Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: June 2011 (Page 1 of 2)

Watching multimedia in Slackware’s browser

June 26, 2011 / / 28 Comments

While I was sitting in my chair with little room for escape (I sprained my lower back yesterday when trying to lift something and can barely move) I thought, I need to do something useful while being constrained.

So, I created some new packages and wrote a few blog posts – this one being the last, because sitting in this chair is becoming equally painful.

What packages? You can already find them in my repository or its mirrors. They are dconf (new package altogether) and updates to gnome-mplayer as well as gecko-mediaplayer for which I did not yet have Slackware 13.37 packages.

And why exactly these three?

I was not too satisfied with the state of viewing embedding media clips in a web browser on Slackware. In the past, I used to check out the new movie trailers on Apple.com, In Slackware, that has never been possible I think. The VLC browser plugin crashes more than that it works, and the mplayerplug-in program which uses MPlayer to show the embedded video did not work reliably. I had built the gecko-mediaplayer browser plugin for earlier versions of Slackware – it uses gnome-mplayer to display embeeded media – but that too never worked with the Apple trailers and it had some of the same quirks that mplayerplug-in also had (all too natural since gnome-mplayer is a continuation of the abandoned mplayerplug-in by the same author).

But today, I grabbed the latest sources and built packages. And lo and behold! I can view Apple’s trailers!

Now, why did I mention that dconf package? Well, it turns out that gnome-mplayer which should not depend on any Gnome library, in fact does depend on an “application settings storage backend” – which is Gnome’s gconf… which is not part of Slackware. So, my Slackware package has gconf support disabled, but that only lead me to the next issue – my firefox kept crashing after installing the gecko-mediaplayer & gnome-mplayer packages.

Easy to spot the cause: you only need to run either firefox or gnome-mplayer from the console and you’ll see the following error message:

GLib-GIO-ERROR **: Settings schema ‘apps.gnome-mplayer.preferences’ is not installed
aborting…

That error was fixed by adding the following command to gnome-mplayer’s post-installation script.

glib-compile-schemas /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas

But we are not there yet. Without a settings backend to store the app’s preferences (your preferences), many of the preference settings that you change do not survive an application restart. Running gnome-mplayer from the commandline shows why:

GLib-GIO-Message: Using the ‘memory’ GSettings backend.  Your settings will not be saved or shared with other applications.

This is where the dconf package enters. Let me quote: “Dconf’s main purpose is to provide a backend to GSettings on platforms that don’t already have configuration storage systems.” It’s a small and efficient program without dependencies, and after installing dconf, our gnome-mplayer no longer complains. All its preferences are now being stored on disk.

Looking back on the weekend which is almost over now, I have performed a number of related plumbing activities: I upgraded my MPlayer package to a recent snapshot – you can grab that and use it to upgrade Slackware’s version of MPlayer with mine. Plus, I have not one, but two graphical front-ends for the mplayer binary: my repository now has the entirely new UMPlayer (universal multimedia player) which has a Qt4 interface, and an updated gnome-mplayer whose GUI is based on the GTK widget set. The choice is yours! But you should definitely give UMPlayer a trial run if you are a regular YouTube visitor – it has an awesome YouTube search & play feature that does not require a webbrowser.

Eric

Google toolbar in Firefox 5

June 26, 2011 / / 6 Comments

Mozilla upgraded its Firefox browser to version 5.0. Slackware followed by packaging it for Slackware -current and offering it as a patch (it fixes some security holes) to the old 4.0.1 version in Slackware 13.37.

Infected by Google Chrome’s release strategy, it seems like the Mozilla developers now think that jumping to new version numbers fast, while abandoning their older release, is a good thing to do. Their rationale, “the web is changing fast and our software should keep the same pace” sounds valid, but I predict that it will negatively affect their usage statistics.

Read this blog entry which voices concern over the deployment of Firefox in enterprise environments and especially Mozilla’s director for the Firefox browser (Asa Dotzler)’s comment… I do not think he did the right thing by downplaying the corporate environment in which most of us have to spend 40 hours every week.

I work in two different “corporate environments”: one is that of my employer (IBM) where we have standardized on Firefox but internal IT keeps tight control over versioning and features… I guess IBM can do that. And then I face the IT landscape of my customer where Internet Explorer is king and open source / open standards adepts are fighting an uphill battle in getting Firefox accepted as a viable alternative.

