My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything
I caught a bad case of it, I have been slowly deteriorating during the week and not accepting it, and I was finally felled on thursday evening.
If you wondered, why no new calibre packages, why no talk about the upcoming libreoffice or KDE, well that is why. I am unable to work on computers right now.
See you soon. Eric
Hi folks
This is the last day of 2012 and I want to take the opportunity to thank you all for reading my blog posts and your support in whatever way. Some good people sent me donation money through PayPal for which I am extremely glad since these times are not at all good, financially speaking. I was about to give up this summer, but your support allowed me to keep paying the bills for the build box and compensate to my family for all the hours I was not available for them. Thanks also to the generous person who keeps hosting my taper mirror for free – which is also the home of the Slackware Documentation Project coincidentally.
The birth of the Slackware Documentation Project was the highlight of 2012 for me, it gave me a lot of fresh energy to see so many of you reach out and bring together precious documentation for new and experienced Slackers alike.
I hope to see you all back in good health in the New Year!
The year has had its ups and downs for Slackware, one of the least enjoyable moments was when the Slackware.com webserver died and we were without an “internet sign post” for a while. That caused a stir for sure 🙂 I was glad to see the response from Slackers around the world and the expression of faith in the future of our favorite distro.
As the year ends, we are going strong as ever again, with Slackware 14 running on a lot of computers. Let’s see what 2013 brings. At least KDE 4.9.5 packages are waiting on my server for the public release on the 2nd of January 2013. They will not show up in Slackware-current (probably) but you will find them in my ktown repository. I will post here once they are available..
Remember, Slackware will always be free, but please consider a small donation or buy a copy of the Slackware installation media in order to support Pat Volkerding financially.
Finally, I want you to watch a bit of video before you head out into the night and light the fireworks. Be careful, especially you young people!
Cheers, Eric
The host machine which is running the virtual machine “taper.alienbase.nl” and “docs.slackware.com” has malfunctioned.
According to the story told by that server’s owner, the power cord got loose during the re-build of the RAID array after the guy replaced a failing hard drive.
After a power-on the RAID volume refused to mount…
It looks like the host server may be up and running at the end of the day, if the owner manages to recover from the partition corruption. In that case, my mirror server taper.alienbase.nl and the Slackware Documentatoin Project’s Wiki docs.slackware.com may be online a little later, provided that I can access the server and start the Virtual Machine.
In the worst case, the server will not be able to recover and I have to find a location where I can restore my daily backup of the Wiki content. It’s just bad co-incidence that I will travel to India tomorrow early morning. I have no idea how fast I would be able to arrange for a new host, fix the DNS entries, setup apache and start the Wiki… for the docs.slackware.com hostname I need to involve Pat.
More news later.
Eric
Update Fri Nov 23 18:55:29 UTC 2012 –
The server is back up! The server admin fixed it, no data was lost.
The KDE team has just made the sources available for the first beta of KDE 4.10. It will take until next week to release that beta1 to the public but I had already decided to skip the Betas for the KDE releases and wait until a Release Candidate. I am afraid that I have very little time for absorbing any more time-consuming projects… like getting a KDE Beta built and tested for Slackware.
In exactly one week I will be traveling to India. Not a holiday, but a business trip to spend a week with my helpdesk team. I will give some training there and talk about “our” side of the work in the Netherlands where I work for the IT department on the ASML campus. My visit should be beneficial to our helpdesk team members who have never actually seen anything of the customer they are working so hard for. There will be plenty of room for socializing as well, and I hope to see something of Hyderabad and its suurroundings at least. I will try and order a meal of the original Hyderabadi Biryani, of which I have a recipe in my own blog as well. And pictures of course… I want to make a lot of photos while I am there.
But, preparation time for that trip is very short, because my employer gave an approval only this week, and that leaves less time for Slackware related stuff. As I said, no new KDE 4.10 beta packages. I have no idea if I will be on time with the KDE 4.9.4 packages which are due early December.
