Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: August 2015

New LibreOffice 5.0.1, and VLC 2.2.1 / tigervnc 1.5.0 rebuilds for slackware-current

August 28, 2015 / / 13 Comments

After slackware-current was treated to a massive update last weekend, it could be expected that some 3rd-party software packages needed to be recompiled – especially due to linkage to gnutls but also icu4c libraries. One by one I am working on the big or complex packages in my own SlackBuild repository, and below you will find the harvest of the week gone by. Note that I am also working on a new KDE Plasma 5 set of packages which is unfortunately quite challenging due to migration of many applications from kdelibs 4 to frameworks 5… lots of compatibility issues to resolve before packages start compiling again. I would have liked to have them ready for release before the end of august but I am afraid that I may not succeed.

Anyway. On to the real news.

libreoffce_logoSurprise: I wanted to just recompile my LibreOffice 5.0.0 packages but then I checked the Document Foundation blog and found the announcement – very fresh – of version 5.0.1! I took those sources and did a trial run of a LibreOffice compilation on my OpenVZ virtual machine which I am renting from HostUS at a very reasonable price (thanks to providing them with a Slackware 14.1 installation image for OpenVZ). With a compilation time just over 5 hours instead of the 16+ hours in my QEMU virtual machine…. this VPS is a winner.

LibreOffice 5.0.1 is a bugfix release. According to the Document Foundation “LibreOffice 5.0.1 is targeted to technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users. For more conservative users, and for enterprise deployments, TDF suggests the “still” version: LibreOffice 4.4.5“. I offer 4.4.5 packages for Slackware 14.1 by the way. They should also work on -current, but I have not yet tested. Let me know if you tried!

largeVLC

Some VLC plugins were broken due to missing system libraries after the Slackware-current update. So I have rebuilt my VLC 2.2.1 packages for Slackware-current. At the same time, I updated some of its internal libraries: libbluray, ffmpeg, libva, live555 and vdpau.

icon-tiger-vnc

The tigervnc package in Slackware-current’s “extra/” directory does not work anymore since the big update. We will have to wait until Pat finds the time and the willingness to do something about that. In the meantime, my own tigervnc packages for Slackware-current also stopped working, so I have rebuilt those and you can download the version 1.5.0 package from my repository if you were using Slackware’s package until now. This upgrade is not a bad thing anyway, the version 1.5.0 offers noticeable advantages (speed- and functionality-wise) over the old 1.1.0 in Slackware.

Get all these packages from my server or any mirror closer to you:

Note that you can use slackpkg+ to manage your 3rd party packages if those are maintained in Slackware-compatible repositories (like mine). The “slackpkgplus.conf” configuration file for slackpkg+ already has example entries for my repositories – it will be a matter of “slackpkg update && slackpkg upgrade libreoffice” to upgrade to my latest versions.

Have fun! Eric

Another big update in slackware-current

August 22, 2015 / / 79 Comments

Fire in the hole! Damn the torpedoes.

With 281 new lines in the ChangeLog.txt, this update to slackware-currrent can be called a big one.

But the real interesting stuff is not just those sheer number of updated packages – it’s the new 4.1.6 Linux kernel, the gcc 4.9.3 compiler suite, glibc 2.22 C libraries, mesa 10.6.4,  a new libepoxy package which was required to get glamor 1.0.0 into the xorg-server… exciting times for the adventurous who are running slackware-current!

A note about mesa: it refuses to compile on 32-bit Slackware unless the ARCH is set to i586… gone is the i486 compatibility. Well, if you had watched the ChangeLog.txt these past months you’d already have noticed that updated packages  switched from i486 to i586, but that was voluntary. Mesa is the first real stumbling block.

I am in the process of upgrading my slackware64-current virtual machine and will compile new packages for the multilib gcc and glibc versions… you have to be patient a bit. You can of course go ahead and upgrade to the latest slackware-current, overwriting gcc and glibc with the official versions. All you lose is the ability to run 32-bit programs until my packages are ready. Should not take more than a day.

Pat also warned me about the upgrades to nettle and gnutls. They are likely to break many 3rd party packages because of the change in library version. Please report any broken package from my own repository, so that I can release rebuilt and fixed versions ASAP. Also, libelf was replaced with elfutils but a copy of libelf.so.0 was added to the aaa_elflibs package to keep the breakage to a minimum.

All this info is thanks to Pat who commented on this upgrade verbosely – it is background information MoZes needs for his slackwarearm, and important for my multilib.

Have fun! Eric

August ’15 security fixes for Adobe Flash

August 12, 2015 / / 1 Comment

adobe_flash_8s600x600_2In their “tuesday is patch day” routine, Adobe released updated Flash player plugins which adddress many new vulnerabilities (as usual).

