Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Day: September 15, 2021

Gentoo eudev adopted by Eudev Project

September 15, 2021 / / 4 Comments

A recent LinuxQuestions thread discusses the depreciation of the eudev fork which was created by Gentoo a few years back in order to keep systemd at bay. This step by Gentoo sparks some serious doubts among LQ members about what Slackware should do – is the inclusion of systemd near, now that eudev is dead?

Short recap: In November 2015 Slackware replaced its no longer maintained original udev with this new eudev (a standalone extract of udev out of the systemd sources but modified so that every dependency on systemd is removed). This change was actually my chance to announce the liveslak project as a ‘celebration to say farewell to udev‘.
In November of 2020, a similar event happened when Slackware replaced ConsoleKit2 with elogind – a standalone copy of the logind code extracted from systemd and with all dependencies to systemd removed. Both events were meant to keep Slackware free of systemd, at least for a while… who can stem the flow of water.

But there is good news. Yesterday, a collaboration between Alpine, Devuan and Gentoo contributors has announced their adoption of eudev and a new repository has been created where the new project will further develop eudev: https://github.com/eudev-project/eudev/blob/master/README.md . Let’s give these folk our best wishes!

Eric

Windows 96, wtf?

September 15, 2021 / / 10 Comments

Tonight I played a bit with Windows 96.
Errrrr… Wait. There was nothing between 95 and 98, right? Right.

Mikesoft Windows 96 is a seriously fun effort to re-create classic MS Windows inside your browser. It’s actually a bunch of efficient JavaScript code making good use of your browser’s WebGL and WebAssembly capabilities. The project has a Wiki that explains the workings and gives more background if you are curious.

The web page loads fast and the Windows experience is uncanny. The Internet Exploder browser that’s included won’t load all pages I tried but at least it loads this blog 🙂

The desktop has a shortcut to connect to the project’s Discord server and also sports an application icon for MsgRoom – a chat application which connects you to an old-skool IRC-like server channel where other users of Windows 96 will show up once they start their own MsgRoom app. Cool!

The rudimentary package manager lets you install Wine, and even Shareware Doom, and it will play pretty damn well, including sound and smooth controls.

Give it a shot if you are wondering what to do tonight! Eric

Update your Chromium to 93.0.4577.82

September 15, 2021 / / 12 Comments

Today, I uploaded a set of Chromium 93.0.4577.82 packages for Slackware 14.2 and -current (32-bit as well as 64-bit).

According to yesterday’s official announcement on the Google blog, this release patches a number of vulnerabilites and two of them are zero-day vulnerabilities that are actively being exploited online.

The advice is to upgrade Chromium on your Slackware 14.2 and -current computers as soon as possible.

The ungoogled-chromium sources are lagging behind as usual, but I have hopes that a new source tarball will appear soon, now that we have a Chromium update which addresses multiple zero-days. Eloston, the project maintainer, seems AWOL but several contributors have a working patch set ready.

Stay safe! Eric

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