My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: September 2012 (Page 1 of 2)

Slackware 14 released

Folks, it’s that time which you have all been anticipating!

 

Slackware 14 has been released today, wrapping up 17 long months of development. Read the announcement to learn all about this new release.The Slackware homepage has some more information for you, as well.

I think there has not been such a long series of release candidates, ever before. Thanks to the co-operation of our Slackware user base, there has been a tremendous amount of beta testing during the past few months. Pat could probably have gone on releasing updates and allow further testing for months to come, but essentially, we have a solid and stable Slackware release in our hands.

What’s new?

We have X11R7.7 (X.Org server 1.12.3), KDE 4.8.5, XFCE 4.10, the Linux 3.2.29 kernel as default, but with lots of sample kernel configs for newer 3.x kernels included as well. NetworkManager has been added for people who like to be mobile and configure their network connections using a GUI. We still include WICD, and we kept full support for the traditional style of network configuration. There is lots more! Of the nearly 1150 packages in Slackware core, more than 800 have been upgraded or recompiled since Slackware 13.37. “Why were not all of those packages recompiled or upgraded” I hear you say. Remember, the Slackware adagium is “if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it!“.

Those who have been running “-current” will not notice much – they are in fact running Slackware 14 already. But if you are upgrading from Slackware 13.37 you will certainly want to read the CHANGES_AND_HINTS file to get a good picture of the many package additions and what to expect from them. I wrote an article for  our new Slackware Documentation Project, called “upgrading Slackware to a new release“.which will help you convert your Slackware 13.37 system to 14.0 painlessly. The Slackware Documentation Project gets a mention in the Slackware 14 announcement as well, yay 🙂

Use the weekend to download the ISO images – our torrent tracker is ready and we have initial seeds on big pipes: http://www.slackware.com/getslack/torrents.php.

And consider buying a subscription at the Slackware Store – it will help keeping the lights on at Pat’s place. Mind you – Pat is the only one in the core team who is financially dependent on the sales of Slackware DVD’s and other merchandise. The rest of the team does this for fun, not for profit – we buy our own subscriptions from the Store, just like you do.

Have fun! Eric

 

OS upgrade for taper mirror aka docs wiki

Last night I upgraded the Operating System of my taper mirror (which also hosts the Wiki for docs.slackware.com) to Slackware 13.37 plus patches. It has been running Slackware 13.1 reliably for two years now, but I do not want my public servers to be more than one OS release behind the most recent version.

With Slackware 14 around the corner this was the perfect opportunity to spend a sleepless night on an upgrade. Using slackpkg, I basically followed the procedure which I recently added to SlackDocs: http://docs.slackware.com/howtos:slackware_admin:systemupgrade using my own local package mirror.

No issues were encountered. I kept all services running, as long as they were in RAM they would not be affected by the package’s binaries being replaced on disk.

The upgrade to 13.37 was also a requirement for any future upgrade to the Dokuwiki software which I use for the docs.slackware.com Wiki. The pcre package in Slackware 13.1 lacks proper unicode support and that breaks the search function in the new beta of Dokuwiki. This is what you should see (and Slackware 13.37 does it right):

$ pcretest -C | grep -i unicode
Unicode properties support
\R matches all Unicode newlines

Nobody has noticed that I upgraded the OS 🙂 The server did not go down except for a reboot into the new kernel… all in all, the server was unavailable for 30 seconds. A Slackware system upgrade works flawlessly, which distro can beat that?!?

Eric

End of the week, end of the cycle?

Most of you will have seen the latest comment in the slackware-current ChangeLog:

Wed Sep 19 23:52:16 UTC 2012
Here we go one more time with Slackware 14.0 release candidate 5.
Really, this time it is not a drill!  Everything is in place and
ready to release at this point, and unless there’s some kind of
showstopper found (which doesn’t seem too likely after all the
testing that’s happened), the release can be expected soon.

It means that we could see a Slackware 14 release very soon. As always, it’s ready when it is ready… but it is not going to take weeks.