For your information: The updated Slackware package for chromium-pepperflash-plugin (to be used together with my chromium package) has version 18.0.0.233. The updated flashplayer-plugin has version 11.2.202.508.

The Chromium plugin was extracted from the official Google Chrome 44.0.2403.155 RPM which was released yesterday. New packages for my own chromium package based on the sources of that same version are being compiled at the moment… it always takes half a day for the sources to become available for download.

My download locations for the Flash plugin packages are unchanged:

If you are using the slackpkg+ extension for slackpkg, then you just run “slackpkg update && slackpkg update flash”. Alternatively, you can subscribe to my repository RSS feed to stay informed of any updates.

Eric

Rebuilt multilib gcc compiler suite for slackware-current

August 8, 2015 / / 4 Comments

There were many updates for Slackware-current last night. One of them was a rebuilt gcc compiler suite, and therefore an updated multilib compiler set was due as well.

The new multilib gcc packages are now online, The set of 32-bit “compat32” packages for slackware64-current has also been refreshed. The gcc packages had to be rebuilt because of other package updates causing library version bumps, but Pat took the opportunity to add two shell scripts “c89” and “c99” that are part of POSIX standard – they call the compiler with additional compatibility parameters. This was necessitated by the fact that recent git checkouts of the VLC mediaplayer would not compile on Slackware because the VLC developers started enforcing a check on the availability of the “c99” command.

You can obtain the updated multilib packages from the URLs below or from any other mirror near you that carries copies of my repositories:

A refresher on “multilib” for new users of Slackware: if you want to use (binary-only) 32-bit software on a 64-bit Slackware installation then that is not possible out of the box, because Slackware64 is a pure 64-bit OS. You need to expand the OS with “multilib capability” so that the OS can run (and compile) 32-bit programs as well. Examples of 32-bit (closed-source) programs are Skype, Valve’s Steam Client, the WINE emulator, the Pipelight browser plugin, Citrix client etc.

Instructions on how to add or update multilib on your 64-bit Slackware can be found on the Slackware Documentation Project. Also, the slackpkg+ extension to Slackware’s own slackpkg contains the script “setupmultilib.sh” which can help you in setting up multilib properly. With slackpkg+ it is then trivial to keep your multilib installation up to date when updates occur.

Security tip:

One note on the side about last night’s Slackware -current update. The work on this update was supposed to take a while longer because Pat wants to update additional packages and a proper integration is important so that things don’t break due to library incompatibilities. But the update to the mozilla-firefox package addresses a serious and critical security issue. This security fix needed to get out to you people as fast as possible. The exploit (which was found in the wild by an attentive Firefox user and then reported to Mozilla) uses Firefox’s internal PDF viewer implementation to gain access to your local files, and uploads e.g. your ssh configuration and keys, the password file, pidgin and psi configuration files to a Russian server – pretty sensitive things.

If you have been using Firefox 38 or 39 (normal or ESR versions) on your Linux computer and visited dodgy sites recently, and you have ssh keys for accessing remote servers without a password, you may want to consider replacing these ssh keys with fresh ones.

Enjoy! Eric

LibreOffice 5.0.0 and 4.4.5 for your Slackware box

August 8, 2015 / / 16 Comments

libreoffce_logoWeekend treat: new LibreOffice packages for the latest releases from the Document Foundation.

For our stable Slackware (which is 14.1 of course) I have packaged LibreOffice 4.4.5 which was announced at the end of July. Actually, these packages were already available in my repository for the past couple of days but I wanted to wait with writing about it here until I could bake packages for LibreOffice 5.0.0 as well. Note that “LibreOffice 4.4.5 is replacing LibreOffice 4.3.7 as the ‘still’ version for more conservative users and enterprise deployments” according to the official announcement. Therefore I decided to be conservative and stick with 4.4.5 instead of packaging 5.0.0 for Slackware 14.1.

And then LibreOffice 5.0.0 has finally been released in a stable version. I have shared with you the last few Release Candidates to experiment with on slackware-current and therefore I’m happy to tell you that the stable LibreOffice 5.0.0 is packaged and ready for all of you who are running our development version of Slackware. If you are curious about the new features that LO 5 has to offer, I advise you to visit this overview page. Of course, there are numerous improvements all over the board compared to LO 4 – with a strong focus on the User Interface and interoperability with Microsoft’s and Apple’s office suites.

Get the packages from my server or any mirror closer to you:

Note that you can use slackpkg+ to manage your 3rd party packages if those are maintained in Slackware-compatible repositories (like mine). The “slackpkgplus.conf” configuration file for slackpkg+ already has example entries for my repositories – it will be a matter of “slackpkg update && slackpkg upgrade libreoffice” to upgrade to my latest versions.

Have fun! Eric

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