Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Author: alienbob (Page 9 of 175)

Calibre 6.14.1 – I finally made it past 6.11…

April 3, 2023 / / 10 Comments

News for people who no longer read paper books!
Well 😉 I guess everyone needs paper from time to time, but in all honesty, my eyes are getting worse and an E-reader is the optimal device for me when I want to read books – I can enlarge the font and it has a night light.

Calibre 6.x is a really cool-looking and versatile graphical Python3 application, using PyQt to build the graphical interface based on Qt6 widgets. It is the application to use if you have a collection of E-books and an E-reader, and want a decent library management program to move these E-books onto your E-reader. In addition, it offers a good ebook-viewer application for your computer and even an impressively powerful E-book editor.

As you may know, I have been creating native Slackware packages for Calibre for many years. However I had some issues with the compilation of any Calibre release past version 6.11.0. Kovid Goyal, the developer of this e-book management software, removed some of the content from his release tarballs and since version 6.12.0 requires that the build process generates these required files instead.

This meant that I had to study the changes in the Python files which are used to build Calibre to discover how the missing pieces where getting downloaded and compiled during a ‘bootstrap’ build. That took a while but I found a way to get these sources in place before starting the build.
So now again, Calibre packages for Slackware 15.0 and -current will be getting refreshes in my repository.

Download the new Calibre 6.14.1 packages from my repository or any mirror (like my own US mirror). No external dependencies, works out of the box on Slackware 15.0 or -current.

 

Have fun! Eric

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

Chromium (-ungoogled) 111 packaged for Slackware 15.0 and -current

March 10, 2023 / / 9 Comments

You’ll have noticed – as indicated earlier, the Chromium packages for Slackware 14.2 are no longer being updated.
Today I made available the Slackware packages available for Chromium 111.0.5563.64, and they are accompanied by the un-googled version. This latest release squashes a massive 40 vulnerabilities, none labeled critical, but it’s wise to keep your systems uptodate nevertheless.
These new packages are targeting Slackware 15.0 and newer.

Enjoy! Eric

LibreOffice 7.5.1 packages for Slackware 15.0 and -current

March 10, 2023 / / 17 Comments

I skipped LibreOffice 7.5.0 because I was too busy at the time, but last week there was a release of LibreOffice 7.5.1. I got stuck in my attempts to change my chromium SlackBuild script to run more efficiently on Slackware 15.0, so it seemed like a good time to work on something else than a Google product.

But as with many software products that make a version jump, updating the Libreoffice build script was not completely trivial. Not as bad though as with Chromium. Eventually, I was able to come up with nice working binaries and I have already uploaded those to my repository and its US and UK mirrors.

These packages are targeting Slackware 15.0 and newer.
Note that my libreoffice package depends on openjdk11.

The link above to the release announcement also lists the most important new features that come with LibreOffice 7.5.x. Well worth checking out.

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