My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Back from holidays, some package updates

Just came back from a short stay in Brittany, France where we stayed in a mobile home. Lots of sun, and lots of sleep to catch up on while being there!

While I was gone enjoying some freedom, interesting things happened in computerland. Slackware’s development reached the “Slackware 14 Beta 1” mark (see the “Sun Jul 22 22:38:36 UTC 2012” entry in the current ChangeLog). And the VideoLAN developers released an update to the VLC player. I am sure that there were other things that will grip me when I read them, but I have not been home long enough to notice 🙂 In the meantime, you may want to read about a man and his software which I do not care to see getting a grip on Slackware: systemd and slackware’s future … just to keep you focused on what’s good and what’s evil.

First Slackware of course.

The “Beta 1” update was pretty huge, as it involved the introduction of XFCE 4.10 and all the dependencies that required. The changes of “Wed Jul 25 02:02:40 UTC 2012” have fixed some of the expected fall-out which results from big and intrusive updates in slackware-current. It should be safe for all you beta testers out there to play with this Beta. But please make sure that you start with upgrading the “slackpkg” package and then run “slackpkg update” again!

I took the opportunity to refresh my set of pre-converted multilib packages for slackware64-current, and added “l/libffi” to the “massconvert32.sh” script (part of my own compat32-tools package) since people were noticing an error about missing libffi during the boot of a multilib slackware64-current system.

Then VLC.

I quickly built new packages for the 2.0.3 release which I have already uploaded. This is not a spectacular update, mostly beneficial to OS/X users and also refreshing a lot of UI translations. Note that I maintain the usual split in “restricted” and “unrestricted” functionality: the packages which I host on slackware.com are not able to encode MP3 and AAC audio (that version of my VLC package is of course perfectly able to play back those audio formats) due to software patent restrictions which apply in the US. For un-crippled packages you should head over to any mirror which carries the “restricted_slackbuilds” repository, like http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/ .

Have fun!

Eric

 

Edit: I forgot to mention that I also uploaded a new version of Calibre – the weekly update cycle was broken because of my holidays. If you use an “old” version of Calibre and do not want it to quit every week when it checks for updates and finds a new version, you can simply disable that check for new releases.

20 Comments

  1. Mike Langdon (mlangdn)

    Thanks, Eric – and welcome home. I’m going on vacation myself this Friday. Going camping at Rough River Lake with most of my kids and grandkids. Swimming and Fishing – my cellphone the only tech taken along. Won’t be much sleep time for the weekend, though 🙂

  2. escaflown

    Welcome back Eric!

  3. Marcelo

    Thanks, thanks very much. Is running a very nice. | Java is included? | Again, thanks.

  4. Helios

    Will kde-4.9rc1 still work with the new update of openssl ?

  5. alienbob

    Hi Helios

    I have not been back long enough to test that. I could upgrade my work laptop but that is running Slackware’s own KDE packages. My desktop in the living room is running KDE 4.9 RC1 but that one must still be upgraded to Slackware 14 Beta 1.

    You can just try and see what happens. I did not get a bug report yet.

    Eric

  6. alienbob

    Hi Marcelo

    Java has been removed from Slackware – if you need Java you can either download and install my OpenJDK package, or download the official Oracle binaries, and wrap those into a Slackware package.

    Perhaps I will maintain a SlackBuild script for wrapping the Oracle jre and jdk on http://slackbuilds.org/ when the new Slackware 14 has been released. That way you can easily install a JRE or JDK just like the one in previous releases of Slackware.

    At this point, it looks like Java (in the form of OpenJDK) will not get added back to Slackware in any official capacity.

    Eric

  7. Helios

    I was asking this question about openssl because some kde packages in slackware-current’s kde-4.8.4 have been updated together with openssl, and several programs (like kaddressbook) are linked with libssl.0, which is now changed to libssl.1.
    I remember also a little problem with convertpkg-compat32, which failed with a unique package : cxxlibs-6.0.17-i486-1.txz
    Anyway, you know probably this already, because I did not see cxxlibs in your already made packages.

    I get the following:

    -root-> convertpkg-compat32 -i cxxlibs-6.0.17-i486-1.txz -d .
    Converting package cxxlibs (version 6.0.17) to cxxlibs-compat32-6.0.17-x86_64-1.txz (cxxlibs-compat32)
    Exploding package /d1/cxxlibs-6.0.17-i486-1.txz in current directory:
    ./
    install/
    install/slack-desc
    install/doinst.sh
    usr/
    usr/lib/
    usr/lib/libstdc++.so.5.0.7
    usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6.0.17

    An installation script was detected in ./install/doinst.sh, but
    was not executed.
    find: usr/i486-slackware-linux’: No such file or directory
    /usr/sbin/convertpkg-compat32 FAILED at line 247

  8. alienbob

    Hi Helios

    If you check http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.9_Release_Schedule you’ll see that the final tagging in the source repository of KDE SC 4.9 is about to happen. If there is anything really broken in my 4.9.rc1 packages then I can rebuild individual packages, but I will wait for bug reports first. I hope to be able to access source tarballs for KDE 4.9 soon so that I can start compiling that instead.

