My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: December 2012 (Page 1 of 2)

Best wishes for a healthy and safe 2013

Hi folks

This is the last day of 2012 and I want to take the opportunity to thank you all for reading my blog posts and your support in whatever way. Some good people sent me donation money through PayPal for which I am extremely glad since these times are not at all good, financially speaking. I was about to give up this summer, but your support allowed me to keep paying the bills for the build box and compensate to my family for all the hours I was not available for them. Thanks also to the generous person who keeps hosting my taper mirror for free – which is also the home of the Slackware Documentation Project coincidentally.

The birth of the Slackware Documentation Project was the highlight of 2012 for me, it gave me a lot of fresh energy to see so many of you reach out and bring together precious documentation for new and experienced Slackers alike.

I hope to see you all back in good health in the New Year!

The year has had its ups and downs for Slackware, one of the least enjoyable moments was when the Slackware.com webserver died and we were without an “internet sign post” for a while. That caused a stir for sure 🙂 I was glad to see the response from Slackers around the world and the expression of faith in the future of our favorite distro.

As the year ends, we are going strong as ever again, with Slackware 14 running on a lot of computers. Let’s see what 2013 brings. At least KDE 4.9.5 packages are waiting on my server for the public release on the 2nd of January 2013. They will not show up in Slackware-current (probably) but you will find them in my ktown repository. I will post here once they are available..

Remember, Slackware will always be free, but please consider a small donation or buy a copy of the Slackware installation media in order to support Pat Volkerding financially.

Finally, I want you to watch a bit of video before you head out into the night and light the fireworks. Be careful, especially you young people!

Cheers, Eric

Multilib update for slackware-current

Pat Volkerding released new packages for the GCC compiler suite on the day the world would end (21 dec 2012) but yet here we are… on the other side and feeling fine. And of course, urgently in need of multilib versions of that gcc-4.7.2 compiler suite for Slackware-current.

I built them today and they are at their usual download locations:

Remember, multilib configuration is needed if you want to use some binary-only 32-bit software on 64-bit Slackware – think of Valve’s Steam Client, the WINE emulator, Citrix client etc. If you are looking for instructions on how to add or update multilib on your 64-bit Slackware, check out our Slackware Documentation Project which has this information and much more. Perhaps you even care to contribute there by writing an article about a topic you are familiar with (but the rest of us isn’t). That would be an awesome thing to do for Christmas!

Cheers, Eric

 

Steam for Linux Beta opens to everyone

 

The Steam for Linux beta program has just opened its doors to the general public.

When I looked, there were 48 games in the Steam catalogue, paid-for ans well as free-to-play. Part of opening up the Steam for Linux beta is moving their bug tracker to Github, which allows for a better interface than the old bugtracker which was used during the closed-beta phase.

Here is the official announcement:

An Early Holiday Gift!
added by Frank @ 01:13AM on December 20, 2012

The Steam for Linux beta program is now open to the public! In order to participate in the beta, you must download the latest Steam Linux client (found here) or upgrade your existing Steam for Linux client to the latest version. In addition, we will now track Steam for Linux client bugs using GitHub. This provides a better interface for tracking bugs than the forums used in the closed beta. The Steam for Linux repository (currently empty) is public, allowing anyone with a free GitHub account to create a new issue and edit or track it and search the existing bug database. The repository contains a readme file (README.md) detailing how to create a new issue (it describes the same format used in the closed beta). The team will continue working through existing issues in the forum but it is strongly recommended that any new issues be entered using GitHub’s issue tracking interface. The sub forums will remain open so that people can join/continue existing discussions about the Steam for Linux client. And last but not least, we now have a steam installer package repository. There is a mailing list for announcing updates to the steam installer package. To subscribe, use the public mailman page located here: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/steamrepo. Here’s the change list for this release:

  • The Steam for Linux client closed beta transitioned to an open beta.
  • Linux – Fixed excessive CPU usage by the Steam client when running Team Fortress 2
  • Linux – Fixed overlay crash when starting Cubemen
  • Big Picture – Improved back navigation behavior throughout user interface
  • Big Picture – Added discount timers and other user interface to store

Remember, my Steam Client package for Slackware can be found here: http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/steamclient/ . I will have to look into the new installer repository to see if I have to update the download link for my own package but that may have to wait until the weekend.

