My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Updates for LibreOffice, Chromium, Calibre, QBittorrent, Veracrypt

I have been preparing a stable release of liveslak, and I wanted the PLASMA5 ISO to have up-to-date software taken from my own “alien” package repository. So I downloaded the latest sources and have prepared new packages for Slackware-current on which the Live ISOs are based, for the following:

  • LibreOffice:
    LibreOffice 5.1.3 is a minor update, focusing on bug fixes.
  • Chromium:
    Chromium 50.0.2661.102 is a security fix, addressing 5 CVE’s. Some days earlier I already uploaded a newer version of the PepperFlash plugin for Chromium. Note that Google no longer releases 32bit versions of its Chrome browser, so that the PepperFlash and Widevine plugins will see only 64bit updates.
  • Calibre:
    Nothing really exciting about the new 2.56.0 version. Kovid Goyal keeps improving this e-book library management program at a steady rate. Its GUI uses Qt5 so this is a natural inclusion for the Plasma5 Live ISO.
  • QBittorrent:
    Version 3.3.4 is the latest of this great bittorrent client with a Qt4 based GUI (I have not switched to its new Qt5 based GUI yet)
  • Veracrypt:
    The successor of TrueCrypt when that program stopped being developed. VeraCrypt fixes many (security) bugs that were still present in TrueCrypt. Its development continues with the 1.17 release while remaining compatible with older TrueCrypt containers.

Now we just need to cross fingers and hope that there will be a release of Slackware 14.2 soon, so that I can create definitive versions of Slackware Live Edition.

Packages for the aforementioned software can be obtained from these mirror sites and probably others too:

Cheers! Eric

18 Comments

  1. cmyster

    1st – Top notch, will test ASAP.
    The 2nd thing, I was unable to find any way to install ^ on the hdd… sort of mirroring what I have on the Live environment to a local HDD.
    It would be nice to add the installation scripts and use a tag generated from the live environment and in that way provide “flavors” of Slackware installations (which is working rather well with the XFCE live flavor).

  2. alienbob

    cmyster can you elaborate? When you boot a Live ISO and run its script “setup2hd”, that script will install the full Live environment to your harddrive. For the Plasma5 ISO variant that means, you will get Chromium, LibreOffice et.al. installed to your harddrive as well.
    The setup2hd is a modified Slackware setup program, stripped of the choice of packages to install (only one option: everything is installed) and you do not have to specify the location of the package source because the setup2hd script will find its own Live media.

  3. Trolecki Jan

    Any news about date of Slackware 14.2 release?

  4. Darkstarfire

    I am waiting patiently for the release of Slackware 14.2, I even bought an SSD last month, not put on my notebook because I’m waiting out the new version of Slackware to open my first SSD.

    \ * Sorry for my bad english (Google Translate).

  5. rel

    Eric,

    64 bit question: If one installs from the liveslak iso to a hd using the setup2hd script, what’s the recommended way to then keep chromium and its pepperflash plugin up to date on the target pc? (as well as other software that should be updated regularly?)

    Cheers,
    rel

  6. Eduardo

    Hi Eric! I can report smooth upgrades on LibreOffice, Chromium and VeraCrypt. Thank you!!

  7. D.L.C. Burggraaff

    Eric: Any reason why you did not update the chromium widevine plugin to 102 as well?
    Regards, Dick

  8. D.L.C. Burggraaff

    … The chromium-widevine-plugin.SlackBuild runs ok.

  9. alienbob

    D.L.C. Burggraaff that’s more of a cosmetic thing these days. I have noticed that the version of the Widevine CDM library does not change a lot. When I run the chromium.SlackBuild and it downloads a new chromium source, it will also download a Chrome RPM and my SlackBuild script will write the version of the internal Widevine library to standard output. If that new version is the same as the old version, there is no need for a new chromium-widevine-plugin package except for the cosmetic aspect (to keep its version number equal to the chromium package version).
    I will admit that I forgot to update the widevine plugin package though 😉 Usually I do this even when the widevine library version did not change, to avoid questions like yours. But I did too many things at the same time and overlooked the package.

  10. alienbob

    rel, not really a “64bit question” but a more generic question. If you install the Plasma5 ISO to harddisk using the “setup2hd” script, then the setup2hd script will also copy a pre-configured slackpkg+ to your harddisk.
    The slackpkg+ extension is meant to manage packages from 3rd party repositories, like mine (the repository containing Plasma5 but also the repository containing chrmium, libreoffice and so on).

    It is as simple as running:
    # slackpkg update ; slackpkg upgrade-all
    … to upgrade to newer versions of my packages as well as receiving regular Slackware updates (because that is what slackpkg still does too of course).

  11. rel

    Apologies, I should have been more clear: I only said 64 bit to differentiate from my past questions, which typically related to the 32bit flavor. Since the PepperFlash plugin is no longer updated for 32 bit, I suppose that’s the part of my question that was 64bit only. 🙂 Anyway, thanks for the clear answer. Looking forward to the final release.

    Cheers,
    rel

  12. inman

    hi,
    excuse my ignorance but I just got the calibre updated with slackpkg+ and it now clearly requires qt5-5.6.0 as it claims it can not definitely find some function in 5.5.1.
    The 5.6.0 won’t easily build on current, so I just took yours.
    Now everything is fine and calibre gets one step forward but stops with: … failed to start because it could not find or load the Qt platform plugin “xcb” in “”.
    So I wonder if you use different libxcb, or is there anything else that I have to consider?

    thank u for ur time
    best,
    Inman.

  13. alienbob

    Inman, the ChangeLog.txt entry for the Calibre update reads as follows:

    +————————–+
    Fri May 13 11:10:46 UTC 2016
    calibre: updated to 2.56.0 for Slackware-current
    (needs libxkbcommon, podofo, qt5 and qt5-webkit).

    When you install libxkbcommon your error about “could not find or load the Qt platform plugin “xcb” ” will be gone.

    Note that this new calibre-2.56.0 package is an update just for slackware-current. My repository has qt-5.6.0 for slackware-current: http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/qt5/pkg64/current/ (not 5.5.1). You definitely need to install / update all the dependencies in my repository.

  14. inman

    hi,
    thank for the response, I just setup to read the changelog of your repository.
    you might want to change the caliber.SlackBuild cause somewhere around line 90 the qt5-5.3.2 is been suggested as the minimum requirement.
    thanks a lot for your patient.
    cheers.

  15. alienbob

    Inman, what’s in that SlackBuild is the recommendation if you compile it yourself. But for using the package, you will have to use the version of qt5 that it was compiled against. It’s not always this rigid but there are considerable differences between Qt 5.5.x and 5.6.x that make it mandatory.

  16. Qunying

    For the LibreOffice 5.1.3 build, (64-bit, current), I only get blank screen when slide show in impress. But the official package converted from the RPM works (using script from SlackBuilds.org).

  17. Qunying

    No, I tried disable hardware acceleration without success. With the official binary, I could turn on hardware acceleration without problem.

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