Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: June 2012 (Page 2 of 3)

Testing can continue: KDE 4.9 Beta2

June 13, 2012 / / 48 Comments

The KDE team has officially announced the second beta of KDE Software Compilation 4.9. A more technical overview of the changes with regard to the previous beta can be found on this community page. After an API and feature freeze, it is just bug hunting (and fixing) until we see the arrival of KDE 4.9 in early august.

As usual, the packages for this second beta have been compiled on Slackware-current. The upgrade from Slackware’s KDE 4.8.2 to the 4.9-beta2 release (the version number is 4.8.90) should be trivial. There are two updated dependencies (soprano and shared-desktop-ontologies, the latter was added for beta2). Like with the previous beta, I did not bother with anything from “extragear” – although I was tempted to try Calligra. Please report the bugs you find! It will make the next KDE release even better

Get my packages in any of the following locations (the master repository at slackbook.org is severely restricted in bandwidth so using a mirror is always advised):

The accompanying README file contains detailed installation/upgrade instructions.

As you may have noticed when inspecting the above URLs, I have re-arranged my “ktown” repository. People were confused about what version would work with Slackware -current and what would work for 13.37. Also, some people have asked for sources of older releases for which I no longer host the packages.

I moved all the sources out of the package trees, you will now find a “sources” directory right at the top level of the repository. Below that will be the sources of all package sets which I currently have in my repository (KDE 4.6.5, 4.8.4 and 4.8.90) and soon I will also add sources for KDE 4.7.4 (including all the dependencies you may want for compiling it on Slackware 13.37). The packages will be available below a toplevel directory equal to the Slackware version they were compiled for (at the moment those are “13.37” and “current”). Below that you will find the actual KDE versions and further down, the 32-bit and 64-bit packages.

Have fun! Eric

KDE 4.8.4 (last in the 4.8 series)

June 8, 2012 / / 34 Comments

With a few days’ delay due to patches which were contributed at the last moment and resulting build failures (…), the KDE team announced the final increment in the 4.8 series: KDE Software Compilation 4.8.4 . I have packages for you and am announcing those for all users of Slackware-current.

The upgrade is trivial if you are already running Slackware-current. It already contains KDE 4.8.2, so the upgrade to 4.8.4 will mostly give you bug fixes and some performance enhancements. There was some talk about adding an unplanned 4.8.5 release because it will take so long until 4.9 stable but it seems that the reasons for wanting this have been addressed in the form of those patches to the 4.8.4 source tarballs which I mentioned above.

Re-compiling the 4.8.4 sources for Slackware 13.37 will not be so trivial, since you have to update quite a lot of other packages in Slackware (and install some new ones). Check out this directory with symbolic links in the slackware-current source tree. It points to all the package sources which you need if you are going to create packages for 13.37: http://slackware.osuosl.org/slackware64-current/source/kde/kde-deps-build/ . If there is enough demand, I will consider adding a “13.37 deps” directory for KDE 4.8.4 to the reposititory.

Get my KDE 4.8.4 packages for -current here:

The accompanying README file contains detailed installation/upgrade instructions.

Remember: if you rather want to try out a beta of the future 4.9 series, then I have that available too! See http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/results-of-a-few-days-of-packaging-software/ . I am running that Beta on my desktop and I have not found a single bug yet.

Have fun! Eric

Installing Diablo 3 on Slackware Linux

June 7, 2012 / / 18 Comments

Linux Today News has a headline “How to Install Diablo 3 on Linux” which points to the following article on SoftPedia: http://news.softpedia.com/news/How-to-Install-Diablo-3-on-Linux-273950.shtml .

I smiled for a bit, because I already have Diablo 3 running on my Slackware desktop for a few weeks now. And it did not take “PlayOnLinux” to do this.

  1. Install my wine  1.5.x and wine_gecko 1.5 packages. I have applied patches specifically to make the Diablo 3 installer work. Do not use my wine 1.4 package – that is the “stable” release which can probably play Diablo but can not install it.
  2. Run “winecfg” and configure wine to behave like a Windows 7 OS.
  3. Download the winetricks script, copy it to your /usr/local/bin directory and make it executable.
  4. Run “winetricks vcrun2008” in order to install the MS Visual C++ 2008 runtime  This will prevent application crashes when starting Diablo 3.
  5. Download the Diablo 3 setup from your Battle.Net account (assuming you already have an account and a Diablo 3 license). If you have a Diablo3 DVD then you mount that of course
  6. Run the setup using this example command (you may have downloaded another localization than enGB): “wine Diablo-III-Setup-enGB.exe” (if you have the DVD then you run the setup from the mounted directory).
  7. The setup will download about 8 GB of installation files and will then start the actual installation process.
  8. Once the installation has finished, you’ll see the big button “Play”. Click it to start the game.
  9. The game has been installed as a menu entry as well: below a top-level menu called “Wine”.