    About the error you see in convertpmg-compat32, I had never seen that before. I will look into it.

    Eric

  9. Sébastien Ballet

    Hello,

    The problem with the package “cxxlibs” has also been reported by brox at linuxquestions.org (http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/bug-in-convertpkg-compat32-4175417032/). I checked this and found a small problem with the latest “cxxlibs” which has no directory “usr/i486-slackware-linux”. I posted a patch at linuxquestions.org, but it seems that you didn’t read this thread. Sorry, I should have send you this patch directly.

    SeB

  10. alienbob

    Hi Sébastien

    I was unable to read all the new and updated threads on LQ.org 🙂 But I will have a look at that particular one. Thanks,

    Eric

  11. Sébastien Ballet

    In the latest multilib changelog, you are wondering if someone remembers why you have added xfce.

    I remember that after you added xfce, I updated the 32-bit layer descriptor for compat32pkg and I added to it, the note below (taken from your multilib changelog):

    # Compatibility note (thanks to Csaba Biegl):
    # You will have to edit “/etc/xfce/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc” and remove/comment the
    # line:
    # export GTK_PATH=”$GTK_PATH:/usr/lib64/gtk-2.0″
    # This is apparently needed for 32bit GTK plugin search. There are no negative
    # side effects from removing that line, GTK (64bit as well as 32bit) does not
    # need it.

    But, as I was sure there was something else, I checked this. In fact, without xfce-compat32, when you start a 32-bit GTK software from the command line, you get a lot of warning, like below :

    (firefox-bin:4948): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: “xfce”,

    (thunderbird-bin:7123): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: “xfce”,

    As there’s no other trouble without xfce-compat32, I see no reason to not remove it from the multilib.

    Greetings.


    SeB

  12. Willy Sudiarto Raharjo

    @eric:
    KDE 4.9 source packages has been uploaded to the private repos known only to packagers and it will be released next Wednesday, so i guess the next update will be 4.9 Final

  13. Marcelo

    Thanks for the reply, Eric. I was honored.
    Ps.: Was removed the “mousepad” from xfce4.10?

  14. Troy Unrau

    Hey Eric, just one thing. Your calibre package doesn’t run on -current anymore, due to imagemagick major version bumps, afaict. I’m happy to recompile it, but it raises the question: how long until you have slackware-14 packages for things? 😀

  15. alienbob

    Hi Willy

    Yes, I know, I am on the same mailing list as you probably 😉 I had already downloaded the sources when that post was made and the 64-bit packages have already been compiled.
    The official 4.9.0 source release is next wednesday so it will take a while before everyone can install those new packages.

    Eric

  16. alienbob

    Hi Troy

    Yes, calibre has not been working for a while now on Slackware-current. Rebuilding will fix that. If you move ${TMP}/calibre_pythondeps-$(cat /etc/slackware-version)-x86_64.tar.bz2 into the directory with the SlackBuild script then the next time a calibre compilation will be a _lot_ faster since it won’t have to compile all the Python deps. Actually, on Slackware 14 we already have a compatible Python, so an internal Python is no longer needed for the calibre package anyway.

    I have some other packages with the same runtime problems – tigervnc is an example of that.
    Probably I will start creating and uploading Slackware 14 packages once we reach a Release Candidate status. However, it doubles the time spent on compiling and packaging, and I am dangerously close to not finding enough time and virtual machines to compile everything I feel responsible for… so the period in which I compile packages for both 13.37 and 14 will be as short as possible.

    Eric

  17. Willy Sudiarto Raharjo

    @Troy
    compiling Calibre without Python is REALLY FAST, compared to build the whole packages with internal Python.
    I have simplified Eric’s SlackBuild to build Calibre only since i have other packages installed on my machine and it took less than 1 minute to complete 🙂
    The calibre should be easier to install when Slackware 14 has been released since one of the primary component is already included.

    @Eric
    That’s good news about KDE. Waiting for the official announcement…

  18. alienbob

    Willy, Troy

    I have a full set of dependency packages for Calibre, compiled on -current, and a Calibre package which does not have an internal Python compiler plus modules. I will test those tonight and then upload all of it if Calibre works on Slackware 14 beta.

    I chose not to simplify the calibre.SlackBuild since my server is running Slackware 13.37 and I want the script to be capable of building the “big package” for several months after the release of Slackware 14. If the script detects python27 on your system, then it will automatically skip the python stuff anyway, and just compile calibre. You will have to have all the dependencies installed then, of course.

    Eric

  19. alienbob

    Calibre plus a full set of dependencies for (what will become) Slackware 14 is now available in my repository.

    Eric

  20. Troy Unrau

    Thanks Eric!

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