Due to the Corona (COVID-19) crisis, Google decided to postpone the introduction of Chromium 81 to the stable channel. Understandably due to the challenges created by sending most developers home for their own safety and protection, which is a cause for less efficient work schedules.
Instead, there is an increased focus on addressing security related issues in Chromium 80 and releasing those in rapid succession. After all, any crisis attracts the worst of humankind to mess with the more gullible part of the population and browser based phishing and hack attempts are on the rise.
And so, yesterday there was another version upgrade, and I built the new chromium packages for Slackware 14.2 and -current already. The chromium-80.0.3987.149 release can be downloaded from any mirror – or upgraded using slackpkg/slackpkg+ if you use that.
In addition, new LibreOffice packages are available for Slackware -current.
You’ll get the latest and greatest ‘fresh’ release of 6.4.2 and unfortunately, no new packages for Slackware 14.2. I am unable to compile the 6.3 or 6.4 releases on the stable version of Slackware due to outdated/obsoleted libraries.
Note: among the packages for LibreOffice that are targeting Slackware-current, you will find a “libreoffice-kde-integration” package which adds Qt5 and KDE5 (aka Plasma5) support to the LibreOffice suite.
If you run Slackware-current but do not have KDE5 packages installed at all, don’t worry. LibreOffice will work great – the KDE integration package just will not add anything useful for you. On the other hand, if you have Plasma5 installed you will benefit from native file selection dialog windows and other integration features. And even if you do not have Plasma5 but you do have Qt5 installed, then you will be able to run LibreOffice with Qt5 User Interface elements instead of defaulting to GTK3.
If you want to compile LibreOffice 6.4.2 packages yourself using my SlackBuild script, then be aware that by default the KDE5 support is disabled. You will have to set the value of the script parameter “ADD_KDE5” to “YES”. Additionally you will have to install the packages that this functionality depends on otherwise the compilation will fail.
Read the ‘README.kde5‘ file in the source directory for the list of packages you’ll need. All of the required packages can be found in my ‘ktown’ repository: https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/latest/
Enjoy! Eric
Many thanks Eric. Installed them this morning (CET) and all works fine with latest Plasma5 release. Glad too to see that Pat has now included Qt5. Hopefully means getting closer to Plasma5 integration in -current less work on your end maintaining it as a result.
Merci
Thanks for LIbre office! Hope you and yours are well!
Hi Eric,
I am not sure if I’d rather post here or in LQ : Last libreoffice won’t launch here complaining of something wrong with libfontconfig.so.1
I saw that there wasn’t anything new from fontconfig package since september.
My install is an updated slackware-current from yesterday or so (before recent llvm update) with ktown up to date as well (no wayland for current nore plasma).
Note : I usually sync from personnal mirror but had to do some changes in the scripts to no more exclude some of the ktwn packages that were integrated in current. Tried to avoid mistakes by checking with slackpkg (that I usually lazily use for new-config)
Again thanks for your great (and very educationnal) work
Does it look like this report? See https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/soffice-undefined-symbol-ft_get_font_format-4175671446/
I can not reproduce it.
Indeed, thanks for pointing me there !
For the record, my error is this one (as root for rinaldij in the thread) :
/usr/lib64/libreoffice/program/soffice.bin: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib64/libfontconfig.so.1: undefined symbol: FT_Done_MM_Var
Launching soffice from full do not throw the error (it might look slightly different with the launching window).
Investigating that, I reverted the change I recently made (without harm in first place) :
in /etc/profile.d/libreoffice.sh, I uncommented the line
export SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=qt5
Now it just works (for me).
Hope it could help others.
HI Eric, are you going to have the cycles to build a Chromium 81.xxx release? I would myself but with the last release before the current 81.xxx release your build script died before it completed. If not, no probs. Frohe Ostern, bleib gesund.
Chromium 81 can no longer be built on Slackware 14.2 using my SlackBuild script. The Slackware libraries are too old. THere is an alternative way (Chrome is built that way) using pre-compiled Debian binaries but I do not like that – what’s the point of using pre-compiled binaries, you could almost want to consider switching to Google Chrome entirely. Also, I can not get the new Chromium 81 to compile on Slackware-current. That sucks, too.
Due to limited time behind a computer (my back pain is getting worse) I only have about an hour per day to look into issues like these before the pain gets so bad I have to lie down. And Chromium not compiling is only one of the many issues I am trying to address or solve.
So, let’s see if anyone else finds a way to compile the lot and share his/her fixes. Otherwise, no new Chromium in the foreseeable future.