Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Day: January 26, 2011

Please developers don’t hurt me!

January 26, 2011 / / 16 Comments

Pffffff….

In a few days’ time, there were new releases of major and highly visible pieces of software: VLC, LibreOffice and KDE. I so happen to package all of these as “unofficial” additions to Slackware. I had a few hectic days (well, nights) preparing binaries, testing, rebuilding and writing changelogs and blog posts. I think it’s time for a bit of rest & relaxation, because I also have a stressful day job, and it was becoming a bit too heavy, all combined.

Praise to all of you, but please developers, get a drink, visit long-forgotten friends and let me get my breath back…

I think my next blog post will be a food recipe.

End of communication.

Get it: LibreOffice 3.3.0

January 26, 2011 / / 12 Comments

This was an intense ride.

Ever since the community around OpenOffice.org decided to free this productivity suite from its new guardian Oracle, it was clear that working together is the true driving force behind innovation. The continued development of the same software but with a new name “LibreOffice” took several leaps and bounds by incorporating the enhancements developed independently under the name of “go-oo” and other offshoots. The addition of these enhancements had been withheld for a long time by its previous guardian SUN.

Don’t forget: this software has a long and fruitful history. Being open sourced by Sun was the highly appreciated move that gave “us”, free software lovers, an office suite that could match (or at least aspired to match) with the dominant Microsoft Office. At that time, it felt like an arrow driven right into the heart of Microsoft. Their own Office suite is (was?) their cash cow, it’s what drives their profit. I can do nothing else but applaud Sun for assimilating and then freeing StarOffice. Alas… Sun is gone… but their legacy lives on.

So what is worth mentioning in this first stable release of the LibreOffice productivity suite?

I think the basic support for OOXML document format (Microsoft’s sort-of ISO standard which they pitched against the truely open OpenDocument Format ODF) is what will draw a lot of people to LibreOffice, because it is able to write to this document format – a feature that is not supported by OpenOffice.Org (it supports reading/converting this format only). So, LibreOffice might be better equipped to let you deal with friends, collegues and customers who want to share their Microsoft Office (version 2007, not the newer 2010 OOXML format) documents with you. LibreOffice does not have difficulties with VBA script in your documents either. The older Microsoft Office, Lotus WordPro and Microft Works file formats are supported as well. Even PDF import is built-in.

LibreOffice Draw can import and edit SVG files. That is a feature I still have to test, since I am used to Karbon14.

What can I say? It is a professional productivity suite that I would recommend to anyone.

Now, you want to install this LibreOffice on your Slackware box, right?

Just a wee bit of patience then: I would like to add that the “stable release” 3.3.0 is bit-for-bit identical to the last (fourth) release candidate that was published a few days earlier. The source taballs have remained the same, and still bear the old version number 3.3.0.4. The official binaries have been renamed, is all.

But I have recompiled the Slackware package nevertheless, because I intended to add some extra language packs: cs (Czech), el (Greek), en_GB (UK English), he (Hebrew), hr (Croatian), pa (Punjabi), uk (Ukrainian), ur (Urdu) and zh_TW (Traditional Chinese?). What I did not do, even though I mentioned I wanted to, is to add dictionaries (spell-checkers) for some of the major world languages. It took too long to figure out how to package and install them properly so I reserve that as an exercise for later.

Go get the packages!

There is an rsync access as well:

  • rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/

Be productive!

Eric

KDE 4.6.0 is here

January 26, 2011 / / 37 Comments

We have explosive!

Targeted with deadly precision, we witness the emergence of a new major KDE release.

Have fun with these KDE Software Compilation 4.6.0 packages for Slackware-current (32-bit as well as 64-bit versions available). Slackware itself will stick with the 4.5.5 version, which is rock stable and well-tested.

Highlight of this version is that it no longer relies on HAL. This is the same approach as taken by the X.Org and XFCE developers. While X.Org relies purely on udev, there are a few additional requirements for KDE (and XFCE) which is why you won’t see these new versions of both Desktop Environments yet. The Slackware Team does not want to be confronted with a potential de-stabilization of the desktop at the end of a release cycle.

If you want to replace Slackware’s own KDE 4.5.5 with the new release, several stock slackware packages need to be updated. There are even some entirely new packages (grantlee, libatasmart, libssh, sg3-utils, udisks, upower) which are required in order to run this new version of KDE4.

You can find all of these packages in the “deps” directory for your architecture.

Accompanying this KDE release are updated packages for k3b, kaudiocreator, kdevplatform and kdevelop because the versions that are contained in Slackware will not work with KDE 4.6.  New companions for KDE 4.6 are kwebkitpart (which allows you to use webkit instead of khtml as the rendering engine in Konqueror), polkit-kde-kcmodules-1 and polkit-kde-agent-1. The two “polkit” packages replace the Slackware  “polkit-kde-1” package which does not work with KDE 4.6.

The kdepim & kdepim-runtime

There has been quite a bit of discussion about the development of the Personal Information Manager (PIM) software like kontact, kmail etc. The PIM developers were not able to release a stable version of their product in time for KDE 4.6, so you now have two choices. I’ll accompany those choices with a word of caution:

  • you can either keep the version 4.4.9 of kdepim and kdepim-runtime (these are already included in slackware-current), which is stable, and compatible with KDE 4.6,
  • OR you can upgrade to the new version 4.6beta4 which I have included together with my KDE 4.6.0 packages… and with “new” I mean “new“! The PIM software has been largely re-written from scratch and does not only integrate fully with the Akonadi storage framework but also looks quite different. Also, this is very much Beta software and may not be stable enough for production use.

See the README file for detailed installation instructions! They are especially important because of the Slackware packages you have to upgrade or remove.

Feedback welcome of course. I have been running all intermediate betas and release candidates and see many improvements over 4.5.x releases, but there are some quirks (application crashes) that I think should be ironed out in a .1 or .2 release before this should be added to Slackware itself.

Get your Slackware packages for KDE 4.6.0 here: http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.6.0/ or on any of my mirrors (http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.6.0/ or http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.6.0/). These packages are not fit for Slackware 13.1.

And rsync access is available as always:

  • rsync://alien.slackbook.org/alien-kde/
  • rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/
  • rsync://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/

Cheers, Eric

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