Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: multilib (Page 6 of 10)

End of the week, end of the cycle?

September 21, 2012 / / 11 Comments

Most of you will have seen the latest comment in the slackware-current ChangeLog:

Wed Sep 19 23:52:16 UTC 2012
Here we go one more time with Slackware 14.0 release candidate 5.
Really, this time it is not a drill!  Everything is in place and
ready to release at this point, and unless there’s some kind of
showstopper found (which doesn’t seem too likely after all the
testing that’s happened), the release can be expected soon.

It means that we could see a Slackware 14 release very soon. As always, it’s ready when it is ready… but it is not going to take weeks.

I took the opportunity to implement some ideas which I had been thinking about for my multilib packages. These are the results:

  • In the compat32-tools package, the “convertpkg-compat32” script will now by default add a “compat32” build tag to the converted package name. For instance, when the package “e2fsprogs-1.42.5-x86_64-1.txz” is converted, it becomes “e2fsprogs-compat32-1.42.5-x86_64-1compat32.txz”.
  • Also in the compat32-tools package, the “massconvert32.sh” script will now check the Slackware patches directory to see if there is an update for any package it needs to convert. For instance, when you run the script against a Slackware 13.37 package tree you would get the converted package “openssl-solibs-compat32-0.9.8x-i486-1_slack13.37compat32.txz” instead of “openssl-solibs-compat32-0.9.8r-i486-3compat32.txz” (which is part of the original 13.37 release).
  • The reason for adding a “compat32” build tag to all converted packages is to make system upgrades of a multilib Slackware easier. Up to now, if you were using slackpkg for the upgrades, you had to manually deselect all compat32 packages in the list which is produced by the command “slackpkg clean-system”. With the new scripts, you are able to blacklist all my multilib packages by just adding one line to the file “/etc/slackpkg/blacklist”:

# Blacklist all multilib ‘compat32’ packages:

[0-9]+compat32

  • During the slackware-current development cycle there were several upgrades of the gcc packages. At one time I had to fix my multilib rebuild of gcc. I want to keep my package build numbers in sync with Slackware’s original 64-bit packages to avoid confusion of the kind “do I have the correct multilib package installed“, so I decided to give the fixed gcc packages a build number of “1fix1_alien” instead of “1alien”. Unfortunately this broke the slackpkg blacklist line for my “alien” tag. The expression “[0-9]+alien” will not match packages with a “1fix1_alien” build number. So I decided to rename the multilib gcc packages and use the “1alien” build tag. This will be much friendlier for people who upgrade from Slackware 13.37 to 14.0. If you have been running -current all the time, you should be smart enough to understand my reasoning 🙂

If you are currently running Slackware 13.37 and want to profit from these enhancements, you can of course upgrade to my new compat32-tools package – even though I make it avalable in the “current” (and later on “14.0“) directory of my multilib repository. I took care not to break the compatibility with Slackware 13.37 when I updated the package during the past development cycle of slackware-current.

A note about the Slackware Documentation Project

We  (the editors) are steadily working on expanding the documentation wiki. I recently added an article about how to perform a Slackware system upgrade, to help people who are running Slackware 13.37 and want to upgrade to 14.0 when that is released. Check out “Upgrade Slackware to a New Release“.

We would like to welcome your contributions as well! If you had a problem in Slackware and found the solution, or if you have some particular knowledge which your fellow Slackers could profit from, feel free to visit the Wiki’s HOWTO’s page and create your own article there. Check the existing HOWTO articles to get a feel for what is possible.

If you do not want to write a new article, we still value your feedback. If you have any comments or suggestions about improvements for the site, we would like to hear from you.

Cheers, Eric

Updated glibc multilib packages for Slackware 14-rc4

August 31, 2012 / / 9 Comments

Hi folks

Another Release Candidate for Slackware 14… and that again brings a patched glibc package. I have updated my multilib version of glibc in my own repositoy (http://slackware.com/~alien/multilib/current/) or any of the usual mirrors.

Also note that IcedTea 2.3.2 was released in quick succession to the version 2.3.1 which fixed a critical flaw in OpenJDK7. I am sure that there are more fixes for more flaws in this new update, but I will have to investigate and then build you some new goodies.

Just now that I wanted to start compiling KDE 4.9.1. For that, at least I have time until wednesday when the new KDE will be officially announced.

Eric

Slackware 14 release candidate 3 plus multilib updates

August 25, 2012 / / 14 Comments

Slackware 14 is getting ever closer upon us. Yesterday, the third release candidate was made public:

Fri Aug 24 20:08:37 UTC 2012
This is Slackware 14.0 release candidate 3, and is hopefully the last stop
on our long road to a stable Slackware release soon.  After hearing that
the 3.4.x kernel series will have long term support, I tested 3.4.9 hoping
that it would prove stable enough to use that as the release kernel, but
there are problems with an oops in kernel/time/clocksource.c every few boots.
Given that the 3.2.x series has been very stable, it seems prudent to stick
with that for release, and 3.2.28 is going to be the release kernel.  So,
one more round of testing.  Let me know if there are any problems.  Thanks!

