My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything
You’ll have noticed – as indicated earlier, the Chromium packages for Slackware 14.2 are no longer being updated.
Today I made available the Slackware packages available for Chromium 111.0.5563.64, and they are accompanied by the un-googled version. This latest release squashes a massive 40 vulnerabilities, none labeled critical, but it’s wise to keep your systems uptodate nevertheless.
These new packages are targeting Slackware 15.0 and newer.
Enjoy! Eric
I skipped LibreOffice 7.5.0 because I was too busy at the time, but last week there was a release of LibreOffice 7.5.1. I got stuck in my attempts to change my chromium SlackBuild script to run more efficiently on Slackware 15.0, so it seemed like a good time to work on something else than a Google product.
But as with many software products that make a version jump, updating the Libreoffice build script was not completely trivial. Not as bad though as with Chromium. Eventually, I was able to come up with nice working binaries and I have already uploaded those to my repository and its US and UK mirrors.
These packages are targeting Slackware 15.0 and newer.
Note that my libreoffice package depends on openjdk11.
The link above to the release announcement also lists the most important new features that come with LibreOffice 7.5.x. Well worth checking out.
I have uploaded the packages for Google Chromium 110.0.5481.77 as well as its un-googled version. The sources for this new major release were available since a week ago, but as it often happens when Chromium updates its major version number, I get to find ways around the breakage that seems to be specific for the unusual Slackware target, and create fixes and patches to make the sources compile into a package for Slackware.
It took me so long to come up with packages this time, that Google already released a newer update (110.0.5481.96) today…
You won’t get that update now, hopefully soon though. Get the 110.0.5481.77 release from my server (chromium or chromium-ungoogled) or its US mirror (chromium or chromium-ungoogled).
The new packages are targeting Slackware 14.2 and newer. As announced last year and repeated a couple of times, I am going to drop support for Slackware 14.2 on the first anniversary of Slackware 15.0, which is February 22nd, 2023.
Ergo, the final version of Chromium you’ll get from me for Slackware 14.2 will be this “110” release because Chromium 111 will see the light on March 1st.
It would be wise to upgrade to Slackware 15.0 anyway if you are still on 14.2.
Enjoy! Eric
It looks like Slackware 14.2 is starting to show its age when it comes to supporting Chromium. The packages that I uploaded earlier this week for Chromium (also -ungoogled) version 109.0.5414.74 failed to run on Slackware 14.2 despite the fact that they were successfully compiled on Slackware 14.2. The packages ran without complaint on Slackware 15.0 and -current however.
The cause was a run-time dependency on libdrm for which the minimum version requirement was increased in Chromium 109 and Slackware 14.2 contains a libdrm library that is now too old.
After finding that root cause, I have rebuilt the chromium (also -ungoogled) packages, this time using an internal copy of libdrm instead of relying on the system libraries. The BUILD=2 version of these packages is now available for download from my repository and its mirrors, they are working correctly on Slackware 14.2 again.
Have fun! Eric
For some time now, the slakfinder.org website has been offline. The domain still exists, but the web site just does not respond. Matteo Rossini (zerouno) needed a break from computers, so it is likely that the site won’t return on short notice.
The effect of the site’s unavailability becomes quite obvious if you use the slackpkg+ extension for slackpkg to manage the packages you installed from 3rd-party community repositories. The “/etc/slackpkg/slackpkgplus.conf” configuration file contains these lines:
?# use this to keep the slackpkg+ package updated to the latest stable release
MIRRORPLUS['slackpkgplus']=https://slakfinder.org/slackpkg+15/
… and that causes a problem every time you run “slackpkg update“. There will be a timeout querying slakfinder.org and a subsequent error. After that, slackpkg will function as usual, you just won’t be able to check on updates for slackpkg+. But the error is annoying.
Luckily I am mirroring the repository for a long while now, so this is easy to fix. Replace the MIRRORPLUS URL above with the following line and run a “slackpkg update“, which will solve the timeout issue:
MIRRORPLUS['slackpkgplus']=https://slackware.nl/slackpkgplus15/
Now, slakfinder.org fulfilled another role!
It hosted a web-based Slackware package search tool. That may actually have been used a lot more than the slackpkg+ repository.
Unfortunately there has never been another instance of that package searcher available online, and the only thing I could dig up is a 10-year old Git repository archive for its code at https://github.com/mrossini/slakfinder . The code does not work with PHP 7, it has no documentation and the sparse comments in the code are mostly in Italian. It’s greek to me 😉
I thought, “a nice weekend project” and I spent the last few days understanding and then fixing the code. I looked at the repositories that it searched (the Internet Archive luckily created a snapshot early December 2022, right before the site disappeared) and decided to prune that repository collection to just the ones that support Slackware 14.2 and newer, and are known to me. That still leaves 62 repositories.
Today I am opening a custom instance of slakfinder on slackware.nl which will hopefully prevent new downtime. Get a look at it here: https://slackware.nl/slakfinder/ .
I haven’t tested the Guest Book, feel free to leave your comments there as well as in the comments section below. Commenting here on the blog will give you a much higher probability of me answering.
If there’s repositories (Slackware-compatible and for Slackware 14.2 or newer) that you want me to add, let me know.
Enjoy! Eric
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