Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: October 2012 (Page 1 of 2)

Slackware Documentation Project – two months later

October 19, 2012 / / 15 Comments


Hi folks!

I wanted to bring you up to speed about the recent activities on the Slackware Documentation Project and provide you with some statistics.

The Slackware Documentation Project is now active for exactly 2 months. I think we are a lucky bunch that we were given the opportunity to use a hostname in the slackware.com domain – thanks Pat!.And thanks to the anonymous benefactor who pays for server hosting and bandwidth – I could not do this without you.

I want to thank everyone who participated in the LinuxQuestions.org thread which inspired the birth of the project – http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/slackware-documentation-project-4175422561/ is now a sticky thread on the Slackware forum. I want to thank the people who stepped up in the early stages of the project, to volunteer as staff editors, and I particularly want to thank all of you who are creating the content in this Wiki. If we want to find ourselves “a place in history” we need inspired writers.

We have some great HOWTO’s currently and it is rewarding to watch the discussions on the (sic) discussion pages which help the continuous improvement of the articles.

I am very excited by the work that is being done to translate the english pages into a variety of other languages. I don’t think I ever saw a Slackware related site which had pages available in 12 different languages! Thanks to all who care enough to do the hard work of translating and thus enabling whole new communities to get familiar with Slackware Linux.

Matthew Fillpot completed the huge task of running the complete Slackware Essentials Book (http://slackbook.org/beta/) through a DocBook parser which he wrote himself, creating a Wiki version of the Book which is now an integral part of our site. Thanks to Alan Hicks for changing the new Book’s license and thereby allowing us to create a derived work. Any updates to the Book’s content will be fed back into the original of course.

We revamped the front page of the Wiki. It is the page which most visitors will open first. Therefore it should be clean, concise, and show relevant information. We decided to highlight the information which is the most dynamic – your contributions! The HOWTOs pages are now clearly outlined on the homepage, and there is also a shortlist of recent changes to the existing articles, an invitation to click through.

We currently have 180 registered user accounts in the Wiki and 101 people subscribed to the slackdocs mailing list http://lists.alienbase.nl/mailman/listinfo/slackdocs . All in all pretty impressive numbers for such a young project. The Wiki has some public statistics at http://docs.slackware.com/slackdocs:stats and some non-public statistics pages of which I made a PDF print.

We are barely starting… and I would like to see the volume of information grow steadily. How will we achieve that? Well; I would like all of you to go through your private notes. If you know of something that you struggled with, found the solution for and wrote down so that you would not forget – that is exactly the type of information we would like you to add to the Wiki ! Also, you may be a member of a local LUG in your area. Drop the word on the Slackware Documentation Project! And what about your mail closing signature, or discussion forum signature?
Perhaps you can add a link to the SlackDocs Wiki there. Spreading the word about the project, is what will give it the momentum to make it grow bigger.

Thanks for listening.

Eric

Finally, VLC 2.0.4

October 18, 2012 / / 23 Comments

The fifth release in the “TwoFlower” series of the VLC media player is ready. Version 2.0.4 is said to be “a major update that fixes a lot of regressions, issues and security issues in this branch. It introduces Opus support, improves Youtube, Vimeo streams and Blu-Ray dics support. It also fixes many issues in playback, notably on Ogg and MKV playback and audio device selections and a hundred of other bugs.” – quoting the VideoLAN news page.

You can find some additional information on the release notes page. There I saw the new “ogg opus” support mentioned for the first time. OggOpus is a low-latency audio codec optimized for both voice and general-purpose audio. This was new to me so it did not get added to this set of Slackware VLC packages. I promise I will see if I can include it in my next set of packages. The new release also has fixed the playback of Youtube videos. Google changes its Youtube access protocol regularly, probably in an attempt to frustrate non-official ways of watching their videos. Luckily the Youtube video support is implemented as a Lua script so even for the older VLC 2.0.3 package, I was able to fix it without much effort a few weeks ago by downloading an updated youtube.lua file from the source code repository.

