Alien Pastures

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VLC 3.0.8 packages

September 1, 2019 / / 13 Comments

largeVLCAlso during my holiday, the VideoLAN developers released version 3.0.8 of their VLC media player.

The Release Notes state that this releases provides fixes for several security issues among wich 11 which are CVE-worthy. Meaning that it’s prudent to upgrade your VLC to 3.0.8 soonest.

I have the new packages available (for Slackware 14.2 and -current) in my repository since a couple of days. I used the opportunity to update the following internal libraries as well: bluray, dav1d, ebml, and matroska.

You will also probably note that there is no “npapi-vlc” package. I decided to retire this VLC based NPAPI webbrowser plugin from my repository. Modern browsers are all moving away from NPAPI plugin support, and relying on HTML5 instead. Chrome/Chromium always only supported PPAPI based plugins anyway.

A note about dependencies for the VLC 3.x packages:

My Slackware packages for VLC are mostly self-contained with all of the supporting libraries compiled into the package. This makes for a minimal dependency on external libraries/packages. But there are some caveats with the new release: most importantly, its interface has switched from Qt4 to Qt5.
While Slackware contains a ‘qt4’ package, it does not contain ‘qt5’ and therefore, the vlc-3.x package introduces some new external dependencies, all related to the Qt5 GUI: SDL_sound, OpenAL, libxkbcommon, qt5. Hopefully Qt5 will get added to Slackware-current sometime in the future.
On Slackware 14.2, two more packages are needed – they have already been incorporated into Slackware-current: libinput and libwacom .

A note on compiling:

When you want to compile VLC 3 yourself, be sure to install java8 and apache-ant or your build will fail.
If you are running Slackware 14.2 you will additionally need the following four packages (required to compile the ‘dav1d‘ decoder): meson, ninja, python3, python3-setuptools .

Where to find the new VLC packages:

Rsync access is offered by the mirror server: rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/ .

For BluRay support, read a previous article for hints about the aacs keys that you’ll need.

My usual warning about patents: versions that can not only DEcode but also ENcode AAC audio can be found in my alternative repository where I keep the packages containing code that might violate stupid US software patents.

Have fun! Eric

LibreOffice updates for Slackware 14.2 and -current

September 1, 2019 / / 15 Comments

This month, I am building different versions for LibreOffice, for our stable Slackware 14.2 and for the -current testing ground. During my holiday, new versions became available and last week I built packages from those sources.

The 6.2.6 release which was announced by the Document Foundation two weeks ago brings some security fixes to the 6.2 series. Therefore it was important to get rid of the old 6.2.5 packages. I built 6.2.6 for Slackware 14.2 and those packages have been available for download now since early last week. Go get them!

Note: as of this package release, I am no longer including support for KDE4. The “libreoffice-kde-integration” package is no longer available in my repository and you should “removepkg” the older version if you have that installed. The KDE4 support in LibreOffice has been broken for a while and your Office applications will run great on KDE4 without that “KDE integration”. The LibreOffice UI will be based on GTK3 widgets instead and KDE4’s theming engine will make that its User Interface blends in properly.

For Slackware-current I went for the new 6.3 series of LibreOffice instead. The sources for this new release were made public three weeks ago. The release notes state that the 6.3.x office suite should be a lot faster than the previous 6.2.x series with impressively notched-up interoperability support for the Microsoft Office document formats. Go check it out!

The packages for LibreOffice 6.3.0 which are ready for download in my repository, do contain “libreoffice-kde-integration”, yes! Unlike the packages for Slackware 14.2 I have decided to add KDE5 (aka Plasma5) support to my LibreOffice packages for slackware-current from now on.
If you do not have KDE5 packages installed at all, don’t worry. LibreOffice will work great. The KDE integration package will just 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 these Libreoffice 6.3.0 packages yourself, then be aware that by default no KDE5 support will be added. 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. Those are: qt5, libxkbcommon, OpenAL, SDL_sound, and all the packages of KDE Frameworks 5. All of these can be  found in my ‘ktown’ repository: https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/latest/

Enjoy! Eric

Patreon account for Patrick Volkerding’s Slackware

August 5, 2019 / / 36 Comments

Hi Slackware supporters, fans and users.

Patrick Volkerding has confirmed on LinuxQuestions.org that the Patreon account “slackwarelinux” is actually his.

Everybody who wanted to support Slackware after it became clear that the Slackware Store had not been paying Patrick and family for a long time, but was not prepared to create a PayPal account in order to donate money: there is now an alternative.
Patreon is a community site where “Patrons support the creators they love in exchange for exclusive membership benefits“.
I don’t know whether Pat will do stuff like “exclusive benefits” considering the fact that he already gives away Slackware Linux for free since 26 years… anyway, he created a page there where you can setup a monthly recurring payment of one dollar or more – whatever you can spare. Payment methods are either PayPal or credit cards.

if you do not have a credit card and do not want to use PayPal either, you can still send money through regular postal mail. Pat’s address can be found in the initial post here: https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/donating-to-slackware-4175634729/

So, check out https://www.patreon.com/slackwarelinux and consider helping Patrick and family to keep Slackware alive.