This LinuxQuestions.org thread is still being used for discussions and bug reporting.

Cheers, Eric

Valve’s Steam client for Linux

notifyFor people who visit this page – it was written a long time ago. The requirements to run Steam on Slackware are a lot lighter nowadays! Most important: PulseAudio is no longer required!
All you need is a package for OpenAL (to play audio) and flashplayer-plugin (in order to watch the videos in the Steam Store).
If you are running 64-bit multilib you will also have to create and install “compat32? versions of the 32-bit OpenAL and flashplayer-plugin packages.
That’s all.

It was august 2012 when I wrote an article about the viability of commercial games on Linux. In particular, I was talking about the new Steam client for Linux which Valve Software was developing. Read that article now if you have not seen it yet, it will give insight as to where I stand with regard to the use of commercial software on Linux.

It took a while, and then Valve opened a limited Beta for their Steam client, inviting 1000 users at random, but targeting users of the Ubuntu distribution for obvious reasons: Valve wants to create a firm foothold in Linux now that they have “officially” denounced Windows 8 as a platform for which they will develop their software and games. Gabe Newell’s criticism of Windows 8 is well-known by now and in October of this year, Valve issued a similar statement during the Ubuntu Developer Summit.

And Ubuntu has the biggest potential user base for game fans – let’s face it, more people move from Windows to Ubuntu than to Slackware, so commercially Valve is doing the smart thing.

 

When the Beta program kicked off, people found out relatively fast that the Steam client had limited functionality, even for people who were not part of the initial beta. I quickly hacked together a set of instructions based on the tests I did.

Last week, the Steam for Linux Beta program opened up to a much wider audience and I received my invitation email as well (along with many more Slackers). It looks like there will not be any limitations at all after next week, so I decided to use a little of my holiday to properly package the Steam Client for Linux. Obviously, the client software is distributed as binary-only. Furthermore, it is 32-bit software and developed on Ubuntu. Nevertheless, it is not hard at all to run the Steam client on Slackware. I created a 32-bit package, see http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/steamclient/ , and added some additional instructions in a README.Slackware file:

The Steam client is primarily targeting Ubuntu, so in order to make it work
on Slackware, the package ships with a slightly modified steam startup script.

You will also have to install several dependencies:
  - pulseaudio
  - speex
  - json-c
  - OpenAL
  - flashplayer-plugin
These are all available as SlackBuild scripts on http://slackbuilds.org,
while OpenAL and flashplayer-plugin packages can be found in my own repository
at http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/ too.

Note that the Steam client currently is 32-bit only. If you are running a
64-bit Slackware you must add multilib capability to it first.
Then, you need to add several more 'compat32' packages. In addition to
'compat32' versions of the aforementioned dependencies, you also need to
install 'compat32' packages for:
  - flac
  - libogg
  - libvorbis
  - oxygen-gtk2

Note that before building pulseaudio, its README instructs you to create
a "pulse" user and group:
  # groupadd -g 216 pulse
  # useradd -u 216 -g pulse -d /var/lib/pulse -m pulse
However, there is no need to actually _start_ the pulseaudio server. You can
prevent this by running:
  # chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.pulseaudio
The Steam client is dynamically linked against pulseaudio libraries, but my
modification to the steam startup script will actually force it to use
Slackware's ALSA for audio output. Pulseaudio will not be used.

In order to run the Steam client you will probably need a Nvidia or Ati card
with proprietary drivers. I would like to hear from people who are able to
start Steam and play a game using open source drivers.