Again, it took quite a while to get a new version of VLC stamped and the sources released to the public. Judging from the discussions on IRC, the developer team seem to have a fundamental internal disagreement about how to set goals for a release. It is obvious (if you read between the lines of the release notes) that the focus of the development effort between 2.0.3 and 2.0.4 has been on the Windows and Mac platforms with additional focus on the new Android platform (did you try the Android app yet? I like it). This does not mean that there is nothing new to report for the Linux users. The number of general improvements is equally impressive. There is also talk of “security fixes” but so far I was not able to find a CVE reference.

I have been making preparations for the compilation of new VLC packages a while ago. Remember that I have to create 8 VLC packages when VideoLAN developers release a new version of their player (two Slackware releases, two architectures per release, and then restricted/unrestricted versions of each) so I use tarballs of pre-compiled “contribs” binaries to speed up the process. The contribs (which is how VideoLAN calls them) are actually the set of supporting libraries which provide the real functionality in VLC – playback, encoding, hardware support, etc. I compiled a set of these contribs two weeks ago for Slackware 14, and more than a month ago for Slackware 13.37. Several of those internal supporting libraries were updated with regard to my previous vlc-2.0.3 packages: Shout, aacenc, amrwbenc, amr, lua, upnp, v4l, x264; and for Slackware 14.0 I added two more: ffmpeg and live555.

A further update to the vlc.SlackBuild (only relevant should you attempt to rebuild VLC from source) is the fact that it no longer needs to compile and use an internal Mozilla SDK. Slackware’s own seamonkey package in 14.0 (and the version of seamonkey for Slackware 13.37 which you can install from its/patches/packages directory) is now capable of compiling the Mozilla-compatible webbrowser plugin package “npapi-vlc”. Not having to compile the Mozilla SDK speeds up the total build time a lot.

One remark about npapi-vlc: I still use the 2.0.0 release tarball since that is the most recent one that you can download. However, a version 2.0.2 was tagged in the source repository a few months ago. It’s just that the developer did not create an official tarball for that, and therefore I stick to the older version.

The release notes speak of improved BluRay support in this release. Note that the BluRay support in VLC (at least in my package) works only for unencrypted disks… and I do not think these exist actually. But extracted unencrypted BluRay files on your hard drive should playback just fine.  Playback of encrypted BluRay DVD’s requires that you also install my libaacs package: http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/libaacs or http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/libaacs/) and find yourself a set of AACS decryption keys (see these comments for some hints on that).

Time to download the new VLC packages:

Rsync acccess is offered by the mirror server: rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/ .

My usual warning about patents: versions that can not only DEcode but also ENcode mp3 and aac audio can be found in my alternative repository where I keep the packages containing code that might violate stupid US software patents.

Have fun! Eric

OpenJDK 7 Update 9 with IcedTea 2.3.3 fixes security flaws

October 18, 2012 / / 11 Comments

Shortly after Oracle released its own Update 9 for Java7, there was a similar update from the IcedTea team. New releases of IcedTea for OpenJDK6 and OpenJDK7 fix several critical security bugs. The version of IcedTea which I use (2.3.3) builds a OpenJDK 7 Update 9 package.

I also wanted to inform you about the relevant blog post from one of the main developers: GNU.Andrew (Andrew John Hughes from Redhat). His blog site was down – and it had been down for weeks – but it is available again. Unfortunately there is no news to be found there yet.

The list with security fixes in the IcedTea 2.3.3 build of OpenJDK is impressive:

  - S6631398, CVE-2012-3216: FilePermission improved path checking
  - S7093490: adjust package access in rmiregistry
  - S7143535, CVE-2012-5068: ScriptEngine corrected permissions
  - S7158796, CVE-2012-5070: Tighten properties checking in EnvHelp
  - S7158807: Revise stack management with volatile call sites
  - S7163198, CVE-2012-5076: Tightened package accessibility
  - S7167656, CVE-2012-5077: Multiple Seeders are being created
  - S7169884, CVE-2012-5073: LogManager checks do not work correctly for sub-types
  - S7169887, CVE-2012-5074: Tightened package accessibility
  - S7169888, CVE-2012-5075: Narrowing resource definitions in JMX RMI connector
  - S7172522, CVE-2012-5072: Improve DomainCombiner checking
  - S7186286, CVE-2012-5081: TLS implementation to better adhere to RFC
  - S7189103, CVE-2012-5069: Executors needs to maintain state
  - S7189490: More improvements to DomainCombiner checking
  - S7189567, CVE-2012-5085: java net obselete protocol
  - S7192975, CVE-2012-5071: Issue with JMX reflection
  - S7195194, CVE-2012-5084: Better data validation for Swing
  - S7195549, CVE-2012-5087: Better bean object persistence
  - S7195917, CVE-2012-5086: XMLDecoder parsing at close-time should be improved
  - S7195919, CVE-2012-5979: (sl) ServiceLoader can throw CCE without needing to create instance
  - S7196190, CVE-2012-5088: Improve method of handling MethodHandles
  - S7198296, CVE-2012-5089: Refactor classloader usage
  - S7158800: Improve storage of symbol tables
  - S7158801: Improve VM CompileOnly option
  - S7158804: Improve config file parsing
  - S7198606, CVE-2012-4416: Improve VM optimization