If you want to install Diablo into its own wine prefix (meaning it will get its own toplevel directory and thus cannot influence the functionality of other Windows programs you may have installed) then you need to add something like “WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine-diablo3/” in front of the above winedcfg and wine commands (you are free to pick any directory you like, mine is just an example); or just run “export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine-diablo3/” once before starting the first wine command. The desktop menu entries which are created by the Diablo setup will automatically be configured to also use a custom wine prefix.

Using the wine-1.5.5 which I patched and packaged I could install Diablo 3 and play for hours without a single glitch. Well done wine developers!

Very good troubleshooting information about running Diablo 3 on Linux using wine can be found in the Diablo 3 appdb page on winehq.

Cheers, Eric

Interview with Patrick Volkerding, tomorrow on LQ

June 6, 2012 / / 8 Comments

On thursday 7 june 2012, you will finally be able to read a full-scale interview with Patrick Volkerding, founder and head honcho of Slackware. The announcement was made earlier today by Jeremy, who runs LinuxQuestions.org, in this thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/interview-with-patrick-volkerding-940870/

The questions which will be featured have for the most part been asked in that forum thread. I believe that Pat answered all of the ones that have been sent to him by Jeremy. His answers are so detailed, that the article in the Interviews section may get split into two separate halves.

Have fun – tomorrow.

Eric

 

Update:

The interview has been posted on LQ.org.

 

Results of a few days of packaging software

June 3, 2012 / / 34 Comments

I hinted at the upcoming packages in an earlier post. KDE release team had asked on the packagers mailing list if it would be possible for distros to make early betas available of KDE 4.9 because it needs a lot of testing. It took me a while to find out how to build everything and to discover that not all of the split-off packages (the old “kdemultimedia” has been split up) would compile on Slackware. While I was busy with that, I discovered that there was a new IcedTea release too, which meant I could compile a new OpenJDK package.

KDE 4.9-beta1

The KDE team will officially announce the sources for the first beta of KDE Software Compilation 4.9 on monday 4 june, after some delay which was caused by a missing soprano package. However, I do not have time for a blog post on monday, being too busy at work, so I will make my packages and scripts available one day earlier.

Keep in mind that the packages for this beta have been compiled on Slackware-current. The upgrade from Slackware’s KDE 4.8.2 to the 4.9-beta1 release (the version number is 4.8.80) should be trivial. There is only one updated dependency (the aforementioned soprano) and none of the “extragear” was upgraded – I focused on the KDE core. If you are interested, grab them, install them, try out as much of the desktop environment as you can, and report the bugs you find!

Get my packages here:

The accompanying README file contains detailed installation/upgrade instructions.

Note: KDE 4.8.4 packages will be hot on the heels of this package set. I am already compiling it, and will wait until the official announcement on kde.org with making them public.

OpenJDK 7u4

 The newest release 2.2 of IcedTea builds the fourth update to the Java 7 platform. Icedtea is a “build harness” – it provides an enhanced way of compiling OpenJDK sources, adding a lot of patches which are not present in the original OpenJDK sources and offering an additional Java web browser plugin, icedtea-web.

I built the OpenJDK 7u4_b21 packages for you, along with the icedtea-web plugin package. Note that Slackware (as with all other distros) is no longer allowed by the new terms of Oracle’s license to distribute the official Oracle binaries of the JDK and JRE. Therefore you have not seen an update to the Java packages in Slackware for a long time. You can update using my native (i.e. compile on Slackware) packages of OpenJDK (the open sourced version of large parts of Oracle’s Java code), or download Oracle’s official binaries yourself and use the official Slackware build script to wrap those binaries into a Slackware package. The choice is yours!

You can test the installed packages here for instance:

Upgrade to my OpenJDK package now!

Note: you will find a JRE (java runtime engine) and a JDK (java development kit) package. Only install one of those! The JRE is sufficient if you just want to run Java based applications. You need the JDK if you want to be able to compile Java code. Also, grab the icedtea-web (optional) and rhino (required) packages.

Better even: download them from one of the mirrors. Since the slackware.com web server is up and running again, we have applied a download cap to the team’s member pages which will slow down your retrievals. For instance, you could use my taper.alienbase.nl or Darren Austin’s UK mirror .

Have fun! Eric

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