Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Day: November 10, 2016

Transitioning to a new GPG key

November 10, 2016 / / 17 Comments

 

I have generated a new GPG key to replace my old one which was based on a 1024-bit DSA primary key. The new primary key is 4096-bit RSA. I will be transitioning away from my old one.

The old key will continue to be valid, but i prefer all future correspondence to use the new key. I would also like this new key to be re-integrated into the web of trust. The online version of this message is signed by both my keys (old and new) to certify the transition.

The old key was:

pub 1024D/A75CBDA0 2003-01-17
 Key Fingerprint = F2CE 1B92 EE1F 2C0C E97E 581E 5E56 AAAF A75C BDA0

And the new key is:

pub 4096R/769EE011 2016-08-21
 Key Fingerprint = 2AD1 07EA F451 32C8 A991 F4F9 883E C63B 769E E011

To fetch the full key (including a photo uid, which is commonly stripped by public keyservers), you can get it with either of these two commands:

wget -q -O- http://slackware.com/~alien/alien.gpg.asc | gpg --import -
 wget -q -O- http://alienbase.nl/alien.gpg.asc | gpg --import -

Or, to fetch my new key from a public key server, you can simply do:

gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-key 769EE011

If you already know my old key, you can now verify that the new key is signed by the old one:

gpg --check-sigs 769EE011

If you don’t already know my old key, or you just want to be double extra paranoid, you can check the fingerprint against the one above:

gpg --fingerprint 769EE011

If you are satisfied that you’ve got the right key, and the UIDs match what you expect, I’d appreciate it if you would sign my key:

gpg --sign-key 769EE011

Lastly, if you could upload these signatures, i would appreciate it. You can either send me an e-mail with the new signatures (if you have a functional MTA on your system):

gpg --armor --export 769EE011 | mail -s 'GPG Signatures' alien@slackware.com

Or you can just upload the signatures to a public keyserver directly:

gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --send-key 769EE011

Please let me know if there is any trouble, and sorry for the inconvenience.

Eric

Some reading material in case you too want to transition to a new key or even want to start using GPG:

Note:
The above text is based on a “gpg-transition-document” template which seems to be pretty widely used on the Internet for purposes of GPG key transitioning. My own text (the one of this blog post) can also be found here: http://www.slackware.com/~alien/gpg_transition_20160821.txt . That text file has been digitally signed with my old and new keys so that you can verify the correctness of my statements.

 

Slackware Live Edition 1.1.4 – based on slackware-current of 4 Nov 2016

November 10, 2016 / / 29 Comments

blueSW-64pxToday I conclude my packaging frenzy with a new release of ‘liveslak‘. Version 1.1.4 is ready with only some minor tweaks. Users of the “iso2usb.sh” script on non-Slackware distros should be happy that the script finds all the required programs now.
I made a set of ISO images for several variants of the 64bit version of Slackware Live Edition based on liveslak 1.1.4 and using Slackware-current dated “Fri Nov  4 03:31:38 UTC 2016”. These ISO images have been uploaded and are available on the primary server ‘bear‘. You will find ISO images for a full Slackware, Plasma5 and MATE variants and the 700MB small XFCE variant.

Here are some screenshots of the PLASMA5 variant:

plasma5_login_5.8

SDDM login screen

plasma5_login_5.8_2

The new Plasma loading animation

plasma5_login_5.8_3

Plasma 5.8.3

plasma5_login_5.8_4

The logoff/shutdown

If you already use a Slackware Live USB stick that you do not want to re-format, you should use the “-r” parameter to the “iso2usb.sh” script. The “-r” or refresh parameter allows you to refresh the liveslak files on your USB stick without touching your custom content.

To find out what’s on the ISO you downloaded, try this command:

$ isoinfo -d  -i your_downloaded.iso | egrep “Volume id|Publisher id|Data preparer id|Application id”

And if you want to know what ISO was used to create your USB stick, check the content of the /.isoversion file in the root of its Live partition (partition number 3).

New in the ISOs

The new ISOs are based on the latest slackware-current with Linux kernel 4.4.29.

The SLACKWARE variant contains exactly that: the latest slackware-current and nothing else.

The MATE variant (a Slackware OS with KDE 4 replaced by Mate) has a refreshed ‘msb‘ package content,  I synced my local ‘msb‘ mirror with the official package repository at http://slackware.uk/msb/current/ which means you get Mate 1.16, the GTK3 version.

The PLASMA5 variant (Slackware with KDE 4 replaced by Plasma 5) comes with the latest Plasma 5 release “KDE-5_16.11” as found in my ktown repository. This ISO also contains the LXQT and Lumina Desktop Environments. Both are light-weight DE’s based on Qt5 so they look nice & shiny. The Plasma 5 packages inside the ISO already satisfy most if not all of their dependencies. Let me know what you think of Lumina and LXQT!
One word of caution when using the Lumina DE:

  • The network applet is not enabled by default, and you may have to enable the network manually. I used “nmtui” in a terminal window but you can try enabling the networkmanager-applet instead. I did not find out how, yet.

 

The changes between liveslak scripts 1.1.3 and 1.1.4

The ‘1.1.4’ tag was mainly applied to accompany the release of the new ISOs.

  • iso2usb.sh: get rid of hard-coded program pathnames in favor of searching a hard-coded $PATH . This should improve the usefulness of the script on non-Slackware distros.
  • make_slackware_live.conf: make the filename ‘min.lst’ customizable for Live distro developers.
  • PLASMA5: use the ‘latest’ instead of the ‘testing’ repository.

Download the ISO images

The ISO variants of Slackware Live Edition are: SLACKWARE, XFCE, PLASMA5 and MATE. These ISO images (with MD5 checksum and GPG signature) have been uploaded to the master server (bear) and should be available on the mirror servers within the next 24 hours.

Download liveslak sources

The liveslak project can be found in my git repository: http://bear.alienbase.nl/cgit/liveslak/ . That’s all you need to create a Slackware Live ISO from scratch. Documentation for end users and for Live OS developers is available in the Slack Docs Wiki.

Have fun! Eric

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