My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: November 2012

mirror & wiki server temporarily down

The host machine which is running the virtual machine “taper.alienbase.nl” and “docs.slackware.com” has malfunctioned.

According to the story told by that server’s owner, the power cord got loose during the re-build of the RAID array after the guy replaced a failing hard drive.

After a power-on the RAID volume refused to mount…

It looks like the host server may be up and running at the end of the day, if the owner manages to recover from the partition corruption. In that case, my mirror server taper.alienbase.nl and the Slackware Documentatoin Project’s Wiki docs.slackware.com may be online a little later, provided that I can access the server and start the Virtual Machine.

In the worst case, the server will not be able to recover and I have to find a location where I can restore my daily backup of the Wiki content. It’s just bad co-incidence that I will travel to India tomorrow early morning. I have no idea how fast I would be able to arrange for a new host, fix the DNS entries, setup apache and start the Wiki… for the docs.slackware.com hostname I need to involve Pat.

More news later.

Eric

Update Fri Nov 23 18:55:29 UTC 2012 –

The server is back up! The server admin fixed it, no data was lost.

Busy days

The KDE team has just made the sources available for the first beta of KDE 4.10. It will take until next week to release that beta1 to the public but I had already decided to skip the Betas for the KDE releases and wait until a Release Candidate. I am afraid that I have very little time for absorbing any more time-consuming projects… like getting a KDE Beta built and tested for Slackware.

In exactly one week I will be traveling to India. Not a holiday, but a business trip to spend a week with my helpdesk team. I will give some training there and talk about “our” side of the work in the Netherlands where I work for the IT department on the ASML campus. My visit should be beneficial to our helpdesk team members who have never actually seen anything of the customer they are working so hard for. There will be plenty of room for socializing as well, and I hope to see something of Hyderabad and its suurroundings at least. I will try and order a meal of the original Hyderabadi Biryani, of which I have a recipe in my own blog as well. And pictures of course… I want to make a lot of photos while I am there.

But, preparation time for that trip is very short, because my employer gave an approval only this week, and that leaves less time for Slackware related stuff. As I said, no new KDE 4.10 beta packages. I have no idea if I will be on time with the KDE 4.9.4 packages which are due early December.

What I did manage, was to update my multilib repository for Slackware 14.0 (something I had forgotten when I updated the -current packages) so that you can try out the new Skype for Linux on a multilib Slackware 14.0. I will try using Skype while visiting India. And I will package a new version of Sigil, the EPUB book editor. For those who regularly update to my newer Calibre e-book management packages – there was no new release this friday because the developer Kovid Goyal took a week off (he lives in Mumbai, India and they had Diwali Festival over there).

I can’t leave you without at least informing you about a new and promising fork of UDEV software. Initiated by Gentoo developers, they are calling this “udev-ng“. You may have noticed in the past that I do not speak favourably about the band of Redhat developers who are trying to destroy anything that is not Redhat by forcing SystemD on everyone – alienating everyone they should be co-operating with and killing software which other distros depend on. With the prospect of an independent fork of UDEV (which Lennart Poettering and friends have merged into systemd with the intent of dropping support for it later) we in Slackware land stand a better chance of keeping systemd out of our distro. In fact this is the second fork of UDEV, I hope the teams will be working together.

Cheers, Eric

Java in Slackware ARM

I am slaving away on my ARM port. It is mostly a side activity at the moment, I am doing a lot of other things which are higher on the priority list while I am getting the core ARM package set on par with the Slackware 14 versions. But it did already enable me to build a working version of the OpenJDK packages using the same SlackBuild script (well, a teeny bit of editing was needed) which I am using for the “Intel-compatible” versions of Slackware.

MoZes (Stuart Winter, the maintainer of Slackware ARM) decided that this was a good enough time to use this SlackBuild script and finally add a working Java to Slackware ARM.

From his site comes this message:

Thanks to the work of Eric Hameleers, Slackware ARM v14.0 and -current now sports OpenJDK and OpenJRE packages. A JRE has always been absent from Slackware ARM, so I’m particularly pleased to be able to now strike one off the “missing package list”. I hope it’s useful!

Slackware 14.0 has the packages in patches and -current has them in extra/openjdk. You’ll need to install the “rhino” package as this is a run-time dependency.

This is also good news for people who want to experiment with Java on their Raspberri Pi or Pandora Box for which ARMedslack community builds are available.

Eric

KDE releases 4.9.3

I was busy with other stuff and luckily I had already built my packages, but today the KDE team released the KDE Software Compilation 4.9.3 and I had to be reminded by reading Willy’s tweet about it. I have uploaded my new stuff and it is now available for download.

This is again a bugfix and improved stability release, so an upgrade from 4.9.2 should be painless. The translations have been improved as well. The release notes will have more details if you want to read them.

My packages are for Slackware 14 (and -current) and if you are still on 13.37 and want a more modern KDE, you’ll have a lot of work hunting down required updates for KDE dependencies… my advice is to upgrade to Slackware 14 now! And then grab my KDE 4.9.3 packages from my master repository or better, use one of the (faster) mirror servers, see below.

I have updated the guidelines for upgrading to this release of KDE in the accompanying README (some people wanted explicit instructions for downloading only the packages for the architecture they are running) and you are strongly advised to read and follow them.

Highlights for the new set of Slackware packages:

  • You will find five updated dependencies compared to Slackware’s own KDE 4.8.5: akonadi, qt, shared-desktop-ontologies, soprano, virtuoso-ose. The qt package is basically the same as Slackware 14, with some additional patches: I applied a patch which disables TLS compression by default which should safeguard against the “CRIME” SSL attack , and I applied a patch which is needed to fix crashes in kdevelop (QTBUG-27322 and QTBUG-23871).
  • The qt and akonadi packages have been refreshed since my previous KDE 4.9.2 package set.
  • I have added some upgrades to the “extragear” of KDE: you will find new versions of kdevelop and kdevplatform, as well as oxygen-gtk2.
  • I have added a new package, oxygen-gtk3, which should give any software which uses the GTK+3 widget set a nice integrated look and feel when you run it in KDE.
  • 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.

Download locations (using a mirror is preferred):

A word of warning… I have not yet installed and tested these packages myself 🙂 Please tell me about anything that is not right.

And to all US citizens, congratulations with the re-election of Barack Obama as your President.

Have fun! Eric

 

Libreoffice 3.6.3 packages available

The LibreOfffice developers have released the next update, 3.6.3. This is again mainly a bugfix and stability update. A list with most prominent bugfixes is available too.

LibreOffice extensions are available from http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center

As LibreOffice diverges more and more from OpenOffice I am not certain that the old OOo templates are still working with LibreOffice but the collection of LibreOffice-specific templates is growing steadily in the template-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 3.6.3 packages which I am making available have been built on Slackware 13.37. They can be installed on Slackware 14 as well. If you find any issues on Slackware 14 please tell me.

I uploaded the packages yesterday, silently, to give the mirrors a chance to update before announcing them on my blog and in the ChangeLog (tip: subscribe to the RSS feed if you want to be informed first!). Downloads are available here:

Have a good weekend and watch out for new KDE packages next week!

Eric

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