Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: November 2011 (Page 1 of 2)

Raspberry Pi deserves Slackware

November 27, 2011 / / 31 Comments

Some time ago I ran into this website promoting a very cheap computer the size of a credit card. The Raspberry Pi is being created by a charitable foundation. It is designed to “plug into a TV or be combined with a touch screen for a low cost tablet“. Typically its target is “teaching computer programming to children“, but such a cheap computing device will certainly have “many other applications both in the developed and the developing world“.

You have to see the device to believe it, I guess. The videos and photos look very promising. It’s not in production yet but according to the developer team’s schedule first shipments should commence before the end of the year.

Its specifications are not stellar (256 MB of RAM will likely rule out the top-heavy desktop environments like KDE) but hey! it only costs 35 euros! And the ARM processor, a Broadcom BCM2835 SoC with a ARM1176JZF-S core seems to have good support in the Linux kernel (a patch that adds support to linux-3.0.4 is fairly trivial). Check out this video which shows the Raspberry Pi running Quake III in 1920×1080 resolution with 4x antialiasing.

There is a thread on LinuxQuestions which shows that it may in fact not be hard to boot Slackware – or rather, ARMedslack. Using the latest QEMU which supports the Broadcom’s ARM version, and a recent kernel compiled for ARM (see above), QEMU can successfully boot one of ARMedslack’s “mini rootfs” filesystem images.

So, I think that the Raspberry Pi deserves Slackware. If we are going to bring Slackware to the masses, this ARM device would be a nice vehicle. I am going to get myself one or two of them. Stuart Winter (ARMedslack developer) promised to help me with the nasty bits. We will see how this ends up – either incorporated into ARMedslack, or as a separate development tree hosted by me, or (nicest option but not a very realistic one perhaps) folded into the main Slackware tree. It would be cool to have the main tree expand to support a third architecture besides x86 and x86_64.

Cool, another project for my evergrowing TODO list! Oh my… I can’t even find the time to spend on another project that is itching at the back of my mind… I guess should at least make an effort to upload all of the OCR related packages I created a month ago.

Eric

Fixes for LibreOffice in KDE

November 26, 2011 / / 7 Comments

Those of you who use KDE as their desktop environment and also use my LibreOffice packages, will know that there are two major annoyances, related to KDE’s theming engine but ultimately caused by bugs in LibreOffice.

Those annoyances are:

  • Tooltips in LO applications show up as black text on black background, effectively rendering them useless. You can fix that by changing the color of Tooltips in “System Settings > Application Appearance > Colors” and then in the tab called “colors” look for “Tooltip background” and change that to some lighter color. But that changes the behaviour of every tooltip in other applications as well, so this should really be fixed in LibreOffice.
  • When using KDE’s Oxygen window decorations, all LO applications will have a non-functional horizontal scrollbar – you can not grab hold of it or move it left-right with your mouse.

Two patches which I found in OpenSuse were needed to fix both these annoyances. I rebuilt my LibreOffice packages for Slackware after applying them. Get them if you were annoyed by these issues just like me.

Note that the mirror sites also offer rsync access as well as faster download speeds. Only taper.alienbase.nl and alien.slackbook.org are up to date at this moment (because I maintain those myself) but the other mirrors should pick up the updates automatically soon enough.

Eric

Multilib version of Slackware’s “11-11-11” glibc

November 13, 2011 / / 14 Comments

 The glibc packages in Slackware -current were updated to 2.14.1 a few days ago. Unfortunately, a couple of issues were reported, you will find them in this LinuxQuestions thread.

Since I had to compile my multilib version of glibc still, I decided to wait a bit with releasing them, and that allowed me to find and apply the patch reported in the above thread that seems to solve the issues. The patch comes from Linux From Scratch and appears to be upstream fixes that are going to be in the next release of glibc. I upgraded my laptop with this new multilib glibc package, and can confirm that applications like firefox, libreoffice, calibre, mplayer run without any issues here.

I know that several people have mentioned this patch to Pat Volkerding already, and if the patch gets applied to Slackware’s glibc package I will simply rename my own multilib versions from “1alien” to “2alien” in order to stay in sync with the versioning of the originals.

