My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Packages for LibreOffice 3.6.5, calibre and steamclient, and lots of movement on the horizon

Yes, I finally got rid of the flu – but it took a week. I lost some weight (and I am not overweight so I am looking starved now), I still have a bad cough and my lower back muscles are strained and painful because of the continuous coughing. Otherwise I am fine.

I had a bit of a Slackware backlog which I am getting rid of now, thanks to my automated build scripts (creating these packages took time, not effort).

LibreOffice

The Libre Office developers had published their 3.6.5 release last week, and I finally felt good enough to build packages. I did a quick examination and it appears that the opening/saving of password-protected files is finally working! Other bugfixes are documented in the release notes. That shows a fairly long list, let’s hope 3.6.5 is going to be rock stable for everyone. It is the last 3.x release before moving on to 4.0.0 in February.

These LibreOffice 3.6.5 packages have been built on Slackware 13.37. They can be installed on Slackware 14 as well, but there seem to be some dynamic linking errors, so I assume that some functionality is broken. I have not yet found where that happens, though. If you find any issues on Slackware 14 please tell me.

The next series, 4.x ,will be compiled on Slackware 14.0 and that will be the end of the library errors in any case. Modifying the libreoffice.SlackBuild script for the 4.x release required real effort! I am running LibreOffice 4.0.0_RC2 here on the desktop machine and it will be worth it, I promise. I will wait with making my new packages public until the official stable 4.0.0 release, so be patient for now please… Those who are still on Slackware 13.37 will have a good fallback choice with LibreOffice 3.6.5.

Downloads are available here, as usual:

Remember, you can add more functionality by installing extensions. LibreOffice extensions are available from http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center

steam

Steam client

I also updated my steamclient package with a re-packaging of Valve’s latest binary release (a debian package for Ubuntu actually): 1.0.0.22. I am going to write a separate blog entry about Steam this weekend so I am not lingering here too long. Rest assured that the new package will rid you of the annoying “outdated client” errors and works like a charm (mostly).

calibreico

Calibre Ebook Management

And I am again in line with the weekly updates of Kovid Goyal, developer of Calibre. I still maintain an up-to-date version of my custom-built package because I think it is an important tool for anyone with an E-Reader who does not want to tie his hands to a commercial ebook management & library system. Calibre acts as my family’s library and using OPDS protocol, I do not even need a cable to download new books onto the reader. I just use the wireless network.

The Event Horizon!

The blog’s subject hinted that more is coming.. Indeed I already have my packages ready for KDE 4.10.0 but I am not yet releasing them yet… I am waiting for the official announcement next week (and maybe other packagers will find bugs in the meantime). It is looking cool and I am running it here with no issues. In fact I played several hours of Half-Life Deathmatch against my son (there’s a Linux Beta of that too, since this week on Steam – well worth the 10 bucks), and neither the new KDE nor Steam nor Half-life crashed. Also imminent is a new release of IcedTea, the build framework for OpenJDK which I use. That means, there will be a Slackware package for OpenJDK “7u12” or somewhat like that, very soon.

And last but certainly not least, the VideoLAN developers (who are currently partying at FOSDEM, Brussels) will have to come up fast with a fix for a critical vulnerability in the VLC player, which was divulged yesterday… I guess that you should not be opening ASF files in the meantime.

Eric

20 Comments

  1. laitcg

    Glad your getting better! Down hill slide now. Thanks for all your effort for the Slack community.

  2. Gabriel Yong

    Glad see you back in action. Well, time spent is also consider as your valuable effort, thank for that.

  3. Alex

    Hi Eric,

    the current flu is very bad, lots of people are struggling to get rid of the bad cough, that comes with it.

    It’s good that you feel better now, but be careful. Some of my colleagues got back to work to early, and now they are ill again, and need to take antibiotics.

    Take care!

    Alex

  4. jaycee

    Hey Eric! It’s great to hear you’re better! Is your family well too?
    Thank you, as always, for all the packaging you’ve done! I’m really looking forward to overwriting my recent Debian install with Slackware – accompanied by KDE SC 4.10 and LibreOffice 4.0, it’ll be a pleasure to use! πŸ˜€ Also, I think you made a wise decision to package LO 4 on Slackware 14.0. However, may I ask whether you intend to package LO 3.6.6 for Slackware 13.37 when it’s released in April? It’d be good to have the last release of LO 3.6 available for the venerable 13.37…

  5. fabio

    So you have ready packages for kde 4.0.0? I heard it’s a bit raw, I think I’ll wait for 4.10 instead πŸ˜‰

  6. Willy Sudiarto Raharjo

    Jaycee: if i’m not mistaken LibreOffice 3.6.5 will be the last maintenance release for 3.x branch,so no more 3.6.6 release

  7. alienbob

    Hmm, according to https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleasePlan/3.6#3.6.6_release there will be a final 3.6.6 release in April. I may, or may not, build packages for that release.
    It will depend if I still run Slackware 13.37 on any of my machines at that time.

    Eric

  8. alienbob

    Fabio, oops… I will fix that in my article πŸ™‚

    Eric

  9. Jen

    Glad you’re feeling better!

  10. Eduardo

    Eric, I am glad that you got rid of the flu. Stay well and thanks for the packages!

  11. Gabriel Yong

    Regarding the Calibre, it did not run after i install into my Slackware14(i am sure all the deps needed were installed). But it run when i reinstall thru its official website(http://calibre-ebook.com/download_linux). Later will tried it on -current. Not sure if this is only me having this issue.

