Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: July 2017 (Page 2 of 2)

July 17 updates – Plasma 5, Live ISOS and more

July 18, 2017 / / 76 Comments

Slackware turned 24 today, 17 July.

To celebrate I have created some goodies for you. Nothing you can eat or drink…

First, Plasma 5 updates.

I have uploaded the July ’17 set of Plasma 5 packages for Slackware 14.2 and -current to the ‘ktown’ repository. KDE 5_17.07 contains: KDE Frameworks 5.36.0, Plasma 5.10.3 and Applications 17.04.3. All based on Qt 5.9.0 for Slackware-current and Qt 5.7.1 for Slackware 14.2.
NOTE: I will no longer be releasing Plasma 5 packages for 32bit Slackware 14.2.

What’s new this time

Apart from the usual upgrades to the Frameworks, Plasma and Applications subsets, there is only one interesting piece of news: I added ‘kile’ to the applications-extra directory. Kile is a LaTex editor and the port to the KDE Frameworks 5 is well underway. I based the package on a git snapshot of its repository. One more KF5 application in “applications-extra”.
The goal of the KDE community is that the Applications 17.12 release (i.e. end of this year) will not have any application that is still kdelibs4 based. Everything in Plasma 5 Desktop should then finally be based on KF5.

Installing or upgrading Frameworks 5, Plasma 5 and Applications

As always, the accompanying README file contains full installation & upgrade instructions.

Recommended reading material

There have been several posts now about KDE 5 for Slackware-current. All of them contain useful information, tips and gotchas. If you want to read them, here they are: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/tag/kde5/

Where to get the new packages for Plasma 5

Package download locations are listed below (you will find the sources in ./source/5/ and packages in /current/5/ and  /14.2/5/ subdirectories). If you are interested in the development of KDE 5 for Slackware, you can peek at my git repository too.

Live ISO of PLASMA5

A Plasma5 Live ISO image will follow shortly on http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/latest/ in case you want to try it out first (check the timestamp of the ISO on the web page). I am currently testing it, looks fine. Here is a screenshot showing the QtAv player (a proper QT5 and QML based video player so that you can forget about kplayer or gmplayer):

What else is in stock

The PLASMA5 Live ISO is crammed with all my relevant big packages (libreoffice, vlc and friends) and I refreshed a few of these packages:

  1. A package is available for the latest MKVToolnix 13.0.0 – Slackware 14.2 and -current.
  2.  I built the latest Calibre 3.4.0 for Slackware 14.2 and -current, adding several internal modules which I omitted in my first Calibre 3 release. As a consequence, Calibre now also depends on unrar for which I also compiled the latest release (5.5.6) into a Slackware package.
  3. Podofo is another dependency for Calibre that received a long overdue update, and my repository now contains version 0.9.5.

And I am also preparing Live ISO images for the variants SLACKWARE (64bit and 32bit), XFCE (64bit and 32bit) and MATE. They should go online at the same time as the PLASMA5 ISO.

Have fun! Eric

Pale Moon browser new release, better media support

July 13, 2017 / / 4 Comments

The Pale Moon browser had a new release this week.

I have updated my palemoon.SlackBuild and have uploaded fresh Slackware packages for this new Pale Moon 27.4.0. As previously shared with you, I diverge from the official developers’ recommendations about how to compile this browser on Linux. For instance the gcc compiler I used on Slackware 14.2 is gcc-5.3.0 (which is part of this distro release). On -current I failed compiling with the gcc-7.1.0 compiler which is the default there and I had to create a “gcc5” package for gcc-5.4.0 (which was an earlier gcc version in slackware-current). I wrote an article on this very blog about that gcc5 package if you are interested, it can be installed in parallel with Slackware’s own gcc-7. There are some other differences, mainly in the way I optimize my build.

The resulting palemoon packages have been quite stable. Note that many crashes are triggered when you use Pale Moon in KDE4 with the oxygen theme selected for your GTK+2 programs. Get my patched oxygen-gtk2-1.4.6.1 package in my SlackBuild repository, if you are experiencing crashes.

What’s the news for this release? The most effort seems to have gone into solving the media streaming issues, by rewriting the Media Source Extensions (MSE) code to make it compliant with the official MSE specifications. This is what Youtube reports about the media capabilities of the new Pale Moon on Slackware:

 

Be aware that unlike the official binaries, my palemoon package relies on ffmpeg for the multimedia support – not on gstreamer. This means that on Slackware 14.2 you need to install a ffmpeg package (I used my own ffmpeg-3.3.2 package to compile palemoon). Slackware-current already has a ffmpeg package so you are OK there (but you still might want to replace that ffmpeg with my own package which is more feature-packed).

