My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: September 2013

So I finally packaged VLC 2.1. And what about LibreOffice?

VLC

Finally, the daunting task of compiling 12 packages for VLC has come to completion. I created packages for the latest VLC 2.1 (codenamed ‘rincewind’… who the heck keeps thinking that these half-arsed nicks are useful). Like with the release candidate which I packaged last month, the internally used libraries are up to date again (ffmpeg, fluidsynth, libass, libcdio, libdc1394, libdvbpsi, libebml, libmatroska, libva, opus, orc, schroedinger, vcdimager, vo-amrwbenc, and x264).

Those of you who are running Slackware 13.37, 14.0 and -current will rejoice 🙂 That being said, it is likely that this is the last major VLC update for which I will produce a Slackware 13.37 package – the effort is just becoming too big.

The 2.1 release is the culmination of nearly two years of work by the team, squashing over a thousand bugs (although it is not mentioned anywhere how many of those were caused by actually coding the 2.1 branch). More importantly, the commit history shows that VLC is very much alive, evidenced by the fact that 140 code committers do not belong to the actual VideoLAN team. Good news because my expericnce was that the 1.x and 2.0 development cycles have actually caused a decrease in the quality and robustness of VLC as an allround media player. Let’s see if 2.1 will turn this around. With a new audio core and lots of work on improving the ports to other platform, I really hope that much of the deficits of the video decoders which made me switch back to MPlayer as my video app of choice, have been addressed as well.

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.

libreoffce_logoLibreOffice

My latest LibreOffice packages (for Slackware 14) are version 4.0.5. In the meantime, those hard-working LibreOffice developers are almost at version 4.2.1… so what happened to the ‘alien’ builds of LibreOffice 4.1?

Well, during the packaging of 4.0 I noticed that the dictionaries which are now being offered as a source tarball, including many languages, needed another way of building and installing. I have been trying to find time to investigate and come up with proper packages, but I ran into a snag with the SlackBuild script and kept telling to myself that I would look into it right after the next KDE… OpenJDK… Calibre… whatever package would have been created. To be honest…. I am swamped with work during my paid daytime job and I spend more hours per week at work. It takes time to finish the bigger projects (like LibreOffice) in my spare time. Be patient, packages will be released eventually.

Oh yeah…

I helped my son today with the home-made pizza he had promised to create. I did something I realized I had never done before… I created the pizza dough from scratch: flour, yeast, water, olive oil, salt. Kneading the dough, seeing it rise and flattening it out to an oven-plate sized pizza bottom was very rewarding. Eating the pizza was rewarding as well! I have promised myself to finally bake that Focaccia bread which I have been wanting to try forever.

And finally:

Anyone with a Google Nexus tablet out there and experience with unlocking it, putting some brand of real Linux on it? I am going to pick up my own ARM port after Slackware 14.1 is released and besides my personal targets (getting it to boot on my TrimSlice and my ChromeBook) I was wondering how open the Google Nexus tablets really are with regard to having linux device drivers available. I am dead-curious about seeing how well Slackware behaves on a touch device… and both the Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 look like they are awesome devices.

Be good! Eric

 

 

SteamOS coming to your living room

steamos

Today, Valve Software has announced their next move in bringing the Steam content delivery (read: gaming) platform to the masses. The developer is going to wrap Steam into its own in-house developed Linux Operating System!

The SteamOS is meant to be installed onto living room devices (your TV, multimedia streaming box, and probably onto a SteamBox eventually).

It was already clear that Valve was sort-of preparing for a customization layer on top of a Linux OS; the http://repo.steampowered.com/hometest/pool/steam/ directories show some interesting tidbits. But rather than building the Steam binaries with Ubuntu Linux as the OS target, like they have done until now, Valve have come up with a whole Operating System of their own.

The good news is that this will be a Linux OS and it will be free to use by gamers as well as manufacturers. It will probably not be based on Slackware – their loss… but hey, they can always hire me. Keeping Steam supported in Slackware will not be a daunting task, because I am willing to bet a few dimes that the SteamOS will be yet another Ubuntu derivative or at least a Debian derivative.

Let’s hope that there will be a real Steam Box in the end. Having a SteamOS firmware for multimedia devices and smart TV’s will at least keep some of you busy. Interesting enough, Valve released a couple of teasers in the past week, hinting for interesting announcements. Well, this was the first of three. The next one can be expected on Wednesday 25 september. To shorten the wait, you may want to check out a review of the keynote speech at LinuxCon 2013 by Valve’s head honcho Gabe Newell. His thoughts shed more light on what we may expect from Valve in the near future.

steamos_back_buttonHave fun! Eric

OpenJDK 7u40_b60 built with IcedTea 2.4.2

Last time I updated my OpenJDK packages there was a ton of critical bugfixes which had been applied by the IcedTea community – fixes which Oracle had not yet added to its own version of Java. That version of OpenJDK called itself “Java7 Update 40 Build 31” aka openjdk-7u40_b31.

