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Eric

428 Comments

  1. Arkadiusz

    Hi Eric,

    I would like to ask if You plan upgrade wxGTK2 to newest version?

    • alienbob

      I had no plans to touch that. What program still requires wxGTK 2.x?

      • Arkadiusz

        It’s Aegisub šŸ™

        • alienbob

          Aegisub should compile against wxGTK3 if you add this parameter to the configure (assuming you installed my wxGTK3 package):

          # configure –with-wx-config=/usr/bin/wx-config-gtk3

  2. Jesus M

    Hi there!

    Are you aware of any problem with Plasma starting in the last couple of days? I am not sure when exactly.

    Today I had to log out and when tried to log in again I simply couldn’t. I started to troubleshoot the issue and initially there was apparently a problem with “baloo” that was generating tons of log messages (similar issue than explained here https://askubuntu.com/questions/1214572/how-do-i-stop-and-remove-kde-baloo-that-is-broken-and-filling-up-my-syslog-file), after stopping baloo I was able to log in again, but I had to try to reproduce the problem … so I logged out and in again, and I just couldn’t. I tried to identify the problem but unsuccessfully so far. So I just removed the whole KDE and installed again from your repository, but with no luck. I can open other desktop environments, as XFCE that I am using right now without issues, and will continue troubleshooting to see if I can find the problem, but just wonder if you (or any of your followers) is experiencing similar problems.

    Thanks!

    • alienbob

      I am using KDE Plasma5 on Slackware64-current every day, the whole day, and have no issues.
      My desktop (which I use more at the moment than my laptop) has a Nvidia GPU and I use their binary drivers. Also I added the PAM support from the Slackware (and ktown) testing area.
      Baloo can be resource-intensive during the first hours on a freshly installed system while it is busy indexing your files, but that will go back to normal once the indexing is complete. Sometimes a baloo index becomes corrupted (for instance when you do a forced power-down) and then you need to stop baloo, delete its index and restart baloo. But issues with baloo should normally not prevent you from logging in. Is your harddisk having physical issues perhaps?

      To remove and re-create the baloo database, try:
      # balooctl stop ; balooctl disable ; rm -rf ~/.local/share/baloo ; balooctl enable ; balooctl start

      • Jesus M

        Hi again.

        No, the hard disk is a new one and apparently has no errors.

        When starting Plasma from the console it get stuck with this messages:

        Registering “:1.35/StatusNotifierItem” to system tray
        Registering “:1.78/StatusNotifierItem” to system tray
        Registering “:1.80/StatusNotifierItem” to system tray
        qt.qpa.xcb: QXcbConnection: XCB error: 3 (BadWindow), sequence: 1302, resource id: 98566147, major code: 7 (ReparentWindow), minor code: 0
        qt.qpa.xcb: QXcbConnection: XCB error: 3 (BadWindow), sequence: 1304, resource id: 98566147, major code: 141 (Unknown), minor code: 1
        qt.qpa.xcb: QXcbConnection: XCB error: 3 (BadWindow), sequence: 1305, resource id: 98566147, major code: 6 (ChangeSaveSet), minor code: 0
        qt.qpa.xcb: QXcbConnection: XCB error: 3 (BadWindow), sequence: 1306, resource id: 98566147, major code: 25 (SendEvent), minor code: 0
        qt.qpa.xcb: QXcbConnection: XCB error: 3 (BadWindow), sequence: 1307, resource id: 98566147, major code: 12 (ConfigureWindow), minor code: 0
        qt.qpa.xcb: QXcbConnection: XCB error: 3 (BadWindow), sequence: 1309, resource id: 98566147, major code: 12 (ConfigureWindow), minor code: 0
        qt.qpa.xcb: QXcbConnection: XCB error: 3 (BadWindow), sequence: 1310, resource id: 98566147, major code: 8 (MapWindow), minor code: 0
        qt.qpa.xcb: QXcbConnection: XCB error: 3 (BadWindow), sequence: 1311, resource id: 98566147, major code: 61 (ClearArea), minor code: 0
        Service “:1.78” unregistered
        Container window visible, stack below
        kdeinit5: Got EXEC_NEW ‘/usr/lib64/qt5/plugins/kf5/kio/file.so’ from launcher.
        kdeinit5: preparing to launch ‘/usr/lib64/qt5/plugins/kf5/kio/file.so’

        Does it tell you anything?

        Thanks

        • alienbob

          Unfortunately this does not tell me anything about what could be wrong.

          • Jesus M

            And today it worked fine! šŸ˜®

            I have no idea of what’s going on. I just installed the last couple of upgrades for current, but apparently nothing relevant for this problem.

            I don’t know, if it happens again I will try to investigate further.

            Thanks

  3. Craig

    will a version of DevHelp become available soon for slackware64-current ?

    Thanks for all your slackware efforts !!

    Craig

  4. Jesus M Diaz

    Hi again,

    Plasma started to fail again and apparently SDDM was crashing:

    Apr 11 10:58:51 liet kernel: [ 55.238700] sddm-greeter[1401]: segfault at 1501e36389 ip 00007fa561ecd2c8 sp 00007fff18a4d440 error 4 in libQt5Core.so.5.13.2[7fa561c77000+2d3000]
    Apr 11 11:05:44 liet kernel: [ 468.103765] sddm-greeter[1542]: segfault at 30 ip 00007f7970bccabd sp 00007ffdb99525e0 error 4 in libQt5Core.so.5.13.2[7f7970b0c000+2d3000]
    Apr 11 11:16:53 liet kernel: [ 36.322246] sddm-greeter[1383]: segfault at 1 ip 00007f9ab9d8cabd sp 00007ffe74067440 error 4 in libQt5Core.so.5.13.2[7f9ab9ccc000+2d3000]

    I removed all Plasma packages and installed them again. I even removed all user specific Plasma and KDE configuration (didn’t make any sense anyway since the error happened before any user info was loaded). No success, it was still failing 90% of the times (but once in a while it worked and I could not find a patter).

    Finally I made a new fresh slackware-current installation and installed again your Plasma set, and it is working apparently fine.

    My guess, I installed something that is conflicting with Plasma, but I have no idea of what was it. So I am installing again one by one all my packages and documented the order and all changes, so if it happens again I will be able to identify the conflicting software.

    Thanks

  5. PeterH

    Dear Alienbob,

    First, I very much appreciate your work on Slackware. I would like to suggest an improvement on Slackware installer, or at least ask a question for clarification.
    I just would like to ask question about the setup “Select Prompting Mode” step. The menu and the options have been changed, and I think the older version was better.
    In an older version of Slackware Install the options and the explanations were these:

    menu Choose groups of packages from interactive menus
    expert Choose individual packages from interactive menus.

    I’m referring to the old installer, please see on the Slackbook webpage 3.4.7:

    https://www.slackbook.org/html/installation-setup.html

    On the other hand, the newer and current version of Installer says this:

    menu Choose individual packages from interactive menus
    expert This is actually the same as the “menu” option

    I think the old version was better: it was more clear and it offered two genuinely different options: selection of groups of packages vs selections of individual packages. Why it has been changed?
    Also, I think it would be better if the users had this option still. Is it possible to, say, in next release of Slackware we’ll get the old intall options again with two different and clearly distinguishable options?

    In sum, I think the current installer is confusing or redundant. And I don’t see at all an improvement here from the newer version.

    If there is currently no real difference between the “menu” and “expert” options, then there is no reason to keep both of them. I would keep only one of those with the explanation: “Choose individual packages from interactive menus”.
    If, however, there is or should be a real difference and choice between individual vs groups of packages, then the old version should be used.

    I would go for the old version: the explanation is clear, it offers an extra option and more flexibility in installing.

    Thank you for clarification.

    Best wishes,
    Peter

  6. Svoboda

    Hey Eric !

    I wanted to ask if you plan an update to Wine, your version of it is the best I ever got my hands on.

    Cheers !

    • alienbob

      Yeah I can add that to the TODO.

      • Svoboda

        Awesome, looking forwards to see it.

        Thanks Eric

  7. Henry Pfeil

    Thank you for upgrading ktown-kde5.
    Here’s hoping you are feeling better after that recent illness!

    P.S. My previous woes included not installing taglib, since I listen to
    https://streams.audio.wgbh.org:8208/Bach-8108 and
    https://jazzknob.org
    Alll those kf5.kio messages vanished. Don’t have a mp3 library, thought I could do without taglib.

  8. Allan H.

    Eric, I used your amazing iso2usb.sh script (no options) to copy the 30 April versions of the slackware64 live ISOs (current and current-xfce) onto a pair of thumb drives (a cheap PNY and a higher-end SanDisk Cruzer Glide 3.0), but neither my Lenovo T420s and X120 recognized any bootable software and bounced back to their respective boot drive selector screens. After the initial failures, I used “dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=1M count=100” to wipe any boot records from the drives and used iso2usb.sh again, but again, the computers refused to boot.

    However, when I used dd to copy the ISOs onto the PNY drive, both computers booted both versions immediately. I’m using the current 3.7G ISO right now on my X120e to write this.

    Let me know if you need more information or want to try different ISO files.

    • alienbob

      Well, “no options” is not correct, you would at least have to provide the ISO as input and the USB device as output parameter… but no other options are required to create a bootable USB stick.
      If the process of letting iso2usb.sh write the ISO to the USB stick had no errors, then I can not tell you why the USB stick would not boot your computers. I have a T460 on which my own USB Live stick boots just fine. The Live stick works on all (not a large amount) of the BIOS and UEFI computers I tested.

  9. Bob Geer

    Way back on March 21, 2020, I wanted to boot my circa 2013 Macbook Air using Liveslack XFCE on flash drive & ran into the old Broadcom_sta problem – no driver.

    The rest of the story: I downloaded live-current & installed it on a SSD connected via USB. I SlackBuilt broadcom_sta on it, installed wicd since I’m not familiar with NetworkManager, & now I’m off to the races. Way cool. Except for wireless master mode. Oh well…

    I configured it with my fave fvwm window manager + config which has suited me fine-aree for a b’zillion years. Starts up way faster than heavier window managers. At least I’m using my covid time for something I’ll use…:-)

    Cheers, Another Bob

    • alienbob

      You know, all of the Live ISOs except the small XFCE variant, already have a “broadcom_sta” module in their “optional” module subdirectory.
      So if you boot a live medium (except XFCE) and add “load=broadcom_sta” to the boot commandline in the syslinux or grub menu page, you will get that Broadcom support out of the box.

  10. KG Hammarlund

    Hi Eric,
    after upgrading to freetype-2.10.2 (and creating/installing a compat32 package) yesterday on my -current64 multilib system i ran into problems with some wine apps. I finally found out that the new freetype version seems to be dependent on brotli. Created a brotli compat32 package was the solution.
    Maybe it’s possible to add that package to your /multilib/current/slackware64-compat32/ repo when you have time to refresh it.
    Cheers,
    KG

    • alienbob

      Yes, I can do that.

