Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: Slackware (Page 2 of 2)

End of may ramblings

May 31, 2012 / / 22 Comments

It has been a while since my latest blog post, so I thought it would be good to talk a bit about the goings-on.

First about the Slackware web server. I know, people, that we have been without http://www.slackware.com/ for a few weeks now, but rest assured that the site will eventually be back. Either we put the old web site code on a temporary server or we wait a little longer and publish a new site based on a new CMS. It all pretty much depends on how much time we can volunteer for this – it is mostly handled by a few people in the coreteam. Pat should focus on Slackware and make sure we get a new stable release at some point – there is a lot to do still on that front.

And then about my own packaging activities.

There was a new release of LibreOffice yesterday, and I am currently building packages for that. If there are no issues with the build then you can expect those packages tomorrow.

KDE release team is in the process of releasing the first beta of KDE SC 4.9, and I intend to make packages for that. There was a heated discussion about this beta when the new release manager announced he was going to call off the beta1 release… but all issues have been resolved yesterday and new tarballs are going to be made available ahead of time to the packagers. There are quite a few changes compared to KDE 4.8.x so it will cost me a while to work out the updates to the KDE.SlackBuild framework.

I also hope that VLC releases their version 2.0.2 soon. It has been lingering just around the corner for a while, but a recent fall-out between several of the core developers threatened the whole project’s existence when their most important Linux developer quit the team out of frustration. That animosity has now subsided, the team is whole again, and development is progressing toward a new release.

I also want to thank the kind people who donated a few bucks after all the upheavals about the Slackware webserver’s outage. Although I work on Slackware in my spare time, because I like it, it’s my main hobby so to speak, getting some funds enabled me to buy a new and faster build box last year, and now I ordered a Raspberry-Pi (finally…) and I am also looking for a good tablet which allows the installation of a different OS than only Android… so that I can put my unfinished port of Slackware to modern ARM architectures on it and finally release that. A release does not make sense if it runs on only one device (the Trim Slice). Perhaps I will buy some more ARM hardware too. Even Pat was becoming excited about this ARM port.

Eric

Slackware 13.1 is here

May 24, 2010 / / 10 Comments

Just to add another message to the turmoil of cheering blog posts 🙂

Slackware 13.1 has been released today.

Read all about it in the official announcement or  read the ANNOUNCE.TXT directly.

As usual, it is recommended (but not mandatory) to buy a copy of the DVD or CD-set which helps funding the development of the distro (no, I am not getting any money out of that). The ISOs are of course available for free, and Bittorrent is the fastest way to get them: http://www.slackware.com/getslack/torrents.php

Alphageek’s “sligdo files” are a very fast way of creating byte-exact copies of the official ISOs in case you already have a local mirror-copy of the full Slackware 13.1 tree. The ISOs you create with sligdo (http://alphageek.dyndns.org/linux/sligdo/) will pass the GPG verification test. I just hope he will have those sligdo files ready for downlooad in time. If not, I have copies here: http://alien.slackbook.org/sligdo/ .

If you want to know more about how to create a Slackware USB installer if your computer does not have a CD or DVD drive, read this older article of mine: ??http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/installing-slackware-using-usb-thumb-drive/ – or for the Windows users: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/welcome-windows-user/

If you install or upgrade to the 64-bit version of Slackware 13.1 and want to have a system which is capable of running 32-bit software too (Slackware64 itself is a pure 64-bit distro), then you can make your Slackware64 multilib – read all about the process (which is fairly easy and straight-forward): http://alien.slackbook.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=slackware:multilib

To celebrate the occasion, I have created Slackware 13.1 packages for the VideoLAN Player (VLC) with added support for the new WebM video format which has the potential of becoming the default  video format in the implementation of the HTML5 “video” tag. Packages here (look for vlc-1.1.0.rc – at the moment of publishing this post I am still building them on a fresh Slackware 13.1…): http://www.slackware.org.uk/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/ . An example .webm video file is here if you want to try: http://www.jbkempf.com/~jb/yt3.remux.webm with thanks to Jean-Baptiste Kempf of the Videolan team.

Have fun! Eric

Slackware 12.2 is nearing release

December 9, 2008 / / 2 Comments

The Slackware ChangeLog.txt is full of frenzied activity these days. It may be obvious that the next official release is just around the corner. I was taken by surprise when I saw the ChangeLog entry of Mon Dec 8 22:31:55 CST 2008:

isolinux/initrd.img:  Added missing mount.nfs.
       Added INSSMB, an installer script to use a Samba source.
       Thanks to Eric Hameleers.

I had not expected to see the Samba network installation choice appear in this release… I wrote this fairly recently and it was targeted to be added only after 12.2 was officially released. Anyway, it is nice to see it appear now. All you need to use it, is a Samba share (using a Samba or even a Windows server) that does not require authentication.

This is how that looks when you are installing Slackware 12.2:

Network install options

Slackware 12.2 network install options

Hope you all like it! It will certainly make life easier for those who only have a Windows server to store the Slackware directory tree on.

A related note:

At the same time, we (the http://slackbuilds.org admin team) are working hard behind the screens to get all the SlackBuild scripts in our “12.1” repository validated for the new 12.2 release. We have asked all maintainers to test their own contributions when possible, and for those who do not have a slackware-current system available, we will do the validation ourselves. The http://slackbuilds.org web site is already prepared, so the update should be fast and painless.

Cheers, Eric

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