Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Category: Me (Page 23 of 27)

Wondering how to spend my computer cycles

July 30, 2010 / / 15 Comments

I am beginning to feel the lack of computing power in my attic…

There is a pending KDE 4.5.0 release, which needs to be built for slackware-current. Then there is also VLC 1.1.2 which was released a few days ago… and those packages need to be built for Slackware 13.1 (so that they can join my main repository). I have only one “build box” which is fairly old and sporting a CPU without hardware virtualization capabilities.

Decisions, decisions… there’s only 24 hours in a day.

So I decided to start with building a test set of KDE 4.5.0 (the sources of which I already have) because that will be a big event for a lot of people, and leave the new VLC for another time. Don’t worry! Linux users will find that the 1.1.2 release of VLC does not offer anything worthwhile, except perhaps for some bugfixes in the DVB (digital video) module. The VLC 1.1.1 packages which I have created for Slackware are still very much OK.

Having to build packages for Slackware 13.1 as well as -current, and for two architectures (32-bit and 64-bit) is proving a bit too much for that old computer (which happens to be my home desktop as well), so I decided to use the donation money that has been accumulating and order an Athlon II X4 640 boxed CPU, along with an Asus M4N68T motherboard and 8 GB of RAM, completed with a 2 TB SATA hard drive. Once all that arrives on my doorstep, I will assemble a full computer using the case I have here (with a motherboard that caught fire last month because of a crappy condensator). That machine will become my new server.

Thanks to all of you who took the trouble to click my PayPal button – you know who you are, even if I did not thank you in person. Your gracious gifts will be spent with the purpose of making Slackware an even better experience.

By the way – I intend to use qemu-kvm to run a load of virtual machines on that computer, so that it will be easier to build in parallel. I have been considering VMware, VirtualBox and Xen as well. I decided against VMware for being closed-source. VirtualBox could still find its way onto the computer at some later stage; I decided against it because of the mixed license model where you get additional functionality only in the closed-source version. And Xen, well I am quite interested in how that works and performs, but unfortunately it requires a patched “xenified” kernel for the host and Linux guest. That was one bridge too far for me.

Nevertheless, there was a recent post from Chris Abela on the slackbuilds.org mailing list about the “The Xenification of Slack” which will most certainly help Slackware users get jumpstarted into the Xen world. Worth checking out, there is a tarball attached to that post with scripts and configuration files. Well done.

Enough of this, time for a beer.

Cheers, Eric

Miscellaneous packages (vlc,wine,wiipresent)

July 21, 2010 / / 12 Comments

Hi!

Just a quick message before I hit the bed,

I uploaded some Slackware packages for your consumption.

  • vlc – the new stable release 1.1.1 became available for download today and my packages are now ready to be grabbed at http://slackware.org.uk/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/ (this UK mirror hosts the packages with export restrictions – they contain mp3 and aac audio encoders) or http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/vlc/ . Several bugs got fixed and features added. See the VLC ChangeLog for details.
  • wiipresent – this package needed a rebuild (actually the supporting libwiimote needed a rebuild) because of the updated BlueZ stack in Slackware 13.1.
    I use the wiipresent software for presentations (duh)… It allows me to use my son’s Wii controller (the wiimote) as a pointing/navigation device so that I can walk the stage comfortably.
  • wine – this was recently released in a stable 1.2 version, after lots and lots of release candidates. Please note that my wine packages will only run 32-bit Windows binaries. Even the package I created for Slackware64 ! If someone convinces me that it is worth the effort to add support for 64-bit Windows to my wine package, I will add that, but not before. Also note that wine on Slackware64 requires multilib. You could build wine on a pure 64-bit Slackware but then it would only run 64-bit Windows binaries. That is not what I chose to offer you.

I hope you enjoy these updates!

Eric

Slackware 13.1 is here

May 24, 2010 / / 10 Comments

Just to add another message to the turmoil of cheering blog posts 🙂

Slackware 13.1 has been released today.

Read all about it in the official announcement or  read the ANNOUNCE.TXT directly.