  11. KG Hammarlund

    Thanks! Maybe woff2 as well, found the explanation for freetype’s new dependency here:
    https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FreeType-2.10.2-Released

  12. gegechris99

    Hi Eric,

    It seems that synchronization of Slackware current repositories didn’t work last night on bear.alienbase.nl
    The Changelog entries dated “Tue May 26 20:35:03 UTC 2020” do not exist on the server at time of writing.

    • alienbob

      Some of the cron jobs (not all apparently, just those for root) stopped working that day. I need to find out what happened, but I killed crond and restarted it, let’s see if that is sufficient.

  13. Bob Geer

    Here I go again – back on May 8 I described my success using live-current installed on a SATA SSD & booting it via USB cable – a SATA-USB2 cable. Works fine, lasts a long time!

    But I acquired an SATA-USB3 cable thinking it might be faster plus if my SATA-USB2 becomes disabled I would have an alternative. USB3 cable works fine when plugged into a running system – either Linux or MacOS. But it fails to boot.

    Boot starts successfully to the Live Slack 1.3.5.1 screen & continues booting generic. Ultimately it stops with “SLACKWARELIVE: No live media found…trouble ahead” & suggests I add rootdelay=20 to boot command. It then drops to /bin/sh suggesting “RESCUE mode”. I tried various rootdelay’s with same result. It appears that the USB3 (I bought 2 & both fail to boot) never “sees” sdb & it’s partitions.

    I’ve been googlin’ around & looking at linuxquestions.org & haven’t figured anything out yet.

    The USB3 cable is described thus when plugged into running Linux:
    Bus 002 Device 004: ID 174c:55aa ASMedia Technology Inc. Name: ASM1051E SATA 6Gb/s bridge, ASM1053E SATA 6Gb/s bridge, ASM1153 SATA 3Gb/s bridge, ASM1153E SATA 6Gb/s bridge

    I booted liveslack using SATA-USB2 – success. I then plugged an unused SSD using SATA-USB3 – success. The USB3 cable I bought won’t support boot for some reason.

    Any suggestions?

    Much Obliged, Bob

    • alienbob

      You’ll have to revert to troubleshooting in that rescue shell.
      Try stuff flike “fdisk -l” in that rescue shell, to see what the kernel detected and whether your USB drive is actually there, because if it is there then liveslak has a problem itself.
      You could also add “debug=4” to the boot commandline of liveslak. That will show a lot more output on your screen than during a regular boot and it will eventually stop in the emergency shell as well. But perhaps the added verbosity brings some clarity into what’s happening.

  14. Ricardo

    Does liveslack use an initrd?
    Might it lack a USB3 (xhci* I believe) module?

  15. Eduardo

    Hi Eric,

    In case you haven’t noticed, the latest entry in your ChangeLog:
    http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/ChangeLog.txt

    is wrongly dated (Mon Mar 18 20:12:56 UTC 2019)

    Thanks and best regards!

    • alienbob

      Indeed and I will fix that, thanks.

  16. Bob Geer

    I apologize for not providing more information.

    The RESCUE mode occurs after usbcore has registered usb-storage & usbhid modules. USB system has identified a Logitech mouse unifying receiver & an internal webcam as noted in “dmesg”. Not captured in “dmesg” are usb related errors which I will try to summerize below. The SSD partitions are not successfully discovered nor listed in /dev/disk/*. As noted by Ricardo above, lsmod reveals modules xhci_pci & xhci_hcd are both loaded, as are sdhci_pci, cqhci, sdhci, mmc_block, & mmc_core among others. Note my 2 linux laptops (kernel 5.4.4X) have only USB2 hardware while my Macbook Air has USB3; boot problem is essentially identical. “debug=4” doesn’t seem to reveal more information about the problem.

    Not during each boot, but occasionally, repeating messages such as these roll up the screen continuously. The device number XX increments by 1 in each group of errors. I surmise the USB system at boot time apparently isn’t happy with recognizing the USB3 cable.

    usb 1-1-port 1: unable to enumerate USB device
    usb 1-1.1: new full-speed USB device number XX using ehci-pci
    usb 1-1.1: device not accepting address XX. error -32
    usb 1-1-port 1: attempt to power cycle
    usb 1-1.1: new full-speed USB device number XX using ehci-pci
    usb 1-1.1: device descriptor read/8. error -32
    usb 1-1.1: device descriptor read/8. error -32

    I can’t seem to interrupt the scrolling thus what I have typed is questionable given my old eyes trying to focus on it while flying up the screen. I think usb 1-1.1 is a hub & not the USB3 cable which I believe is usb 2-1.2.

    Another tidbit: when successfully booting using the USB2 cable, I see this:
    [ 19.839615] EXT4-fs (sdb3): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null)
    [ 20.886272] /dev/loopX: Can’t open blockdev
    …[above line repeats for X=0..19]]
    [ 21.818404] EXT4-fs (sdb3): re-mounted. Opts: (null)

    All is curious, don’t know if it’s worth pursuing at length. Perhaps a kernel 5.4.4X vs liveslak’s kernel 5.4.35?

  17. Bob Geer

    Upgraded to 1.3.5.2 with kernel 5.4.42 – same problem. I’ve ordered a different SATA-USB3 cable. Will post report.

  18. FRED M GILHAM

    Assuming this will get seen and is the right place for this!

    I tried out slackware live. The ISO I downloaded worked OK except I noticed an error scrolling by at boot time. It is a “chown” command that uses the –reference argument in liveinit.tpl. Since the boot process uses “busybox” there is no –reference argument. That didn’t seem to create problems, but it is there.

    Unfortunately when I tried to make my own ISOs, even with just default settings, I would be unable to log in with either account. I would get strange “incorrect” errors on the GUI login page, and when I tried the console it gave “permission denied” errors (for both accounts). I could not figure out what the issue was.

    I don’t think it was the chown issue above, because I did modify liveinit.tpl. So I’m at a loss.

    This is not a crucial thing for me. I was just experimenting with the possibility of making custom ISOs for live USB sticks, which would be very cool. (The project as a whole seems very cool except for the above problem.)

    • alienbob

      Hi Fred,

      Can you share the exact command you used to create an ISO? Perhaps I can give you some pointers. The issue sounds like PAM-inflicted, so perhaps you pointed the ‘make_slackware_live.sh’ script to a slackware-current mirror that was in the process of updating itself?
      And thanks for pointing out the busybox related error in liveinit.tpl. I will have a look into that.

  19. FRED M GILHAM

    Hello,

    Managed to get the process to work by removing and updating everything. I have a local mirror that I update with the script you wrote, and probably my mirror was not consistent or something.

    Anyway thanks, everything seems to work fine now!

    • alienbob

      Good to hear Fred.
      If you run into issues during your Live ISO customization, let me know so that I can see whether it is fixable through liveslak modifications.

  20. Bob Geer

    Re: Booting from SSH using SATA to USB3 cable failure.

    I bought a Sabrent SATA-USB3 cable & no change in boot failure behavior previously described. rootdelay=60 causes a notable pause but boot still fails. Yet booting with a SATA-USB2 cable succeds.

    Appreciate all you do. Next I will try a USB3.0 & USB3.1 flash drive i.e. not an SSD connected via SATA-USB3 cabke,

    • Bob Geer

      I tried liveslak 1.3.5.2 on USB3.0 & USB3.1 flash drives. They boot properly & indeed they are quicker than my USB2 flash drives – expected that of course. I’ve had flash drives “die” unexpectedly which is why I was working with a SSD connected via SATA-USB3 cable (see above). I’ll update liveslak when available on my SSD & continue trying to boot using the USB3 cable. Will post results.

      Cheers to All, Bob

  21. Eduardo

    Hi Eric! I just got your LibreOffice 6.4.5 packages and all work OK. However it seems like the kde-integration packages are missing. Are they no longer included? Thanks!

    • alienbob

      Ah, I forgot, sorry.
      And I won’t be able to include them for the next couple of weeks because I will be traveling.

  22. Eduardo

    Hi Eric, thanks!
    No problem for me. I will keep an eye on the ChangeLog for when it happens.

    Have a safe trip and good return home.

  23. Eduardo

    Hi Eric! Saw that the Plasma5 support for LibreOffice 6.4.5 was added today. Thank you!!

    I can confirm it works OK. Stay safe and get well,

    Eduardo

  24. inman

    Hi Erric

    thanks for all the job you do. I have two questions, is there any particular reason you kept calibre2 in you repo? the same also on vlc, vlc2 has any reason?

    The reason I am aksing is that the names vlc2 or calibre2 sound like there are now new vlc or calibre and these are the new product name. Also slackpkg info (.txt or .meta) does not give any clue about the version, or why one shall decide for one or the other.

    A friend of mine ask me these & I ended up opening the repo and checking the date of package, is there any other way you suggest?

    Cheers
    Inman

    • alienbob

      In my repository, ‘vlc’ and ‘calibre’ will give you the preferred version of the package that you should install for your version of Slackware Linux.
      Sometimes I make alternative releases available because people prefer that particular version instead of the recommented version.
      So, calibre2 and vlc2 offer an older release of calibre and vlc if you would want that.

  25. VideoQ

    Just wanted to say THANK YOU!
    Your VLC build script is a marvel, it has indirectly helped power SiriusXM radio transmissions for a number of years.

    Thanks Alien Bob, hope your ship is repaired soon enough to fly back out and travel the Universe.

    Your talent is much appreciated Sir

  26. Henry Pfeil

    Just wondering, I know you are quite busy with other matters. Who has picked up kde/plasma? They’re up to Frameworks 5.72.0 and Plasma 5.19.3 with no Slackware July update. How do you get your source packages for deps and kde in your KTown repository? I think your SlackBuild scripts would work if I could get the new sources.

    • alienbob

      You could also just enjoy your current installation. If new packages get released you’ll find out soon enough.
      If you do not know how to get the source tarballs for newer releases, then it’s best to wait in any case.

      • Henry Pfeil

        Thanks, good idea.

  27. Carlos Nuno

    I installed Kde plasma in Slack current and the shutdown options do not appear in the menu, I had plasma installed before and it worked well, but since it was updated it does not appear shutdownfile:///home/portu/ImƔgenes/Screenshot_20200804_150918.png

    • alienbob

      My guess is that you forgot “slackpkg install-new” and missed the new mozjs68 package which is required to make polkit work. And a non-working polkit causes exactly the issues you encounter.

      You could easily have found out yourself what was wrong, if only you would have read my most recent blog post about KDE Plasma5 and especially the comments below that article. The article is only a few days old and hard to miss – it covers the blog’s front page.
      This generic feedback page is not the right place to report this kind of PLasma5-specific issues. Also I do not know what you wanted to achieve with that screenshot? It is not a working link.

      • carlos Nuno

        I install mozjs68 and now everything work fine,thanks,i’m new in salckware.

