Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: March 2011 (Page 2 of 2)

Multilib updates to go with new kernel

March 9, 2011 / / 3 Comments

Hi folks!

Slackware -current’s kernel has been updated to 2.6.37.3 (something many of you probably did not expect) as part of the large update leading to the first release candidate for Slackware 13.37.

This newer kernel seems to work better on all the developers’ computers especially for X sessions.Also speakup (a kernel driver for speech synthesizers) is now part of the kernel since 2.6.37, which means that a separate kernel containing a speakup patch could be dropped from the installer.

Anyway, as part of the kernel update, Pat Volkerding rebuilt the glibc packages against the new kernel headers.

Those of you who run a multilib-enhanced version of Slackware64 know what that means… I have updated my own multilib repository with rebuilt glibc-2.13 packages. This is not an urgent or mandatory upgrade for you, as the previous version of the multilib glibc packages will probably work fine. But for compiling new software that wants to use the kernel api you’d want to go with the rebuilt versions.

Get the new glibc packages at http://slackware.com/~alien/multilib/current/ as usual.

As a bonus, I have also updated my massconvert32.sh script which is part of the compat32-tools package in the same directory. Several packages have been added for the benefit of compiling and running wine. Please tell me if more packages have to be added to that script!

I also updated the content of the slackware64-compat32 directory which holds a copy of all the packages which are created by running the massconvert32.sh script (to make it easier for you if you have your doubts about how to use that script).

Eric

Updated 64bit packages for libreoffice-3.3.1

March 5, 2011 / / 6 Comments

Drat…

Today, uploaded a set of updated packages of libreoffice-3.3.1 for the 64bit Slackware platform. The packages that I had originally made available were sub-optimal.

What happened? When I compiled libreoffice 3.3.1 earlier this week I used two separate (virtual) machines for that, one running 32bit Slackware and the other 64bit Slackware. Somehow I was not paying attention when I copied the results back into my repository and the correct 64bit packages were overwritten by a flawed attempt of a day earlier.

The packages (version “1alien“) that I originally had in the 64bit repository did not include many of the extensions that should have been bundled (the pdf-import, mysql-connector and report-builder modules for instance) and they did not have a working dictionary install routine either.

The updated 64bit packages (version “2alien“) are the good ones. They contain all the extensions, and several dictionaries in the language packs just like the 32bit packages already had. I advise you to upgrade to these versions of libreoffice-3.3.1 for Slackware64! Note that the 32bit packages were alright  from the beginning – they do not need an update.

Eric

PS: This is what my Extensions Manager shows now:

LibreOffice 3.3.1 packages

March 2, 2011 / / 9 Comments

Right…

So I finally built my Slackware packages for LibreOffice 3.3.1. It took way too long, but I hope you like the result. A lot of additional language packs are available this time.

One thing I had overlooked was that the new LibreOffice branded icons were not installed by default, so my package is still using the old OpenOffice.org branded icons. Next time, the old icons will have been replaced with appropriate new icons, I promise! Thanks to David for noticing and reporting that omission.

Get the packages here:

For completeness’ sake: my own packages are built from source, on a Slackware computer. There is another way to get LibreOffice installed and that is to take the official pre-compiled binaries (unfortunately only available as RPM packages) and use the SlackBuild script at http://slackbuilds.org/ to extract the goodies from these RPMs and create useful Slackware packages out of them. Which of the packages you use is a matter of preference. The RPMs are not built on a Slackware box but they are guaranteed to work… probably on older versions than Slackware 13.1 too.

Cheers, Eric

Compiling libreoffice, a bumpy ride

March 1, 2011 / / 7 Comments

A new version of LibreOffice was released last week: 3.3.1. This is the first release where divergence from the old OpenOffice.org may become apparent.

Of course I wanted to build Slackware packages for it but being audacious, I decided to make some expansions to the SlackBuild script in order to achieve the following:

  • include more extensions by default
  • include dictionaries for some of the major world languages (US and UK english, french, german, spanish, dutch)
  • add more language packs!

I just did not think it would cost me 6 days of work to get the bugger to compile correctly… I needed to hunt down several patches, and find out how to apply patches at all in the build phase of LibreOffice. At this moment I have the 64bit packages ready and installed on my desktop machine, and that runs smoothly… but the 32bit build keeps throwing errors at me. Go figure.

I think I finally found how to fix this, unfortunately it takes 5 hours of compiling in my virtual machine to experience the error… or not. Hence the large delay in producing working packages.

One side effect of fixing the build process is that the new package again wants to use ~/.ooo3 as the preferences directory, instead of using ~/.libreoffice like my previous version of the LibreOffice package.  People that get fed up with the alternating use of these two directories can just remove the ~/.ooo3 directory and instead create a symlink to ~/.libreoffice/3 in your homedirectory (or the other way round of course, depending on what directory you like more):

$ ln -sf .libreoffice/3 .ooo3

I do hope and anticipate that I can present a complete set of LibreOffice 3.3.1 packages for your Slackware powered computer tomorrow… keep your fingers crossed.

Cheers, Eric

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