Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Category: Me (Page 16 of 27)

Sadness and loss

August 6, 2013 / / 28 Comments

cat_asleep

This afternoon at 19:15 we had to put our dearest cat SOX to sleep.

She reached the respectable age of 17 years. That is a pretty impressive for a Holy Birman. We got her and her sister when they were only seven weeks old – a kitten so small, she could sit on one hand.

Two years back she was terribly ill and we thought we would lose her. But she fought back and survived her failing kidneys with a special diet, and lots of drinking. Unfortunately, her condition deteriorated rapidly while we were on holiday in Italy, and we drove back in a hurry, ending our holiday prematurely. She had us near her for 30 hours (and we were so glad we could see her alive). But we saw she was suffering and she tried to find remote spots in the house and garden just to lie down – something she never did in the past even when she was sick – and wait for the end. Her condition got much worse today and we could no longer bear to see her in pain.

She has given us an enormous amount of love – and received our love and affection in return. The grief I feel stings like hot needles. That small cat comforted me in difficult times and strange as it may sound, she kept me sane.

Sox, we will be missing you, you wonderful and sweet cat.

A look on the sunny side

May 9, 2013 / / 23 Comments

2013-05-04 15.26.25

It will be obvious by now, that I work somewhat like a manic-depressive person. Bursts of frenzied activity are followed by periods of silence and withdrawal.

After I had worked like a maniac to release a usable version of my Slackware ARMv7 port (creating a git repository, cleaning up build scripts, uploading packages and setting up a local infrastructure to keep all of those easily updated) I was exhausted and my work output went down a lot. I have a day-time job and I do take that seriously… there was no energy left in the evenings to work as much on Slackware as I wanted.

Luckily, I had a short holiday scheduled and during the previous week, I have enjoyed life from the sunny side again. Spending a week in a holiday home with my family, sleeping long hours and walking through the hilly landscape of South-Limburg was something I needed to re-gain fresh energy.

And this week too has its pleasantries. Today is Ascension Day, which is a national holiday here in NL, and my employer gives us another day off tomorrow. Long weekend ahead! Time enough to enjoy my birthday (today), eating cake and warming up under the sun in my garden.

But last week I still managed to release some packages even though I did not write blog entries about it (you can always follow the RSS feed of my repository ChangeLog). New calibre, owncloud client and steamclient packages, and virtualenv which I needed in order to play a little with the Django web framework.

And I added a new version of the icedtea-web program, the webbrowser plugin for Java (works with my OpenJDK packages, either jdk or jre). This is a security update, here are the CVE entries it fixes and it is recommended that you upgrade:

  • CVE-2013-1926, RH916774: Class-loader incorrectly shared for applets with same relative-path.
  • CVE-2013-1927, RH884705: fixed gifar vulnerability
  • CVE-2012-3422, RH840592: Potential read from an uninitialized memory location
  • CVE-2012-3423, RH841345: Incorrect handling of not 0-terminated strings

Furthermore I am using my day off to build the recently released KDE 4.10.3 for Slackware 14.0. This version of KDE landed in slackware-current a few days ago but as a result of my holiday, I was not able to build packages for Slackware 14.0 sooner. Tonight I will write a separate blog post about this when the packages are ready and the repository updated.

Cheers, Eric

Only 24 hours in a day

April 2, 2013 / / 3 Comments

cat_asleep

During the Easter weekend, I have been working on almost 150 SlackBuild script updates for my ARM hardfloat port. That costs time… and with several setbacks like creating a new gcc-4.8.0 compiler package which then refuses to compile anything else; a new glibc-2.17 package which causes segfaults of every binary after installation (an exclusive ARM hardfloat issue apparently); the creation of a new llvm package which was needed for icu4c to compile on an ARM platform took NINE hours to complete, so I had to setup distcc and a new cross-compiler on my AMD Phenom build server to distribute the load… and then it was Easter too!

So, I am a bit behind on other stuff I wanted to do. The new KDE 4.10.2 is around the corner and I am going to provide Slackware 14 packages (Pat will hopefully update the KDE in slackware-curent at the same time). There is also the new LibreOffice 4.0.2 which I want to make available for Slackware 14. Even LibreOffice 3.6.6 was released in the rock-stable old 3.6 branch (for which I am going to create Slackware 13.37 packages). KDE just started compiling here, and that will take most of tomorrow to finish (the 32-bit packages will be created while I am away for work). That means, don’t expect LibreOffice packages before friday.

But what I really want is some more sun, higher day temperatures and an end to this horribly cold and hard East-wind!

Eric

Call for help: Slackware on an ARM Chromebook?

March 19, 2013 / / 37 Comments

Well folks, the ARM-powered Chromebook built by Samsung can finally be bought in the Netherlands, and this raises a hairy question. Should I buy one and have a real-life target for my ARM port of Slackware which has been on the backburner for a year?

