My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Day: February 11, 2018

New Live ISOs for Slackware-current 20180209

blueSW-64pxI have uploaded a fresh set of ISOs for the Slackware Live Edition. They are (of course) based on the ‘liveslak‘ scripts and contain the latest Slackware-current dated “Fri Feb 9 19:59:54 UTC 2018“), which sports the new 4.14.18 kernel which is mitigated against the Meltdown and Spectre v1 vulnerabilities.
The ISO variants you will find at the download URL https://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/ (remember to add support for CACert to your system if you see certificate warnings!) are:

  • Full unmodified Slackware (32bit and 64bit).
  • Stripped-down XFCE (32bit as well as 64bit), this ISO will fit on a CDROM medium.
  • Slackware with MATE instead of KDE4 (64bit) to showcase the new 1.20 release of just 2 days ago. Thanks to Willy Sudiarto Raharjo for the packaging!
  • Slackware with Plasma 5 instead of KDE4 (64bit) to showcase the Plasma 5.12 Long Term Support (LTS) release. This ISO also contains LibreOffice 6.0.1 and VLC 3.0.0.

The new liveslak version 1.1.9.6 has seen only a few updates since the previous tag, they are related to the package additions in Plasma 5.

Wayland and X.Org

The PLASMA5 ISO image does not feature Wayland support this time, but if you want you can build an ISO version that does! Download my liveslak scripts and use the following command to generate a PLASMA5 ISO (you will find it in /tmp afterwards) with the additional packages from my ‘testing’ repositories that add Wayland support:

# git clone --depth 1 git://bear.alienbase.nl/liveslak.git
# cd liveslak
# ./make_slackware_live.sh -d PLASMA5 -m plasma5wayland -M -X

If you run a Wayland-enabled Slackware Live, you can login to a regular X.Org Plasma5 session but you can also choose the “Plasma – Wayland” session from the SDDM dropdown menu.

Refreshing your USB stick instead of re-formatting

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. If you want to modify other parameters of your USB stick, use the script “upslak.sh“. It’s main feature is that it can update the kernel on the USB stick, but it also can replace the Live init script. As with most (if not all) of my scripts, use the “-h” parameter to get help on its functionality.

Historical info on liveslak

More detail about the features of Slackware Live Edition can be found in previous posts here on the blog.

Have fun!

LibreOffice 6 packaged for Slackware

The new major release ‘6’ of LibreOffice was made available almost two weeks ago but I have been struggling with the 32bit build. Despite the fact that my 64bit -current packages for libreoffice-6.0.0 were online for a short while (almost nobody noticed), I did not have anything good to share so I removed those again.
And in the meantime, faster than scheduled because of some serious regressions and a security report, I noticed the release of version 6.0.1 two days ago. I had been busy with new Plasma5, VLC and GCC packages but with those out of the way I set myself again to the task of fixing the 32bit build. And I nailed it, so now I can finally announce packages for Slackware 14.2 and -current.

There’s a lot to write about what has been improved or added to LibreOffice 6, the release page names quite a few already and here is a selection of features that I found striking:

  • modernized look & feel of the user interface
  • gpg-based document signing & encryption, yay!
  • export to epub
  • better unicode font coverage by including a selection of noto fonts
  • improved spell-checker and custom dictionaries
  • improved help system
  • interactive form creation through a new ‘form’ menu in writer
  • impress templates are re-designed into 16:9 format
  • etc…

The Document Foundation has also recorded a video summarizing the best new features of LibreOffice 6. i invite you to take a look at it.

You can get the new libreoffice-6.0.1 packages from my repository or any mirror, like:

I have also added this release of LibreOffice to my just-uploaded PLASMA5 Live ISO which is based on Plasma 5.12 LTS.

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