Along with the updated mulitilib glibc packages, I also uploaded a new version of the “compat32-tools” package to the “current” section, containing a bug-fixed convertpkg-compat32 script. I also refreshed the “slackware64-compat32” subdirectory which contains the packages converted by the “massconvert32.sh” script.

Eric

kmail terminates during startup with “Failed to fetch the resource collection”

November 13, 2011 / / 11 Comments

One thing that keeps boggling people’s minds when they use KDE is Akonadi, the framework used to access PIM-like data. PIM being “Personal Information Management”. Akonadi leaves me in the dark too, sometimes!

If you want to know a bit more about how Akonadi sits at the core of your personal data management in KDE, you might want to read these articles first, one being two  years old and the other a bit more recent… http://thomasmcguire.wordpress.com/2009/10/03/akonadi-nepomuk-and-strigi-explained/ and http://vizzzion.org/blog/2010/08/demystifying-akonadi/ . This is also a nice article “Akonadi misconception #1: where is my data?“: http://blogs.kde.org/node/4503 which is definitely worth checking out.

In the meantime, there is an issue I wanted to discuss with you, considering Akonadi. When you upgrade to KDE 4.7.x coming from Slackware’s KDE 4.5.5, the upgrade process is not always smooth. The PIM suite in KDE 4.7.x is now using Akonadi as its backend, meaning your PIM data (kmail, kontact etc) are migrated over to the Akonadi storage the very first time you start your new KDE. This migration is not always proceeding perfectly.

There’s a thread on LinuxQuestions.org about kmail crashing on startup with a very specific error message “Failed to fetch the resource collection“. I provided the solution in that thread but thought it would be good to document it here in the blog as well. The bug is fairly old, it is being discussed in https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=259355

What you have to do if you encounter this issue, is the following:

  1. Launch Akonadi Console (for instance by pressing “Alt-F2” to open krunner and typing “akonadiconsole”).
  2. In the “Agents” tab, select the “Local Folders” resource.
  3. Select “Configure > Configure natively…”.
  4. If an error appears indicating that “the current folder does not exist” don’t worry. Select a new directory which does not yet exist, for instance: /home/<USERNAME>/.kde/share/apps/kmail/mail/

This should fix the issue with kmail.

You can fix it the hard way, by removing all of your “.kde” directory content but that is so rude, and you lose a lot of other configurations besides your mail.

A whole section of the KDE User Base is devoted to Akonadi troubleshooting, I recommend you check that out if you run into Akonadi related issues: http://userbase.kde.org/Akonadi_4.4/Troubleshooting

Cheers, Eric

LibreOffice 3.4.4

November 11, 2011 / / 14 Comments

 Just released: Libreoffice 3.4.4. Please read the official announcement which tells us that “This is the fourth update to the stable version of LibreOffice. It contains only safe code fixes and translation updates, and is considered safe for production use“.

 

I have created some packages for you. Like the last time, there is the big “libreoffice” package containing all the modules and extensions, as well as US english language support (including a dictionary). Then there is the “libreoffice-mozplugin” package for those who want to be able to embed Office documents in their (Mozilla-compatible) browser window. And finally there are many language packs, containing the translated menus and help texts. Some of the language packs contain dictionaries too (german, british english, spanish, french, italian, dutch and  polish). You can of course download your own dictionary or other extensions at http://extensions.libreoffice.org/

I am contemplating another split-off. The KDE integration support is nice but has one glaring bug which has been around for ever and does not stand a big chance of getting fixed soon. Try moving the horizontal slider in a Calc spreadsheet when you are running KDE… your mouse will not be able to do it. It is trivial to split the four KDE support files into a separate package which allows you the choice of not installing it. I hesitate, because I want to keep the total amount of packages “small” (relative term, looking at all those language packs). I would only do this to alleviate the pain of KDE users. Do not think you can persuade me to split-off other things like extensions or the core components! Not going to happen.

Get the packages in the usual locations (all of the mirrors below also offer  rsync access):

Cheers, Eric

 

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