        • alienbob

          Good! And welcome to Slackware.

  28. Yury

    Seems like there might be an issue with liveslak in CINNAMON variant.
    Making a CINNAMON ISO produces a system which cannot be logged in.
    Credentials both for ‘root’ and ‘live’ accounts are accepted but then ‘Permission denied’ is immediately given, when either in X display manager screen or in a console.
    (ISOs in both SLACKWARE and PLASMA5 variants are okay.)

    • Willy Sudiarto Raharjo

      @Yury

      Thanks for reporting
      i’m investigating about this issue and hopefully come up with a solution as soon as possible

      • Willy Sudiarto Raharjo

        @yury, i think we have found the culprit and the solution is already available.
        It just have to wait until AlienBOB pushed the changes in the liveslack repository soon šŸ™‚

        • alienbob

          Updated liveslak sources are available and the git repository has all the new updates as well:
          http://www.slackware.com/~alien/liveslak/
          http://slackware.nl/mirrors/people/alien/liveslak/ (rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/people/alien/liveslak/)
          https://git.slackware.nl/liveslak/
          According to Willy, this should fix the Cinnamon Live ISO.

          • Yury

            Capital!
            Thank you, Eric, and thank you, Willy!
            I’ll try it ASAP (hoping there’ll be nothing negative to report).

          • Yury

            @Eric
            I suppose you’d want to correct the line 99 in make_slackware_live.sh.
            Now it reads (with doubled dblquote):
            LIVEUIDFN_DAW=””${DISTRO^} Live Musician”
            I don’t know advanced bash, but the script won’t start with that.

          • alienbob

            I fixed the script error Yury, indeed a double-quote character too many there.

  29. Hendi Saputra

    any plan to add virt-manager to alienbob repository?

    • alienbob

      Not going to happen. I experimented with it. Too many packages needed and it made my server crash all the time.

  30. Andrew Patrzalek

    The Changelog for Sept. 15, 2020 18:51 shows:
    “l/mozjs78-78.2.0esr-x86_64-1.txz: Added.
    This is needed by the new version of polkit.
    l/polkit-0.118-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
    This requires the new mozjs78 package.”

    However the upgrade via slackpkg did not include polkit-0.118.
    So the package was specifically upgraded to 0.118.
    Today when the system was upgraded the polkit packages was rolled back to 0.117.

    I must have missed a notification. Any ideas/clarification?

    • alienbob

      Andrew, this is normal when you use slackpkg+ to manage 3rd-partyt repositories: my ‘ktown’ version of polkit has precedence over the Slackware polkit package, and so you’ll always end up with my version 0.117 after a “slackpkg upgrade-all”.
      The Slackware version of that new polkit package does not include elogind support so you’ll have to stick with the older ktown version (and keep mozjs68 installed!) or else recompile polkit-0.118 using my modified SlackBuild script to enable elogind support again.

      • Andrew Patrzalek

        I’ll have to go with the latter.
        Would
        Slackbuild, 120: –enable-libelogind=yes
        dep: elogind-243.7-x86_64-1alien
        be sufficient?

  31. Andrew Patrzalek

    From: https://mirror.slackbuilds.org/slackware/slackware-current/source/l/polkit/

  32. Andrew Patrzalek

    Found the slackbuild which you’ve provided at:
    http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/source/latest/deps/polkit/
    I’ll use this script and dependencies on the source from:
    https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/polkit/polkit/-/tree/0.118

    • alienbob

      Yes that ‘alien-kde’ location is – of course – the script you should use and not the Slackware one that does not add elogind support.

      • Andrew Patrzalek

        Very good,
        Thanks.

  33. Anton

    Hello Eric,

    In the latest Slackware64 (kernel 5.4.66) KDE 5.20.08 I faced with next problems:
    Can’t connect to my WiFi network from KDE Networks. After clicking on connect button, “Not authorized to control networking.” message appears. But my user is added to netdev group.
    Also K Menu starts freezing right after system booting and after a while works good.

    Best regards,
    Anton.

    • alienbob

      I have articles on this blog specifically discussing KDE Plasma package releases. The “your feedback” page really is not the place for questions like this, since you may miss the information that could have helped you answer the question all by yourself.
      Did you read the Slackware ChangeLog.txt recently? Noticed the polkit update? Are you aware what consequences this has for a Plasma5 installation if you blindly update Slackware?

    • Anton

      After mozjs68 package update WiFi in KDE works well. Many thanks!

      • alienbob

        Good. You found the missing piece all by yourself. Remember to check the Slackware ChangeLog.txt, this blog’s most recent postings and the recent topics on https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/ before you upgrade an installation of Slackware-current. Most issues are reported and the fixes documented quite fast.

  34. Richard Herbert

    Hi, Eric. Is there a reason why https://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/ChangeLog.txt and http://slackware.uk/people/alien-kde/ChangeLog.txt are out of sync? Less presumptuous than asking why, I guess. Thanks.

    • alienbob

      Good catch. That https://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/ repository is updated manually every time I release new ‘ktown’ packages, and the last two updates I forgot to login to the VM host server and run an rsync.
      I fixed that now, and the repositories are again in sync.

  35. Lanna

    Thank you for making “slackware current” available. I love it and can use it on my laptop. Thank you and continue this great job. Kisses.

  36. Inman

    Hi Eric

    Can you please kindly give me hint if I do a mistake here?

    Because of my printer, I am using glibc-solibs from your multilib repo. I am on the current version. Lately, when I installed the “glibc-solibs-2.30_multilib-x86_64-1alien” to get the 32-bit driver of my printer work, I ended up in a terrible situation, shell was gone, and I could not even boot, if I were not wrong /bin/sh was not working anymore. Even chroot worked only when I bound the lib64 folder of the live image. So, I ended up using a live image and correct bunch of lib64 libraries and revert the links. Any clue what I am doing wrong?

    I even found last week something similar here https://docs.slackware.com/howtos:hardware:brother_printer_installation?s%5B%5D=brother&s%5B%5D=printer
    so I am not the only one who comes up with the Idea to take only glibc-solibs. Do you have any clue? Is something changed?

    Thanks in advance

    • alienbob

      Are you sure you have a 64bit Slackware installation? If you installed the multilib glibc-solibs, and then stuff broke so bad you were unable to boot, and you needed a live ISO to fix a lot of lib64/ libraries, then the most likely explanation is that you have been mixing 32bit and 64bit Slackware packages, or even replacing 64bit packages with their 32bit versions..
      That is never the correct way to fix problems. A multilib add-on to a 64bit Slackware leaves ALL the Slackware 64bit packages un-touched. All it does is ADD a bunch of converted 32bit packages. With the exception of glibc (and gcc if you also want to be able to compile 32bit packages).
      If you are actually running Slackware 64bit, then it may enlighten you if you boot a Live OS and do something like “ls /var/log/packages/ |grep -E ‘i.68′” to find out how many 32bit packages are actually installed on your 64bit OS. The number should be ZERO.

      • Inman

        I am using a pure x86-64 current, at least it is what I told myself the last 10 years. Let us hope I am not that stupid. šŸ˜€ Here is also the output for your command:
        20:38:52 >> $ ls /var/log/packages/ |grep -E ā€˜i.68? | wc -l
        0
        My observation is the list below will every time get replaced in /lib64 with the one from the package. Effectively these library files will be moved to the /lib64/incoming folder and the new ones will be placed in /lib64, linked to, and get used. Is it correct behavior and what you will expect? Excuse my ignorance isn’t it suppose to be placed in /lib and then linked from there? or the /lib64 is really the place for multi-lib files?

        The lib64 is so wrong that I need to bind /lib64 of host for chrooting, else it complains, that it cannot find /bin/bash even, while /bin/bash is obviously there. My call is some basic commands are not working anymore! While booting, it complains even earlier and about /bin/sh.

        Obviously when I correct /lib64, linking back to Patrick’s lib64 files, chrooting is fine and I can do simple chroot, with only proc, system and device bound, and also the installation boot. Any other guess, am I using the correct package at all?

        Side note: I solved my problem with the printer driver hacking and creating a pure 64 bit base on another driver, but I would still appreciate your advice on what could be my mistake. I may need this for other stuff, and I would like to avoid going full multi-lib, jus to keep things simple for myself.

        Thanks in advance.

        ld-2.30.so
        libBrokenLocale-2.30.so
        libanl-2.30.so
        libc-2.30.so
        libcrypt-2.30.so
        libdl-2.30.so
        libm-2.30.so
        libmemusage.so
        libmvec-2.30.so
        libnsl-2.30.so
        libnss_compat-2.30.so
        libnss_db-2.30.so
        libnss_dns-2.30.so
        libnss_files-2.30.so
        libnss_hesiod-2.30.so
        libnss_nis-2.30.so
        libnss_nisplus-2.30.so
        libpcprofile.so
        libpthread-2.30.so
        libresolv-2.30.so
        librt-2.30.so
        libthread_db-1.0.so
        libutil-2.30.so

        • alienbob

          Inman, I think you do not realize what “multilib” means.
          In a pure64 bit system you will have only 64bit binaries, and libraries placed in /lib64 and /lib64. On a pure 32bit system you will only have 32bit binaries and libraries placed in /lib and /usr/lib.
          A multilib system is in its core a 64bit system with the added capability of (compiling and) running 32bit binaries. Some original core OS packages like glibc-* (for runtime support) and gcc-* (for compile-time support of 32bit) are going to be replaced with multilib versions. That means, these multilib versions of glibc and gcc packages contain both 64bit and also 32bit binary code, and you will find that their lbraries will be placed in all of /lib64 , /lib , /usr/lib64 and /usr/lib.
          Then you’ll need runtime support for 32bit programs that you want to (compile or) run. Every program links to shared libraries at runtime, and for a 32bit program you’ll have to provide the 32bit runtime shared libraries. This part is fulfilled on Slackware64 multilib by my set of “compat32” packages which are nothing more than original Slackware32 packages, re-packaged with a slighly different package name (adding “-compat32” to the name and using x86_64 architecture even though the binaries are 32bit).

          It looks like you (correctly) replaced Slackware’s glibc-solibs with my multilib version. However, if you have other Slackware glibc packages installed, you need to replace them all, not just -solibs!

          If you replace the glibc packages with their multilib versions, a chroot should not stop working. If you have errors like “cannot find /bin/bash” that actually means that a bash binary is found but it is the wrong architecture. Which leads me to believe (also considering all that symlinking you thought was needed) that you removed the 64bit glibc libraries or at least made the 32bit libraries found first in the library path.

          NOTE: YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE TO CREATE ALL THESE SYMLINKS BETWEEN LIB AND LIB64.
          That will only break stuff and is completely unneeded.

  37. matteo

    Hi Eric,
    I noticed you have an opencv package in the ktown deps, what is it needed for?
    I usually build my own from SBo but i see you use my same options so i don’t mind borrowing it now that i use a weak laptop. Do you build it with OpenBLAS support? also do you plan to keep building it now that ktown is not getting updates?