As usual, it is recommended (but not mandatory) to buy a copy of the DVD or CD-set which helps funding the development of the distro (no, I am not getting any money out of that). The ISOs are of course available for free, and Bittorrent is the fastest way to get them: http://www.slackware.com/getslack/torrents.php

Alphageek’s “sligdo files” are a very fast way of creating byte-exact copies of the official ISOs in case you already have a local mirror-copy of the full Slackware 13.1 tree. The ISOs you create with sligdo (http://alphageek.dyndns.org/linux/sligdo/) will pass the GPG verification test. I just hope he will have those sligdo files ready for downlooad in time. If not, I have copies here: http://alien.slackbook.org/sligdo/ .

If you want to know more about how to create a Slackware USB installer if your computer does not have a CD or DVD drive, read this older article of mine: ??http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/installing-slackware-using-usb-thumb-drive/ – or for the Windows users: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/welcome-windows-user/

If you install or upgrade to the 64-bit version of Slackware 13.1 and want to have a system which is capable of running 32-bit software too (Slackware64 itself is a pure 64-bit distro), then you can make your Slackware64 multilib – read all about the process (which is fairly easy and straight-forward): http://alien.slackbook.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=slackware:multilib

To celebrate the occasion, I have created Slackware 13.1 packages for the VideoLAN Player (VLC) with added support for the new WebM video format which has the potential of becoming the default  video format in the implementation of the HTML5 “video” tag. Packages here (look for vlc-1.1.0.rc – at the moment of publishing this post I am still building them on a fresh Slackware 13.1…): http://www.slackware.org.uk/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/ . An example .webm video file is here if you want to try: http://www.jbkempf.com/~jb/yt3.remux.webm with thanks to Jean-Baptiste Kempf of the Videolan team.

Have fun! Eric

Preparing for a release is tedious

May 18, 2010 / / 6 Comments

Now that Slackware is nearing a new release (that would be 13.1 of course), it is again obvious how tedious this process of finalizing is. Even though I am not the maintainer, just someone on the side (albeit pretty close to the fire) there are so many small issues to be taken care of… I am glad about all the people installing the release candidate and reporting their findings through http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/ , Freenode’s ##slackware channel and other means (email, this and other  blogs). It’s typical that there is always a flurry of bug reports right before a release. Apparently many folks out there are triggered by the message “this is Release Candidate…” and decide that Slackware-current is stable enough to try it out.

I welcome any remarks about installing slackware-current over a network (NFS/HTTP/FTP/Samba) and using LVM/LUKS. If anything should be added to the README files, this is the moment, and it will pass soon.

There are (again) several items on my private TODO list which I did not find time for during this release cycle… I want to write a script to create a Live DVD out of the installation ISO (for demonstration purposes) – nothing like the Linux-Live scripts which enable you to convert a running Linux system to a Live CD… those scripts are awfully complicated and I want to have something basic. I also wanted to work on the mkinitrd_command_generator.sh and the liloconfig scripts – I want to make it easier to create an initrd.gz during installation, for use with the generic kernel and especially in those cases where an initrd is required like when you are using LVM, or LUKS encryption.

Something needs to be left for the future I guess, so that I have something to look forward to 🙂

On the other hand, I am glad that I managed to update the usbimg2disk.sh script though so that you can create a complete USB installer for Slackware quite easily now (without destroying the data on your USB stick even, if you want). Read my old blog post for usage instructions. The move to KDE SC 4.4.3 in Slackware 13.1 is something I am delighted by as well – I had not thought Pat Volkerding would accept this version into 13.1. Perhaps I should now shift my attention to the development of KDE 4.5 packages…

On another note, the http://slackbuilds.org/ site has closed the submission form in anticipation of the new Slackware release. The admin team needs time to get the database ready for accepting new entries and there are very interesting new features coming up. Be sure to watch the site closely in the near future!

Have fun, Eric

Musings on Software Development With Linux

February 26, 2010 / / 2 Comments

A few weeks back Laurent Parenteau asked me to contribute a post to his series “Meet the Linux family” on the blog “Software Development with Linux“. Well here it is: http://laurentparenteau.com/blog/2010/02/meet-the-linux-family-eric-hameleers/ . Nothing spectacular, but just enough controversy (I hope… I wrote “Steve Balmer” and “Eric Raymond” on the same page) to make it interesting for you to read.

Eric

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