Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Day: March 19, 2023

Steam Client for Slackware updated to 1.0.0.76

March 19, 2023 / / 10 Comments

steam

A few weeks ago, Valve‘s official Linux binaries for its steamclient got an update. The 1.0.0.76 version is built using an updated Steam client:

  • Client timestamp 1676336721 (2023-02-14)
  • Steam Runtime version 0.20221019.0

The steamclient package which I create from this release tarball is meant to bootstrap the installation of Valve’s Steam gaming platform on your Slackware computer. The package installs a couple of scripts and a 32-bit Linux runtime based on Ubuntu, and adds a desktop menu entry so that you can easily start Steam.
When you first start ‘steam’ from the menu or from the X terminal command-line, the client scripts will download a larger set of runtime libraries, including 64-bit support. From then on, the steamclient will keep its runtime libraries up-to-date automatically, every time it starts up and connects to the Steam servers.
The Slackware package has a couple of tweaks because we obviously do not have all the expected Ubuntu tools on board. With the help of these tweaks, Steam works out of the box on Slackware – both 32bit and 64-bit with multilib!

If you are using Steam for gaming, be sure to check out its Slackware community. It’s not really chatty in there but last time I checked, the group listed over 400 Slackware users and there’s always a few online and playing.

Enjoy!
Eric

Wine 8.4 packages for Slackware

March 19, 2023 / / 7 Comments

The Wine developers released version 8.4 last week. There’s lots of bugfixes of course, but the announcement also mentions that the work has started on a Wayland graphics driver. Note that in the previous 8.3 release for which I did not create packages, Smart Card support was added, using PCSC-Lite for which I also have a package.

I have created and uploaded fresh Slackware packages (targeting 15.0 and -current) for pure 32bit Wine as well as a 64bit Wine which also contains the 32bit WoW64 (Wine on Wine64) binaries. Both packages have the ‘staging‘ patches applied and contain Gecko (the Wine implementation of Internet Explorer) and Mono (the open-source and cross-platform implementation of the .NET Framework).

The external dependencies for this package remain the same: FAudio and vkd3d are required.
On 64bit Slackware you need to have multilib installed (read the docs). In addition to a standard multilib package set, in addition you need to convert the 32bit versions of the FAudio and vkd3d packages to ‘compat32’ packages and install those.

Note: the MinGW-w64 compiler suite is used to generate the native Windows DLLs in my wine package. This compiler is not needed when you just want to run wine. If you want to compile your own wine, you can install MinGW-w64 from my repository.

Have a good weekend!
Eric

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