I have added the required dependency packages (including those required for multilib) in a separate “deps” directory of that steamclient package. Note that my old hacks of creating a symlink to the “/sbin/pidof” binary and exporting several variables is no longer needed, the steam start-up script does all of that now.

Installing the steamclient package, will get you a “Steam” icon in your desktop menu. Alternatively you can type “steam” in a terminal to start the client.You will see it downloading updates first, and then it allows you to connect to your Steam account.

 

When you are connected to your Steam account you will see the Steam Store and a “Linux” menu which is exclusive to the Linux client. You can of course do anything (purchases, community chat etc) which you would also do in the Windows client or the web interface.

You can then check out your own virtual “Library” which will contain the games you have purchased or which you could add because they are free to play. The Linux Beta shows two games here, the “Team Fortress Beta” which is an online shooter and “World of Goo Demo”, both of which are free.

Note that I modified the steam startup script to use ALSA as audio output. The pulseaudio libraries are required because the Steam binaries link against them but PulseAudio is not used for sound. Also note that if your default ALSA soundcard is not “hw:0,0” you may have to add one more variable. The AUDIODEV variable defines which audiodevice ALSA should use instead of “default”. You can set additional environment variables in a file” ~/.steam4slackware “. This is what I have in that file:

$ cat ~/.steam4slackware
export AUDIODEV=hw

This tells ALSA to use the first “hw” device available. The default value for AUDIODEV is “default”.

One more quirk was that I had to stop any program which was playing audio (like VLC) before starting the Steam client, or else the Steam games would not have sound…

Cheers, Eric

New VLC and FlashPlayer releases

Just a saturday afternoon post… I intended to write about these updates earlier, but I had a very busy work week which did not leave room for Slackware PR. Now that my two-week holiday has started, I have my hands free to work on software updates, my ARM port (which is again threatening to shrivel up and die, I am so much behind on -current) and I also want to put some serious work to a viable Slackware setup for Valve’s Steam client for Linux.

VLC Media player

The sixth version of VLC’s “Twoflower” (codename for the 2.x series), is “a minor update that improves the overall stability. Notable changes include improved reliability for MKV file playback, fixed MPEG2 audio and video encoding … and other fixes. It also resolves potential security issues in HTML subtitle parser, freetype renderer, AIFF demuxer and SWF demuxer.” – quoting the VideoLAN news page.

I checked the release notes page for 2.0.5 but was a bit disappointed that they just re-used the 2.0.4 release notes, changing “2.0.4” to “2.0.5” which means the release notes page is just bogus.

Can anyone tell me how the new “ogg opus” support works for you? This new codec is supposed to replace other low-bandwidth codecs like speex but I have not seen any real-life cases.

When the IRC developers channel mentioned earlier this week that the 2.0.5 release was nearing completion, I compiled the VLC “dependencies” tarballs in advance. 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). The pre-compiled binary tarballs  of statically-compiled dependencies or “contribs” speed up the process of creating these packages a great deal. The main update to these “contribs” for the new packages is for the ffmpeg libraries: I switched to the git snapshot which is considered the best available version by both VLC and at least one MPlayer build team.

A note about BluRay support: I do not own a BluRay player, not BluRay disks or “downloaded” movies. The BluRay support in VLC (at least in my package) works only for unencrypted disks… and I do not think these exist actually – but I can not verify this. If you are able to playback BluRays please let me know about your experiences. 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).

Where to find 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.

 

FlashPlayer-plugin

I also upgraded my Flash Player packages. Adobe plugged another set of critical vulnerabilities (CVE-2012-5676, CVE-2012-5677, CVE-2012-5678) and if you are using a Mozilla-compatible web browser to watch Flash content, upgrading is strongly recommended. For more details, check here: http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb12-27.html .

After upgrading, use the following URL to check that you are indeed running the latest version of the Flash Player plugin: http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/ .

Have fun! Eric

 

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