My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: February 2013 (Page 2 of 3)

Two fix-packages for KDE SC 4.10.0

There are two bugs in the new KDE SC 4.10.0, which I was compelled to fix without waiting for a 4.10.1 release.

The first concerns the new “simple locker” which can be chosen instead of the normal screensaver. In KDE 4.10.0, this new screenlocker has the annoying behaviour that it will activate even if you selected the normal “legacy” screensaver and have explicitly configured KDE not to ask for a password when killing the screensaver. There is a patch on KDE ReviewBoard which attempts to fix this. This does provide a partial fix in my patched “kde-workspace” package: a password is no longer asked if you did not configure one, which takes away the annoyance. But the “simple locker” still manages to run on top of the configured screensaver occasionally. I guess we will have to wait for a better patch.

The second fix has been applied to the “nepomuk-core” package. On the kde-packager mailing list, Vishesh Handa announced a patch today for the broken “recursive file indexing“. This regression accidentally slipped into Nepomuk’s code when the developers attempted to reduce the memory usage of the file indexer.

Both packages (kde-workspace and nepomuk-core) are available in my ktown repository:

Eric

LibreOffice 4.0.0 has been released

Yesterday the LibreOffice developers released their 4.0.0 milestone. This is essentially the same code as the 3rd Release Candidate for which I dropped some testing packages a few days ago.

Quoting the announcement, “LibreOffice 4.0.0 is the first release that reflects the objectives set by the community at the time of the announcement” (On 28 September 2010, several members of the OpenOffice.org project formed a new group called “The Document Foundation” and forked LibreOffice from their former project). These objectives are (quoting again): “a cleaner and leaner code base, an improved set of features, better interoperability, and a more diverse and inclusive ecosystem“.

The most important highlights of this version 4.0.0 are:

  • Integration with several content and document management systems – including Alfresco, IBM FileNet P8, Microsoft Sharepoint 2010, Nuxeo, OpenText, SAP NetWeaver Cloud Service and others – through the CMIS standard.
  • Better interoperability with DOCX and RTF documents, thanks to several new features and improvements like the possibility of importing ink annotations and attaching comments to text ranges.
  • Possibility to import Microsoft Publisher documents, and further improvement of Visio import filters with the addition of 2013 version (just announced).
  • Additional UI incremental improvements, including Unity integration and support of Firefox Themes (Personas) to give LibreOffice a personalized look.
  • Introduction of the widget layout technique for dialog windows, which makes it easier to translate, resize and hide UI elements, reduces code complexity, and lays a foundation for a much improved user interface.
  • Different header and footer on the first page of a Writer document, without the need of a separate page style.
  • Several performance improvements to Calc, plus new features such as export of charts as images (JPG and PNG) and new spreadsheet functions as defined in ODF OpenFormula.
  • First release of Impress Remote Control App for Android, supported only on some Linux distributions. (The second release, coming soon, will be supported on all platforms: Windows, MacOS X and all Linux distros and binaries.)
  • Significant performance improvements when loading and saving many types of documents, with particular improvements for large ODS and XLSX spreadsheets and RTF files.
  • Improved code contribution thanks to Gerrit: a web based code review system, facilitating the task for projects using Git version control system (although this is not specific of LibreOffice 4.0, it has entered the production stage just before the 4.0 branch).

You can read the “features and fixes” page if you want to learn the full scope of the new release.

Of course, the best way to experience this new feature set is to download and install packages which have been built on and for Slackware natively!

I rebuilt the “RC3” packages which I already had, this time also compiling a dictionary for every language pack, using a newly added LibreOffice “dictionaries” source tarball (the total number of source archives has still shrunk to four). I checked with other distro packages but so far, nobody seems to be incorporating these new dictionaries. I can not tell you anything about their quality yet, so what I would appreciate is if you comment on what you think of the quality of dictionary available in the language pack you install. If you are not happy with the included dictionary you can always download and install one of the dictionaries found at the LibreOffice extensions site.

Please note that LibreOffice 4 stores its configuration in a new numbered directory, “~/.config/libreoffice/4/” and I have not found a way to automatically migrate the settings from the old “3” directory. If you find a way, let me know in a reply to this blog.

Packages can be downloaded from one of the mirrors, and keep in mnd that they were built on Slackware 14, which will make them unfit for Slackware 13.37 or earlier (but of course the packages will work on slackware-current):

Remember, you can subscribe to the repository’s RSS feed if you want to be the first to know when new packages are uploaded.