Leaving alone all the enterprise stuff for a bit, what consequences has this new Mozilla strategy for you and me, Slackware users? Well hum.

It became obvious very soon after running slackpkg and upgrading to the latest slackware-current… I started Firefox and was greeted with the message that my Google Toolbar extension would be disabled because supposedly it is not compatible with Firefox 5.0:

I know, some of you consider that toolbar a piece of legalized spyware, but it keeps my search history available to me and not just Google (what do you think happens with all the search queries you enter in a Google search?) and I like it. So… I wanted it back ASAP.

It is most unfortunate that Google no longer considers the Toolbar as the ultimate weapon to get their Google services onto everybody’s desktop; now they have their own browser, Chrome, and that gets all the attention. This means that updating the Toolbar to the latest Firefox requirements does not have a lot of priority.

There is a way around it, which does not involve waiting for Google, and does not require any other software to be installed. Adding one configuration setting is all:

  • Open the Firefox configuration window by typing “about:config” in the URL entry field
  • Right-click on any of the items displayed and select “New” and then “Boolean“
  • The name of the new entry should be “extensions.checkCompatibility.5.0” and its value should be set to “False“
  • Then, restart your Firefox browser.

If you open your add-on configuration Window now (“Extra > Add-ons“), you will see that the compatibility check has been disabled for Firefox 5.0! And you will also see that the Google Toolbar (and possibly other so-called incompatible add-ons) are enabled again – at your own risk of course:

I hope this helps some of you.

Cheers, Eric

Libreoffice 3.3.3 versus 3.4.0

June 26, 2011 / / 3 Comments

I uploaded Slackware packages for LibreOffice 3.3.3 last week but never mentioned that on my blog.

As promised earlier, I will try to keep building packages of the 3.3 series on Slackware 13.1 for as long as the libreoffice-3.4.x series is considered “experimental” or “unstable”.

It looks from what I saw in the #libreoffice IRC channel that it we will have to wait at least until 3.4.2 to see a “stable” release in the 3.4 series. So there you have it… my libreoffice-3.3.3 packages, built on Slackware 13.1 but they should work on Slackware 13.37 too. If you run into compatibility issues on Slackware 13.37 please let me know!

Get them at any of the following sites (and look in the “13.1” directories, not the “13.37” directories!):

If you feel adventurous and are running Slackware 13.37, you could use my libreoffice-3.4.0 packages. I heard about some crashes of 3.4.0 (mainly in calc) which possibly relate to the cached extensions in your ~/.libreoffice directory. If you experience bad behaviour of LibreOffice, try removing the “tmp” directory below “~/.libreoffice/3/user/extensions/” and if that is not doing it, also remove the “shared” and “bundled” directories you find there.

Eric

E-book management on Slackware

June 19, 2011 / / 23 Comments

Managing your e-book collection

In an earlier post, I hinted about a Slackware package I was trying to create for Calibre. The reason being that I bought my wife an e-reader: a Sony PRS650 with a touch screen using infrared instead of a touch-sensitive layer and pearl e-ink technology. Both those features make for an extremely pleasant reading experience.

However, the Sony Reader software that accompanies the device, is a Windows-only application (of course…) and second, it is not all that much of an application either. Even for Windows, the usual advice you get it is to install Calibre for  managing your e-books – including uploading them to your device.

So, I needed to have Calibre available on my Slackware computers. In fact, I used to have a package for Calibre already! At some point in time the Calibre developer decided to increase the required version of the Python interpreter to 2.7.1. And since Slackware ships Python 2.6.6 to this day, I was no longer able to compile updated packages  (I got stuck at 0.7.23 but I guess it would have been possible to keep compiling Calibre as far as 0.7.45).

I still wanted a recent version of Calibre, the software has updates about once a week! So I spent quite a lot of time researching how I could add an embedded Python interpreter plus several supporting Python modules into the Calibre package.

And I think I succeeded. I have uploaded Slackware packages for calibre-0.8.6 to my repository yesterday (for Slackware 13.1 as well as Slackware 13.37). During the period where I did not actually have an e-reader at my disposition (it arrived at the house only a few days ago) I used the testing genius of my pal mrgoblin who happened to have an e-reader device in his possession. His beta tests made me realize that I was missing the dbus-python module which is needed for Calibre to recognize when a device is plugged into the computer.

