Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: May 2019

April ’19 release of OpenJDK 8

May 26, 2019 / / 10 Comments

icedteaEarly May I was confined to my bed, immobilized on my side and under medication, after I had incurred a second back hernia in four months’ time. And so I missed the announcement on the OpenJDK mailing list about the new icedtea-3.12.0.
Why again is that important? Well, the IcedTea framework is a software harness to compile OpenJDK with ease. Andrew Hughes (aka GNU/Andrew) who is the release manager still did not update his blog with this announcment, but nevertheless:  the new Java8 that we will get is OpenJDK 8u212_b04. This release syncs the OpenJDK support in IcedTea to the official April 2019 security fixes for Java.
I built Slackware packages for Java 8 Update 212 so that you do not have to succumb to the official Oracle binaries which are compiled on God-knows what OS.

It’s about JAVA, so I recommended that you upgrade your OpenJDK 8 or OpenJRE 8 packages to the latest version ASAP.

Here is where you can download the Slackware packages for openjdk and openjre:

If you want to compile OpenJDK 8 yourself you will need apache-ant as well, but otherwise the openjdk/openjre packages have no external dependencies.

Note about usage:

My Java 7 and Java 8 packages (e.g. openjdk7 and openjdk… or openjre7 and openjre) can not co-exist on your computer because they use the same installation directory. You must install either Java 7 or Java 8.

Remember that I release packages for the JRE (runtime environment) and the JDK (development kit) simultaneously, but you only need to install one of the two. The JRE is sufficient if you only want to run Java programs (including Java web plugins). Only in case where you’d want to develop Java programs and need a Java compiler, you are in need of the JDK package.

Enjoy! Eric

This week’s updates: Chromium, LibreOffice, Flash

May 25, 2019 / / 13 Comments

There was an update to Chromium browser code this week as announced a few days ago by Google. I built new Slackware packages for Chromium 74.0.3729.169 and uploaded them earlier this week to slackware.com and slackware.nl (or you can use any mirror site of course).
There were two intermediate updates to Chromium 74 which I did not compile & package. Both versions address a couple of security issues (CVE’s), but at the time I was unable to work a computer. It’s therefore a good idea to upgrade to this new package.

 

Also this week, the Document Foundation released version 6.2.4 of their office suite LibreOffice. I have built and uploaded sets of packages for Slackware 14.2 and also for -current, 32bits and 64bits.

I had some issues with the visibility of LibreOffice icons in its toolbar recently (last couple of versions of LibreOffice that I built actually).
I am using LibreOffice on Slackare-current with Plasma5 and in the profile script “/etc/profile.d/libreoffice.sh” I have uncommented this line because the GTK+3 widget set usually gives the best possible interface for LO in a Plasma5 desktop:

export SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gtk3

However, icons would not show unless you moved the mouse across them, or sometimes even that would not work. In other words, it made working with LO impossible unless I switched the widget support to “generic’ by uncommenting “export SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gen” in aformentioned profile script instead. But that results in a butt-ugly interface.

By chance I found out that this is caused by a setting in LibreOffice itself. Go to “Tools > Options > Libreoffice > View > Icon Style” and I noticed that the style was set to “Automatic (Breeze)”. I selected “Elementary” instead and voila, I had a working toolbar with visible icons again. For some reason, the integration of GTK+3 applications in Plasma5′ QT5 based interface using the ‘breeze-gtk” package is not fully compatible with the LibreOffice icon handling.
Just so you know.

And finally, there were fresh security updates on the Adobe website for their Flash player plugin. The new version 32.0.0.192 which was released last week (but I missed it) was announced in a security bulletin. I built the packages for the Chromium-compatible and Mozilla-compatible browsers so that you can visit Flash-based web sites safely again (or of course you abandon the use of Flash entirely).

Who is still using these Flash plugin packages?

