My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: April 2022

Chromium 101 for Slackware – ungoogled variant follows soon

Earlier this week, Chromium 101.0.4951.41 was released according the announcement on Google’s releaseblog.
As usual, this release addresses several vulnerabilities of which some have the criticality label “high” – meaning it can crash your browser but not compromise your computer. Interesting again to see an impressive list of high/medium/low vulnerabilities (a total of 30 this time) for which Google paid bounties of over 80,000 dollars in total to their individual reporters.

Get chromium packages here (NL mirror) or here (US mirror).

The chromium-ungoogled packages are currently being compiled but that takes more  than 8 hours per package… so a bit of patience is required. Once they are ready you’ll find them here (NL mirror) or here (US mirror).

Enjoy the weekend, Eric

Interested in a job in the US at ASML?

I am on the look-out for good people again. This time in the US.

Remember – I left IBM (involuntarily) and started working at ASML at the end of 2016, first in a technical IT role but nowadays as an IT Group Leader focusing on providing services and solutions in Virtual Product Development (VPD) and Engineering Simulation (simulation driven design) toward our internal customers (mechanical, fluid dynamics, optical and multi-physics engineering, and research).

Need I remind you? ASML is all over the news these days, labeled the “linchpin of the electronics industry“. It is an exciting company to work for, and the amount of work we do is rapidly expanding as a result of two years of COVID19 pandemic and the resulting increase in demand for consumer electronics and computer chips. As a company we are at the forefront of lithography innovation with our EUV machines (Extreme Ultra Violet laser powered).
See this one-minute intro video for instance:

The complexity of our machines keeps increasing, and with it the demand for smart IT solutions that enable our engineers and researchers to perform more and bigger model simulations in less time. But also we need to address the needs of our customer support and operations divisions to use Machine Learning in order to become more predictive about our machines’ performance in the field.
I manage a couple of Agile IT teams that form an Agile Release Train and work together with our Engineering colleagues to improve their Simulation Workspace (VDI client, HPC cluster, masses of storage all placed in the Data Center and connected with high-bandwidth network).
I posted about open positions in my Veldhoven (Netherlands) teams last year (btw there are still open positions in my Dutch teams), and I am now bringing my latest vacancies to your attention. These are openings in the US, not in the Netherlands, but you would be closely collaborating with your Agile team members both in the US and in the Netherlands!

I’ll come to the point: for our IT Agile Release Train I have two job openings in the US: one for our SIMS team, one for our HPDA team.

  • The SIMS (Simulation Services) team vacancy is for an “IT Support Engineer – Engineering Simulation“. See the online profile for all the job details.  The location is Wilton, CT and you would be required to come to the ASML office so you will have to live in the region.
  • The HPDA (High Performance & Data Analytics) team has a vacancy for a “High Performance Computing (HPC) System Administrator” where you have a choice of office: either San Diego (CA) or Wilton (CT). We operate a High Performance Compute cluster in both these areas. Check out the job profile to get more details. This job also requires you to come to the office.

Feel free to ask below in the comments section about further background info.

Hope this is of interest to someone!
Eric

Chromium 100 out-of-band security update addresses (again) a single vulnerability

I have uploaded new chromium 100 packages for Slackware. The chromium-ungoogled 100 packages are currently being built and will follow shortly.
What’s with all these updates that follow rapidly on each others’ heels? Just like the recent Chromium 99 security update which addressed a single critical vulnerability, last monday Google announced on their official blog the immediate availability of Chromium 100.0.4896.75. This hotfix release plugs a single hole which Google deemed serious enough to warrant the update. See CVE-2022-1232. The difference with last week is that no known exploit of this vulnerability is reported yet.
Still, it’s highly recommended that you upgrade ASAP.

My Chromium 100.0.4896.75 packages can be downloaded from my own repository (or any mirror that has synced up), for instance:

Once I have finished compiling the un-googled version of chromium and uploaded the packages, I will mention it in the comments section below and you can download them from: https://slackware.nl/people/alien/slackbuilds/chromium-ungoogled/ or https://us.slackware.nl/people/alien/slackbuilds/chromium-ungoogled/ .

Until I get tired of compiling for Slackware 14.2 (aka once I have migrated my last server to 15.0) these packages will work on Slackware 14.2 and newer. I provide 32bit as well as 64bit variants.

Eric

Libreoffice 7.3.2, Ungoogled-Chromium 100

The latest update for LibreOffice Community Edition, version 7.3.2 was released last week, fixing over 80 bugs (see changelogs for RC1 and RC2).
My repository now contains a new set of libreoffice-7.3.2 packages for Slackware 15.0 and -current.

Get these packages from my own Europe-based server: https://slackware.nl/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ or my US-based server: https://us.slackware.nl/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ ;or any mirror if you wait a day, for instance https://slackware.uk/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ . Rsync access is also available for these servers.

And then there’s the update for Un-Googled Chromium that I promised in my previous blog. It took a little while to get the sources released because of its approval process, but the new chromium-ungoogled-100.0.4896.60 packages for Slackware 14.2 and newer are now also available from mirror servers around the world.
If you are a fresh Slackware user (or never read this blog) and wonder what this un-Googled Chromium is about and whether it is something you’d like, just read some of the older articles on my blog: Google muzzles all Chromium browsers on 15 March 2021, and How to ‘un-google’ your Chromium browser experience.

Enjoy the new releases – Eric

Chromium 100 available

The Chromium version has reached a triple-digit number: I have uploaded new packages for Chromium 100 (Slackware 14.2 and newer, 32bit as well as 64bit). Specifically it is the release 100.0.4896.60 which was announced a few days ago. It fixes a number of vulnerabilities with the criticality label “high” which usually means it can crash your browser but not compromise your computer.

Google currently maintains a release schedule for Chromium where a new major version (98, 99, 100, …) is made available every month. This means that new features are not added with a big bang after being beta-tested for months, but the browser’s feature list will evolve over time.

For instance, this 100 release will be the last release where your UserAgent string mentions details about your OS; now it is still “Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/100.0.4896.60 Safari/537.36“.

A return to Chromium 100 of a lost feature, is the ability to use the audio indicator in a browser tab to directly mute that tab. When website plays audio in a tab, the tab strip will mention that “audio is playing” when you hover your mouse over it, and it shows a speaker icon. Now, when you explicitly enable it with the flag “chrome://flags/#enable-tab-audio-muting” you can click that speaker icon to mute  the sound immediately instead of having to right-click first and then select “mute this site”.

Get chromium packages here (NL mirror) or here (US mirror). The chromium-ungoogled packages are still waiting for the source code to be released. I expect that to happen any time and then I’ll build and upload those packages too.

Enjoy the weekend, Eric

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