In a Skype blog post yesterday, the announcement was made that the latest version of Skype has dropped support for the ALSA sound system and that Linux users are expected to use PulseAudio exclusively from now on.
Boo Hoo Microsoft, for killing this itsy bit of Linux compatibility in your closed-source product.
I guess for Slackware users it is game over for Skype calls. Time to find out if we can come up with a solution that bundles private libraries for PulseAudio so that we do not have to pollute the system directories with it.
Did I make you jump by showing the intrusive banner?
Today marks the start of a campaign, called Reset the Net, sponsored by digital rights groups and well-known Internet companies. It is meant to encourage both users of the Internet and companies with an active presence there, to take measures to prevent getting their data snooped by surveillance agencies. The campaign focuses on the promotion of privacy-enhancing tools.
Today’s launch of the campaign is not coïncidentally linked to the first anniversary of the publication of the leaked NSA documents through news articles online and on paper.
Last month saw the HeartBleed bug, today we are confronted with yet another bloody serious leak in OpenSSL., only a few days after the disclosiure of another serious leak in GnuTLS, the OpenSSL alternative. The Internet is never a safe place. Slackware is a fairly sane OS security-wise but the highest risk always comes from the user of that OS.
When you are on-line, act consciously, and think before you do. Guard your privacy and respect that of others. No, Edward Snowden is not a traitor. He sacrificed a lot in order to get the truth out there, and we should have respect for that, too.
In an earlier article I have explained how you can use pipelight to run a Windows-based browser plugin seamlessly in your Linux browser. This solution makes use of a modified Wine under the hood. This way, you can for instance display web sites using Microsoft’s SilverLight technology (many dutch schools use a proprietary SilverLight based pupil management system), or use the Windows Flash Player which is much more up to date than Adobe’s plugin for Firefox.
The pipelight plugin loader also supports the Widevine content decryption module, which is used to decrypt a DRM-protected Flash video stream. Widevine is used by UPC‘s service to subscribers to watch television channels on your computer: Horizon TV. I pride myself to be the initiator for getting widevine support added to pipelight because I am a UPC subscriber, but when it actually got added, I found out that I could not make it work with Horizon TV. Bummer!
After a lot of frustration I accidentally stumbled across a thread on the UPC community forum, where cause of the issue was explained and the solution was provided.
The widevine plugin as installed by pipelight is actually too new! In order to make Horizon TV work in a Linux browser, you need an older version of the Widevine DLL. That older version is still available for download, but to be safe I made a copy.
These are the steps you need to perform to make it work: Download the Widevine plugin for Firefox (an XPI file); unzip it in order to extract the DLL file it contains; and then copy the DLL file into the wine-pipelight prefix where Widevine has been installed – this will overwrite the newer (but non-functional) version of the DLL with the older (but working) version.
<rant> After three compilation failures (each setting me back several hours) I must say this:
Whenever I have to bump a LibreOffice package – and perhaps due to moving up from Slackware 14.0 to 14.1 for compiling – it annoys the hell out of me that there are so many unexpected build failures. Not because I cannot fix them, but because every iteration of a LibreOffice compilation attempt costs another few hours. And there’s only so many hours between coming home from work and falling over because of sleep deprivation.
I am afraid that it will take some time before I can produce proper LibreOffice 4.2.0 packages for you. They will be available for Slackware 14.1 and newer . If you are running Slackware 14.0 then you’ll have to stick with LibreOffice 4.1.x (32-bit, 64-bit) for which I will build new packages soon (4.1.5 is around the corner). Users of Slackware 13.37 can still enjoy LibreOffice 3.6.7 (32-bit,64-bit).
In the meantime I am baking a fresh bread for tomorrow morning, so that I get at least something useful out of this frustrating evening.
When it comes to audio and sounds in Slackware, we’re happy to have ALSA as the sound subsystem. It works reliably, and has done so ever since it replaced OSS in Slackware all those years ago. In due course ALSA got capable of dynamically mixing multiple sound sources – which is basically what a sound server does, too. We were never plagued with the issues of other distros when they abandoned ALSA for PulseAudio.
When the Arts sound daemon of KDE was deprecated and finally removed with the release of KDE4, Slackware was left without a sound “server” that ran out of the box. We still have ESD, the Enlightened Sound Daemon but that one has limited use because of the wrapper programs it needs.
There are however scenarios where you wish Slackware had some sort of audio server. Until now, the only times when that thought crossed my mind it was related to streaming audio over a network – think of remote desktop sessions and virtual machines. I may write some more about that topic in a future post because I think I have the solution now – read on.
A more immediate need arose when I went looking for software that can record videos of my Slackware desktop – individual program windows and gameplay footage. My son is a huge Minecraft fan and wants to be able to do in Slackware what he already does with Fraps in Windows. My intention is to task him with creating some Slackware “end-user” videos to attract newcomers to the distro 🙂
It turns out that there really is not all that many good desktop video recording software in Linux land. I have tried recordmydesktop and like it well enough (that is how it ended up in Slackware’s “/extra” section) but it does not deliver stellar videos, in particular I don’t think it is suited for recording gameplay. It also produces OGG video only, which is OK since that gives you the only free and open video format and codecs… but I believe this design decision limits my options too much.