 

Where to find my packages? In any case, on these three sites. And slackware.nl as well as slackware.uk also offer rsync access:

Have fun! Eric

Reverse birthday present: KDE-5_19.05

May 9, 2019 / / 87 Comments

After a three-month hiatus, I have new Plasma5 packages for you. I just uploaded “KDE-5_19.05” to the ‘ktown‘ repository. It’s filled to the brim with new stuff.
Hopefully not many of you will be disappointed by the fact that this is a 64bit-only release. I have a severely limited capacity unfortunately due to health issues. But, today is my birthday and I wanted to get this out as a ‘reverse present’ to all of you 🙂 The 32bit packages will eventually follow, but I am afraid I will no longer be able to manage a monthly update cycle.

As always, these packages are meant to be installed on a full installation of Slackware-current which has had its KDE4 removed first. These packages will not work on Slackware 14.2.

What’s new for this May 2019 release

My May 2019 release of KDE Plasma5 for Slackware contains the KDE Frameworks 5.58.0, Plasma 5.15.5 and Applications 19.04.1. All this on top of Qt 5.12.3.

Deps:
Because of the three-month hiatus between releases, there are quite some updates to be reported. The ‘qt5’ package went up to 5.12.3 and with it come the latest versions of ‘libxkbcommon’, ‘qt5-speech’, ‘qca-qt5′, gpgme’, ‘sip’ and ‘PyQt5’. The ‘qt5-webkit’ package was recompiled against the new ‘qt5’.

The ‘cryfs’ package and its dependency ‘cryptopp’ were updated to their most recent releases.
To support the latest version of kdenlive, a new package ‘rttr’ was added and the ‘mlt’ package was updated.

Frameworks:
Frameworks 5.58.0 is an incremental stability release, see: https://www.kde.org/announcements/kde-frameworks-5.58.0.php

Plasma:
Plasma 5.15.5 is the final iteration before we move on to 5.16. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.15.5.php

Plasma-extra:
I updated to the latest release of ‘kdeconnect-framework’. If you use a smartphone then this is a must-have application to integrate phone and laptop into one seamless experience.

Applications;
Applications 19.04.1 is a stability and bugfix update for the 19.04 cycle, but since I never packaged the .0 release, this is actually the first ‘ktown for Slackware‘ release with the new Applications in which we find a KDEnlive with 60% of its code re-written from scratch. Other main applications like Okular, Dolphin, Kate have been enhanced significantly. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-applications-19.04.1.php and if you want more detail about the 19.04 cycle you should also read https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-applications-19.04.0.php .

Applications-extra:
Many upgrades here: ‘alkimia’, ‘digikam’, ‘falkon’, ‘kdevelop’, ‘kdev-php’, ‘kdev-python’, ‘kmymoney’, ‘kpmcore’, ‘krita’, ‘kstars’, ‘okteta’ and ‘partitionmanager’.

Where to get it

Download the KDE-5_19.05 from the usual location at https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/latest/ . Check out the README file in the root of the repository for detailed installation or upgrade instructions.

I am not yet able to generate a new ISO of the Slackware Live Plasma5 Edition, because I am in the midst of an update to the liveslak scripts. When I find time to finish or revert that update, the ISO will follow soon after. When I upload a new Plasma5 Live ISO you will find it in https://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/

And let me know – in the comments section below – whether you are actually using my 32bit Plasma5 packages!

Have fun! Eric

GCC 9.1.0_multilib for Slackware-current

May 5, 2019 / / 6 Comments

The GCC compiler suite in slackware-current got a major version bump last week in a dual update (the second update added the new ‘gcc-gdc’ package).
GCC version went up from 8.3.0 to 9.1.0.

I just uploaded the multilib version of the GCC packages, including that ‘gcc-gdc‘ package containing the new ‘D’ compiler.
The set of ‘*compat32’ packages was also refreshed with the latest 32bit binaries from Slackware 14.2 and -current.

Grab the packages from my server or from any mirror (those will have a few hours delay until they catch up).

Have fun, Eric

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