NOTE: let me know and do not bother the Pale Moon developers with any issues you encounter while using my Slackware package instead of the official binaries.

Adobe Flash security update July ’17

July 12, 2017 / / 3 Comments

adobe_flash_8s600x600_2This month’s security update for the Flash Player plugin has arrived. The new version is 26.0.0.137 for both the PPAPI (Google Chrome and friends) and the NPAPI (Mozilla Firefox and friends) based plugins.
I know… Flash is a monster and should be killed. But as long as people need it on Slackware, and as long as Adobe keeps releasing Linux plugin updates, I will package them and add them to my repository.

You can find Slackware packages for the Flash plugins in the following locations:

Also security related but nothing to do with either Adobe or CVE’s:

The Veracrypt developers have released version 1.21 of their fork of the abandoned TrueCrypt code. The Slackware ‘veracrypt‘ packages for this new version can be found in the same repositories as mentioned above.

Have fun.

Encrypted Media Extensions on the World Wide Web

July 11, 2017 / / 6 Comments

Today, a post about Digital Rights Management. I am not going to bore you with the pros and cons of restricting your freedom, but I do want to point to a meaningful event which happened this week.

Before I continue, I want you to fully realize that with Slackware Linux, your rights are not taken away. You are free to use – or not use – technologies that allow you to watch “protected” content like Netflix videos. Our browsers will work just as well if you choose not to use DRM technologies. The libraries which implement the DRM layer are separate from the Slackware packages containing the browsers (Firefox, Chromium) and are not distributed with the OS. It is up to you to add DRM extensions if you need them. You are and remain in control of your OS.

With that out of the way, what happened?
This week, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has finally approved the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) as part of the HTML5 standard. Objections from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Software Foundation and other digital freedom advocates have not been honored. But that does not necessarily mean it’s a bad thing. EME is a standard to implement DRM, but it is not a DRM solution itself. EME allows companies that built their business model around the commercial distribution of protected media content to create rich applications that run in your browser, based on international standards.
Digital Rights Management is not new and it is not going away either. However: it is in need of standardizing to improve the current status-quo. Because there are already several de-facto standards to stream protected content to your browser: Flash, Silverlight, to name the two that have been most widely used in the past years. Both these technologies are dying or dead already. New technologies that build on HTML5 are already becoming unofficial standards; think of Widevine, which is a DRM solution from Google. Not just browser plugins like the ones I mentioned, but also applications can implement DRM when they allow you to watch or listen to multimedia without the option to make unrestricted local copies. Locally stored content will be encrypted and can only be played back using the original app. Lots of those on Android for instance.

DRM solutions are proprietary. Their code is not free and the libraries are distributed as binary-only. There’s a logic to that of course. Think what you will, but there are both providers and consumers that embrace them. What is more important, is that there is wisdom in embedding these technologies in Web standards. We should not encourage companies to pollute our computers with incompatible and non-interoperable solutions. So yes, I am glad that EME is a W3C standard finally. Let the Web remain viable, allowing maximum flexibility and compatibility.

I mentioned Widevine in the text, and I have something new to tell about that too.
My package repository contains the chromium-widevine-plugin. It is a add-on package to my chromium browser package that allows you (among others) to watch Netflix video content in your Chromium browser. In the past I have always used the Google Chrome RPM’s to extract the ‘libwidevinecdm.so‘ library and make a Slackware package out of it. Google stopped distributing 32bit versions of the Chrome browser after version 48 so those of you on 32bit Slackware and using my Chromium package, were stuck with an old version of the Widevine CDM library and no way of knowing how long this library would remain compatible with newer Chromium sources.
But Mozilla have since then extended Firefox’ capabilities, so that it too is now able to use Widevine’s Content Decryption Module. In Firefox, this DRM capability was implemented in such a way that by default, the browser is completely DRM-free. You (the enduser) first have to explicitly enable DRM in the browser’s settings after which Firefox will download the Widevine CDM from an Internet URL. And since Firefox comes in 32bit as well as 64bit variants, I was thinking “where do they download these Widevine libraries and are they useable in Chromium as well?”

So I set out to find the Firefox download location for Widevine CDM libraries, found them, retrieved them and tested the libraries in 32bit and 64bit Chromium. Lo and behold…. this worked!

I have now rewritten my SlackBuild script for the chromium-widevine-plugin package to use this alternate download location. And since I no longer have to extract the library from a Chrome RPM, I have also changed the package version numbering. The package version no longer reflects the Chrome release, but now it is actually reflecting the internal version of the Widevine CDM library.

Have fun watching Netflix! While I am at it, I recommend The Expanse, or perhaps Helix. If you’re not so much into Sci-Fi (or have already seen those series) and want to know more about our basic foods, check out Cooked.

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