Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: October 2015 (Page 2 of 2)

Handbrake 0.10.2 (but only for slackware-current)

October 2, 2015 / / 9 Comments

handbrake_logo Nearly a year after my rant about Handbrake’s switch from GTK+2 to a bleeding edge version of GTK+3, I am about to give up on my attempts to build the required GTK+3 static libraries into the handbrake package. Unlike the situation with applications that use Qt or WxWidgets for their GUI, creating a private run-time for GTK is like wading through the pools of hell. GTK wants caches, configuration files and stuff all over the place. My handbrake with private GTK+3 crashes because it might still be trying to use the older GTK+3 libraries on my Slackware 14.1 computer.

So I said to myself: “fuck it” and build Handbrake 0.10.2 for Slackware-current exclusively. The development version of Slackware does have a GTK+3 which is contemporary enough and with some tweaks, I was able to compile a (hopefully) working handbrake GUI.

handbrake-0.10.2

It is of course possible to compile the commandline version of Handbrake on Slackware 14.1 because that does not require GTK+3 as a dependency. Come to think of it, perhaps I should adapt the handbrake.SlackBuild with a switch parameter that will allow you to skip the “ghb” GUI program and only compile “HandBrakeCLI“.

I wonder if anyone will step up and write a Qt-based wrapper about the HandBrakeCLI program. That would be really welcome, because I do not think that the Handbrake developers will ever produce a Qt based GUI variant. They attempted that once if I remember correctly, but nothing good came from that.

When I have some spare time I will prod further at getting Handbrake to use a private GTK+3 run-time, but don’t hold your breath. I have a program that compiled with zero errors, but it crashes on the GTK component libraries. I am not sure if I ever find out how to overcome that… I am not aware of anyone else ever successfully creating a GTK+3 based GUI program on Linux that used its own private library versions.

Anyway, have fun with handbrake if you are running Slackware-current.

You can get the package from my “restricted” repository. The package contains software which is under patent dispute (the MP3 and AAC audio encoders) so I can not host the package on the Slackware server.

Eric

Update for VeraCrypt, new flaws in TrueCrypt

October 1, 2015 / / 10 Comments

veraCrypt Recently TrueCrypt has been in the news again, because of a couple of new critical security issues that were found for its Windows version. You can read more in these articles at Engadget, Threatpost and  Extremetech. Windows computers with TrueCrypt installed can be taken over completely by a non-privileged user, and the computer does not even have to have mounted any TrueCrypt container.

These recently uncovered flaws were not found in last year’s code audit of TrueCrypt sources. Apparently this omission is due to the complexity of Windows drivers and “the kind of vulnerabilities that exist in many software on Windows and they are caused by lack of proper parameter validation in kernel mode code” according to Mounir Idrassi (VeraCrypt developer) in Threatpost.

Despite the fact that these new vulnerabilities are not affecting Linux, it is highly unwise to keep using TrueCrypt on Linux. The code is no longer maintained, it already has security issues and good alternatives exist.

The aforementioned VeraCrypt is a fork of the TrueCrypt code which is actively maintained, and the recent flaws found (to be disclosed next week) in TrueCrypt have already been patched in VeraCrypt 1.15 last weekend.

VeraCrypt is a drop-in replacement for TrueCrypt if you let it handle your encrypted container in “truecrypt mode”:

veracryptI have built new packages for VeraCrypt 1.15, updating it from the previous 1.13 which I had in my repository. You can get the packages (for Slackware versions 13.37 and newer) here: http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/veracrypt/ or at its primary mirror location http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/veracrypt/

Users of slackpkg+ merely have to run “slackpkg update && slackpkg upgrade veracrypt“, assuming that the repository mirror you are using is up to date.

Cheers! Eric

 

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