  12. Gabriel Yong

    Same result here in my -current when i try to run calibre:

    bash-4.2# calibre
    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File “/usr/bin/calibre”, line 20, in
    sys.exit(main())
    File “/usr/lib64/calibre/calibre/gui2/main.py”, line 414, in main
    app, opts, args, actions = init_qt(args)
    File “/usr/lib64/calibre/calibre/gui2/main.py”, line 85, in init_qt
    from calibre.gui2.ui import Main
    File “/usr/lib64/calibre/calibre/gui2/ui.py”, line 31, in
    from calibre.gui2.widgets import ProgressIndicator
    File “/usr/lib64/calibre/calibre/gui2/widgets.py”, line 21, in
    from calibre.gui2.progress_indicator import ProgressIndicator as _ProgressIndicator
    File “/usr/lib64/calibre/calibre/gui2/progress_indicator/__init__.py”, line 15, in
    pi_error)
    RuntimeError: Failed to load the Progress Indicator plugin: the sip module implements API v9.0 to v9.1 but the progress_indicator module requires API v8.1
    bash-4.2#

  13. alienbob

    Gabriel,

    You have this error because of the “sip” package upgrade in Slackware-current (and in Slackware 14.0 if you are using my KDE 4.10.x packages).
    The solution is to recompile calibre. It is dynamically linked to sip so the rebuild will solve the library incompatibility which was introduced by the sip package upgrade.

    Eric

  14. Gabriel Yong

    I see…
    yes, i had just upgraded my KDE in both Slackware 14.0 and -current. i will recompile it for learning purposes.
    Thank you!

  15. Gabriel Yong

    Recompiled Calibre in -current, works well. Thank you πŸ™‚

  16. Gabriel Yong

    Hi Eric,

    In the latest version of -current, i use KDE 4.11.3. Having problem during recompile the Calibre 1.9.0

    What is PODOFO?
    Below is the last few line of compilation error:
    ####### Building extension cPalmdoc #######
    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File “setup.py”, line 99, in
    sys.exit(main())
    File “setup.py”, line 85, in main
    command.run_all(opts)
    File “/tmp/build/tmp-calibre/calibre/setup/__init__.py”, line 180, in run_all
    self.run_cmd(self, opts)
    File “/tmp/build/tmp-calibre/calibre/setup/__init__.py”, line 174, in run_cmd
    self.run_cmd(scmd, opts)
    File “/tmp/build/tmp-calibre/calibre/setup/__init__.py”, line 177, in run_cmd
    cmd.run(opts)
    File “/tmp/build/tmp-calibre/calibre/setup/extensions.py”, line 367, in run
    raise Exception(ext.error)
    Exception: (‘PoDoFo not found on your system. Various PDF related’, ‘ functionality will not work. Use the PODOFO_INC_DIR and’, ‘ PODOFO_LIB_DIR environment variables.’)
    mv: cannot stat ‘/tmp/build/package-calibre/usr/etc’: No such file or directory
    bash-4.2#

  17. Gabriel Yong

    installed Podofo and recomplie, now need to deal with dateutil.tz module, got this error below:

    *
    * Running gui
    *

    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File “setup.py”, line 99, in
    sys.exit(main())
    File “setup.py”, line 85, in main
    command.run_all(opts)
    File “/tmp/build/tmp-calibre/calibre/setup/__init__.py”, line 180, in run_all
    self.run_cmd(self, opts)
    File “/tmp/build/tmp-calibre/calibre/setup/__init__.py”, line 174, in run_cmd
    self.run_cmd(scmd, opts)
    File “/tmp/build/tmp-calibre/calibre/setup/__init__.py”, line 177, in run_cmd
    cmd.run(opts)
    File “/tmp/build/tmp-calibre/calibre/setup/gui.py”, line 37, in run
    self.build_forms()
    File “/tmp/build/tmp-calibre/calibre/setup/gui.py”, line 60, in build_forms
    from calibre.gui2 import build_forms
    File “/tmp/build/tmp-calibre/calibre/src/calibre/gui2/__init__.py”, line 21, in
    from calibre.utils.date import UNDEFINED_DATE
    File “/tmp/build/tmp-calibre/calibre/src/calibre/utils/date.py”, line 13, in
    from dateutil.tz import tzlocal, tzutc, EPOCHORDINAL
    ImportError: No module named dateutil.tz
    mv: cannot stat ‘/tmp/build/package-calibre/usr/etc’: No such file or directory
    bash-4.2#

  18. alienbob

    Gabriel, please read the list of dependencies for Calibre. I think you are missing all of them.

    I mention these dependencies every time I update the calibre packages: http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/ChangeLog.rss

    Eric

  19. Gabriel Yong

    Sorry to bother you. Just didn’t realized that i need to install all the dependencies one-by-one before compilation. I thought that by compiling from the “build” folder will do just that, as it have all those dependencies inside.

    Problem solved. Thank you!

  20. alienbob

    Gabriel,

    The SlackBuild script is able to compile all dependencies but I only use that for Slackware 13.37 because the Python is too old there.
    For Slackware 14.0 and newer I only compile calibre itself and depend on all the other packages to have been compiled and installed before. That way, upgrading calibre from source takes a _lot_ less compilation time.

    Eric

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