    • alienbob

      OPencv is required by Digikam and can be used with KDEnlive as well. I do not compile it against OpenBLAS, which I only have in my regular repository, not in ktown. I have to tread carefully when it comes to dependencies that may prevent software inclusion in Slackware at some future date.
      I am no longer providing updates to ‘ktown’ at this moment (except security updates and fixing broken packages).
      I need Patrick Volkerding to adopt Plasma5 into Slackware and when he does that, I will see what packages he did not accept. Then I will decide how to proceed with the abandoned stuff.

  38. Mat

    Hi AlienBob,

    I would like to say thank you very much for your blog-posts, for often really helpful informations and the packages especially for the 32-bit systems. All of that has saved my time more then once.

    šŸ™‚

    • alienbob

      Mat, you’re welcome. And good to know that there are still people who use 32bit Slackware. I sometimes wonder, is it still worth the effort creating these 32bit packages, until I get a message like yours here.

  39. Alexey

    Hi, Eric! Already wanted to ask here, since my LQ question was not answered… Then suddenly I found what I missed myself. So… Just thank you so much for you great job šŸ™‚ Your Plasma 5 live iso is definitely great improvement in UX for slackware users. Cheers!

    • alienbob

      Hi Alexey, I don’t recall the question on LQ.

      • Alexey

        Nevermind, it was not asked to you personally and I already found what I simply misunderstood. No any problem. Actually it was my lack of XP with Plasma 5. So again, thank you that we have Plasma 5 in Slackware.

  40. DLCBurggraaff

    Please have a look at https://forum.porteus.org/viewtopic.php?f=140&t=9371 and especially the posts #3 and #4.
    Thks, šŸ˜€

  41. DLCBurggraaff

    Nevermind, I checked myself with your 32 XFCE live CD.
    šŸ˜€

    • alienbob

      I think there is no sense for me to answer to those posts. The Porteus community and other communities of Live distros (Puppy to name one) generally take my binaries, repackage them and do not give credit when re-sharing. I don’t mind all that much, as long as they do not harass me with support questions as a result of re-using my binaries…
      As for the complaint that LibreOffice plus Java “is too big for porteus”: that describes exactly the incompatible goals between their Porteus and my liveslak.

      Java is always optional when compiling LibreOffice (you’ll lose some non-critical functionality) and in the SlackBuild script for LibreOffice 7.x I added a single parameter “USE_JAVA” which you can set to “NO” to skip Java support entirely.

  42. ArTourter

    Hi Eric,
    A request (sorry if it is not the right place):
    could you add gdk-pixbuf2-xlib to multilib? if seems to have been split from the main gdk-pixbuf2 package last friday. The reason I ask is that not having it breaks adobe-reader.
    Cheers

    • alienbob

      Sure, I’ll add that.

      • ArTourter

        Thanks Eric, much appreciated!

  43. Kari Malsom

    Hi Eric,

    Thank you for all your work and the extra packages you provide. I’ve been using Slackware for a long time (around 3.4) and appreciate the time and effort you put into building/maintaining and supplying these packages.

    I have a problem trying to get OBS to stream. I have all the dependencies installed that are listed as well as your version of ffmpeg, but whenever I try to stream, OBS crashes and I get this error message: “obs: symbol lookup error: /usr//lib64/obs-plugins/obs-outputs.so: undefined symbol: mbedtls_pk_load_file”

    Any idea what might be causing that?

    Thank you!

    • alienbob

      Strange. the obs-outputs.so library does not link to mbedtls. I wonder what triggers that linker error. You do have mbedtls installed?
      Can you tell me how you stream your output?

      • alienbob

        Nevermind, I tried setting up a stream to Youtube and OBS crashed with that exact same error.

        • Kari Malsom

          Yeah, not sure what’s causing it. I’m trying to stream to twitch. The build on slackbuilds.org has a couple different dependencies. rtmpdump instead of mbedtls maybe? Not sure. I couldn’t get the version from there to build, but that was a couple of months ago.

          Here is the list of their dependencies:
          jansson, libfdk-aac, qt5, ffmpeg, rtmpdump, x264, faac, jack

          Your dependencies:
          fdk-aac, jack2, mbedtls, vlc, x264

          I’ll keep playing and see if I can figure anything out.

          • Kari Malsom

            Their readme file:
            This project is a rewrite of what was formerly known as “Open Broadcaster Software”, software originally designed for recording and streaming live video content, efficiently.

            For full functionality, plug-ins using jack, luajit and vlc will be constructed if those packages (all available at SBo) are detected at build time.

            Another optional build requirement is the mbedtls package which is used to provide RTMPS support. However it will be disabled unless at least version 2.7.0 of the mbedtls package is detected at build time.

            Due to the cmake version in Slackware-14.2, the latest buildable version of obs-studio is restricted to version 24.0.6.

            (of course I’m on current, not 14.2)

          • alienbob

            I have uploaded newer obs-studio and mbedtls packages and have also fixed the crash when starting a streaming session.

          • Kari Malsom

            Just downloaded it and will try it. Thanks. šŸ™‚

  44. Goran

    Hello Eric,

    I’m typing this from your DAW live distro. I’m far from being a Linux guru, but I understand the amount of work that you’ve provided to the community. Thank you!

    I’ve had the idea of doing something similar to your DAW, but was always put off by the Slackware package system. I’ve tried deb and rpm-based distros, and yes, they are far from perfect. I’ve been using nixpkgs (not the nixos distro, just the package manager) on top of Slackware current for about a year, and so far, it’s been working fine. Therefore, my intention was to build a multimedia subsystem within nixpkgs. Thankfully, you’ve beat me to it.

    How do you manage the complexity of a project such as DAW? I don’t even wanna think about coupling that with other slackware-related stuff you’re doing. I’d like to hear your opinion on nixpkgs and nixos, spack, or easybuild. These package management systems promise to resolve dependencies in a new way. What does a veteran Slacker make of this?

    • alienbob

      I have never used package tools on Slackware that claim to resolve dependencies automatically. That is basically not possible if you use Slackware packages. A packaging system on top of Slackware which builds its own packages using its own package format would not result in a system you can call Slackware.
      Spin-off distros who do claim to offer automatic dependency resolution either rebuild all their packages to include dependency information, or else maintain a separate database for original Slackware packages where these dependencies are listed. Still, that would not result in a system you can call Slackware. Adhering to another philosophy is fine, but then name the resulting system differently. Automatic dependency resolution takes some of the freedom of the system owner away.

      Maintaining anything of size, whether it is KDE Plasma5, liveslak, DAW, multilib, the Slackware Wiki, or my package repository, simply costs time. Time to manage updates, time to do research into new things (I do not know everything upfront and need to search, read, experiment a lot), et cetera.
      Managing it all simultaneously becomes easier the longer you keep doing it. But it could easily be a day-time job because there’s still so much on my TODO that I can not do – if only I would get paid for it. That is not the case, so I have a paying job and everything I do for Slackware is a hobby by necessity, done in my free time at night and during weekends.

  45. Anton

    Hello Eric,
    After last system update built-in sound on my laptop has stopped working.

    uname -r
    5.10.10

    inxi -Fxz | grep -i audio
    Audio: Device-1: Intel Comet Lake PCH-LP cAVS vendor: Dell driver: sof-audio-pci bus ID: 00:1f.3

    dmesg | grep audio
    [ 6.308170] sof-audio-pci 0000:00:1f.3: DSP detected with PCI class/subclass/prog-if info 0x040100
    [ 6.308188] sof-audio-pci 0000:00:1f.3: Digital mics found on Skylake+ platform, using SOF driver
    [ 6.308208] sof-audio-pci 0000:00:1f.3: enabling device (0000 -> 0002)
    [ 6.308479] sof-audio-pci 0000:00:1f.3: DSP detected with PCI class/subclass/prog-if 0x040100
    [ 6.721175] sof-audio-pci 0000:00:1f.3: bound 0000:00:02.0 (ops i915_audio_component_bind_ops [i915])
    [ 6.758892] sof-audio-pci 0000:00:1f.3: use msi interrupt mode
    [ 6.775485] sof-audio-pci 0000:00:1f.3: hda codecs found, mask 5
    [ 6.775486] sof-audio-pci 0000:00:1f.3: using HDA machine driver skl_hda_dsp_generic now
    [ 6.775489] sof-audio-pci 0000:00:1f.3: DMICs detected in NHLT tables: 2
    [ 6.776486] sof-audio-pci 0000:00:1f.3: Direct firmware load for intel/sof/sof-cml.ri failed with error -2
    [ 6.776487] sof-audio-pci 0000:00:1f.3: error: request firmware intel/sof/sof-cml.ri failed err: -2
    [ 6.776488] sof-audio-pci 0000:00:1f.3: error: failed to load DSP firmware -2
    [ 6.780225] sof-audio-pci 0000:00:1f.3: error: sof_probe_work failed err: -2

    ls /var/log/packages/ | grep firmware
    bluez-firmware-1.2-x86_64-3
    kernel-firmware-20210119_0578970-noarch-1
    zd1211-firmware-1.5-fw-3

    Best regards,
    Anton.

  46. Anton

    Hi Ricardo,
    It sounds strange but, yes, it worked on kernel-5.4.84 (without microphone) and stopped working right after I updated my system. I suspect, that there is another way to get it worked, without SOF firmware.
    Than you for you post. Installing Intel’s SOF firmware helped. Now it works just fine! Thank you very much!
    Best regards.

  47. Henry Pfeil

    Thank you for your ffmpeg restricted. Apparently current is not as robust. I extracted image frames from an mp4, edited the images, then when I tried to put the png images together with the aac audio back, “Default encoder for format mp4 (codec aac) is probably disabled.” says the error message. Same commands with your restricted slackbuild worked.
    si cuius intersit
    ffmpeg -i ka.mp4 ka-%03d.png
    ffmpeg -i ka.mp4 -vn -c:a copy ka.aac
    [add 40 to the Hsl lightness value for each pixel]
    ffmpeg -framerate 29.97 -i ka-%03d.png -i ka.aac ka1.mp4
    I wonder why the aac codec is “restricted”, since it is better than mp3 and is part of the mpeg-4 standard since 1997.

  48. Henry Pfeil

    Ahh, patent-encumbered. No patent required for software distributed in source form, but according to
    https://www.via-corp.com/licensing/aac/aac-licensors/, there be infringements if you compile the aac source code and distribute executable software containing compiled aac code. *grr* Nobody cares if I compile the sources for my own use, but the lawyer lobbyists lurking about the US Congress with wheelbarrows full of cash pretty-much get whatever they want.
    [comments regarding enormous fees for committee membership excluded]

    • alienbob

      I wonder under which rock you have been hiding all these years. Glad you got out from under it. Life is better under the open sky.

