Alien Pastures

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X-Mas Plasma5 – December ’19 release of ktown for Slackware

December 22, 2019 / / 80 Comments

I uploaded KDE-5_19.12 as an early Christmas present. You can download these fresh packages as usual from my ‘ktown‘ repository. Still targeting a full installation of Slackware-current (with KDE4 removed first) these packages will not work on Slackware 14.2.

What’s new in the December 2019 release

This month’s KDE Plasma5 for Slackware contains the KDE Frameworks 5.65.0, Plasma 5.17.3 and Applications 19.12.0. All this on top of Qt 5.13.2. Do not forget to install the new packages md4c, kquickcharts, pulseaudio-qt, kpeoplevcard, and elisa !

Deps:
This month I removed the qt-gstreamer package because the only package which depended on it (telepathy-kde-call-ui) has been removed a few months back with the rest of KDE Telepathy.
I added md4c, which is a dependency for Qt 5.14 but then decided against updating my qt5 package to 5.14 because there’s a lot of software which is not completely ready for this new release of Qt. Maybe next month.
I updated the lensfun and  mlt packages to their latest releases and updated sip so that it matches the version in Slackware again.

Frameworks:
Frameworks 5.65.0 is an incremental stability release, see: https://www.kde.org/announcements/kde-frameworks-5.65.0.php but the developers added a new Framework this time: kquickcharts.

Plasma:
Plasma 5.17.3 is a an incremental bug-fix release in the 5.17 cycle of the KDE desktop environment. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17.3.php

Plasma-extra;
In plasma-extra I updated latte-dock and kdeconnect-framework. The new release of kdeconnect required the addition of two new dependencies to plasma-extra: pulseaudio-qt and kpeoplevcard.

Applications;
The Releases 19.12.0 is the start of a new quarterly release cycle for the Applications, but it is also a rebranding. The old name “Applications” was no longer considered representative for what it offers and “Release Service” is the new name. I will probably keep calling this “Applications” nevertheless, tired as i usually get from overzealous PR folk.
Note that there’s a new application in here, the music player ‘elisa‘. I did not compile elisa against VLC even though that would make it more powerful. If I had installed a vlc package and compiled elisa against it, then the elisa program would fail to run for people that do do not have VLC installed. Feel free to recompile though!
For more info, see https://www.kde.org/announcements/releases/19.12/

Applications-extra:
In applications-extra I updated calligraplan, kstars and krita to their latest releases. In particular this Plan (calligraplan) release is seen as a major milestone achievement.

Telepathy:
Note: KDE Telepathy is no longer part of my ‘ktown’ distribution of KDE Plasma5.

Where to get it

Download the KDE-5_19.12 from the usual location at https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/latest/ or one of its mirrors like http://slackware.uk/people/alien-kde/current/latest/ (both these sites are also offering rsync access). Check out the README file in the root of the repository for detailed installation or upgrade instructions.

Development of Plasma5 is tracked in git: https://git.slackware.nl/ktown/ .
A new Plasma5 Live ISO should be ready somewhere later during my Christmas holiday (probably after Christmas) and then you will find it at https://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/ (rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/latest/)

Have fun! Eric

Chromium 79 for Slackware – trouble for 32bit?

December 19, 2019 / / 13 Comments

In the comments section of a previous post I already hinted at the problems I have in getting a Chromium package compiled on 32bit Slackware 14.2.
The issue started with the first stable release of the Chromium 79 sources and in particular with the ‘gn’ tool which is used by Google to generate the ninja build files for Chromium. The ‘gn’ code was updated with C++17 features and that is too modern for the gcc-g++ 5.5.0 compiler package in Slackware 14.2.
For 64bit Slackware 14.2 I was able to build ‘gn’ using the embedded version of libc++ which comes with the Chromium sources. On 32bit I got bitten by linker errors – which I was unable to resolve. They seem to be caused by the fact that on a 32bit system, libgcc provides compatibility code to deal with constructs (like ‘unsigned long long’) that do not fit in a 32bit architecture.

For Slackware-current I could rely on a more modern gcc-g++ version (9.2.0) and that produced working 32bit as well as 64bit packages.

Therefore, you can get packages for the new Chromium 79.0.3945.88 browser from my repository, but on 32bit Slackware 14.2 you’re stuck with the older 78.0.3904.108 version (let’s hope that this will change in future).

Enjoy the new release!

Eric

Disney+ finally works on Linux!

December 5, 2019 / / 10 Comments

A little more than three weeks after the new Disney+ movie streaming service went officially live, the Disney company has added Linux support to their Widevine DRM protection. No more “Error 83”. No more need to install the Windows version of Chrome in Wine. Watching your favorite movies is now possible in the native Linux browsers – both Mozilla and Google based. Firefox will download the Widevine CDM (content delivery module) automatically, Chrome has the support built-in and for my Chromium package and other Chromium-based browsers you;ll have to install my chromium-widevine-plugin package.

I guess that a sufficiently large group of Linux enthusiasts have been complaining. And with success!

Enjoy! Eric

November ’19 release of OpenJDK 8

November 15, 2019 / / 19 Comments

icedteaToday, icedtea-3.14.0 was released. IcedTea is a software build framework which allows easy compilation of OpenJDK.

The new IcedTea release will build you the latest Java8:  OpenJDK 8u232_b09. This release syncs the OpenJDK support in IcedTea to the official October 2019 security fixes that Oracle released for Java. The release announcement in the mailing list for distro packagers has details about all the security issues and vulnerabilities that are addressed.

I have built Slackware packages for the new Java 8 Update 232 and uploaded them already. Please upgrade at your earliest convenience. Java is still widespread which makes it a popular target for vulnerability attacks.

Here is where you can download the Slackware packages for openjdk and openjre:

If you want to compile OpenJDK 8 yourself you will need apache-ant as well, but otherwise the openjdk/openjre packages have no external dependencies.

Note about usage:

My Java 7 and Java 8 packages (e.g. openjdk7 and openjdk… or openjre7 and openjre) can not co-exist on your computer because they use the same installation directory. You must install either Java 7 or Java 8.

Remember that I release packages for the JRE (runtime environment) and the JDK (development kit) simultaneously, but you only need to install one of the two. The JRE is sufficient if you only want to run Java programs (including Java web plugins). Only in case where you’d want to develop Java programs and need a Java compiler, you are in need of the JDK package.

Enjoy! Eric

Slackware Live Plasma5 edition ISO available (based on liveslak 1.3.3)

November 13, 2019 / / 33 Comments

Yesterday I uploaded a new DVD-sized ISO for the Plasma5 variant of Slackware Live Edition based on the liveslak scripts version 1.3.3. The ISO contains Slackware-current “Tue Nov 12 23:08:45 UTC 2019” with my KDE-5_19.11 and boots a Linux 4.19.83 kernel.

Download this ISO file slackware64-live-plasma5-current.iso preferably via rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/ because that allows easy resume if you cannot download the file in one go.

Liveslak sources are maintained in git. The 1.3.3 release has some fixes for PXE booting older hardware.
If you want to read about what the Slackware Live Edition can do for you, check out the official landing page for the project, https://alien.slackbook.org/blog/slackware-live-edition/ or any of the articles on this blog that were published later on.

Extensive documentation on how to use and develop Slackware Live Edition (you can achieve a significant level of customization without changing a single line of script code) can be found in the Slackware Documentation Project Wiki.

Have fun!

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