Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: slackdocs

mirror & wiki server temporarily down

November 23, 2012 / / 6 Comments

The host machine which is running the virtual machine “taper.alienbase.nl” and “docs.slackware.com” has malfunctioned.

According to the story told by that server’s owner, the power cord got loose during the re-build of the RAID array after the guy replaced a failing hard drive.

After a power-on the RAID volume refused to mount…

It looks like the host server may be up and running at the end of the day, if the owner manages to recover from the partition corruption. In that case, my mirror server taper.alienbase.nl and the Slackware Documentatoin Project’s Wiki docs.slackware.com may be online a little later, provided that I can access the server and start the Virtual Machine.

In the worst case, the server will not be able to recover and I have to find a location where I can restore my daily backup of the Wiki content. It’s just bad co-incidence that I will travel to India tomorrow early morning. I have no idea how fast I would be able to arrange for a new host, fix the DNS entries, setup apache and start the Wiki… for the docs.slackware.com hostname I need to involve Pat.

More news later.

Eric

Update Fri Nov 23 18:55:29 UTC 2012 –

The server is back up! The server admin fixed it, no data was lost.

Slackware Documentation Project – two months later

October 19, 2012 / / 15 Comments


Hi folks!

I wanted to bring you up to speed about the recent activities on the Slackware Documentation Project and provide you with some statistics.

The Slackware Documentation Project is now active for exactly 2 months. I think we are a lucky bunch that we were given the opportunity to use a hostname in the slackware.com domain – thanks Pat!.And thanks to the anonymous benefactor who pays for server hosting and bandwidth – I could not do this without you.

I want to thank everyone who participated in the LinuxQuestions.org thread which inspired the birth of the project – http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/slackware-documentation-project-4175422561/ is now a sticky thread on the Slackware forum. I want to thank the people who stepped up in the early stages of the project, to volunteer as staff editors, and I particularly want to thank all of you who are creating the content in this Wiki. If we want to find ourselves “a place in history” we need inspired writers.

We have some great HOWTO’s currently and it is rewarding to watch the discussions on the (sic) discussion pages which help the continuous improvement of the articles.

I am very excited by the work that is being done to translate the english pages into a variety of other languages. I don’t think I ever saw a Slackware related site which had pages available in 12 different languages! Thanks to all who care enough to do the hard work of translating and thus enabling whole new communities to get familiar with Slackware Linux.

Matthew Fillpot completed the huge task of running the complete Slackware Essentials Book (http://slackbook.org/beta/) through a DocBook parser which he wrote himself, creating a Wiki version of the Book which is now an integral part of our site. Thanks to Alan Hicks for changing the new Book’s license and thereby allowing us to create a derived work. Any updates to the Book’s content will be fed back into the original of course.

We revamped the front page of the Wiki. It is the page which most visitors will open first. Therefore it should be clean, concise, and show relevant information. We decided to highlight the information which is the most dynamic – your contributions! The HOWTOs pages are now clearly outlined on the homepage, and there is also a shortlist of recent changes to the existing articles, an invitation to click through.

We currently have 180 registered user accounts in the Wiki and 101 people subscribed to the slackdocs mailing list http://lists.alienbase.nl/mailman/listinfo/slackdocs . All in all pretty impressive numbers for such a young project. The Wiki has some public statistics at http://docs.slackware.com/slackdocs:stats and some non-public statistics pages of which I made a PDF print.

We are barely starting… and I would like to see the volume of information grow steadily. How will we achieve that? Well; I would like all of you to go through your private notes. If you know of something that you struggled with, found the solution for and wrote down so that you would not forget – that is exactly the type of information we would like you to add to the Wiki ! Also, you may be a member of a local LUG in your area. Drop the word on the Slackware Documentation Project! And what about your mail closing signature, or discussion forum signature?
Perhaps you can add a link to the SlackDocs Wiki there. Spreading the word about the project, is what will give it the momentum to make it grow bigger.

Thanks for listening.

Eric

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

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