I took the opportunity to implement some ideas which I had been thinking about for my multilib packages. These are the results:

  • In the compat32-tools package, the “convertpkg-compat32” script will now by default add a “compat32” build tag to the converted package name. For instance, when the package “e2fsprogs-1.42.5-x86_64-1.txz” is converted, it becomes “e2fsprogs-compat32-1.42.5-x86_64-1compat32.txz”.
  • Also in the compat32-tools package, the “massconvert32.sh” script will now check the Slackware patches directory to see if there is an update for any package it needs to convert. For instance, when you run the script against a Slackware 13.37 package tree you would get the converted package “openssl-solibs-compat32-0.9.8x-i486-1_slack13.37compat32.txz” instead of “openssl-solibs-compat32-0.9.8r-i486-3compat32.txz” (which is part of the original 13.37 release).
  • The reason for adding a “compat32” build tag to all converted packages is to make system upgrades of a multilib Slackware easier. Up to now, if you were using slackpkg for the upgrades, you had to manually deselect all compat32 packages in the list which is produced by the command “slackpkg clean-system”. With the new scripts, you are able to blacklist all my multilib packages by just adding one line to the file “/etc/slackpkg/blacklist”:

# Blacklist all multilib ‘compat32’ packages:

[0-9]+compat32

  • During the slackware-current development cycle there were several upgrades of the gcc packages. At one time I had to fix my multilib rebuild of gcc. I want to keep my package build numbers in sync with Slackware’s original 64-bit packages to avoid confusion of the kind “do I have the correct multilib package installed“, so I decided to give the fixed gcc packages a build number of “1fix1_alien” instead of “1alien”. Unfortunately this broke the slackpkg blacklist line for my “alien” tag. The expression “[0-9]+alien” will not match packages with a “1fix1_alien” build number. So I decided to rename the multilib gcc packages and use the “1alien” build tag. This will be much friendlier for people who upgrade from Slackware 13.37 to 14.0. If you have been running -current all the time, you should be smart enough to understand my reasoning 🙂

If you are currently running Slackware 13.37 and want to profit from these enhancements, you can of course upgrade to my new compat32-tools package – even though I make it avalable in the “current” (and later on “14.0“) directory of my multilib repository. I took care not to break the compatibility with Slackware 13.37 when I updated the package during the past development cycle of slackware-current.

A note about the Slackware Documentation Project

We  (the editors) are steadily working on expanding the documentation wiki. I recently added an article about how to perform a Slackware system upgrade, to help people who are running Slackware 13.37 and want to upgrade to 14.0 when that is released. Check out “Upgrade Slackware to a New Release“.

We would like to welcome your contributions as well! If you had a problem in Slackware and found the solution, or if you have some particular knowledge which your fellow Slackers could profit from, feel free to visit the Wiki’s HOWTO’s page and create your own article there. Check the existing HOWTO articles to get a feel for what is possible.

If you do not want to write a new article, we still value your feedback. If you have any comments or suggestions about improvements for the site, we would like to hear from you.

Cheers, Eric

KDE Software Compilation 4.9.1

Gee wizz! I was happily editing the new SlackDocs Wiki (article submissions are very welcome btw) while at the same time the KDE team released KDE SC 4.9.1 !! I had read on the “kde-packager” mailing list that the public announcement would be on Wednesday, so I was not paying all that much attention to the KDE site. And then all of a sudden there was the announcement on kde.org!

Luckily, I was prepared. I had already built the packages for Slackware-current (or better call that Slackware 14 RC4) and uploaded them to my two mirror servers. Get your KDE 4.9.1 packages .

This release is a bug fix release. Still, there is at least one glaring bug which was only uncovered after the public release (a message about the bug was posted to “kde-packager” which alerted me to the fact that the sources were already public). This is the message:

A nasty regression (was introduced) while fixing a bug inKWin for 4.9.1. With the “wrong” settings and the wrong set of open windows distributed over multiple desktops this can result in a freeze. A freeze in KWin means that the compositor stops, that is the user has no chance to recover from this state unless he knows how to switch to a tty.

A fix should be ready soon, which means a new kde-workspace package. It is a bug which should not affect a lot of people (I have been running KDE 4.9.1 for a few days here without ill effects), so I decided to push out my packages anyway.

The upgrade from Slackware’s KDE 4.8.5 to my KDE 4.9.1 should be safe and fairly trivial, As always, follow the guidelines in the README and you’ll be OK.

Highlights for the new set of Slackware packages:

  • You will find four updated dependencies compared to Slackware’s own KDE 4.8.5: akonadi, shared-desktop-ontologies, soprano, virtuoso-ose.
  • Compared to KDE 4.8.5, there were two package removals:
    • kdemultimedia has been split up into several smaller individual packages.
    • ksecrets has been removed completely in the 4.9.x series.
  • A noteworthy feature in KDE 4.9 has been added to Okular, the document viewer in KDE. Many people will cheer: Okular is now able to save the annotations you make to PDF files.

These KDE 4.9.1 packages are available for download from my “ktown” repository and several mirrors:

Parrot speak: this is a bit of text which I wrote at the time of release of KDE 4.9 release candidate 1 but I will repeat it one last time. After today, you should remember:

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 “source” 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, 4.7.4, 4.8.4 and 4.9.1, 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

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