  49. JosƩ Antonio da Silva Neto

    Good morning

    I’m a C programmer, Slackware user since 2002
    I would like to use a wonderfull developer tool: Frama-C
    Here: https://frama-c.com/
    It would be marvelous a Slackware package of Frama-C (with the GUI)

  50. Helios

    Hello,

    I have a new computer with no OS installed.
    I am trying the nex liveslack (with slackware64-current, kernel 5.10.7), and X does not work. I have some messages : /dev/loopX: Canā€™t open blockdev.

    Do I have to suspect a hardware failure ?

    • Helios

      In fact no. Windows 10 has been installed, everything works, benchmarks OK.
      Maybe it comes from the kernel

      system : CPU amd ryzen 5 5600X, MB msi 570X-A PRO

    • alienbob

      I don’t know what a “nex liveslack” is and please elaborate on the statement “X does not work”. Does the Live OS boot and can you login to a console but not into an X session? Did you try other Window Managers than just the default? Did you ‘dd’ an ISO to a DVD or a USB stick, or did you create a persistent USB stick? Are you experimenting with the ISO in a virtual computer (like using VirtualBox, VMWare Client or QEMU)? Et cetera. I can not give you any meaningful answer now.
      Note: the “/dev/loopX: Canā€™t open blockdev” messages during boot are harmless, they are emitted by the loop driver and the developer does not want to remove that message even though it makes no sense.

      • Helios

        nex=new (misprint)
        I use the USB stick (made from the last slackware64-live-current.iso).
        It is a new computer that I built for someone else. I tried to use liveslack to test it, make some benchmarks, before installing the required OS (windows 10 in this case).

        The Live OS boots, up to the login window . I give the password “live”. Then KDE begins to run as usual (with a black screen) then freezes.
        I can switch to another console (ctrl-alt-F2) but after sometime it freezes also.

        Retrying to boot the USB stick, and looking carefully, I see the blockdev error messages.

        • Helios

          I have used this USB stick on my laptop (with slackware64-curent installed) and it runs perfectly.

  51. maurohq

    Hi Eric,

    Thank you so much for your wonderful job, really appreciate!

    Any reason why slack-current-live-xfce isn’t avaiable anymore?
    I had no problems with it.
    With minimal iso I struggle with wifi driver settings (no ethernet).
    Also tried 64 both live and dvd and isolinux gives me error on usb.
    I’ll do try now the script for usb and another workarounds.

    Cheers!

  52. maurohq

    I’m terrible sorry Eric! Think I might be tired, latelly I find hard to keep focus and do things quick broadly speaking. Las time I download it some years ago was for a replacement for my bactrack rescue usb till recently that I had to format it. I was in the wrong path, didn’t realize it was repo builds updates. Still I might figure out later how can I do a netinstall via wifi. But for now all is good. I see you like to help people that’s very noble, sometimes people don’t give enough credit for that. Again sorry to bother you. All the best for you there. I have friends who moved there. Wonderful city. BTW I loved your tutorial on sqlite wordpress.
    Kind regards from Portugal.

  53. Jen

    Thanks for the multilib refresh and update today. Should the gstreamer packages be removed from multilib? They were removed from the main repo on Jan 25.

    • alienbob

      Yes the gstreamer ‘zero’ 0.x packages will be removed at some point soon. Note that the ‘regular’ gstreamer 1.x packages will not be removed.

      • Jen

        Gotcha. Good thing I didn’t go house with removepkg, then. šŸ™‚

  54. KG Hammarlund

    Thanks, Eric, for the fresh wine package! I’m always a bit wary when it comes to upgrading wine, but once again everything went smoothly and my applications run just fine.

  55. ryuuzaki42

    Thanks, Eric.
    If I not wrong, is missing a link “/lib/libnsl.so.2” to /lib/libnsl-2.32.so from the package aaa_glibc-solibs-2.32_multilib-x86_64-2alien. In my case Steam got the error:
    “Error: You are missing the following 32-bit libraries, and Steam may not run:
    libnsl.so.2”

    After I create a link, Steam start run Ok.
    # ln -s /lib/libnsl-2.32.so /lib/libnsl.so.2

    • alienbob

      They’re here on my own system alright:
      -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 119452 Jan 19 22:41 /lib/libnsl-2.32.so*
      lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 Jan 25 12:13 /lib/libnsl.so.1 -> libnsl-2.32.so*
      lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 Feb 10 15:06 /lib/libnsl.so.2 -> libnsl.so.2.0.1*
      -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 96192 Jan 21 11:56 /lib/libnsl.so.2.0.1*

      Something seems to have gone wrong on your end.

  56. attilio

    wine crashes:

    Wine cannot find the FreeType font library. To enable Wine to
    use TrueType fonts please install a version of FreeType greater than
    or equal to 2.0.5.
    http://www.freetype.org
    00ec:err:module:open_builtin_file failed to load .so lib “/usr/lib/wine/winex11.drv.so”
    00ec:err:user:load_desktop_driver failed to load L”C:\\windows\\system32\\winex11.drv”
    00ec:err:winediag:nodrv_CreateWindow Application tried to create a window, but no driver could be loaded.
    00ec:err:winediag:nodrv_CreateWindow The explorer process failed to start.

    • attilio

      I have multilib e your wine 6.1. The bug begins with slackware 15 alpha1

    • Jen

      Hi! I’ve been having problems with versions of WINE I compiled myself, but Alien Bob’s works. I”m not getting the freetype error, though. It looks like freetype was refreshed in the update, but maybe you’re missing something else it relies upon? Did you do “install-new” and “install multilib”?

      The last time I had strange crashes with WINE, it was due to a mismatch between libraries with the 64-bit and 32-bit libraries. It could be something going on here, although the only two changes were with openssl-solibs and libzstd.

      What program were you trying to run with WINE?

      • attilio

        (SOLVED)
        in slackpackplus.conf I forgot to add priority to multilib so slackpkg does not upgrade some packages.
        NOW IT’S ALL OK

        Thanks

  57. Boris

    Just installed the new ungoogled chromium package, and when going to the chrome webstore for extensions, the “Add to Chrome” button is missing on all extensions. Is this the intended functionality in the new builds. Is this the correct functionality for these builds?

    • alienbob

      What did you actually think “un-googled” meant before you installed the package Boris?
      In un-googled Chromium it is IMPOSSIBLE to use any of Google’s web services.
      That does not mean you can not install and use extensions though. I suggest you RTFM first: https://ungoogled-software.github.io/ungoogled-chromium-wiki/faq#can-i-install-extensions-or-themes-from-the-chrome-webstore

      • Boris

        Thought all the sync services would be gone, but addons would still install/work, same as before; didn’t know they were based on a service . Thanks for the link. That addon was a very simple fix.

        • alienbob

          What you are describing is how my regular Chromium package will work after March 15th when my Google API key loses its special abilities – Chromium will no more have access to Chrome Sync and some other Chrome-specific web services that Google wants to block from non-Chrome products.

          But the “ungoogled” project goes several steps further – through a set of patches it removes the ability of the resulting browser to contact *any* Google web service. For instance, by editing all the “google.com” URLs in the chromium source code and making them end on the meaningless “9oo91e.qjz9zk”domainname instead. None of your browsing activities reaches Google – no more phoning home.
          I have built the chromium-ungoogled package in such a way that it writes your profile data in ~/.config/chromium-ungoogled/ . That makes it co-installable with the regular Chromium or even Chrome because those browsers use profile directories ~/.config/chromium/ and ~/.config/chrome/ respectively.

  58. Henry Pfeil

    Thank you for updating VLC!

  59. Eduardo

    Hi Eric, I downloaded and installed your LibreOffice 7.1.1 packages for -current. They seem to work initially but they don’t show any text or widgets on dialog boxes. I’m using Plasma as my desktop.

    Is there any way I could perhaps switch to GTK or similar in the meantime so I can use the suite? Thanks!

  60. Eduardo

    My bad. It was a corrupt download. Now 7.1.1 works OK. Please disregard.

    Thanks Eric!!

  61. Eduardo

    Hi Eric! This is just a suggestion:
    Can you please upgrade your restricted ffmpeg to 4.3.2? In that way it will become again in sync with the stock -current version. Thanks!

    • Ricardo

      FWIW, today Patrick recompiled ffmpeg against the new libvpx so it might not be a bad idea to update your (Eric’s) ffmpeg:

      l/ffmpeg-4.3.2-x86_64-2.txz: Rebuilt.
      libvpx-1.10.0 seems to have a changed ABI, so recompile against it.

      • alienbob

        Eduardo, Ricardo: my ffmpeg package is not depending on critical Slackware’s libraries. It has its own statically compiled libvpx (and many others) so that my ffmpeg-4.3.1 can live peacefully on the latest Slackware-current.

  62. Dmity Kulikov

    Hello Eric,

    I need help and hope you can resolve my problem. It is related to VLC media player.
    When I open a capture device, with
    Capture mode: TV-analog
    Device name: /dev/video0
    Audio device name: hw:0,0
    and press Play I see the message:
    Your input can’t be opened:
    VLC is unable to open the MRL ‘file:///home/dima/hw%3A0%2C0’. Check the log for details.
    Why is it trying to find “hw:0,0” in my home directory?

    With best regards,
    Dmitry Kulikov

    • Ricardo

      Maybe VLC expects a full path like for video device.

      Have you tried /dev/snd/hwC0D0 or similar?

      • Dmitry Kulikov

        There is only the select with one option: “hw:0,0”.

        • Ricardo

          Hi Dmitry!

          But the dropdown box is editable, you can write the full path in it.
          But I don’t have a TV card so I don’t know the name of the device.

          • Dmitry Kulikov

            Yes, you are right, thanks.
            But it does not help.
            VLC is unable to open the MRL ‘alsa:///dev/snd/hwC1D0’. Check the log for details.

            The log says:
            access_alsa error: cannot open ALSA device “/dev/snd/hwC1D0”: No such file or directory

            $ ll /dev/snd/hwC1D0
            crw-rw—-+ 1 root audio 116, 7 Apr 29 09:09 /dev/snd/hwC1D0
            $ id
            ā€¦groups=ā€¦,6(disk),7(lp),10(wheel),11(floppy),17(audio),18(video),19(cdrom),65(pulse),86(netdev),93(scanner),100(users),281(docker),400(bumblebee),1000(timedoctor),1001(rvm),1002(skype),1003(fast)

    • alienbob

      Are you actually telling VLC to use a *recording* device? Usually “hw:1,0” is your *playback* device.
      Try “arecord -l” and it shows you all the recording devices that are available.
      In my case I get multiple options but this is the relevant one:

      card 3: Webcam [C922 Pro Stream Webcam], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
      Subdevices: 1/1
      Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

      And when I tell VLC to use “hw:3,0” as the audio recording device, I get nice video and audio.