I must say, using Calibre is a lot of fun! I have a small collection of e-books and after installing the Slackware package, I was able to transfer my books to the Sony device and read them there. Then, I managed to almost brick the device by ripping out the USB cable before selecting “Eject Device” in Calibre… let that be a warning for prospective users! It took a lot of reading about soft and hard resets before I had a working e-reader again. I had to reset the device to factory defaults – which means you lose all the books that were already present on the device. It was a good learning experience with only minor inconvenience (because I had transfered only two books to the e-reader at the time) but I kept feeling my wife’s prying eyes in the back of my neck… she was not too pleased with seeing her birthday present getting bricked only 15 minutes after unpacking it!

Calibre will also be very useful for everyone who owns a Kindle (Amazon’s own e-reader). The Kindle only accepts Amazon’s own MOBI format and refuses the “open” EPUB format (which is the most commonly used e-book format outside the US). Using Calibre, you can easily convert your EPUB collection to MOBI format – when you select an EPUB file and tell it to upload it to a Kindle, Calibre will show a dialog that prompts for the automatic conversion to the Kindle’s format. Perfect!

OK, enough talk. Get a package and/or SlackBuild script at:

and don’t forget to also install the icu4c and podofo packages; these two are the only dependencies now. If you want to build the package yourself, be warned if you are running Slackware-current. There is a bug in the “file” utility in Slackware-current which prevents it from recognizing a ZIP file as such, and this bug will cause the SlackBuild script to fail. Thanks to Francesco Allertsen who first ran into this issue and reported it to me, a quick fix is to change the line 235 in the calibre.SlackBuild script:

if $(file ${SOURCE[$i]} | grep -qi “: zip”); then

to:

if $(echo ${SOURCE[$i]} | grep -qi “.zip$”); then

I hope to see a fixed “file” soon. A bugfix has been applied to the file repository already, so file-5.08 should detect ZIP files correctly when it gets released.

Have fun! Eric

KDE Software Compilation 4.6.4

June 10, 2011 / / 31 Comments

I may have been ranting about KDE’s future policies on source code packaging, but that does not mean I am unhappy with the software. Much to the contrary! So here it is again:

KDE team is proud to announce the release of KDE Software Compilation 4.6.4 – and I built you some nice packages for Slackware. This version of the KDE SC is probably not going to end up in Slackware in the next few days (Pat Volkerding is showing his face on the South East Linux Fest (SELF) of which Slackware is a “bronze” sponsor) so I took my chances. If you want to keep updated on the changes in these KDE packages, please subscribe to my ktown repository’s RSS feed.
You have to be running Slackware 13.37 (32bit or 64bit) or newer in order to use these packages. They were built on slackware-current. Please read the accompanying README file for installation and upgrade instructions!

This is the fourth incremental release in the 4.6 series, meaning it’s mostly bugfixes and translation enhancements. Functionally there is nothing spectacular. Nevertheless, some of the highlights of my package set:

  • Packages of the stable release 4.6.0 of kdepim and kdepim-runtime are included as well. YES! The 4.6 release of the KDEPIM suite has taken a long time to stabilize, after it had basically been re-written from scratch.
  • Updated dependencies since KDE 4.6.3 if you have that installed already: akonadi, libssh.
  • Updated dependencies with regard to the stable Slackware 13.37 are: PyQt, QScintilla, akonadi, attica, ebook-tools, hunspell, libdbusmenu-qt,sip, soprano, system-config-printer, virtuoso-ose.
  • Not part of Slackware 13.37 at all (yet): grantlee, libatasmart, libbluedevil, libssh, sg3_utils, udisks.
  • And bluedevil of course – the new KDE bluetooth stack which is based on the BlueZ libraries already present in Slackware. It got added to “kde”. It integrates a lot better into KDE than the GTK application “blueman” which is now primarily meant to be used with the non-KDE desktop environments.

The KDE 4.6.4 packages for Slackware 13.37 & current should be available for download from my “ktown” repository by now (the Indonesian mirror may need a bit of time to sync up):

Thanks to the many KDE developers, sysadmins, advocates and documentation writers, and whomever I may have forgotten. KDE is simply the best desktop environment around.

Have fun! Eric

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