Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: May 2015 (Page 2 of 2)

New chromium-dev package and plugins

May 15, 2015 / / 2 Comments

chromium_iconI have been working on some changes for the chromium package, and what’s better than to first test those changes on a Chromium Development release?

I have not really been happy with the choice I made to have a single configuration file (/etc/default/chromium) which would then have to be re-written by any plugins that you would install. For instance, the PepperFlash plugin modifies that file so that Chromium learns of the pathname and version of that plugin when it starts. Unfortunately, some people would accidentally wipe those modifications with every update to the Chromium main package (the “/etc/default/chromium.new” file would overwrite the “/etc/default/chromium” file if you were not paying attention).

So what I did was change the single configuration file into a configuration directory, which is “/etc/chromium-dev/” for the Chromium Dev package. Each package (Chromium as well as any plugin or extension) can add its own configuration file to that directory. As an example of how that works, I have created packages for chromium-dev, chromium-dev-pepperflash-plugin and chromium-dev-widevine-plugin that use this new setup. Those are Slackware packages  for -current only by the way – when a new version of Chromium Stable is released  I will also add this new configuration setup and then the packages will be released for Slackware 14.1 as well.

What else is there to say about my chromium-dev packages? Chromium-dev is the development release of the browser (there’s also a “beta” channel but I don’t care about that too much). Testing the development release from time to time is preparing me well in advance for major (or subtle) changes in the compilation process and functionality, so that when the stable channel jumps to a higher major release it won’t take me long to come up with a set of packages.

The new chromium-dev packages have the version number 44.0.2398.0. So what changed with this new major release 44 compared to the previous 43 (or even the stable 42)? One important change is that it is no longer necessary to extract the Widevine CDM library from an official Google Chrome RPM in order to compile the Open Source Widevine adapter library which is the piece of code that interfaces between the browser and the closed-source Content Decryption Module. Therefore even the Open Source purists should be at peace now with the new process. If you do want to use Widevine CDM, for instance when you want to stream Netflix in your Chromium browser, you simply install my widevine-plugin package (the version it reports will be 1.4.8.823). The browser itself will not be tainted.

The PepperFlash plugin package which I added as well (first time for my Chromium Dev releases) has a change as well, compared to the package for Chromium Stable. The PepperFlash directory is installed to “/usr/lib64/chromium-dev/” instead of “/usr/lib64/” (it’s “lib” for 32bit Slackware of course) so that the pepperflash-plugin package’s files will not clash with the pepperflash-plugin for Chromium Stable. The plugin for Chromium Dev reports itself as version 18.0.0.114 by the way. This version is not even listed yet on Adobe’s Flash test page. I assume that this too, is a development version.

Get my Chromium Development packages in one of the usual locations:

Change the URL a bit to get the widevine-plugin and pepperflash-plugin packages.

Eric

May ’15 security updates for Adobe Flash

May 12, 2015 / / 7 Comments

adobe_flash_8s600x600_2Just before going to bed with a belly full of good red wine and lamb roast, I noticed the new Adobe Flash security bulletin: apsb15-09.

I could not ignore that, so I prepared Slackware packages for you to address this new bulletin. As usual, the packages offer a Flash plugin for the chromium browser (PPAPI) and mozilla-compatible browsers (NPAPI).

If you have pipelight installed, you should run “pipelight-plugin –update” as root to get the latest MS Windows-based Flash installed automatically the next time the browser loads the pipelight plugin (at the time of writing, there is no pipelight update available but that should change in the coming days).

The updated Slackware package for chromium-pepperflash-plugin has version 17.0.0.188. The updated flashplayer-plugin has version 11.2.202.460.

Download locations:

Eric

No more cats

May 10, 2015 / / 21 Comments

Peewee_tuin2015_250px

Goodbye dear girl.

She was named “Witje”, Whitey, at birth because her fur was pure white. During her final year, the color went slowly out of her black face-mask. She survived a mysterious illness of which her sister died almost two years ago. She remained fragile after that ordeal. But very cute and adorable still.

She would sleep in my lap in the evening when I was working on your packages, she would eat her morning food on the kitchen counter next to me while I would be preparing my work lunch; she has wanted to be near us all the time. She was a “people” cat until the end. She loved us and we loved her back.

Last week she stopped eating, and three days ago she would no longer drink. She was a strong girl, that she managed to hold on to life for so long. She slowly faded from consciousness to deep sleep until she would no longer respond to our voices and we knew the end was not far off. But while she was awake and still able to walk she wanted to stay with us, never tried to find a quiet spot and wait for the end like her sister.

We let her sleep inbetween us during her final two nights, and now she’s gone and leaves an empty space in this household.

You will be missed.

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