been overhauled and slackware-current is now at gtk+2 version 2.18.7.
  • Because the upgrade of libpng was an incompatible change (I refrain from using bad language about this piece of software, but I invite you to examine the libpng.SlackBuild closely), every single package which depends on this library needed to be recompiled. D’ oh!
  • Lots of core packages were updated to their latest version as well – too many to write down here.

To get all of these updates working as a whole, took its time. I know that some of you complained that “the team is having all the fun in secret” but I assure you, you were not left out in the cold. The long silence was something that could not be avoided, as it would have been kind of stupid to write blog posts like “hey! we’re currently adding this new X.Org” in case it turned out that we could not integrate it into Slackware properly. I do think it was worth waiting for, but now is the time for the bigger test – by all of you out there.

Note for self-compiling folk:

Something you may experience when you compiled your own applications: some of them may suddenly refuse to show buttons/bitmaps. This is because the application is linked in an incompatible way with libpng… it means you will have to recompile it. For instance, I will have to update my own VLC package because the control interface is now showing empty grey squares… bummer.

Instructions for people running Slackware64 with my multilib packages and/or KDE 4.4.0 packages:

Multilib gcc/glibc packages (64-bit)

  • Due to the addition of a new kernel and the upgrade of the “png” library in slackware-current, the glibc and gcc packages had to be recompiled. My recompiled multilib versions of gcc and glibc for slackware64-current are available at the ususal place – please upgrade to these versions now: http://slackware.com/~alien/multilib/13.1/ – if you forget this and instead upgrade to Slackware’s standard gcc/glibc packages, you will still have a fully functional 64-bit Slackware… just with a non-functional 32-bit subsystem.

KDE 4.4.0 (32-bit as well as 64-bit)

  • Due to the upgrade of the “png library” I also had to recompile some of the KDE 4.4.0 packages and their dependencies. I took the opportunity to also add a couple of fixes to the KDE packages. I also removed two dependencies which are now covered by Slackware-current (deps/libv4l and deps/libxklavier).
    Here is the list of my updated packages (for both architectures, 32-bit and 64-bit):

    • deps/libiodbc
      deps/qt
      deps/virtuoso-ose
      kde/kdebase-workspace
      kde/kdelibs
      kde/kdepim
  • To upgrade, you can either download only those packages I just mentioned from http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.4.0/ and use “upgradepkg” to upgrade them, or if you already have a local mirror of http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.4.0/ you can refresh this mirror and upgrade according to the article I wrote earlier: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/its-been-released-kde-sc-4-4-0/ . Please note that I did not create an “update” or “patches” directory – the new packages have just replaced the old ones (with an updated build number).

Enjoy!

Eric

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