Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: package

Mirror for slackpkg+ and slakfinder

January 9, 2023 / / 37 Comments

For some time now, the slakfinder.org website has been offline. The domain still exists, but the web site just does not respond. Matteo Rossini (zerouno) needed a break from computers, so it is likely that the site won’t return on short notice.

The effect of the site’s unavailability becomes quite obvious if you use the slackpkg+ extension for slackpkg to manage the packages you installed from 3rd-party community repositories. The “/etc/slackpkg/slackpkgplus.conf” configuration file contains these lines:

?# use this to keep the slackpkg+ package updated to the latest stable release
MIRRORPLUS['slackpkgplus']=https://slakfinder.org/slackpkg+15/

… and that causes a problem every time you run “slackpkg update“. There will be a timeout querying slakfinder.org and a subsequent error. After that, slackpkg will function as usual, you just won’t be able to check on updates for slackpkg+. But the error is annoying.
Luckily I am mirroring the repository for a long while now, so this is easy to fix. Replace the MIRRORPLUS URL above with the following line and run a “slackpkg update“, which will solve the timeout issue:

MIRRORPLUS['slackpkgplus']=https://slackware.nl/slackpkgplus15/

Now, slakfinder.org fulfilled another role!
It hosted a web-based Slackware package search tool. That may actually have been used a lot more than the slackpkg+ repository.

Unfortunately there has never been another instance of that package searcher available online, and the only thing I could dig up is a 10-year old Git repository archive for its code at https://github.com/mrossini/slakfinder . The code does not work with PHP 7, it has no documentation and the sparse comments in the code are mostly in Italian. It’s greek to me 😉
I thought, “a nice weekend project” and I spent the last few days understanding and then fixing the code. I looked at the repositories that it searched (the Internet Archive luckily created a snapshot early December 2022, right before the site disappeared) and decided to prune that repository collection to just the ones that support Slackware 14.2 and newer, and are known to me. That still leaves 62 repositories.

Today I am opening a custom instance of slakfinder on slackware.nl which will hopefully prevent new downtime. Get a look at it here: https://slackware.nl/slakfinder/ .

I haven’t tested the Guest Book, feel free to leave your comments there as well as in the comments section below. Commenting here on the blog will give you a much higher probability of me answering.
If there’s repositories (Slackware-compatible and for Slackware 14.2 or newer) that you want me to add, let me know.

Enjoy! Eric

Miscellaneous packages (vlc,wine,wiipresent)

July 21, 2010 / / 12 Comments

Hi!

Just a quick message before I hit the bed,

I uploaded some Slackware packages for your consumption.

  • vlc – the new stable release 1.1.1 became available for download today and my packages are now ready to be grabbed at http://slackware.org.uk/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/ (this UK mirror hosts the packages with export restrictions – they contain mp3 and aac audio encoders) or http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/vlc/ . Several bugs got fixed and features added. See the VLC ChangeLog for details.
  • wiipresent – this package needed a rebuild (actually the supporting libwiimote needed a rebuild) because of the updated BlueZ stack in Slackware 13.1.
    I use the wiipresent software for presentations (duh)… It allows me to use my son’s Wii controller (the wiimote) as a pointing/navigation device so that I can walk the stage comfortably.
  • wine – this was recently released in a stable 1.2 version, after lots and lots of release candidates. Please note that my wine packages will only run 32-bit Windows binaries. Even the package I created for Slackware64 ! If someone convinces me that it is worth the effort to add support for 64-bit Windows to my wine package, I will add that, but not before. Also note that wine on Slackware64 requires multilib. You could build wine on a pure 64-bit Slackware but then it would only run 64-bit Windows binaries. That is not what I chose to offer you.

I hope you enjoy these updates!

Eric

VLC media player

September 1, 2008 / / 0 Comments

Are you one of these people who puts Slackware on a computer and then immediately follows up with the installation of another media player than Xine?

Well, I am one of these people. I have been using MPLayer a lot – it builds relatively easily and because it uses Windows codec DLL’s it supports a multitude of audio and video formats. But it is not cross-platform, and it does not give me a happy experience when I use MPlayer to watch DVD’s (the way it handles DVD menus is clumsy at best). And why do I still have to use these Windows codecs when I am running Linux??

The videolan project addresses my issues with MPlayer. Once started as a student project at the French École Centrale Paris it is now an international development effort. The videolan flagship product is VLC (it used to be called the VideoLan Client). VLC is a cross-platform media player which supports many multimedia formats as well as input- and output devices through a plugin architecture. The project went through some tough times when many of the core developers left around two years ago. Ever since, the 0.8.6.x versions have matured so that the current version is stable and great to use. Around the same time, development on a re-designed version of VLC – using Qt4 instead of wxWidgets as it’s GUI – was started.

It is probably due to the fact that the remaining developers plus those who joined the team in the past two years had to figure out VLC’s architecture that it took them so long to produce a version of the 0.9.x series that is stable enough to be useable.

I have had a package for the VLC 0.8.6 series in my repository for some time now, and have been using this alongside MPlayer. I have videos on my hard drive that play fine in MPLayer while VLC will just choke on it, so unfortunately I can not just ditch the MPLayer. The VLC developers tell me that this is a sign of a badly encoded video, and that VLC is not going to try and make the best of it like MPlayer (successfully) does. I think that is just too bad, because this philosophy prevents VLC from being the best media player all around.

Anyway… I had to give that rant a place. Let’s continue with the actual post.

Now that vlc 0.9.1 has been released as source only (the developers do not consider it stable enough to release official binary packages) I decided to upload a Slackware package for it. I have been building betas for many months now, and was not impressed at all by it’s terrible instability, hard lock-ups, and lack of media support. But surpsisingly, the 0.9.1 release shows that an enormous amount of work has been done in the past month, and this version is actually enjoyable. I invite everyone who wants to find out how well it runs, to download my package at one of these locations:

and tell me what you think of it.

Also, you may want to re-build the package in case you already have the Qt4 libraries installed – for instance when you have KDE4.x on your system. The static Qt4 library in the VLC package adds a full 8 MB to it’s size. When you want to make use of the system Qt4 instead in order to slim down the VLC package, you need to run the following commandlines (as root) to download build script and sources, and compile these into a Slackware package:

# lftp -c “open http://slackware.org.uk/ ; cd 3rd-party/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlctest/ ; mirror build”

# cd build

# STATIC_QT4=NO sh vlc.SlackBuild

Note: if any of the required source tarballs are missing from your system, the script will download them automatically. You will find the “vlc-0.9.1-i486-1alien.tgz” Slackware package in the /tmp directory after the compilation has finished.

Enjoy! Eric

© 2024 Alien Pastures

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