      • Dmitry Kulikov

        Indeed I am trying to make the record from MACROSILICON AV TO USB2.0.
        I manged to do it with the command
        $ ffmpeg -thread_queue_size 4096 -i /dev/video2 -f alsa -ac 1 -thread_queue_size 4096 -i hw:2,0 ~/video/01.mp4
        But with vlc I always have no sound and the message with hw:2,0 in it.
        For the simplicity I have tried with hw:0,0 and only once it worked and I got the autogenerated sound.

  63. Eric Madrid

    I know Slackware has been on a long journey.
    We are about to get some major upgrades!
    The Install system, I like it’s simplicity.
    I just need it to be more simple, simple as in a server console only install.
    I usually remove these:
    setup
    – Keep A, AP, D, F, K, L, N & TCL
    – Skip E, KDE, KDEI, T, XFCE & Y (Any X)
    I installed the latest -current a week ago, did the:
    slackpkg update
    slackpkg install-new
    slackpkg upgrade-all
    slackpkg clean-system
    Iā€™ve been showcasing various distros of Linux w/ Informix on them for about 3 years.
    Including Slackware, just last week I ran ā€œslackpkg install-newā€, I usually get 0 or may 2-3 items.
    I got tooooo many, and they seems to be the KDE stuff, I do not need or want these.
    -Skip options above.
    Looking at the usage of each different server distro I noticed this:
    OS: Slackware 14.2 x86_64 (post 14.2 -current)
    Storage usage: 14G
    OS: Debian GNU/Linux 10.9
    Storage usage: 2.9G
    OS: Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo)
    Storage usage: 6.1G
    OS: openSUSE Leap 15.2
    Storage usage: 6.4G
    OS: openSUSE Tumbleweed 20210423
    Storage usage: 6.3G
    OS: C?ntOS Linux 8.3.2011
    Storage usage: 3.9G
    OS: Fedora 34 (Server Edition)
    Storage usage: 3.5G
    OS: FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE amd64 GENERIC ā€“ is a mongodb web server, I added 600k for extra IFX stuff, no Informix available for FreeBSD…
    Storage usage: 3.1G
    As clean and simple as Slackware seems, it has almost double or 5x the storage usageā€¦
    Slackware Server Edition (Console / Core) Install would be nice!

    Also how soon will PHP 8.x be available?

    • Eric Madrid

      Oops, sorry…

      Thanks for all the work you all do!!!

      Eric

    • Ricardo

      Striping Slackware is left as an excercise for the reader šŸ™‚

      Slackware uses so much space because, contrary to other distros, every package is a full installation, i.e on Slackware you get php, on Debian you get php, php-devel, php-doc, etc.

      Besides, nowadays storage is pretty cheap so 10 GB more or less shouldn’t matter. And if it does, well, as you found out there are lots of alternatives šŸ™‚

      Oh, and php 8 is in /extra for Slackware current:

      https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware64-current/extra/php8/

      Cheers!

      • Eric Madrid

        So,

        What you are saying is my Computing Symmetry OCD is out of luck… LOL
        It’s not the space, it’s the cleanliness, I need all the junk gone…

        Thanks,
        Eric

        • goarilla

          A full install is around 8-10 GB. I think you still have the upgrade-to-current packages residing on your system.
          Probably in /var/cache/packages/ or some other location like that. Now … the reason other distro’s are still
          half or even less than half the size of a full slackware install is because other distros split up packages/’projects’
          into subpackages. For example nagios becomes nagios-cgi, nagios-html, nagios-doc, nagios-dev, nagios-common, etc …
          and only one or a few are installed by default.

          While it’s nice to have a small system, especially on shared storage, it comes at the price of requiring you
          to apt-get install package-dev, package-doc, package-… and satisfying a sleuth of other dependencies with other packages,
          in the future when you actually want to build software or run a full big DE like KDE, which is included in a default install.

          • goarilla

            I would like to rescind my message. Or at least apologize for jumping the gun on this one.
            I have been taking a rest from slackware for a couple of years now …

            But It seems slackware64-current and seems to become slackware 15.0 sooner rather than later is huge
            even the dialog install option mentions 15+GB for a full install now. I don’t consider that a lot for a Desktop system
            but 14.2 was a lot smaller.

            Cheers,

            Kevin

    • Ricardo

      About “slackpkg install-new”, you can blacklist packages or series you don’t need to avoid getting them, checkout /etc/slackpkg/blacklist

      • Eric Madrid

        Blacklisting, hmmm, that will work.

        Thanks,
        Eric

  64. Jesus M Diaz

    Hi!

    I am looking for advice.

    I am and always have been a ‘desk computer’ person, but now I am preparing a home-office in an outdoor small building in the yard. I will work there every day and I am happy with that specially because working from home most of the time, having some kind of physical separation between work and home is usually a good idea.

    But I will have there also my personal computer, a desk one running Slackware current (yes, sometimes I boot Windows to play WoW because I couldn’t make it work yet with Linux šŸ™ ), anyway, the point is that knowing myself I reckon some evenings I will be too lazy to go to the home-office for those ‘short-that-will become-hours* moments of doing stuff in my private computer.

    To solve this I am thinking on getting a laptop to use from the house to, mostly, be used as a terminal to my actual computer where I run everything. And I have never bought a laptop to be used almost exclusively with Linux (most likely Slackware) and mostly as a client for the main server (running X I guess).

    Ah! And I don’t want to spend too much …

    So, based on your (and everybody’s following you) experience, any idea? suggestion? advice?

    Thanks a lot in advance!

    • Ricardo

      Hi Jesus,

      Depending on where you live, and if you don’t need something extra powerful, I’d recommend you to get a (refurbished) Thinkpad. Those usually either come with Linux, or are very compatible.

      You should probably also search in linuxquestions.org, or ask there.

      • alienbob

        I would also go for a ThinkPad.

  65. will kranz

    Hi Bob,
    I’m sure I am being inept in some way. I am running a new install of Slackware 14.2. I’ve made no attempt to make it ‘current’ as I haven’t had problems in the past and I fear this is the problem. I downloaded your
    chromium-90.0.4430.212-x86_64-1alien.txz from the slackware repository and installed with installpkg. But if I run it I get the following:
    bash-4.3# chromium
    /usr/bin/chromium: line 16: /usr/lib64/chromium/chromium: cannot execute binary file: Exec format error
    /usr/bin/chromium: line 16: /usr/lib64/chromium/chromium: Success

    tried to look at library dependancies and ldd doesn’t like it:
    bash-4.3# ldd /usr/lib64/chromium
    ldd: /usr/lib64/chromium: not regular file

    Any suggestions?
    Will

    • alienbob

      Looks like you have installed a 64-bit Chromium package on a 32-bit Slackware OS?

      • will kranz

        My apology, what an incompetent rookie error. Just checked and you are correct. Just got this 64 bit system and was configuring. Apparently grabbed 32 bit CD when did the Slackware 14.2 install.
        Fortunately I have not installed much on it yet as I now have to start over! Bottom line, thank you for your efforts, this is the 2nd time I’ve used one of your packages.

  66. keithpeter

    About recent changes to Audacity – addition of telemetry and change in privacy/licence

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27727150

    https://github.com/audacity/audacity/issues/1213#issuecomment-873547330

    As you have generously provided us with ungoogled-chromium, do you have any interest in investigating the viability of ‘un-networked audacity’. Basically why on Earth does an audio editor need to send information to servers in the USA and Russia?

    (The limitation to age 13+ will ensure that Audacity is not made available in the UK to any educational institution so quite a lot of damage has already been done)

    Many thanks for all your work

    • alienbob

      There’s always more sides to a story.
      Audacity telemetry feature which had been proposed, was actually not implemented after the developers recognized that they had not thought this through: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/discussions/889
      In any case, the telemetry feature was only going to be implemented in the CI builds, i.e. the binaries you download from the developers themselves. The built-from source packages like mine for Slackware do not have and will not have a telemetry feature – by default this would not be enabled in a from-source build and there would also be a compile-time option to explicitly disable it. Anyway, this was never implemented.
      Then there’s the crashreporting and update checks, which would make Audacity connect to the Internet. That too, is not enabled by default, you need to do this manually.
      The changes in the Audacity Terms of Service and the change towards a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) are a lot worse than that whole telemetry issue. But then again – without telemetry, you will not share any data with the Muse Corp anyway, so the point is moot.

      The change away from GPL to CLA is the only reason for me to hope for a fork of the software.
      Well, that plus the ridiculous demand that you need to be over 13 years of age to use the software … but then again, the age limitation is a weird way to deal with data collection consent. The binaries that do not collect your data (like my package) do not have to adhere to this age restriction, it would go against the GPL.

      • keithpeter

        Reassuring, thanks.
        (The 13+ age thing may well kill audacity use in schools in UK anyway once people need to upgrade from the 2.x version. Schools mostly use windows and tend to download from Audacity).

  67. Marcel

    Hi,

    I tried to install slackware64-current using HTTP/FTP as source but it give out an error
    wget:note: TLS certificate validation not implemented

    when using an Https or http mirror. FTP mirror works fine. Thought you should know. Anyhow I installed slackware current.

  68. Bob McConnell

    I recently bought a pair of USB WiFi adapters from a ‘Five Below’ store and would like to use them with Slackware64-current. The instructions explain where to download and install the Linux drivers for an RT5370, but all I get at the link is a source code archive with no information on how to compile the driver. Once plugged in, ‘lsusb’ returns “Bus 002 Device 004: ID 148f:7601 Ralink Technology, Corp. MT7601U Wireless Adapter”. I found a script for 14.0 on Slackbuilds, but the source archive is no longer available, and the copy I found elsewhere will not build on 64-current with that script, nor does it say why it can’t. Any suggestions on what else I could try?

    • alienbob

      Slackware 14.2 and -current have a driver “mt7601u” already included in the kernel-modules package, which should work with that USB device. Did you try just using that device? Does it show up when you do “cat /proc/net/wireless” or “lsmod” or “lsusb -t” ?

      • Bob McConnell

        Interesting. ‘lsusb’ now shows “Bus 002 Device 005: ID 148f:7601 Ralink Technology, Corp. MT7601U Wireless Adapter”

        ‘lsmod’ starts out with:
        Module Size Used by
        mt7601u 143360 0
        mac80211 1036288 1 mt7601u
        fuse 151552 3
        cfg80211 1003520 2 mt7601u,mac80211
        rfkill 28672 2 cfg80211

        and /proc/net/wireless has a two line header but nothing after that.

        So it appears that driver is loaded, so I only have to figure out how to configure and activate it.

        • alienbob

          Check your kernel messages right after booting (the “dmesg” command) and also a “ifconfig -a” as root should show the wireless interface if it was initialized correctly by the kernel.
          This device needs a piece of firmware to function, and this firmware blob should be in the kernel-firmware package. The “dmesg” output should tell you whether that is the root cause or not.

