Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: ungoogled (Page 1 of 4)

KTOWN: live ISO with Plasma6 Alpha. Also, chromium now supports HEVC/AC3 playback

November 10, 2023 / / 20 Comments

I have uploaded a 5 GB ISO file containing a new KTOWN variant of Slackware Live. This is the KDE Plasma6 Alpha release. Play around with it and perhaps you will be able to contribute to an improved Beta by finding and reporting the bugs you encounter.

Get the ISO from my NL or my US server (US ISO still uploading at the moment). There’s also an MD5 checksum and a GPG signature file in those same locations if you want to validate the download.

A lot of packages did not compile yet for various reasons. I am not too concerned about that, next update hopefully will be more complete. A lot of work still needs to be done however (by the KDE developers) to port the remainder of KDE Gear (formerly called Applications or Software Collection) to Qt6.
Not ported to Qt6 as of yet are: artikulate cantor cervisia juk kamoso kde-dev-utils kdenlive kdesdk-thumbnailers kdev-php kdev-python kdevelop kget kgpg kig kio-gdrive kipi-plugins kiten kmix konversation kqtquickcharts krfb ktorrent ktouch kwave libkipi lokalize marble okular parley poxml rocs umbrello.

Still, I was impressed with the fully working and stable Plasma6 Wayland session when I tested an unreleased KTOWN Live ISO a week ago. Of course, as things go, I seem to have broken the Wayland session in this public release of the KTOWN Live.
The version of SDDM graphical session manager should also be Wayland-capable but I will test that in a future ISO.

Let me know in the comments section below what you think of this Alpha release.

News about my chromium package (also its ungoogled sibling).

I was finally able to get the HEVC video and AC3 audio codec support working. There’s a patch set on github, maintained by StaZhu but I did not like the complexity and I am not really interested in GPU hardware-only support. The browser’s internal ffmpeg libraries playback HEVC just fine, taxing your CPU a bit more than in the case of a supported GPU.
Now, the Thorium Browser is also Chromium based and its developer Alex313031 used StaZhu’s patches and wrote some of his own to add not just HEVC video but also AC3 playback support.
Again, I did not like the complexity of his solution (documented on github) but could not get around using some of the patches provided by both. I simplified some of the others into a bunch of ‘sed’ commands. And that made it work for me.

The browser will now playback HEVC and AC3 media formats, as long as the container file is a MP4. I have not found how I can convince Chromium to also support MKV containers.
The chromium-119.0.6045.123 package is already available in my repository, and chromium-ungoogled is still compiling (the ungoogled patch kit only became available earlier today).

You can test the new HEVC playback capability here: https://test-videos.co.uk/ if you select any MP4/HEVC sample (none of those have sound) or Thorium browser test page: https://thorium.rocks/misc/h265-tester.html (those have AC3 audio).

Have fun!

Chromium 118 (also ungoogled) is a security update

October 14, 2023 / / 18 Comments

I uploaded new 64bit packages for Chromium 118.0.5993.70 (also the un-googled variant) for which the sources were released a few days ago. This first release in the 118 series addresses a critical vulnerability (CVE-2023-5218) so it’s wise to upgrade.
As mentioned in a previous blog post, future 32bit package updates will have a lower frequency: one update per month. Google has increased the frequency of its Chromium releases dramatically (one per week) and I just cannot keep up. If you need that 32bit package badly now, you can of course grab the sources and my SlackBuild and build it yourself.

Looking at this 118 major release, one thing you need to be aware of is the changed behavior of “Enhanced Safe Browsing” which you can enable in the browser’s security settings (chrome://settings/security). Probably most of you already have this enabled. This is what changed:

Google will be able to disable an installed browser extension remotely if it determines the extension is labeled as ‘malicious’ and the extension was not installed via the Chrome Web Store.
The browser’s security checks of downloaded online content have been enhanced with so-called ‘deep scanning’ meaning the browser may now ask you for a password to open a protected archive you just downloaded. Note that the scanning occurs in Google’s datacenter – when you enable ‘enhanced safe browsing’ you consent to uploading some of your data to Google for the specific purpose of scanning and analyzing it for malicious content.
Also with ‘enhanced safe browsing’ enabled, the browser will send telemetry data about installed browser extensions using the chrome.tabs API to Google’s servers for analysis. This is meant to improve the “detection of malicious and policy violating extensions”.