I had not paid good attention, so it took me a few seconds to realize that a rebuild of the glibc package was mentioned there. So, I proceeded with updating my QEMU virtual machine of slackware64-current and rebuilt my multilib versions of the glibc packages:

Sat Aug 25 07:47:10 UTC 2012
current/glibc-2.15-x86_64-5alien.txz:  Rebuilt.
current/glibc-i18n-2.15-x86_64-5alien.txz:  Rebuilt.
current/glibc-profile-2.15-x86_64-5alien.txz:  Rebuilt.
current/glibc-solibs-2.15-x86_64-5alien.txz:  Rebuilt.
current/glibc-zoneinfo-2012e_2012e-noarch-5alien.txz:  Rebuilt.
  Upgraded to tzcode2012e and tzdata2012e.
current/compat32-tools-2.2-noarch-2alien.tgz:  Improved handling of qt package
  in comvertpkg-compat32 (makes the resulting package a lot smaller by weeding
  out unneeded stuff). Thanks to Sebastien BALLET.

Get them here as usual – I suppose that by now you’re able to find the mirror sites?

I also refreshed the set of converted 32-bit packages in the “slackware64-compat32” subdirectory, so if you are lazy and don’t want to run the “massconvert32.sh” script you can just download and install/upgrade those.

The fact that I was not paying close enough attention was caused largely by the Slackware Documentation Project, which we kick-started a little over a week ago. In that week, there was an enormous amount of activities and judging by the “recent updates” page, people are still enthusiastic about it. I must say, not everybody was happy with the way I crafted the project – but hey! You could have started this project yourself in the last 19 years! Nobody was stopping you!

I did not want to wait for someone else and gave form and direction to my own ideas about a good multi-language documentation site. Enjoy it, contribute to it, make it so extraordinary that even non-Slackers will want to read it. It does not have to be difficult.

Eric

SlackDocs logo courtesy of V. T.Eric Layton

Back from holidays, some package updates

July 25, 2012 / / 20 Comments

Just came back from a short stay in Brittany, France where we stayed in a mobile home. Lots of sun, and lots of sleep to catch up on while being there!

While I was gone enjoying some freedom, interesting things happened in computerland. Slackware’s development reached the “Slackware 14 Beta 1” mark (see the “Sun Jul 22 22:38:36 UTC 2012” entry in the current ChangeLog). And the VideoLAN developers released an update to the VLC player. I am sure that there were other things that will grip me when I read them, but I have not been home long enough to notice 🙂 In the meantime, you may want to read about a man and his software which I do not care to see getting a grip on Slackware: systemd and slackware’s future … just to keep you focused on what’s good and what’s evil.

First Slackware of course.

The “Beta 1” update was pretty huge, as it involved the introduction of XFCE 4.10 and all the dependencies that required. The changes of “Wed Jul 25 02:02:40 UTC 2012” have fixed some of the expected fall-out which results from big and intrusive updates in slackware-current. It should be safe for all you beta testers out there to play with this Beta. But please make sure that you start with upgrading the “slackpkg” package and then run “slackpkg update” again!

I took the opportunity to refresh my set of pre-converted multilib packages for slackware64-current, and added “l/libffi” to the “massconvert32.sh” script (part of my own compat32-tools package) since people were noticing an error about missing libffi during the boot of a multilib slackware64-current system.

Then VLC.

I quickly built new packages for the 2.0.3 release which I have already uploaded. This is not a spectacular update, mostly beneficial to OS/X users and also refreshing a lot of UI translations. Note that I maintain the usual split in “restricted” and “unrestricted” functionality: the packages which I host on slackware.com are not able to encode MP3 and AAC audio (that version of my VLC package is of course perfectly able to play back those audio formats) due to software patent restrictions which apply in the US. For un-crippled packages you should head over to any mirror which carries the “restricted_slackbuilds” repository, like http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/ .

Have fun!

Eric

 

Edit: I forgot to mention that I also uploaded a new version of Calibre – the weekly update cycle was broken because of my holidays. If you use an “old” version of Calibre and do not want it to quit every week when it checks for updates and finds a new version, you can simply disable that check for new releases.

New multilib packages for slackware-current

June 25, 2012 / / 17 Comments

 Earlier today, there was a massive update to Slackware-current. The ride was fun, and I am fairly certain we’ll see some breakage. In fact, we found some already and fixed that in a quick update (mounting of Samba shares was broken after splitting the mount utility for Samba shares into its own “cifs-utils” package).

So, what was updated? The highlights of this batch are:

  • the version of the next release is known: it will be “Slackware 14”.
  • kernel is now 3.2.21 – we will likely stick with the 3.2 series since that will get long-term support.
  • KDE moved up to 4.8.4 (meaning that I can remove my own packages for that version from my ktown repository).
  • gcc was bumped to 4.7.1 to accompany the new kernel.
  • glibc was patched to fix a regression
  • python got updated to 2.7.3 (the switch from the old 2.6.x version meant that every package needed to be recompiled which depends on python)
  • the network scripts (rc.inet1) got support for setting up betwork bridges – something I use every day because it allows me to make my Virtual Machines accessible from other computers in my LAN.
  • lots of other individual updates (the complete ChangeLog.txt entry of “Mon Jun 25 05:17:48 UTC 2012” measures more than 300 lines)

And since glibc was rebuilt and gcc updated, I needed to create multilib versions of those.

They can be found here (all of the mirrors below also offer rsync access):

 NOTE:

The update to attica-0.4.0 in slackware-current broke many packages of my KDE 4.9-beta2 set. Head over to my other blog post to find out how to fix that easily!

Have fun! Eric

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2024 Alien Pastures

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