What I did manage, was to update my multilib repository for Slackware 14.0 (something I had forgotten when I updated the -current packages) so that you can try out the new Skype for Linux on a multilib Slackware 14.0. I will try using Skype while visiting India. And I will package a new version of Sigil, the EPUB book editor. For those who regularly update to my newer Calibre e-book management packages – there was no new release this friday because the developer Kovid Goyal took a week off (he lives in Mumbai, India and they had Diwali Festival over there).
I can’t leave you without at least informing you about a new and promising fork of UDEV software. Initiated by Gentoo developers, they are calling this “udev-ng“. You may have noticed in the past that I do not speak favourably about the band of Redhat developers who are trying to destroy anything that is not Redhat by forcing SystemD on everyone – alienating everyone they should be co-operating with and killing software which other distros depend on. With the prospect of an independent fork of UDEV (which Lennart Poettering and friends have merged into systemd with the intent of dropping support for it later) we in Slackware land stand a better chance of keeping systemd out of our distro. In fact this is the second fork of UDEV, I hope the teams will be working together.
Cheers, Eric
Hi folks!
I wanted to bring you up to speed about the recent activities on the Slackware Documentation Project and provide you with some statistics.
The Slackware Documentation Project is now active for exactly 2 months. I think we are a lucky bunch that we were given the opportunity to use a hostname in the slackware.com domain – thanks Pat!.And thanks to the anonymous benefactor who pays for server hosting and bandwidth – I could not do this without you.
I want to thank everyone who participated in the LinuxQuestions.org thread which inspired the birth of the project – http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/slackware-documentation-project-4175422561/ is now a sticky thread on the Slackware forum. I want to thank the people who stepped up in the early stages of the project, to volunteer as staff editors, and I particularly want to thank all of you who are creating the content in this Wiki. If we want to find ourselves “a place in history” we need inspired writers.
We have some great HOWTO’s currently and it is rewarding to watch the discussions on the (sic) discussion pages which help the continuous improvement of the articles.
I am very excited by the work that is being done to translate the english pages into a variety of other languages. I don’t think I ever saw a Slackware related site which had pages available in 12 different languages! Thanks to all who care enough to do the hard work of translating and thus enabling whole new communities to get familiar with Slackware Linux.
Matthew Fillpot completed the huge task of running the complete Slackware Essentials Book (http://slackbook.org/beta/) through a DocBook parser which he wrote himself, creating a Wiki version of the Book which is now an integral part of our site. Thanks to Alan Hicks for changing the new Book’s license and thereby allowing us to create a derived work. Any updates to the Book’s content will be fed back into the original of course.
We revamped the front page of the Wiki. It is the page which most visitors will open first. Therefore it should be clean, concise, and show relevant information. We decided to highlight the information which is the most dynamic – your contributions! The HOWTOs pages are now clearly outlined on the homepage, and there is also a shortlist of recent changes to the existing articles, an invitation to click through.
We currently have 180 registered user accounts in the Wiki and 101 people subscribed to the slackdocs mailing list http://lists.alienbase.nl/mailman/listinfo/slackdocs . All in all pretty impressive numbers for such a young project. The Wiki has some public statistics at http://docs.slackware.com/slackdocs:stats and some non-public statistics pages of which I made a PDF print.
We are barely starting… and I would like to see the volume of information grow steadily. How will we achieve that? Well; I would like all of you to go through your private notes. If you know of something that you struggled with, found the solution for and wrote down so that you would not forget – that is exactly the type of information we would like you to add to the Wiki ! Also, you may be a member of a local LUG in your area. Drop the word on the Slackware Documentation Project! And what about your mail closing signature, or discussion forum signature?
Perhaps you can add a link to the SlackDocs Wiki there. Spreading the word about the project, is what will give it the momentum to make it grow bigger.
Thanks for listening.
Eric
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