Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: May 2012

End of may ramblings

May 31, 2012 / / 22 Comments

It has been a while since my latest blog post, so I thought it would be good to talk a bit about the goings-on.

First about the Slackware web server. I know, people, that we have been without http://www.slackware.com/ for a few weeks now, but rest assured that the site will eventually be back. Either we put the old web site code on a temporary server or we wait a little longer and publish a new site based on a new CMS. It all pretty much depends on how much time we can volunteer for this – it is mostly handled by a few people in the coreteam. Pat should focus on Slackware and make sure we get a new stable release at some point – there is a lot to do still on that front.

And then about my own packaging activities.

There was a new release of LibreOffice yesterday, and I am currently building packages for that. If there are no issues with the build then you can expect those packages tomorrow.

KDE release team is in the process of releasing the first beta of KDE SC 4.9, and I intend to make packages for that. There was a heated discussion about this beta when the new release manager announced he was going to call off the beta1 release… but all issues have been resolved yesterday and new tarballs are going to be made available ahead of time to the packagers. There are quite a few changes compared to KDE 4.8.x so it will cost me a while to work out the updates to the KDE.SlackBuild framework.

I also hope that VLC releases their version 2.0.2 soon. It has been lingering just around the corner for a while, but a recent fall-out between several of the core developers threatened the whole project’s existence when their most important Linux developer quit the team out of frustration. That animosity has now subsided, the team is whole again, and development is progressing toward a new release.

I also want to thank the kind people who donated a few bucks after all the upheavals about the Slackware webserver’s outage. Although I work on Slackware in my spare time, because I like it, it’s my main hobby so to speak, getting some funds enabled me to buy a new and faster build box last year, and now I ordered a Raspberry-Pi (finally…) and I am also looking for a good tablet which allows the installation of a different OS than only Android… so that I can put my unfinished port of Slackware to modern ARM architectures on it and finally release that. A release does not make sense if it runs on only one device (the Trim Slice). Perhaps I will buy some more ARM hardware too. Even Pat was becoming excited about this ARM port.

Eric

Taper mirror down temporarily

May 6, 2012 / / 7 Comments

FYI:

My mirror server taper.alienbase.nl is temporarily down.

This server is in fact a virtual machine and the physical host is being moved to another data center. I am not the host server’s owner, it is a donation made by a generous Slackware user that allows me to operate the virtual server using a big bandwidth connection.

Thanks again to the anonymous donor. I know his identity of course, but he wants to remain anonymous. I was not even allowed to mention his company name on the web site…

I’ll bring the mirror server back up as soon as possible, but it will all depend on the logistics of moving the physical hardware and contract negotiations.

Eric

 

LibreOffice 3.5.3

May 4, 2012 / / 32 Comments

I just uploaded packages (targeting Slackware 13.37 and newer) for the latest maintenance release of LibreOffice. Check out the announcement for 3.5.3: “LibreOffice 3.5.3 provides additional stability to corporate and individual users…”.

If you want to compile this yourself, then remember what I said in my post about the 3.5.2 release: “update … Slackware 13.37 with all the patches which were released by Pat. This includes a spiced-up version of Seamonkey“. All you need to install additionally are packages for Apache Ant and the Archive:Zip Perl module. None of this is necessary if you just want to use my package for LibreOffice.

LibreOffice Math (Formula)

In comments to the LO 3.5.2 blog article, both ngc891 and Willy Sudiarto Raharjo informed me that the LibreOffice Math program did not work in my 3.5.2 packages. If you tried to run “lomath” or “libreoffice–math”, then the Writer would start instead. I looked into this, and found out that several older versions of my LibreOffice packages also did not contain a working LibreOffice Math! I dissected my package and compared it to other distro’s packages. That is how I discovered that my packages were missing one critical file, which (for unknown reasons) is not getting installed by the “make install” routine. Therefore I added a check in the SlackBuild script which copies that “math.xcd” file into the package if it appears to be missing. And now, it works! In the LibreOffice main window, the “Formula” button is no longer greyed-out.

You can find the packages for Slackware 13.37 (and -current) in the usual locations (all of the mirrors below also offer rsync access):

One word of caution!

I wrote this in my previous post as well, but if you did not upgrade from 3.4 yet and this is the first time you are going to upgrade to a 3.5 release, it is important that you follow these instructions first in order to keep your existing configuration, customization and extensions.

Between 3.4.x and 3.5.0, LibreOffice changed the location of its configuration directory (again). Originally using ~/.ooo (a heritage from OpenOffice.org) it switched to ~/.libreoffice which will probably be where you will find your custom settings stored. The 3.5 releases however, use ~/.config/libreoffice . The best thing to do is move your current configuration directory to the new location, so that LibreOffice keeps working as expected:

$ mv ~/.libreoffice ~/.config/libreoffice

If you had already started the new LibreOffice program and noticed that you seem to have lost all your configuration settings, then you will have to stop LibreOffice, delete the fresh and almost empty ~/.config/libreoffice directory and then perform the directory move as shown above.

Cheers, Eric

KDE 4.8.3 packages

May 4, 2012 / / 34 Comments

The KDE team officially released the sources for KDE Software Compilation 4.8.3 today. I grabbed the tarballs from the packagers site a few days earlier, so that I could again have a full set of Slackware packages for you.

The upgrade will be trivial. Slackware-current was enhanced very recently with KDE 4.8.2 and all the software updates which that move required. Apart from the 4.8.3 release sources, I only had to compile a newer version of libbluedevil and bluedevil, and even those two will be updated in Slackware too, very soon (perhaps Pat already pulled the trigger).

Get my packages here; the official Slackware packages will remain at version 4.8.2, while Pat and the team concentrate on other parts of the distro.

The accompanying README file contains detailed installation/upgrade instructions. Do not fail to follow those instructions!

Have fun! Eric

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