Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: x86_64 (Page 4 of 5)

KDE 4.4 release candidate 1 packaged for Slackware

January 11, 2010 / / 4 Comments

Just a quick update:

I have finished building Slackware packages for KDE 4.4 RC1 (aka version 4.3.90). Compared to the previous Beta2, several of the dependencies have been updated. And just as with Beta2, I was unable to create language packs for ca, da, es, et, it, sr due to docbook errors.

Get KDE 4.4.RC1 packages for Slackware-current (64-bit only) here: http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.3.90/ … Because the sources and SlackBuild scripts are available as well, you should be able to create 32-bit packages quite easily yourself.

Have fun, Eric

Bleeding at the edges again?

January 5, 2010 / / 4 Comments

… Ok, ok, it is not so bad actually! Au contraire!

Slackware Linux development made a big leap today, when Pat Volkerding updated the distro’s “vital organs” of kernel, glibc and gcc. The “dull” phase of the slackware-current development cycle is over hopefully, and it’s back to the bleeding edge.

To be fair, gcc 4.4.2 has been sitting in “testing” area for quite a while now, and we think it is time to promote it into the core. With glibc 2.11.1 we are pushing it, as this is the most recent stable release, and the 2.6.32.2 kernel was much-anticipated by those who run -current on their computers.

Note that the new kernel has full support for EFI (the Extensible Firmware Interface which is going to be the replacement for the ageing BIOS on modern computers). This means that there is also support for GPT partitions. GUID Partition Table is a standard for the layout of the partition table on a physical hard disk (part of the EFI specification and meant to overcome the 2 TB size limitation of MBR partitions). We still have to look into updating the Slackware installer for automatic GPT partition recognition, but you will be able to use GPT partitions if you do some footwork yourself before running “setup”.

With this update to Slackware’s vitals, the stage is set for further tweaks of the core, but I think that for now, you will have plenty to play with.

And as promised to those running the 64-bit version of Slackware-current, I have made available multilib versions of the new gcc and glibc packages! Thanks to Pat Volkerding who allowed me sufficient time to build and rebuild these packages on my old computer until they were just perfect (I hope) and could be released along with the Slackware originals.

You can get them here: http://slackware.com/~alien/multilib/13.1/ (I took the liberty of assuming that 13.1 will be the version of the next Slackware release, mainly because I needed to give that directory a name).

For detailed instructions about what multilib means to the 64-bit Slackware and how you can add it, read this wiki article: http://alien.slackbook.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=slackware:multilib

Have fun! Eric

Second beta of KDE 4.4

January 4, 2010 / / 10 Comments

Just before christmas in 2009, the KDE community released the second beta of the upcoming KDE 4.4 desktop environment (or to use the correct name, KDE Software Compilation 4.4).

In Slackware Linux’s development tree we still have 4.3.4 which works really well, but in KDE 4.4 some major strides are being made towards an even better work environment.

I decided to have a look at these new developments, especially since the Nepomuk search should work a lot better with the new and fast Virtuoso backend, and built the whole of KDE 4.4.beta2 for our 64-bit Slackware Linux.

I was not disappointed. Even though this KDE 4.4 prerelease is labeled “beta”, I have found it to be quite stable, fast, slick and very useable. The improvements which I have seen from 4.1 -> 4.2 -> 4.3 -> 4.4 keep amazing me… let alone the giant leap that lay between 4.0 and 4.0… everybody remembers the heated debates between the early adopters of KDE4 and those who hated it. At the time we added KDE4 to Slackware, that was seen as a milestone release. Now, I can not imagine ever going back to using KDE3 as my default desktop. And yes, Nepomuk search is pretty nifty, lightning fast and it does not feel like it is eating away my computer’s resources.

So, I am making my Slackware packages available to the general public – for all of you to enjoy. There is one caveat though:

You will need to run a development snapshot of 64-bit Slackware (meaning, slackware64-current of around 25-december-2009 or newer).

These packages do not work on the 64-bit release of Slackware 13.0. Neither do I have packages for the 32-bit release of slackware-current, simply because I do not have a computer in the house which is running slackware-current and is powerful enough to build KDE4 and the various dependencies in a reasonable time.

KDE 4.4 has requirements that are a bit different than with KDE 4.3.x which we have in slackware-current, or even 4.2.4 which we have in Slackware 13.0. You will have to upgrade several non-KDE Slackware packages as well as add some new ones.

Now, go and have a look at http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.3.85/ . Version 4.3.85 is the same as 4.4.beta2.

  • All of the dependencies that you need are in the “x86_64/deps” directory.
  • All KDE packages can be found in “x86_64/kde”.
  • KDE localizations (language packs) are available in “x86_64/kdei”.

These are the steps you take to upgrade slackware64-current to KDE 4.4.beta2. It will bring you KDE4 even if you did not have it installed before. As part of the steps you will be downloading the new Slackware packages, but not the source or SlackBuilds. It is easy to modify the download command to also get you the sources if you want this.