  69. Martin Dowd

    AlienBob:
    First, I’ve downloaded many of you packages from time to time; thanks for all the hard work. I am in the process of getting slackware-current installed onto a usb drive so i can dual boot with my live, ancient, 14.2. I downloaded slackware-current-mini-install.iso and had a problem. I dd’d it to a usb drive and tried to boot this as a lilo other=device. The boot failed with “isolinux.bin missing or corrupt”. One website said to check permissions, etc, and there are a bunch of owner 500:500 files.

    Rather than trying to fix this, I’m going to try running setup under my live system. I found it in isolinux/initrd.img after extracting this; I don’t know if it’s anywhere else.

    • alienbob

      When you ‘dd ‘ it to a USB drive it is independently bootable. You do not need lilo to boot it. I am sure that you won’t have that isolinux.bin error either.

      Don’t know what kind of live system you have. If it is an old liveslak USB stick from the 14.2 era, I would just backup its data, erase it and put a recent -current based liveslak on it.

  70. Gcubebuddy

    Good morning! First thank you for all the hard work you and everyone on the Slackware team has put into this wonderful OS. I have used Slackware off and on since 1998. I had a question. i am just getting back into using Slackware. i have noticed though that alot of the books seem to be significantly outdated. do you know if anyone in the community has plans to update Slackware Linux Unleashed, or SlackBook, once Slackware 15 comes out? I have the 3rd edition of the Unleashed book, but its really really dated.

    • alienbob

      Slackware Linux Unleashed is a very old book and will not be updated as far as I can guess. You can always ask the author, Tim Parker, but good luck with that.
      The SlackBook is not going to see a future paper edition, you should turn to online resources these days. The SlackDocs Wiki contains a wiki-fied copy of the eternally frozen Beta of the Revised SlackBook at https://docs.slackware.com/slackbook:start

  71. Francisco

    Hi Eric.
    I use to download (checking signature) slackware64-live-current.iso

    From: https://slackware.nl/slackware/slackware-live/slackware64-current-live/

    Some days ago there is no signature generated to be validated.

    Please check and many thanks for liveslak.

    Francisco

    • alienbob

      What do you mean by signature? This ISO is not accompanied by a GPG signature, only by a MD5 checksum. This ISO is auto-regenerated when there’s a change in the Slackware ChangeLog.txt and since it is automatic (cron job) it is never GPG-signed.
      At the moment for instance there is not even an ISO since a new one is in the making. Afterwards a .md5 file will be added; perhaps you looked when a new ISO was done but the MD5 file was still in the making?

      • Francisco

        Hi Eric.

        Yes, I was looking for a GPG signature, but I got confused with another repository where I usually found liveslak ISO sets when you update them with gpg signatures I usually validate.

        https://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/

        A similar liveslak iso file in that repository has a gpg signature: slackware64-live-current.iso.asc

        Thanks for clarify this. I always validate gpg signatures and md5 after downloading, I understand your point.

  72. lucasjose

    Hello Alien, I’m a friend and a Slackware user, I come through this chat here, I’m talking to you. We have a group on Telegram. and I would very much like an answer from you. and everyone in the group speaks highly of their work, and I’m here to say thanks, as I also develop and contribute to some things on BSD but what made me look at Slackware was, this philosophy of keeping things simple. and even more to have someone who is a strong person within their development. I really admire your work, I’m brazilian and we are there in a slackware group in brazil people, they like you very much to continue your work.

    • alienbob

      Hi lucasjose,

      I actually was in Sao Paulo at the Slack Show of 2008, I have an index of the pictures I took here: https://alien.slackbook.org/slackshow2008/alien/
      I was invited along with Robby and Alan to do some presentations about Slackware. We had a great time there and it became obvious that Brazil has a large group of Slackware users. I had no idea and it amazed me.
      Say hi from me to your friends in that Telegram group.
      I am still working on liveslak, on packages and documentation, but I am keeping a distance from Patrick at this moment, we do not see eye to eye. Also I stopped posting on LinuxQuestions and on IRC. I need be away from from Slackware and its users for a while.
      Basically, I need to find a new perspective that will bring back good feelings while working on Slackware. All of 2020 and 2021 was mostly frustrating for me. Slackware 15 should have been released two years ago.

  73. Jen

    27.1.1 OBS-studio builds fine with your Slackbuild. I didn’t try out the new youtube features, because I don’t stream to youtube.

    • alienbob

      Apparently you no longer have to manually enter your own Youtube stream key in OBS in order to stream to Youtube, so that is an added convenience but as far as I see, no new features come with that.
      I am going to be working on new packages after the weekend, currently I am indisposed. OBS Studio, Chromium, Inkscape, LibreOffice, and then some.

      • Jen

        Cool, to the new packages!

        Yeah, I think I’d rather eat a bowl of stewed tomatoes than stream to youtube…

      • Jen

        I’ve been goofing around with stream-pi and OBS: https://stream-pi.com/ Pretty nifty, although using a Pi 4 for it is probably overkill. šŸ™‚

      • Jen

        I’ve run into some issues with the dependencies for frescobaldi. Want me to wait on them?

        • Jen

          Anyway, had some coffee, rebuilt the dependencies, and I think it’s a problem with frescobaldi. I opened a bug on their github.

          • alienbob

            Good to hear. I would need time to update anything anyway.

            I am still fighting (for almost two weeks now) with Chromium (94.x keeps crashing) and Un-googled Chromium (32bit fails to compile) and about to give up on those browsers. I have better things to do than keep patching un-tested code because Slackware is not a development target for Google.

  74. Eduardo

    Hi Eric,

    Just want to report that chromium 94 cannot handle sound. For example, playing a YouTube video is not possible; the video screen tells me “Audio renderer error. Please restart your computer”. The older Chromium version (93.x) however, played sound just fine, as well as Firefox does right now.

    This is a console output. I opened the browser, then I went to YouTube, picked some music video, and pressed play.

    [eduardo:~]$ chromium
    [8842:8842:1014/211911.417669:ERROR:sandbox_linux.cc(374)] InitializeSandbox() called with multiple threads in process gpu-process.
    [8808:8861:1014/211913.948702:ERROR:chrome_browser_main_extra_parts_metrics.cc(228)] crbug.com/1216328: Checking Bluetooth availability started. Please report if there is no report that this ends.
    [8808:8861:1014/211913.948739:ERROR:chrome_browser_main_extra_parts_metrics.cc(231)] crbug.com/1216328: Checking Bluetooth availability ended.
    [8808:8861:1014/211913.948757:ERROR:chrome_browser_main_extra_parts_metrics.cc(234)] crbug.com/1216328: Checking default browser status started. Please report if there is no report that this ends.
    [8808:8861:1014/211914.180619:ERROR:chrome_browser_main_extra_parts_metrics.cc(238)] crbug.com/1216328: Checking default browser status ended.
    Failed to create secure directory (/run/user/1000/pulse): Operation not permitted
    The futex facility returned an unexpected error code.
    Failed to create secure directory (/run/user/1000/pulse): Operation not permitted
    ALSA lib pcm.c:2660:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM pulse
    [9345:9345:1014/211928.882646:ERROR:alsa_util.cc(204)] PcmOpen: default,No such file or directory
    ALSA lib pcm.c:2660:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM pulse
    [9345:9345:1014/211928.882877:ERROR:alsa_util.cc(204)] PcmOpen: plug:default,No such file or directory
    The futex facility returned an unexpected error code.
    Failed to create secure directory (/run/user/1000/pulse): Operation not permitted
    ALSA lib pcm.c:2660:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM pulse
    [9359:9359:1014/211930.189010:ERROR:alsa_util.cc(204)] PcmOpen: default,No such file or directory
    ALSA lib pcm.c:2660:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM pulse
    [9359:9359:1014/211930.189120:ERROR:alsa_util.cc(204)] PcmOpen: plug:default,No such file or directory
    The futex facility returned an unexpected error code.
    Failed to create secure directory (/run/user/1000/pulse): Operation not permitted
    The futex facility returned an unexpected error code.
    Failed to create secure directory (/run/user/1000/pulse): Operation not permitted
    ALSA lib pcm.c:2660:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM pulse
    [9380:9380:1014/211936.142665:ERROR:alsa_util.cc(204)] PcmOpen: default,No such file or directory
    ALSA lib pcm.c:2660:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM pulse
    [9380:9380:1014/211936.142790:ERROR:alsa_util.cc(204)] PcmOpen: plug:default,No such file or directory
    The futex facility returned an unexpected error code.
    Failed to create secure directory (/run/user/1000/pulse): Operation not permitted
    ALSA lib pcm.c:2660:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM pulse
    [9392:9392:1014/211937.187928:ERROR:alsa_util.cc(204)] PcmOpen: default,No such file or directory
    ALSA lib pcm.c:2660:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM pulse
    [9392:9392:1014/211937.188053:ERROR:alsa_util.cc(204)] PcmOpen: plug:default,No such file or directory
    The futex facility returned an unexpected error code.

    • alienbob

      My latest blog post here is about Chromium (also un-googled) 94 and the comments section of that post disccuses the exact same issue you report here in the ‘general feedback’.
      Please look over there for the solution which I posted in one of the comments. I am not going to discuss it further here to prevent duplication.

      • Eduardo

        OK Eric, no problem. Apologies; when I put the comment IIRC your post was not up yet. I’ll see it there and see what can be done. Thanks again!

  75. Yury

    Dear Eric,
    The last package of chromium-94.0.4606.81 has no sound. For example, in YouTube. I faced with this problem for my notebook and work desktop with Slackware64-current. The preview version works normally.

    • Yury

      Sorry for duplicate the issue.

      • alienbob

        Yeah. Reading is an art. The Youtube generation is lost.

  76. Eric Madrid

    ifxpy ERROR

    Ok, I know this is not a python 3.10 problem
    I have this running on:
    CentOS 8.4 just fine, with Pythion 3.10

    I believe it is a python3-devel problem does the new pkg:
    python3-3.10.0-x86_64-1
    Have the dev pkg in it?

    pip3 install ifxpy
    Collecting ifxpy
    Using cached IfxPy-3.0.5.tar.gz (155 kB)
    Preparing metadata (setup.py) … error
    ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1:
    command: /usr/bin/python3 -c ‘import io, os, sys, setuptools, tokenize; sys.argv[0] = ‘”‘”‘/tmp/pip-install-44blkgf7/ifxpy_18c8c5d89b564a67a46350d57bd7fa6f/setup.py'”‘”‘; __file__='”‘”‘/tmp/pip-install-44blkgf7/ifxpy_18c8c5d89b564a67a46350d57bd7fa6f/setup.py'”‘”‘;f = getattr(tokenize, ‘”‘”‘open'”‘”‘, open)(__file__) if os.path.exists(__file__) else io.StringIO(‘”‘”‘from setuptools import setup; setup()'”‘”‘);code = f.read().replace(‘”‘”‘\r\n'”‘”‘, ‘”‘”‘\n'”‘”‘);f.close();exec(compile(code, __file__, ‘”‘”‘exec'”‘”‘))’ egg_info –egg-base /tmp/pip-pip-egg-info-_hdtgiq4
    cwd: /tmp/pip-install-44blkgf7/ifxpy_18c8c5d89b564a67a46350d57bd7fa6f/
    Complete output (3 lines):
    error in IfxPy setup command: use_2to3 is invalid.
    Detected 64-bit Python
    Smart Triggers are enabled.
    —————————————-
    WARNING: Discarding https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/98/d1/e4f1c5dfa2d9c34692cbac13fcf9f136d0391f7d0d7adff21b957c2a47ff/IfxPy-3.0.5.tar.gz#sha256=7884365e04dd2a003be3c5f8f12e062ab97fb0799bee3d6f91049a45779087f8 (from https://pypi.org/simple/ifxpy/) (requires-python:~=3.4). Command errored out with exit status 1: python setup.py egg_info Check the logs for full command output.