It is up to you to decide which way the tradeoff between enhanced security and sharing data with Google works for you. If you don’t feel comfortable with this and you value your privacy, then you need to disable (or not enable) ‘Enhanced Safe Browsing’ in the settings.

Find the updated Slackware 15.0 and -current packages both for chromium and chromium-ungoogled in my repository and its mirrors (like my own US server and in a short while, the UK mirror).

Cheers, Eric

Chromium package and release update

October 6, 2023 / / 4 Comments

You have surely noticed an increase in the frequency with which I am releasing new chromium and chromium-ungoogled packages. This is caused by a new release policy from Google, with an update every week and a bump in the major version (currently 117) every month.
I have tried keeping up with that schedule, but I am giving up.
My reasons? One chromium or chromium-ungoogled package takes 11+ hours to compile (part of the Chromium compilation involves compiling Google’s customized clang compiler). Every update, I need to compile 4 packages. It takes away the fun in updating them to be honest. I don’t know for whom I actually create the 32bit packages still.

So, from this moment onwards, my own package release policy changes as follows. I will keep up with the Google source release cycle, but only for the 64bit packages. My 32bit packages for chromium and chromium-ungoogled will be updated no more than once per month, unless there’s a big security hole to be patched.

By the way, I uploaded new chromium packages for 117.0.5938.149 yesterday and today I added its chromium-ungoogled sibling (64bit only).

Find the updated Slackware 15.0 and -current packages both for chromium and chromium-ungoogled in my repository and its mirrors (like my own US server and in a short while, the UK mirror).

Cheers, Eric

Chromium 117.0.5938.132 fixes zero-day exploit

September 29, 2023 / / 6 Comments

Just yesterday I uploaded my  packages for chromium and chromium-ungoogled to 117.0.5938.92. Only to discover right before heading to bed that there’s a new security update available… Chromium 117.0.5938.132 fixes a zero-day vulnerability in libvpx (CVE-2023-5217) which is already actively exploited to install spyware on computers.

The chromium packages for 117.0.5938.132 are already available in my repository. The chromium-ungoogled packages are currently compiling and will become available in the evening (CET timezone) i.e. later today.
It’s highly recommended to upgrade to my latest chromium and chromium-ungoogled packages.

Find the updated Slackware 15.0 and -current packages both for chromium and chromium-ungoogled in my repository and its mirrors (like my own US server and in a short while, the UK mirror).

Cheers, Eric

Some recent package updates: chromium (-ungoogled), ffmpeg, handbrake, pipewire-jack

September 1, 2023 / / 23 Comments

Chromium, regular and un-googled.

Google is speeding up its Chromium release cycle. Let’s see if I can keep up since I also build the -ungoogled variant. The latest update is 116.0.5845.140 and addresses a vulnerability.
You can now upgrade to my latest chromium and chromium-ungoogled packages. The updated Slackware 15.0 and -current packages both for chromium and chromium-ungoogled are available in my repository and its mirrors (like my own US server and the UK mirror).

FFmpeg.

A recent upgrade of Vulkan in slackware-current prompted a rebuild of the ffmpeg 5.1.3 distro package, and for the same reason I had to recompile my enhanced ffmpeg package for -current. I used the opportunity to add an embedded version of SVT-AV1, an open source AV1 video encoder originally developed by Intel in collaboration with Netflix and later adopted by the Alliance for Open Media. My ffmpeg package already contains an AV1 decoder: the dav1d library, but now you can have a go at creating your own video in AV1 format.
Get ffmpeg-5.1.3 for -current here (unrestricted distribution) or here (this version can encode AAC audio and hence restricted to distribution outside the US).

Handbrake.

The version of this package targeting slackware-current also needed a recompile due to the Vulkan update in -current and here I used the opportunity to apply a minor version upgrade.
Get handbrake-1.6.1 here (unrestricted distribution) or here (this version can encode AAC audio and hence restricted to distribution outside the US).

Pipewire-jack.

In slackware-current, pipewire is a moving target. I know that a lot of people have switched from using pulseaudio and jack to just pipewire with varying levels of success. I keep offering the Jack Audio Connection Kit support libraries for pipewire which are not present in the Slackware pipewire package, simply because Pat compiles pipewire without jack installed.
Note: my pipewire-jack package is not replacing Slackware’s pipewire! It’s an add-on which depends on my jack2 package being installed as well. It’s quite similar in purpose to my pulseaudio-jack package which aims to add support for Jack in pulseaudio.
Get pipewire-jack-0.3.79 here.

Enjoy the weekend! Eric

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