Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Author: alienbob (Page 7 of 174)

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 šŸ˜‰

Surge XT is a virtual synthesizer originally released as ā€œSurgeā€ 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 šŸ˜‰ 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 oldĀ ā€œpro tipā€ for easy upgrade/installation:
If you use slackpkg together with theĀ slackpkg+ extension, you can download a DAW template here:Ā http://www.slackware.com/~alien/tools/templates/daw.templateĀ containing a full list of all my DAW packages. Copy this template file into ā€œ/etc/slackpkg/templates/ā€ and use the command ā€œslackpkg update; slackpkg install-template daw; slackpkg upgrade-allā€ 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 ā€œ/etc/slackpkg/templates/ā€!

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.Ā  Although I don’t think that news will excite a lot of people today šŸ˜‰
    FYI, liveslakĀ  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

Chromium 114 Early Release on Slackware

May 27, 2023 / / 10 Comments

An “early release” of Chromium 114 source code was published a few days ago, the release notes are on the developer blog.Ā  Since Chromium 110, Google rolls out new major releases to a small sub-set of its users to monitor any potential breakage and apply fixes before the majority of users get upgraded. The formal release of Chromium will be on May 30th, but I decided to go along with the early release this time, and offer this version to Slackware users already this weekend, to celebrate the Pentecost šŸ™‚

Looking at the new stuff in Chromium 114, there’s two things you might want to play with, since they are already contained in the browser and mostly usable in Chromium 114, but not yet enabled by default.

  • By toggling the flag “chrome://flags/#chrome-refresh-2023” from “default” to “enabled” the ongoing work will be revealed to bring a new User Interface design (Material You) to the desktop browser. A new tab design, new icons and work on the dark theme is visible. This new UI is scheduled for release in September 2023.
  • The toggle “chrome://flags/#password-manager-redesign” will enable a revamped Google Password Manager. It wants to look more like a standalone application and Chromium will ask you if you want to “install the app” which basically just adds a shortcut to “chrome://password-manager/passwords” in the “three-dots” sidebar menu. I was not yet impressed with this one, as it was unable to show me the passwords I had already saved in Chromium before. Yet is was obvious that my passwords were present since the password manager was able to check them all for compromise and weakness. So, I toggled this one back to “default” and will wait for Google to mature and stabilize it.

Also obvious is the disappearance of the “lock” icon which was an indication that you were visiting a secure “https” site. The lock has been replaced by a settings icon but functionally nothing much changed, as is shown when you click that icon.

Slackware packages (15.0 and -current) for Chromium 114.0.5735.45 are available for download from my repository or any of its mirrors.

The Un-googled version of my Chromium browser package will probably have to wait until May 30th –Ā  the formal release date of Chromium 114. There is no sign that Eloston will release a tarball sooner.

Enjoy! Eric

VLC 3.0.18 packages for Slackware 15.0 and -current

April 16, 2023 / / 6 Comments

largeVLCI have uploaded fresh packages for VLC 3.0.18, targeting Slackware 15.0 and -current.
I realized that it was already nine months ago that I did the last refresh of this mediaplayer package. The prior update also took a long time, 11 months to be precise. There’s not much exciting news about VLC 3.x to report about these days. The developers focus on version 4 of the VLC mediaplayer. The wait for that code to surface as a stable release has been ongoing for several years now. It looks like 4.0.0 is in “beta” but don’t hold your horses.

Apart from the version bump of VLC, I have also updated some of the vlc packages’ internal libraries: bluray, dav1d, ffmpeg, glew, libva, speex, upnp, vdpau, vlx and x265.
I did not consider the Alliance for Open Media’s aom codec yet; aom is a codec for the open and royalty-free AV1 video format, but my package already uses dav1d as an AV1 decoder. If someone needs VLC to be able to encode AV1 video through aom, let me know.

A note about dependencies for the new package:

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; a full installation of Slackware covers it all.
Let’s explicitly mention all those libraries that are statically compiled into my vlc package:

  • ffmpeg of course
  • audio codecs are provided by a52dec, vo-amrwbenc, opencore-amr, libdca, fluidsynth, gsm, lame, libmpcdec, opus, libshout, speex, speexdsp,Ā  twolame
  • video codecs are provided by dav1d, libdvbpsi, libebml, libmatroska, libmpeg2, libvpx, theora, x626, x264, x265
  • subtitle and text rendering: libass, libkate, libtiger, srt
  • extension interpreter language: lua
  • digital media input: libdv, libbluray, libcddb, libcdio, libdvdnav, libdvdread, libdvdcss (only in the restricted package), libavc1394, libdc1394, libraw1394
  • visualisation: goom, projectM
  • file access and streaming: asdcplib, libdsm, libssh2, libupnp, live555, microdns, protobuf-cpp
  • miscellaneous: fribidi, glew, libva, libvdpau, pcre2, taglib

You’ll notice that I statically compile several libraries into VLC that are also present in regular Slackware (ffmpeg, lame, speex, theora, libvpx and more) but other libraries that are also present in Slackware (mpg123, openjpeg etc) are not included statically. I made an educated guess about the risk of breakage of my vlc package due to incompatible library updates in a Slackware release, and then I added all libraries statically that made me feel safer with regard to robustness of the resulting package. And of course, every library that I consider as mandatory for VLC that is not part of Slackware, is also added to my package statically.

A note on compiling:

When you want to compile VLC 3 yourself, be sure to install java11 and apache-ant or your build will fail.

Where to find the new VLC packages:

Rsync access is offered by the mirror servers.
The patent-safe packages are found at rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/vlc/ and rsync://us.slackware.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/vlc/ .
The restricted versions that support AAC encoding and encrypted DVD playback are available from 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.

Enjoy! Eric

Update available for Chromium 112 to address zero-day exploit

April 16, 2023 / / 15 Comments

Chromium, regular and un-googled.

Two days ago on friday, Google released an out-of-cycle stable update. This 112.0.5615.121 update addresses and fixes a zero-day exploit (CVE-2023-2033) which is already actively abused. Since it is a bug in the JavaScript engine, a hacker can craft a HTML page in such a way that your browser will run malicious code on your computer just by loading that web page.

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). Be sure to upgrade at your earliest convenience.

I still get the occasional question “what is this un-googled chromium“? I wrote two articles about it on the blog a while ago: “How to un-google your Chromium browser experience” and “Sync and share your (Chromium and more) browser data among all your computers“. Check those out!

Cheers, Eric

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