Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: July 2012

My (first) Raspberry Pi arrived in the post

July 26, 2012 / / 20 Comments

 At last…

I ordered a Raspberry Pi on May 11, 2012 and Farnell/Element14 delivered it to my home while I was on vacation. Go figure. The postman did not find us home of course, and rang our neighbors’ doorbell. He left the package there, and luckily that neighbor brought me the package the moment he saw our car parked in front of the house.

The little computer came wrapped in a Raspberry Pi T-shirt (with Element14 written all over the front as well) but hey – the T-shirt was free and it served well as wrapping instead of bubble plastic

 

Planning-wise, the Raspberry Pi arrived at an awkward moment. I had not expected delivery until well into august, and intended to pick up my own ARM port of Slackware after my return from France (targeting more recent CPUs than the Raspberry Pi, i.e. an ARM port of Slackware which will be incompatible with the Raspberry Pi). Having the computer in my hands, I could not put it aside, and proceeded with gathering everything needed to make it run Stuart Winter’s ARMedSlack.

The work I intended to do when I wrote my original blog post about the Raspberry Pi (back in November 2011) has been done already. Using ARMedslack as the base distro, David Spencer setup a web space where he writes in great detail how to install ARMedslack on the RasPi. He has created a bootable install image – to be copied onto a SD card – and maintains all his packaging and scripting work on Github.

So I bought a SD card – a Raspberry Pi does not have any internal storage – and dd-ed the installer image to the card. Inserted the card into the Raspi, connected a HDMI cable to my television, attached a USB keyboard with built-in TrackPoint mouse, plugged in a LAN ethernet cable and finally used my phone charger (micro USB) to power it up.

First, a fancy display of colours is visible on the television screen, probably the GPU’s bootloader showing off, and then a Linux kernel with the image of good old Tux replaced by a Raspberry was booting up. The long and boring process follows… formatting the root partition takes ages (which is actually expected behaviour, considering the hardware) and installing the packages is still ongoing while I am typing this:

I guess I will have to be patient. In the meantime I can think of good uses for a second device which should be delivered next week. Will it be good for an XBMC based media streamer? Will I put the semi-official Debian image on that one to see how the two distros differ? I have no idea yet. But just holding a 30 euro computer knowing that it will be running Slackware tomorrow brings a smile to my face.

When I have more to tell you, I will write another post. Now it is time to go to sleep, in the hope that the installation has finished by tomorrow morning so that I can bring the Raspberry Pi along when driving to the office.

Cheers, Eric

Back from holidays, some package updates

July 25, 2012 / / 20 Comments

Just came back from a short stay in Brittany, France where we stayed in a mobile home. Lots of sun, and lots of sleep to catch up on while being there!

While I was gone enjoying some freedom, interesting things happened in computerland. Slackware’s development reached the “Slackware 14 Beta 1” mark (see the “Sun Jul 22 22:38:36 UTC 2012” entry in the current ChangeLog). And the VideoLAN developers released an update to the VLC player. I am sure that there were other things that will grip me when I read them, but I have not been home long enough to notice 🙂 In the meantime, you may want to read about a man and his software which I do not care to see getting a grip on Slackware: systemd and slackware’s future … just to keep you focused on what’s good and what’s evil.

First Slackware of course.

The “Beta 1” update was pretty huge, as it involved the introduction of XFCE 4.10 and all the dependencies that required. The changes of “Wed Jul 25 02:02:40 UTC 2012” have fixed some of the expected fall-out which results from big and intrusive updates in slackware-current. It should be safe for all you beta testers out there to play with this Beta. But please make sure that you start with upgrading the “slackpkg” package and then run “slackpkg update” again!

I took the opportunity to refresh my set of pre-converted multilib packages for slackware64-current, and added “l/libffi” to the “massconvert32.sh” script (part of my own compat32-tools package) since people were noticing an error about missing libffi during the boot of a multilib slackware64-current system.

Then VLC.

I quickly built new packages for the 2.0.3 release which I have already uploaded. This is not a spectacular update, mostly beneficial to OS/X users and also refreshing a lot of UI translations. Note that I maintain the usual split in “restricted” and “unrestricted” functionality: the packages which I host on slackware.com are not able to encode MP3 and AAC audio (that version of my VLC package is of course perfectly able to play back those audio formats) due to software patent restrictions which apply in the US. For un-crippled packages you should head over to any mirror which carries the “restricted_slackbuilds” repository, like http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/ .

