Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: June 2023

Chromium 114.0.5735.133 packages address critical bug

June 17, 2023 / / 27 Comments

Chromium, regular and un-googled.

Earlier this week, Google released its 114.0.5735.133 update for Chromium 114.
This is a bugfix release and on the list of addressed security issues, there’s one which is labeled as ‘critical‘, labeled CVE-2023-3214. Three other fixes are labeled with a vulnerability rating of ‘high‘.
As always, it is wise to upgrade to my latest chromium and chromium-ungoogled packages.

The updated Slackware 15.0 and -current packages both for chromium and chromium-ungoogled are available in my repository and its mirrors (like my own US server and in a short while, the UK mirror).

Cheers, Eric

Surge XT synthesizer added to my Slackware DAW software collection

June 16, 2023 / / 15 Comments

The Surge XT synthesizer was recently mentioned in the comments section of another post, and I thought, why not add it to my DAW collection?
So, here it is 😉

Surge XT is a virtual synthesizer originally released as “Surge” into open source by creator Claes Johanson in September 2018. Since then, it is maintained by a group of volunteers. The most recent release of Surge XT is just a month old and this version 1.2.3 is the one I packaged for you, ready for Slackware 15.0 and -current and in 32bit as well as 64bit flavors. Find it via slakfinder.

If you have my “daw_base” package installed (and you should if you intend to use any of my DAW packages!) the package adds itself into the “Slackware DAW” menu in Multimedia (unless if you use the standard Kicker menu of Plasma5 which does not adhere to Linux interface standards, Surge XT will just install itself straight into the Multimedia menu).
Surge XT can be used as a LV2, VST3 or CLAP plug-in instrument in a host program like Ardour. If you want a quick intro into the synth, check out this Music Radar page.

Let’s share a screenshot of its main interface:

Followed by its “about” window:

This package was not trivial to create. Especially adding the LV2 plugin support was not easy. Surge source releases starting with 1.3.0 will have LV2 plugin support out of the box. For the 1.2.3 release I had to add a fork of the JUCE source code which adds that support. This functionality is folded back into a newer version of JUCE which is not yet used by Surge 1.2.x.
I don’t know if I did the packaging 100% correct, so let me know where you stumble. You can try the Flatpak version to compare if you are already an experienced user of Surge, which would help me with potential improvements 😉 I have an article on adding Flatpak support to Slackware.
And to be honest, I have no clue yet how to use Surge, so by all means try it out and tell me your story. Ideally, also share some of the music you created using this synth!

A quick reminder about this old “pro tip” for easy upgrade/installation:
If you use slackpkg together with the slackpkg+ extension, you can download a DAW template here: http://www.slackware.com/~alien/tools/templates/daw.template containing a full list of all my DAW packages. Copy this template file into “/etc/slackpkg/templates/” and use the command “slackpkg update; slackpkg install-template daw; slackpkg upgrade-all” to get all those new packages installed effortlessly, and obtain all the upgrades as well.
And if you installed my daw_base package, this template will already be available in “/etc/slackpkg/templates/”!

Enjoy, Eric

Liveslak 1.7.0 released with fresh batch of Slackware Live ISOs

June 5, 2023 / / 34 Comments

Liveslak has a slow release cycle these days. It’s ten months since the 1.6.0 release which added full Ventoy support. There were a few minor releases but the last one of those was already half a year ago.
Yesterday I pushed version 1.7.0 to my git repository and used it to generate a fresh batch of Slackware Live ISO images.

New features of liveslak 1.7.0

  • Ventoy is now also supported on Live ISOs that are based on Slackware 14.2.  Although I don’t think that news will excite a lot of people today 😉
    FYI, liveslak  implements the “Ventoy-compatible” guideline. This means, any Slackware Live ISO works out of the box on Ventoy, and liveslak even supports persistence on a Ventoy disk. Read the documentation!
  • The RAM-based Console-OS choice is now supported in the boot menu of all Slackware Live variants.
    This “Core OS” is just 555 MB in size and loads into RAM so that you can remove the boot medium after booting it. Core OS offers a Slackware console, no X, with a lot of useful utilities including the setup2hd tool.
    Booting Slackware Live is the only way (using setup2hd) to install the official Slackware distro from a network server across a wireless connection. The official Slackware installer only supports wired network connections.
  • A more user-friendly GRUB timezone selection menu with submenus (UEFI boot) was added.
  • Lots of small fixes and enhancements too of course, read the Git log for more information.

Get liveslak ISOs

The various variants of Slackware Live Edition can be found in the “latest” subdirectory at https://download.liveslak.org/ or its US mirror https://us.liveslak.org/ . A fast UK mirror is provided by Darren Austin at https://slackware.uk/liveslak/ .
You’ll be able to download ISO Live images of 32bit and 64bit Slackware proper, also of the small XFCE variant for (both architectures), and then CINNAMON, DAW, LEAN and MATE ISOs that only come in 64bits. All ISOs containing a 64bit Slackware have support for SecureBoot.
Also have a look in the “bonus” subdirectory! There’s a Nvidia binary driver, Wine 8 and multilib modules to add if you use the persistent version of liveslak.

Get liveslak sources

The liveslak project is hosted in git. Its browsable cgit interface is here: https://git.liveslak.org/liveslak/

A set of the liveslak scripts can also be downloaded from http://www.slackware.com/~alien/liveslak/ or https://slackware.nl/people/alien/liveslak/

Have fun! Eric

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