Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: April 2013 (Page 1 of 2)

OpenJDK 7 Update 21 released

April 22, 2013 / / 7 Comments

Hot on the heels of the Oracle release of its Java SE 7 Update 21, there is a new icedtea version which brings the free and open source version of Java – OpenJDK – to version 7 Update 21 as well. The OpenJDK 7u21 release addresses several vulnerabilities.

The announcement was made on the mailing list first, but Andrew John Hughes wrote a more official blurb on his blog.

Here is the list (taken from Andrew’s post) of the vulnerabilities which have been plugged and their CVE numbers:

My packages for OpenJDK have been compiled on Slackware 13.37 (and are useable on 13.37 as well as 14.0 and -current!). Get them preferably from a mirror site:

I am happy to announce that I was able to build an ARM version of the OpenJDK again. The build with the “cacao” VM was failing for several months now, and I switched to the “jamvm” which is a small (but fully compliant), efficient Java virtual Machine with JIT compiler.. Sources and packages to be found at http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alienarm/

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). Note that I updated my icedtea-web package less than a week ago, which pugs a few vulnerabilities (CVE-2013-1927 and CVE-2013-1926 to be precise).
  • Required: The rhino package is a dependency of the openjdk/openjre package. It contains the JavaScript engine for OpenJDK.

Eric

Rebuild for glibc-2.17_multilib in slackware-current

April 21, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Pat’s inquery on LinuxQuestions.org about how to “backtrack to sanity” in order to stabilize slackware-current and start laying out the next release, resulted in a kernel upgrade (3.8.8) and accompanying glibc rebuild.

I built the “companion” update of the glibc multilib packages last night. They can be downloaded from:

Remember, multilib configuration is (only) needed if you want to use 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.

Cheers, Eric

VLC 2.0.6 (finally) released. New flash plugin too.

April 12, 2013 / / 2 Comments

I almost finished a bottle of La Trappe Dubbel and before I pass out, there is just this one post to write at the end of another busy week.

VLC Media player

I don’t know how many times during the past two months I thought “I have to start preparing for a new VLC package build” only to discover that the developers side-tracked again and a new release was not going to come after all.

But finally, there it was this week: vlc-2.0.6. This is a bugfix release, notable changes for us Linux users include “support for Matroska v4, improved reliability for ASF, Ogg, ASF and srt support, fixed ALAC and FLAC decoding“.

I finally updated the npapi-vlc browser plugin. I noticed that version 2.0.6 was tagged in the repository and still no release tarball is being made available… get serious, you french! I heard good stories about the new version, so I decided to checkout a snapshot from git. I never really fancied the 2.0.0 release of npapi-vlc and use gnome-mplayer / gecko-mediaplayer instead.

Actually, this is the second build of the packages. Someone notified me that there was an issue with the libupnp plugin (uPnP service discovery) so I upgraded the internal library and applied a patch.

Where to find my 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

WIth all the fuss about vulnerable browser plugins (Java is the bad boy) I was quick to update my Flash Player packages. when I saw that Adobe had released a new security bulletin…See http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb13-11.html for the list of CVE‘s they plugged this time. Better safe than sorry folks – always watch out what web pages you visit!

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

 

Alien’s ARM sources and git

April 6, 2013 / / 11 Comments

ARM_powered_300px

I have been writing regular updates to the Alien’s ARM page on this blog which can be found in the top of left sidebar. Readers of this blog who only visit the blog’s front page, will probably not have noticed, so I decided to write a more visible status update on the main page.

When I first booted my “current state of affairs” on the ARM Chromebook (what I had at that time was a mix of packages somewhere between Slackware 13.37 and 14.0) it was clear that I had a lot of work ahead of me. The X.Org that I had was unable to start on the laptop. I could get as far as a terminal and get a wireless network connection functional, but I really wanted a graphical enviroment.

During the past two weeks I have been steadily updating SlackBuild scripts, and in the last 5 days I (re-)built 637 packages! Long live automation build scripts and distcc.

Creating packages is nice, but I needed to see the results.What I was working towards was the X.Org of Slackware-current and the XFCE which we also have in -current.

I am happy to announce: XFCE works!
Now at least I know that I didn’t do all tthis work for nothing 🙂

Running XFCE unveiled several annoying bugs in packages like pango, gtk+2 and gtk+3 which I fixed today. I also made a first attempt at compiling KDE and quickly ran into further packaging bugs (pciutils and qt need to be fixed). I had hopes that I could dump the content of the SD card into a downloadable image and make that available for download, but I felt that the sources were more important at this moment. Who has a Samsung ChromeBook and is willing to play-test this? I may change my mind tomorrow if there is some interest.

Just for fun: here is a 1’13” video of me logging in as “alienarm” and starting X, then loading up my blog page in firefox: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2329942/VIDEO0006.3gp .VLC and the browser-plugin gecko-mediaplayer will be able to play this .3gp video which I shot with my phone (hence the shaky images).

I already uploaded the latest source code to taper .I have refreshed the sources on http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alienarm/bootstrap/source.local/ – but there is still a lot of work to do before I have fully caught up with slackware-current. I do not know if the stage1.sh bootstrap script still works with all the new sources, I have fixed at least the coreutils build though.

What I have also set up is a git repository for the sources. You can access this repository through a gitweb interface. If you want to clone the repository, you can use the git URI git://taper.alienbase.nl/bootstrap.git . Commit access is limited to myself for the moment, I have no intention of allowing anyone direct commit access except for other Slackware core-team members.

If you want to start compiling ARM packages yourself using these sources, first create a SlackBuild configuration file “/etc/slackbuild/machine.conf” with the following contents which will override the SlackBuild defaults for ARM hardfloat platforms like the Tegra and Exynos CPUs.:

export ARCH=”armv7hl”
export SLKCFLAGS=”-O2 -march=armv7-a -mfpu=vfpv3-d16″
export LIBDIRSUFFIX=””

You can use my rootfs to setup a working chroot environment if you want. More instructions will follow, perhaps it is wise to wait for those. I will leave that for another post, or perhaps a page on the SlackDocs wiki..

Have fun! Eric

LibreOffice 3.6.6 for Slackware 13.37

April 6, 2013 / / 5 Comments

The LibreOffice developers released another update to the old 3.6.x series very recently, but since there is a focus on advertizing the 4.0.x version, you won’t find an announcement anywhere. LibreOffice 3.6.6 is a bugfix release which was initially not planned in the release schedule, but an additional final release was added to the plan fairly soon after 3.6.5 was released.

These LibreOffice 3.6.6 packages which I am making available have been built on Slackware 13.37. They can be installed on Slackware 14 as well, but of course I have LibreOffice 4.0.2 packages (32bit, 64bit) in my repository for Slackware 14 and -current – it is up to you to decide which version you want to use on Slackware 14.

The LibreOffice 3.6.6 packages are available here:

Eric

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