As you may remember, I started an ARM port of Slackware which is different from SlackwareARM.The design goals I have set for my own port are:

  1. it should have SlackBuild scripts which are compatible with official Slackware – i.e. Pat Volkerding should be able to just grab an unaltered script for the ARM port and build a 64-bit Slackware package with it
  2. it should target modern ARM architectures. SlackwareARM targets older generations of ARM CPU’s – notably without hardware floating point support. I want to create a port which can be used on “powerful” ARM tablets, and laptops.
  3. it should be a port from scratch and the process should be documented

I bought a TrimSlice ARM computer late 2011 but unfortunately that hardware did not live up to the promise.It is a nice developer box (meaning it builds packages faster than other ARM computers) but it has not become a consumer product.

I have been thinking about buying a tablet as my new target for the ARM port, but there are no interesting hardware choices really which warrant the effort I have to spend on making Slackware work really well on a touch device. There are some tablets which are catering for Open Source OS-es, like The ZaTab, but it is relatively expensive, not too powerful and this too, never became a viable consumer product. The Vivaldi tablet created by KDE developers is still awaiting its birth and I have no idea if this tablet will be more than a gimmick or even vaporware.

And here is that ARM powered ChromeBook! With 7 hours of battery life, no moving parts, fan-less design, a real keyboard and an exceptional screen (I have held one in my hands) it does not come with any local storage of interest… because it runs ChromeOS on a 16 GB SD card, and you are supposed to store and access all your stuff online in a Google Drive. But, if this laptop would run Slackware, you could add a larger SD card, or plug in a USB hard drive and have a very interesting laptop indeed!

Well, here is the catch. I do not have the funds to buy this laptop. Financially it is looking a bit bland here at the moment. There is some donation money coming in every month, but that is a trickle and does not even pay the electricity bill for the server (which is OK since this is not my job, it is my hobby after all).And this laptop has been eyeing at me from its Google web page, and I seriously like it, and like to have one. I know that Stuart Winter (creator of SlackwareARM) bought one for himself and is working on a SlackwareARM boot.

I decided that there is only one way in which I can revive my own ARM port, and build a hard-float ARM image of Slackware with KDE for that ChromeBook. And that is to ask you people for support.



Note that I already received those 300 euros I needed to purchase the ChromeBook… in fact I received three times as much! As explained on the ARM Port page, the additional money will go into the purchase of additional hardware after I finish the ARM port, or earlier if I need more ARM computers to speed up the compiling process.

Yes, a “donate” button. What I propose is that I try to collect the 299 euros in donation money that it will cost to buy the ARM ChromeBook in the Netherlands. The “donate” button above will lead to a PayPal page where you can contribute an amount of money that you can spare. I will create a blog page http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/armport on which I will keep track of the progress and will mention everyone who made a donation to this cause. If you do not want your name listed,  you can tell me so on the donation page.

In return for the donation money, assuming I am able to collect these 299 euros:

  • I will resume my ARM hard-float porting effort (yes, this may affect the update frequency of other packages I maintain).
  • That porting effort will not be “behind the curtains” like it has been so far. I will upload packages and scripts and will welcome ideas and feedback
  • The Chromebook will be the target hardware to build a bootable Slackware image.
  • I will upload the from-scratch cross-compiler and minirootfs which I created already, to start with
  • I am going to document on docs.slackware.com about porting to a new architecture from scratch.
  • I will also tickle Pat Volkerding’s interest in the ARM port.

I do think that this ARM ChromeBook might be a real viable consumer product worth buying by more than just developers and geeks, and if Slackware runs on it that would be awesome!

What do you think? Am I crazy to ask you for support money? And what if I do get money, but more than 300 euros? Should I try to buy another ARM product (like, a tablet) or return the surplus money? If I fail to collect those 300 euros, people will get their donations back in any case. Feel free to spread the link to this page so it gains some more attraction.

Eric

Half-Life Dedicated Server

March 9, 2013 / / 14 Comments

half-life-logo I have written down how I configured my Half-Life Dedicated Server (HLDS) in a new Slackware Documentation article. You can find the article here: http://docs.slackware.com/howtos:software:halflife_dedicated_server

The reason why I felt compelled to write this, was that the information you can find using Google, and the information on Valve’s own developer Wiki, is not 100% accurate or even outdated.

Writing an article also allowed me to add some tips, like starting the game server in “screen”, and explaining how you can auto-start the game server when your Slackware server boots, and keep the game files updated using a daily cron job.

I hope that the new SlackDocs article will trigger fellow Slackers to create their own HLDS server, and invite each other for some fragging. Hint: you can use the Slackware SteamCommunity group to schedule events like these.

Next on the TODO list is documenting how I created the “minimal Slackware” 32-bits virtual machine (less than 500 MB of Slackware installation footprint) which I use to run my own HLDS at home.

And after that, I still have to document how I setup a TeamSpeak server on the same virtual machine, which can be used for quality in-game voice chat. Lots left to do when I get bored again…

Cheers, Eric

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