  1. Download all of the directory http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.3.85/x86_64/ :
    # lftp -c "open http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.3.85/ ; mirror x86_64"
  2. Change into the directory “x86_64” which has been created:
    # cd x86_64
  3. Remove the no longer required kdelibs-experimental package:
    # removepkg kdelibs-experimental
  4. Install/upgrade the new dependencies:
    # upgradepkg --reinstall --install-new deps/*.t?z
  5. Install/upgrade KDE4.4.beta2 packages:
    # upgradepkg --reinstall --install-new kde/*.t?z

Of course, you should not run those commands while running X and certainly not while running KDE… After the upgrade process finishes, you can start a KDE session and you will be greeted by the familiar yet subtly different  user interface of KDE4.

NOTE: Some of the localizations (the KDEI series) had errors while building. Missing from this beta release are the localizations for the following languages:

ca, da, es, et, it, sr.

Here is a screenshot of my desktop with Dolphin showing a Nepomuk-powered search result for the word “slackware” in documents that it indexes, as well as Dolphin’s extremely convenient “terminal mode” (just press F4 to open Dolphin’s terminal if you need the speed of the commandline for some file operation). You’ll also notice that adding widgets to your desktop looks quite different now.

Have fun, Eric

Flash crashes Firefox on x86_64

January 2, 2010 / / 4 Comments

Some people have reported that on 64-bit Slackware, and after installing Adobe’s 64-bit Flash plugin, their Firefox crashes with an “illegal instruction” error  when it loads a page containing flash video (like Youtube)…

I never had this issue, and for a lot of other people, flash works fine as well. However, the mystery remained until my friend Bruce (whose computer suffers from this crash bug, but only in Slackware, not in Gentoo) found the solution on the Gentoo bugtracker. Bruce wrote a howto on how to fix the crash .

Basically, the bug hits only certain Athlon64 CPUs which do not have the “lahf_lm” processor flag. This seems to be absent in certain processors of the “cpu family 15“. My own Athlon64 3200+ processor is from that same family but still mine has this “lahf_lm” flag (as shown in the output of the command “cat /proc/cpuinfo”).

What is the fix?

If you have an Athlon64 CPU which misses the “lahf_lm” instruction, you need to compile a small dynamic library that traps the “illegal instruction” signal and then emulates its effects. You should either place the plugin in mozilla’s plugins directory (so it’s loaded whenever the Flash plug-in is loaded) or force it to load by adding it to LD_PRELOAD environment variable. Below, I will show you how to build and install the library.

The source code written by Maks Verver is attached to the gentoo bug report I linked to earlier, and I’ve made a copy available here.

Download this “c” source file, then as root build the dynamic library “flashplugin-lahf-fix.so” using the following command (beware of line-wraps, the commands below are each a single line):

cc -fPIC -shared -nostdlib -lc -oflashplugin-lahf-fix.so flashplugin-lahf-fix.c

Copy the resulting library file “flashplugin-lahf-fix.so” to the mozilla plugin directory:

install -m0755 flashplugin-lahf-fix.so /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/flashplugin-lahf-fix.so

Restart your Firefox browser and check that it no longer crashes when you load a flash video.

Eric

Multilib Slackware64

September 1, 2009 / / 5 Comments

By now, the world will be well aware that there was a new release of Slackware Linux last week. Yes, Slackware 13.0 is there… just when I was enjoying a quiet holiday at the french coast. A pity that the release date slipped past the start of my vacation, I always enjoy the virtual “party” when Pat decides to throw the switch.

This also marks the birth of the first stable official release of 64bit Slackware, aka Slackware for the x86_64 architecture, aka Slackware64.  This is a pure-64bit Slackware in the sense that it is unable to compile or run 32bit binaries out of the box. But we took great care to make Slackware64 ready for multilib.  A multilib Linux system has full support for compiling and running both 64bit and 32bit binaries. Pat Volkerding made a decision not to add full multilib capability to Slackware64 initially. Perhaps that will change in future releases.

In the meantime, it is really not hard to add a full multilib layer to Slackware64. The first step would be to build/install multilib versions of gcc and glibc. Then, you have to add 32bit versions of the supporting libraries that your 32bit software will need to run (think of qt, gtk, cups, …. you name it).

Perhaps the mention of “build/install multilib” scared you off?  To make it easy for you, I published a set of pre-built packages that you can install using “upgradepkg –install-new” (gcc and glibc need to be upgraded, the remainder are new packages). You can find those packages at http://www.slackware.com/~alien/multilib/ .

To accompany these packages I wrote an article for my Wiki explaining the steps you need to go through.  If you care to give me feedback on my multilib solution, you can do so on the article’s discussion area: http://alien.slackbook.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=wiki:talk:slackware:multilib .

After completing the intructions, you will have a Slackware system that is capable of building and/or running (among others) Wine, Skype, Citrix client. And many more of course!

Note: if you use slackpkg or another semi-automated package manager, you will have to add the gcc and glibc packages to the update blacklist. If you fail to do so, your package manager will automatically “upgrade” the new multilib gcc and glibc packages to their original pure64 Slackware versions…

Enjoy!

Cheers, Eric

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