Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Day: September 1, 2019

Chromium package updates

September 1, 2019 / / 11 Comments

There was a new Chromium source release last week, but there were other software releases that had priority to get packages out the door. Therefore I could only chromium packages this weekend.
Chromium 76.0.3809.132 fixes 3 security holes. Note that the version before that (76.0.3809.100) also fixed 4 critical holes but I never packaged that as I went on holiday. So, upgrading now would be a good idea.

The packages (for Slackware 14.2 and -current) can be found on my site or any mirror (e.g. http://slackware.uk/people/alien/slackbuilds/chromium/).

Enjoy! Eric

VLC 3.0.8 packages

September 1, 2019 / / 13 Comments

largeVLCAlso during my holiday, the VideoLAN developers released version 3.0.8 of their VLC media player.

The Release Notes state that this releases provides fixes for several security issues among wich 11 which are CVE-worthy. Meaning that it’s prudent to upgrade your VLC to 3.0.8 soonest.

I have the new packages available (for Slackware 14.2 and -current) in my repository since a couple of days. I used the opportunity to update the following internal libraries as well: bluray, dav1d, ebml, and matroska.

You will also probably note that there is no “npapi-vlc” package. I decided to retire this VLC based NPAPI webbrowser plugin from my repository. Modern browsers are all moving away from NPAPI plugin support, and relying on HTML5 instead. Chrome/Chromium always only supported PPAPI based plugins anyway.

A note about dependencies for the VLC 3.x packages:

My Slackware packages for VLC are mostly self-contained with all of the supporting libraries compiled into the package. This makes for a minimal dependency on external libraries/packages. But there are some caveats with the new release: most importantly, its interface has switched from Qt4 to Qt5.
While Slackware contains a ‘qt4’ package, it does not contain ‘qt5’ and therefore, the vlc-3.x package introduces some new external dependencies, all related to the Qt5 GUI: SDL_sound, OpenAL, libxkbcommon, qt5. Hopefully Qt5 will get added to Slackware-current sometime in the future.
On Slackware 14.2, two more packages are needed – they have already been incorporated into Slackware-current: libinput and libwacom .

A note on compiling:

When you want to compile VLC 3 yourself, be sure to install java8 and apache-ant or your build will fail.
If you are running Slackware 14.2 you will additionally need the following four packages (required to compile the ‘dav1d‘ decoder): meson, ninja, python3, python3-setuptools .

Where to find the new VLC packages:

Rsync access is offered by the mirror server: rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/ .

For BluRay support, read a previous article for hints about the aacs keys that you’ll need.

My usual warning about patents: versions that can not only DEcode but also ENcode AAC audio can be found in my alternative repository where I keep the packages containing code that might violate stupid US software patents.

Have fun! Eric

LibreOffice updates for Slackware 14.2 and -current

September 1, 2019 / / 15 Comments

This month, I am building different versions for LibreOffice, for our stable Slackware 14.2 and for the -current testing ground. During my holiday, new versions became available and last week I built packages from those sources.

The 6.2.6 release which was announced by the Document Foundation two weeks ago brings some security fixes to the 6.2 series. Therefore it was important to get rid of the old 6.2.5 packages. I built 6.2.6 for Slackware 14.2 and those packages have been available for download now since early last week. Go get them!

Note: as of this package release, I am no longer including support for KDE4. The “libreoffice-kde-integration” package is no longer available in my repository and you should “removepkg” the older version if you have that installed. The KDE4 support in LibreOffice has been broken for a while and your Office applications will run great on KDE4 without that “KDE integration”. The LibreOffice UI will be based on GTK3 widgets instead and KDE4’s theming engine will make that its User Interface blends in properly.

For Slackware-current I went for the new 6.3 series of LibreOffice instead. The sources for this new release were made public three weeks ago. The release notes state that the 6.3.x office suite should be a lot faster than the previous 6.2.x series with impressively notched-up interoperability support for the Microsoft Office document formats. Go check it out!

The packages for LibreOffice 6.3.0 which are ready for download in my repository, do contain “libreoffice-kde-integration”, yes! Unlike the packages for Slackware 14.2 I have decided to add KDE5 (aka Plasma5) support to my LibreOffice packages for slackware-current from now on.
If you do not have KDE5 packages installed at all, don’t worry. LibreOffice will work great. The KDE integration package will just not add anything useful for you. On the other hand, if you have Plasma5 installed you will benefit from native file selection dialog windows and other integration features. And even if you do not have Plasma5 but you do have Qt5 installed, then you will be able to run LibreOffice with Qt5 User Interface elements instead of defaulting to GTK3.

If you want to compile these Libreoffice 6.3.0 packages yourself, then be aware that by default no KDE5 support will be added. You will have to set the value of the script parameter “ADD_KDE5” to “YES”. Additionally you will have to install the packages that this functionality depends on. Those are: qt5, libxkbcommon, OpenAL, SDL_sound, and all the packages of KDE Frameworks 5. All of these can be  found in my ‘ktown’ repository: https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/latest/

Enjoy! Eric

© 2024 Alien Pastures

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