 

So I guess it is good to upgrade fast! Get my packages (Slackware 13,37 and newer) for OpenJDK 7u9_b30 here:

Further packages that are recommended/required:

  • Optional: If you want a Java browser-plugin you must install icedtea-web (OpenJDK itself does not contain such a plugin).
  • Required: The rhino package is a dependency of the openjdk/openjre package. It contains the JavaScript engine for OpenJDK.

I will repeat these notes:

  • You need to install either the JRE or the JDK package. Not both of them! If you are not a Java developer and never compile Java code, then you do not need the openjdk package and it will be sufficient to install the (smaller) openjre package instead.
  • If you are migrating to OpenJDK after having used Oracle’s Java binaries, make sure that you have removed both “jre” and “jdk” packages. Run a command like “removepkg /var/log/packages/jdk-* ; removepkg /var/log/packages/jre-*” to get rid of both. Then install the openjdk or openjre package. Logout and log back in after this package removal/installation, so that you will get the proper Java environment.
  • Test your java browser plugin online: http://javatester.org/version.html or http://www.java.com/en/download/testjava.jsp .

Good luck! Eric

Bugfix packages for LibreOffice

October 11, 2012 / / 17 Comments

Even with my most recent LibreOffice packages the bug had not been squashed which prevented documents from being saved with password protection. Applying a password would cause the file-save to fail with a “general input/output error” message.

There was a strong indication that this had something to do with NSS but the various distros where the same issue had been reported, appeared to have no more issues, with fixes having been added to the LibreOffice sources. But my Slackware packages were not fixed and no patching would help that.

Finally I discovered that my LibreOffice package built its own internal nss libraries, so I decided to explore the path which Slackware 14 has already stepped onto: I installed a mozilla-nss package on my Slackware 13.37 virtual machine. I changed the SlackBuild script to use the system nss library, waited many hours to let the compilatin finish and… I had the solution. When using the Slackware nss libraries, the password problem went away.

You should have no need for installing mozilla-nss on Slackware if you want to use LibreOffice. I am not even sure if it mozilla-nss was really required during compilation to fix this bug… in Slackware 13.37 the nss libraries are also provided by the seamonkey package. But, I did not want to spend yet another day of compiling in order to find out…

Before you rush off to download and install the new stuff, remember that the LibreOffice 3.6.2 packages are built on Slackware 13.37 but can be installed on Slackware 14 as well. In order to make this more obvious to people who do not read my blog, I have created “14.0” symlinks in the LibreOffice package directories which point to “13.37”. If you find any issues on Slackware 14 please tell me.

Packages are available here (mirrors will catch up in the next 24 hours):

Cheers! Eric

 

Libreoffice 3.6.2 released

October 5, 2012 / / 15 Comments

Just wen I had built Libreoffice 3.6.1 packages (with a bit of delay because releasing Slackware 14 was more important), the developers released the next stabilization update, 3.6.2. Oh well, another two days of compiling and I have another 900 MB of packages for you…

Perhaps good to mention here, is that LibreOffice extensions are available from http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center .

If anyone has created a professional-looking set of Slackware themed presentations or document templates, could you offer those for download? I am not an expert in these things, but it would be a nice-to-have. Not for me alone – there are probably many more people with this wish.

The LibreOffice 3.6.2 packages are built on Slackware 13.37 but can be installed on Slackware 14 as well. If you find any issues on Slackware 14 please tell me. Downloads are available already (mirrors will catch up in the next 24 hours):

Have a good weekend! Eric

 

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