Have fun!

Eric

 

Edit: I forgot to mention that I also uploaded a new version of Calibre – the weekly update cycle was broken because of my holidays. If you use an “old” version of Calibre and do not want it to quit every week when it checks for updates and finds a new version, you can simply disable that check for new releases.

LibreOffice 3.5.5 released – just before 3.6.0

July 12, 2012 / / 12 Comments

I realize that LibreOffice 3.6.0 is almost upon us, but I think that a stable office suite is more important than the latest release. So, I uploaded a set of LibreOffice packages (targeting Slackware 13.37 and newer). The new maintenance release of LibreOffice is characterized with “improvements in … compatibility to third-party formats” apart from the usual bux fixes of course.

As usual, there is the main (big) libreoffice package accompanied by a lot of language packs and the libreoffice-mozplugin for embedding documents in your mozilla-compatible webbrowser.

If you want to compile this yourself on Slackware 13.37, then you must make sure that you have applied all the available patches for 13.37 first, in particular the newer seamonkey package there. Also you have to replace your JRE package with the full JDK found in the “/extra” directory. Additional non-Slackware requirements for compilation are Apache Ant and the Archive:Zip Perl module. after installing/upgrading all that, logout from your shell and login again to update your environment (or just run ” . /etc/profile ” including that dot). None of this is necessary if you just want to use my package for LibreOffice.

You can find the packages for Slackware 13.37 (they will work without issues on -current too!) in the usual locations. All of the mirrors below also offer rsync access by the way:

Good luck with the packages! I will not do a 3.6.0 version but wait for the first bugfix release of that new cycle.

Cheers, Eric

Busy days, not Slackware related

July 11, 2012 / / 20 Comments

In the next days or weeks, I am going to try and rest and re-vitalize myself. It would be a waste of effort if I burnt myself out. But the shitty weather does not help. Who feels like it is summer in Europe? I have just emptied the buckets in the hallway which caught the water seeping through the crack in the roof… repair money is not available right now.

During the past week, there were many such distractions to keep me away from hacking at Slackware. This will likely remain unchanged during the next weeks. We had a fire in the kitchen, which caused damage (the stove and oven were destroyed), but luckily no one got hurt! It takes time to invite experts to assess the damage, arrange repairs and such. I als got hooked on some e-books I had loaded onto my Sony E-reader… reading is eating away precious time faster than you think!

Anyway, all this distraction had consequences for the package pipeline. With regular releases of KDE, LibreOffice, OpenJDK and VLC – all pretty big builds – my free time is increasingly limited to building updates for these aforementioned programs. It is frustrating at times that I have to make an advance planning because especially KDE and LibreOffice releases tend to come at roughly the same time. Building in several virtual machines at the same time hurts my server’s performance and it does not help the total build time per program…

Also, I really need to pick up the pace with my new but currently stalled ARM port of Slackware (which will have differences to the existing ARMedslack port). I am talking to some people about what would be a cool computer to own which really should be running Slackware. The outcome of those discussions I will reserve for a future post, because I will probably need assistance.

That is why I decided that I am not going to build packages for the upcoming KDE 4.9-rc2. I will wait for the final release of 4.9.0 instead.

I will try to get LibreOffice packages compiled for the 3.5.5 release which was announced today. It depends on the errors I encounter during compilation… I do not have time to hunt compilation issues down and fix them. So, fingers crossed!

End of rant.

Eric

Using SQLite for this blog

July 1, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Just to let you know, I created a permanent page (as opposed to a blog article) called “PDO Powered“. You’ll find it in the left sidebar of the blog – right below the link to my  “About” page.

A few posts back when I wrote about a blog upgrade where I finally fixed my database tables and my performance issues, someone asked me if it were possible  that I create a pre-configured empty blog using SQLite. The reason being that it is no longer possible to configure a SQLite backend if you start off with the most recent version of WordPress.

The instruction set on my new page is meant to show you how to do that yourself. I also added a link to a tarball containing such a pre-configured blog so that you can use that too as a bootstrap for your own portable blog.

If you used my instructions or the tarball, it would be nice if you add a link to your blog in the comments section of the “PDO Powered” page (I will check for SPAM attempts!). Perhaps if enough independent blogs show up using SQLite, the WordPress developers will reconsider their point of view (they do not care for other database backends except MySQL).

Eric

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