I read up on ArsTechnica’s attempts to record gameplay footage on SteamOS. To this day, the ArsTechnica folk have not found a way to record the audio of a game… apparently it is not as easy as you might think, to record OpenGL games. Programs like FFMPEG and VLC are able to record (parts of) your desktop but it is cumbersome and also does not deliver high-quality video with properly synced audio. These programs are not capable of intercepting OpenGL renders either, which limits their use.
So I went looking… and came across GLC, an ALSA & OpenGL recording software for Linux which was inspired by Fraps and Yukon, but it seems mostly abandoned by its author. Then there also is SimpleScreenRecorder, a relatively new piece of work by Maarten Baert. The program uses FFMPEG’s codecs to allow you to record audio and video into any format supported by the locally installed version of ffmpeg. It supports the recording of ALSA sound sources (think of a microphone). The word “simple” in its name only characterizes the ease-of-use, not the featureset! And it has a Qt-based GUI which nicely blends into my KDE desktop. By means of an OpenGL injection library it also supports direct recording of OpenGL renders (read: games). That should produce superior videos compared to merely recording the desktop window (because that produces lower frame rate videos or lower quality).
Unfortunately it turned out that SimpleScreenRecorder was not capable of recording my Slackware desktop’s sound, and therefore game videos are silent.
That is a show stopper… apparently you need a sound server like PulseAudio in order to record the audio as well. I am not prepared to install PulseAudio on Slackware – as you are well aware, this is a personal issue I have with the PA author and the way he writes code. So I investigated further, and found out that the unreleased GIT sources of SimpleScreenRecorder support JACK as a new sound source next to ALSA (and PulseAudio). I built the program from its GIT sources and then went on to learn about JACK Audio Connection Kit. I knew that JACK is primarily used by audio professionals and musicians because of its low-latency core design. But as it goes with versatile programs, it is inherently difficult to grasp its concepts and complex to configure. But I persevered and ultimately found a way to configure JACK on my desktop, and reconfigure my ALSA setup so that all the programs that I use can still emit sound, and SimpleScreenRecorder is now capable of recording video and audio! I put a demo video online which I recorded for the intro sequence from the Metro: Last Light game.
As you can see, the game stutters a bit, but that is not caused by the recording software – it’s my desktop PC which is just not fast enough for the game.
My next post will be about how I built and configured JACK, and what I had to change in my ALSA configuration so that for instance Steam games (using SDL for audio) and MineCraft (using OpenAL for audio) would still make sounds.
In the meantime, if you want to try SimpleScreenRecorder, there’s a couple of dependencies you need to install as well. SimpleScreenRecorder was built against ffmpeg (version 2.1 to be precise – please note that upgrades of ffmpeg will usually break a lot of applications that depend on it due to a change in library versions). Also, the package which I released has been built against jack – even if you do not plan on using it, you’ll have to install it… or you can rebuild SimpleScreenRecorder yourself.
If you want to use SimpleScreenRecorder to record 32-bit OpenGL programs (Steam games, WINE based games) and are running a 64-bit Slackware, it will have to be a multilib system and you will have to use the “convertpkg-compat32″ script (part of my compat32-tools package) to convert and install the 32-bits “compat32” versions of the simplescreenrecorder, ffmpeg and jack packages as well as the 64-bit versions.
If you want to try and record a Steam game without the Steam windows being visible (those are also rendered in OpenGL), you’ll definitely have to read these instructions: http://www.maartenbaert.be/simplescreenrecorder/recording-steam-games/#native-steam-for-linux because currently it involves some manual tweaking to get this working (I expect that this will get easier in time). Judging by his Wiki, Maarten is responsive to the users of his program and is able to write meaningful documentation.
NOTICE: My multilib versions of gcc and glibc have been integrated into the core Slackware distro. Slackware-current as of 30 August 2024 the 64-bit version of Slackware ships gcc and glibc packages that support both 32bit and 64bit. I have removed my own packages from the multilib repository. Note that I will keep offering the […]
a/dracut-103-x86_64-2.txz: Rebuilt. Include /etc/dracut.conf.d/elogind.conf to handle uaccess rules correctly. Thanks to LuckyCyborg. l/cairo-1.18.2-x86_64-2.txz: Rebuilt. [PATCH] cff: Don't fail if no local subs. Fixes printing PDFs with CUPS. Thanks to pee_bee and reddog83. l/glib2-2.82.1-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded. l/pipewire-1.2.4-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded. n/NetworkManager-1.48.10-x86_64-2.txz: Rebuilt. Rebuilt to pick up the new plugin directory for ppp-2.5.1. n/bind-9.20.2-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded. n/openssh-9.9p1-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded. Future deprecation notice: […]
academic/R: Updated for version 4.4.1. academic/edsim51di: Updated for version 2.1.36. academic/fet: Updated for version 6.25.0. academic/zotero: updated for version 7.0.5 audio/MP3Diags: Mark as orphaned audio/icecast: update contact email audio/japa: Updated for version 0.9.4. audio/jkmeter: Updated for version 0.9.0. audio/klick: Updated for version 0.14.2. audio/volctl: update contact email audio/wavbreaker: new maintainer desktop/calcure: Rename pytz dependency desktop/gtk-xfce-engine: […]
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When it comes to audio and sounds in Slackware, we’re happy to have 
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