Eric

 

KDE SC 4.10.0 released

Right on time, here is KDE Software Compilation 4.10.0. We left behind the 4.9 series but since this is a “zero release” I will keep my 4.9.5 packages around for a while. With this 4.10 series, one of the most interesting new features for end-users is the enhanced scripting possibilities for Plasma Workspaces (using QML, the Qt Markup Language and QtQuick) and the KWin window manager using external scripts. A new print manager has been added as well.

I have had packages ready for a few days already, and that allowed for limited testing by the people I trust. No strange bugs surfaced, if there are any left I hope you will uncover them 🙂

Remember: my ktown packages for KDE are meant to be used on Slackware-current, but I built this set of packages on Slackware 14.0. It allows these KDE 4.10.0 packages to work on Slackware 14 as well as -current.

How to upgrade to KDE 4.10.0? Whether you are upgrading from the stock KDE 4.8.5 of Slackware 14.0/current, or if you are upgrading from my previous 4.9.5 packages, you will find all the installation/upgrade instructions that you need in the accompanying README file.

You are strongly advised to read and follow these instructions!

Highlights for the new set of Slackware packages:

  • You will find nine updated dependencies compared to Slackware’s own KDE 4.8.5:  PyQt, akonadi, attica,phonon-gstreamer, qt, shared-desktop-ontologies, sip, soprano, virtuoso-ose. Several of those were updated after my previous 4.9.5 packages. I added a new one as well: qjson.
  • Some of the “extragear” of the KDE in Slackware 14/current has been updated: with new versions of calligra (accompanying the KDE 4.10.0 release), kdevelop, kdevplatform, oxygen-gtk2, skanlite (already updated for my previous package sets).
  • The “extragear” section also introduces new packages (compared to the stable Slackware): 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; and kio-mtp which is required in order to access and manage files on devices running Android 4.0 and later. Starting with the KDE 4.10.0 release, I also added libkscreen and kscreen – this is a new screen management software which plugs into the System Settings of KDE’s Plasma Workspace. It tries to make multilple-screen management as easy as possible
  • Compared to KDE 4.8.5, but also compared to KDE 4.9.x, there were some package removals:
    • kdegames has been split up into several smaller individual packages, starting with 4.10.x
    • kdemultimedia had been split up into several smaller individual packages already, starting with 4.9.x.
    • ksecrets has been removed completely since the 4.9.x series.
    • printer-applet has been replaced by print-manager since the 4.10.0 series.

Download locations (using a mirror is preferred:

Have fun! Eric

Steam games in Slackware

steamValve is updating its Steam client for Linux regualarly, fixing the issues which are reported by lots of interested Linux gamers. I was a bit behind with updating my Slackware remix of the client binaries but I have overcome the flue and pushed an update, bringing the steamclient package for Slackware to the latest version, 1.0.0.22.

I did not have to change a lot to the “steam” script which is part of the original debian/ubuntu package. Basically I had to ensure that Steam and its games will be using ALSA instead of PulseAudio since we do not use PA in Slackware. I also added a ‘hack’ which causes the steam startup script to execute a file “${HOME}/.steam4slackware” if it exists. You can add extra definitions of environment variables into that file if you run into sound issues. The default definition of “export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=alsa” may not be enough for you, perhaps something like adding “export AUDIODEV=hw” is needed for your system. Using “${HOME}/.steam4slackware” allows you to leave the steam script unmodified.

Another script which is present in the debian package and which is called every time Steam starts, is “/usr/bin/steamdeps”. Originally this was a Python script which checks (using apt) if you have all required dependencies installed, and will attempt to download and install any missing packages… that was too unfriendly to my liking, so I changed that script’s content to only display a message on standard output (which means you won’t even see that text if you start steam from the desktop menu). If anyone comes up with a decent Slackware alternative for “steamdeps” I”ll consider adopting it.

Gameplay

I have only played two of the available Linux games a lot so far. The Linux Steam client allows you to play the Linux Beta of Team Fortress 2 for free (and of course TF2 will remain free even after the beta) but I found that I am no longer so fond of fast-action, multi-player shooter games playing against hordes of unknown people. I like to team up with people I know… perhaps my age shows 😉

Luckily Valve published a new Beta game last week: their very first game Half-Life is now available as a native Linux game in Steam, and if you already own Half-Life (not the Source version, but the original game) in Steam  then you will get the Linux Beta of Half-Life added to your game inventory automatically! If you bought a CD of the game in the past (before Steam existed, like I did) then you can import its CD key into Steam and it will cost you nothing. Playing Half-Life brought back fond memories. I have been in Deathmatches with my son for hours this weekend (he is a Team Fortress 2 guy but was hooked  to HL and its interesting choice of weapons immediately).