Chromium 76 packages available

August 4, 2019 / / 8 Comments

New Chromium browser for you!
The release earlier this week of Chromium 76 came with a total of 43 security fixes but this new major version of course also sports some real usability changes.

Most notably: Flash is now disabled by default. It’s no longer sufficient to click an “allow Flash on this page” popup but you need to go into the Chromium settings and override the default. And click in on the Flash element to make it start playing. Even then, the changes you make will not survive the restart of the browser. Google is apparently stepping up its efforts in convincing website developers to switch to HTML5 instead. In 2020 Adobe will stop with Flash anyway, so remaining Flash-powered sites will not survive long.
Another big behavioral change is that it is no longer possible for web sites to detect that you are browsing in ‘anonymous mode‘. This will make it a lot harder for sites with a ‘pay-wall‘ to block you from accessing their paid content though trial subscriptions.
And another positive change is that hitting the ‘Esc‘ key to stop a page from loading, is no longer treated as user activation. Meaning that malicious web sites will have more trouble messing with your browser because your ‘Esc‘ keypress is no longer passed to the remote web site.

I uploaded packages for the new Chromium 76.0.3809.87 today. That should have happened days earlier, but unfortunately I had to spend several nights to track down the cause of an inability to compile a 32bit package for the new version.
You may (or may not) know that my chromium.SlackBuild downloads and compiles a custom version of the clang compiler which is then used to compile Chromium. Compiling Chromium with gcc is not fully supported by Google, and Slackware’s own version of clang is too old to be used for Chromium.

So what happened…. some developer determined that no one should run 32bit Linux software anymore and hard-coded a 64bit architecture in the clang build script that is part of the Chromium source. Attempts at compiling a 64bit clang on 32bit Slackware results in weird errors, and of course compiling the Chromium sources was out of the question then. That fuck-up took me a while to find dammit!
After I wrote a patch to fix this for my Slackware package, I inspected the Chromium source repository and was happy to find that this ‘improvement’ had been applied nine weeks ago and that other people had already felt the resulting pain – and that the offending commit has already been reverted.
The next release of Chromium should again compile without issues… fingers crossed.

Wait no more and grab that package (for Slackware 14.2 and -current) from my site or any mirror.

Enjoy! Eric

KDE Plasma5 for Slackware, introducing Qt 5.13 in the July’19 update

July 13, 2019 / / 97 Comments

Now that all major components of the KDE software stack have fresh new releases, I bundled them for Slackware-current and voila: KDE-5_19.07.

I have uploaded KDE-5_19.07 to my ‘ktown‘ repository. As always, these packages are meant to be installed on a full installation of Slackware-current which has had its KDE4 removed first. These packages will not work on Slackware 14.2.

What’s new in the July 2019 refresh

This month’s KDE Plasma5 for Slackware contains the KDE Frameworks 5.60.0, Plasma 5.16.3 and Applications 19.04.3. All this on top of Qt 5.13.0. The new Qt does not seem to de-stabilize things here.

Deps:
Obviously, the ‘qt5’ package had a major upgrade, from 5.12 to 5.13. It demanded a recompile or update of some of the other deps packages: ‘qt5-speech’ and ‘qt5-webkit’, ‘sip’ and ‘PyQt5’, and ‘gpgme’. Two new packages,  ‘brotli’ and ‘woff2’, were needed to compile the newest version of  ‘qt5-webkit’.
I also updated ‘opencv’ so that its version matches that on SBo: 4.1.0. Unfortunately the new face detection code in opencv4 is incompatible with ‘frei0r-plugins’, so I had to disable the face effects in frei0r when rebuilding that.
The new opencv also warranted an update of the ‘mlt’ package.

Frameworks:
Frameworks 5.60.0 is an incremental stability release, just released today.See: https://www.kde.org/announcements/kde-frameworks-5.60.0.php

Plasma:
Plasma 5.16.3 is the third iteration of bugfixes to increase the stability of the Desktop part of KDE. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.16.3.php.

Applications;
Applications 19.04.3 is a stability and bugfix update for the 19.04 cycle, released two days ago. For more information, see https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-applications-19.04.3.php.

Applications-extra:
I upgraded ‘krita’ to the latest release and rebuilt ‘digikam’ against the new opencv package.

Where to get it

Download the KDE-5_19.07 from the usual location at https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/latest/ . Check out the README file in the root of the repository for detailed installation or upgrade instructions.
A Plasma5 Live ISO is on its way. Once it has been uploaded you will find it at https://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/ (rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/latest/)

Have fun! Eric

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