It took a while for Oracle to release its own 7u40 release – as you know Oracle uses OpenJDK as the base upon which it builds its binary releases of Java SE, but the company sometimes does not respond to critical holes as fast as the IcedTea developers do.

Last friday, the IcedTea team released version 2.4.2 of their “build harness”. This new icedtea release updates its OpenJDK support with a number of (non-critical) bug fixes. It also synchronizes the OpenJDK code with the upstream “Update 40 Build 60” tag. Hence, the new OpenJDK packages which I present to you today are versioned “7u40_b60

You can check out the mailing list announcement for the new release, since there is not yet a blog post on Andrew Hughes‘ site. It will be there shortly, for sure. I will merely list the bugfixes here:

- RH661505: JPEGs with sRGB IEC61966-2.1 color profiles have wrong colors
- RH995488: Java thinks that the default timezone is Busingen instead of Zurich
- Cleanup file resources properly in TimeZone_md.
- PR1410: Icedtea 2.3.9 fails to build using icedtea 1.12.4
- G477456: emerge fails on pax system: java attempts RWX map, paxctl -m missing
- G478484: patches/boot/ecj-diamond.patch FAILED
- Fix Zero following changes to entry_frame_call_wrapper in 8016131
- RH1008988: Set ZERO_BUILD in flags.make so it is set on rebuilds
- Cast should use same type as GCDrainStackTargetSize (uintx).
- Add casts to fix build on S390

OpenJDK 7u40_b60 for Slackware:

java_is_working_7u40_b60

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

Further packages that are recommended/required:

  • Optional: If you want a Java browser-plugin you must install icedtea-web which I also updated a couple of days ago (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.

Note that you should only install one of the two packages, either openjdk or openjre, do not install both at the same time or things will break! The openjdk package contains the jre (java runtime) as well as the java development kit.

Eric

Slackware 14.1 Beta1 has arrived

Slackware_BlueOrb

Yesterday, Patrick Volkerding made the following announcement in the ChangeLog.txt of Slackware-current:

Wed Sep 18 02:56:19 UTC 2013
Hey folks, I’m calling this a beta! Really, it’s been better than beta
quality for a while. There will probably still be a few more updates
here and there (and certainly updates to the docs). Enjoy, and please test.

As usual, it was picked up quickly on LinuxQuestions (ok, I created the thread myself…) and even Phoronix posted a surprised-sounding message about it. Distrowatch wrote  a blurb as well. I looked at the all-time-low place of Slackware in the Distrowatch distro raking, and said to myself “that site is no longer attracting serious users” 😉

Note:

This update of Slackware-current contains rebuilt glibc packages (providing a patch for CVE-2013-4332), and therefore I also updated my multilib repository with new builds of glibc for Slackware versions -current, 14.0 and 13.37 . I also refreshed the “slackware64-compat32” subdirectories for those Slackware versions; in there you find a pre-packaged set of 32-bit compatibility packages which will make almost any 32-bit software work on multilib Slackware64.

Read here if you do not know what multilib is: http://docs.slackware.com/slackware:multilib

Enjoy! Eric

KDE SC 4.11.1

KDE Software Compilation 4.11.1 has been released today. The first incremental improvement in the 4.11 release offers more than 70 bugfixes, most importantly: “improvements to the Window Manager KWin, the file manager Dolphin, and others“. Startup times of the Plasma Desktop and scrolling in Dolphin have been improved, and the memory requirements of various applications have been lowered. All in all, a more pleasant experience can be expected after upgrading your current KDE.

Compiling KDE was easy as usual, and between one increment and the other there is not so much to see as perhaps there is to “feel” in terms of responsiveness of the desktop. So I have been thinking how to spice up the experience. I came up with a potential candidate which I may or may not add to the ‘ktown’ set because I doubt that Pat will add it to Slackware eventually. That added spice could be the Plasma Media Center. It looks like an intriguing piece of software with a good chance to end up on tablet computers (it supports the Plasma Active desktop). I still feel that I should buy the new Nexus 7 tablet if it finally hits the stores here in the Netherlands, and if it is indeed possible to install a common Linux on it, Slackware should get its share on the device.

If I do decide to package the Plasma Media Center without adding it to the main ‘ktown’ repository, I might just create a ‘ktown-media’ repository for it. That would allow me to also create some rebuilt KDE packages for everything that will profit from stuff Slackware does not ship with, like FFmpeg or VLC. Not decided yet on this, but it sounds like a useful addition.

How to upgrade to KDE 4.11.1 ?

Note: you have to be running Slackware-current! These packages are not suited for Slackware 14.0.

You will find all the installation/upgrade instructions that you need in the accompanying README file. That README also contains basic information for KDE recompilation using the provided SlackBuild script You are strongly advised to read and follow these installation/upgrade instructions!

Where to find packages for KDE 4.11.1 ?

Download locations are listed below (you will find the sources in ./source/4.11.1/ and packages in /current/4.11.1/ subdirectories). Using a mirror is preferred because you get more bandwidth from a mirror and it’s friendlier to the owners of the master server!

Have fun! Eric

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