Half-Life is of course an old game which every modern computer should play effortlessly. TF2 is built around the Source engine and is newer, but still my PC’s have no issues with it. I remember that Half-Life had measurable level load times, but on my current quad-core desktop, the load times are merely fractions of a second.

Sound works, in all games so far. I verified that I could use my microphone in Steam (View > Settings > Voice) by explicitly selecting the ALSA device instead of PulsAudio, but I have not yet tried in-game if the voice functionality actually works (I don’t like it when other people talk during a deathmatch, so I hesitate using voice myself).

Caveat: For some people (as seen on Google+), sound stops working when Steam updates itself (which can happen everytime you connect the client to the Steam platform) or even segfaults on startup. A hint from Valve’s developers on their bugtracker, indicates that you could try running “steam” as follows (must be done on a commandline):

STEAM_RUNTIME=0 steam

PulseAudio

One of the dependencies of this steamclient is the pulseaudio library. Installing that is no problem of course, but it had an undesired (at least for me) side-effect: I also have Skype for Linux on my desktop and KDE will autostart it when I logon. For some reason (probably because of the desktop autostart files “/etc/xdg/autostart/pulseaudio.desktop” and “/etc/xdg/autostart/pulseaudio-kde.desktop” which are installed by the pulseaudio package), Skype will see the pulseaudio sound system and grab that instead of using the ALSA drivers. There is no way around that except stopping Skype, killing the pulseaudio processes which have been started by Skype, and then starting Skype again. You can of course delete the above two files, but I found out that the following change to “/etc/pulse/default.pa” will also give Skype back its sound. This change tells PulseAudio to use ALSA for its output:

# Following two lines explicitly enabled to make PulseAudio use ALSA - Eric Hameleers
load-module module-alsa-sink device=dmix
load-module module-alsa-source device=dsnoop

# Commented-out because of two explicit load-module lines above - Eric Hameleers
#### Automatically load driver modules depending on the hardware available
#.ifexists module-udev-detect.so
#load-module module-udev-detect
#.else
#### Use the static hardware detection module (for systems that lack udev/hal support)
#load-module module-detect
#.endif
# End commented out - Eric Hameleers

If an application (like Skype) grabs the PulseAudio sound system, it will now be able to produce sound in your desktop.

Voice in Half-Life dedicated server games

half-life-logo I also saw on-screen messages about Half-Life not being able to use my microphone when I play Deathmatch on a HLDS – Half-Life Dedicated Server. The game tells me “Unable to initialize voice codec voice_miles. Voice disabled”. The miles codec is an old codec which is not very efficient, and Steam games switched to the speex codec which uses less bandwidth and apparently has better voice quality. The issue must be fixed on the server side

Add the following line to your “server.cfg” file:

sv_voicecodec voice_speex

Clients connecting to the server should now use the speex codec instead.

I setup a HLDS dedicated server on my Slackware LAN server / build box. That was not trivial at all, dammit! There’s lots of confusing information in Steam’s own knowledge base. Ten years ago I ran a half-life dedicated server on the Internet, but that was before the Steam era, and setting up a server was painless back then.

I have been playing Half-Life with my son on that server which is a lot of fun. I would like people to discover the joy of playing this old-skool game against their friends. So in one of my next blogs I will document how I have setup that server, so that you can repeat it.

Perhaps we will see a “Slackware” server appearing in the game tracker sometime!

Cheers, Eric

 

Fix package for VLC critical vulnerability (Security Advisory 1302)

A critical vulnerability was discovered in VLC’s ASF demuxer, Quoting the VideoLAN Security Advisory page : “Details: When parsing a specially crafted ASF movie, a buffer overflow might occur. Impact: If successful, a malicious third party could trigger an invalid memory access, leading to a crash of VLC media player’s process. In some cases attackers might exploit this issue to execute arbitrary code within the context of the application but this information is not confirmed.”

I wanted to wait for 2.0.6 at first but since the VideoLAN developers are at FOSDEM this weekend, and my build box was idle, I decided to build some packages incorporating the patch for that vulnerability.

Get them at one of the mirrors, for instance use one of my own repositories. Note that there are new packages for both Slackware 13.37 and 14.0:

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.

Eric

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