    Thanks for any help you can give!

    • alienbob

      Hi Eric Madrid,
      This blog is meant to discuss the packages, scripts and documentation I provide. But I do not provide private support for Slackware.
      For your issue with ifxpy, the LinuxQuestions Slackware forum at https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/ is the best place to start asking about it.
      The fact that you need to ask “does the python3 package have the dev pkg in it” shows that your knowledge of Slackware is limited. Slackware does not know the concept of “dev packages”, this is something for other distros that split their packages into runtime and development. In Slackware, you get everything in one package.

      • Eric Madrid

        Well, python 3.10 is a new package
        Everything worked fine with python 3.9
        I’m aware that Slackware comes with everything
        But obviously this new package python 3.10 is missing something
        Slackware 15 with python 3.9, I have no problems
        CentOS 8.4 with python 3.10 no problems
        Slackware 15 with python 3.10 errors…
        I’m not looking for private help
        I’m giving you a heads up

        Some nice additions, since I have been working with Slackware
        I had to add PAM & re2c manually
        And make this link: ln -s /usr/lib64/libtinfo.so.6 /usr/lib64/libtinfo.so.5
        PAM was fixed a while back, but I did not have to add re2c manually this time!
        Or make the link!
        Thanks for the upgrades over the years!

      • Eric Madrid

        OK, It was an error on my part…
        The error came up again.
        The fix was: rollback to an older setuptools.
        The command: pip3 install setuptools==57.5
        Then all works fine…

        Python 3.10.1 works with ifxpy…

        error in IfxPy setup command: use_2to3
        use_2to3 is removed from setuptools 58.x and higher.

  77. attilio

    I have slackware current with kernel 5.15.0 and I upgrade continuosly with slackpack.

    Since last month VirtualBOX stops to functions. I have the last version 6.1.28, but I try also with other older ones.

    None machine starts, but it give me the error:
    Apertura di una sessione per la Macchina Virtuale test non riuscita.

    The virtual machine ‘test’ has terminated unexpectedly during startup with exit code 1 (0x1).

    Codice di uscita:NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005)
    Componente: MachineWrap
    Interfaccia: IMachine {85632c68-b5bb-4316-a900-5eb28d3413df}

    The kernel modules are loaded:
    bash-5.1# lsmod
    Module Size Used by
    vboxnetadp 28672 0
    vboxnetflt 32768 0
    vboxdrv 528384 2 vboxnetadp,vboxnetflt

    I also have another issue, if i lunch upgrade from gui it breaks with:
    VirtualBox

    (process:14084): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: 11:15:17.448: cannot register existing type ‘NMAgentManagerError’

    (process:14084): GLib-CRITICAL **: 11:15:17.448: g_once_init_leave: assertion ‘result != 0’ failed

    (process:14084): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: 11:15:17.448: cannot retrieve class for invalid (unclassed) type ”
    Errore di segmentazione

    Can you HELP me please.

    • alienbob

      My blog is not meant as a general Slackware help forum, we have https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/ for this kind of questions. Please post your issue there, attilio. A quick search on the internet shows hundreds of posts with that exact same error message so it’s not something new. Someone may already have found a solution. I do not use virtualbox myself.

      On the other hand, if you have questions about the packages, scripts, documentation etc that I myself create/write, then of course this blog is the right place to ask.

      • attilio

        Ok, thanks.

        hovever I solved. I install the developer new version 6.1.97 and it runs very well.

        By
        Attiilio

        • alienbob

          I am glad you could solve your issue.

  78. DLCBurggraaff

    Current64 non-full install – libreoffice-7.2.3-x86_64-1alien.txz

    Eric: When starting “LibreOffice Base” on my system I only see the splash. Invoking “libreoffice –base” in an xterm displays the splash and then nothing happens, ^C is needed to get back to the prompt.
    To test things I installed your package on your live CD: “LibreOffice Base” starts OK with a database selection dialog.
    So obviously I am missing something. But alas nothing is logged in /var/log/messages and I cannot find a log somewhere else.
    Googling for “libreoffice log” or “libreoffice debug” only gave a number of not so helpful hits.
    Any hints would be appreciated.
    Regards, Dick
    šŸ™‚

    Actualy I have no need for Base. This research is for completeness only.

    • alienbob

      I don’t know if this is caused by a missing dynamic library, but if it is, perhaps this will give some info:

      $ LD_DEBUG=libs lobase 2>&1 | tee /tmp/lo_libs.log
      $ for LOLIB in $(grep 'fini:' /tmp/lo_libs.log |tr -s ' ' |cut -d' ' -f4) ; do if [ ! -f $LOLIB ] ; then echo "$LOLIB : not found" ; fi ; done

      Also, the output can be used on a full install of Slackware to find which packages the loaded libraries belong to:

      $ for LOLIB in $(grep 'fini:' /tmp/lowriter_libs.log |tr -s ' ' |cut -d' ' -f4) ; do if [ -f $LOLIB ] ; then grep -l ${LOLIB#/} /var/log/packages/* ; fi ; done | sort -u | rev | cut -d/ -f1 |cut -d- -f4- |rev

      You could then try adding these packages one by one to your non-full installation until you find that Base starts properly.

  79. gegechris99

    @DLCBurggraaff
    Do you have Java JRE or JDK installed?

    “Some of Base will work without a Java Runtime Environment (JRE), but the dialogs and wizards that Base uses require JRE. In order to create reports, JRE is also required.”
    source: https://books.libreoffice.org/en/GS72/GS7208-GettingStartedWithBase.html

    • alienbob

      I can start ‘lobase’ on a full installation of Slackware64-current with or without OpenJDK installed. I have version 8 here.
      The Base startup dialog appears and creating a new database is greyed out because I do not have HSQLDB or Firebird available, buit the ‘open existing database’ is still possible.
      I do not use Base so that’s as far as I get… but it’s further than you came apparently.

  80. DLCBurggraaff

    @alienbob: Thank you for responding.
    Your “fini:” grep gave 14 output lines, some of which were doublets. Doing the full monty gave no missing libs.
    When viewing the 145.5 kB log I noticed 112 (!) “error: symbol lookup error: undefined symbol” messages, of which there were 106 for /lib64/libnss_compat.so.2. To me it looks like those 112 are “harmless”.
    Grepping for “find library” gave 214 output lines, again containing doublets. But the libboost* lines in there rang a bell.
    In my liveCD project the only boost user is libreoffice. To keep the ISO size down I created in 2018 a “boost-custom” package that only contains the required libraries — resulting in some 20MB reduction. And as a side-effect this package also serves as a replacement of your “boost-compat” package.
    I my main Slackware installs the only boost user is also libreoffice, so I use the “boost-custom” package there too.
    As it turned out I was missing libboost_date_time. I think I always accepted Base to not work because I do not have databases (?). That the “Select database” dialog now mentions that neiter HSQLDB, nor Firebird is installed will be the subject of another research round.

    @gegechris99: No I dropped Java some years ago. Maybe this will surface again during that new research round.

    šŸ˜€

  81. Michiel

    Some higher level reading, by Cory Doctorow, 29 Nov. : https://gen.medium.com/give-me-slack-b4e88a007dbf

  82. KG Hammarlund

    Thanks for the new wine upgrade!
    After upgrading I found that ADE wouldn’t Accept my authorization, had to fiddle with wine regedit to remove it and then re-authorize. After that all was well.
    I wish you a peaceful Christmas and a great 2022.

  83. Anonymous Internet Troll

    Hello, Eric

    I have a question about protobuf from your repo. The package you have in your repo is called `protobuf`, however, the same package in SBo is called `protobuf3`, and SBo’s “protobuf” corresponds to protobuf version 2. Maybe it would be better to synchronize the naming?

    • alienbob

      Hi! I do not collaborate with SBo submitters, they took some other inconsistent naming decisions in the past, just like this one. SBo likes to change package names when new major versions are getting released and the old versions need to be kept in their repository as well.
      I keep the old names of my packages the same and create new packages if there is a need for parallel existence of multiple major versions.
      Why would you want protobuf 2.x?

  84. Murdo Maclachlan

    Hi there!

    Thought it would be worth letting you know (if you don’t already) that it looks like LibreOffice needs to be rebuilt against the new version of boost (crashing with “/usr/lib64/libreoffice/program/soffice.bin: error while loading shared libraries: libboost_locale.so.1.77.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory”).

    Thanks for all the work you do! =)

    • alienbob

      If you are using Slackware-current you should keep up to date with ways to fix package broken-ness due to Slackware library upgrades. Live and learn.

      It is a FAQ which unfortunately keeps getting asked. The answer is: install boost-compat from my repository. It contains older boost libraries.
      Next LibreOffice update will be when I notice a new release. The boost-compat package allows me to not have to recompile every package that depends on boost in Slackware and breaks with every upgrade.

      • Murdo Maclachlan

        Oh, apologies, I thought I had boost-compat installed (also didn’t realise it contained older libraries; I’m not sure what I thought it did do ?)! My mistake for not double checking on that, I’ll be more thorough next time instead of assuming. Thanks. =)

  85. Henry Pfeil

    Having a spot of bother with your audacity 3.0.2 package:
    Audacity Startup Failure:
    The Audacity IPC server failed to initialize.

    This is likely due to a resource shortage
    and a reboot may be required.

    Not a resource shortage. What part of Audacity needs the IPC server, whatever that is? Everything used to work until a week or two ago. First audacity playback was full of static, then a couple of days later, the IPC error presented itself. Tried a new user with a pristine profile. Tried installing the git version, IPC error.

    • alienbob

      Hi Henry,

      Audacity still works here on my computer. Are you fully update with packages on your Slackware -current?
      You even removed the audacity package and built a version from git, and it still had this IPC error? Perhaps there’s an issue with your audio hardware, considering that remark about static. All other audio / sound programs are running without issues?

  86. Ger Wesselink

    Please contact me in connection with Patrick Volkerding Slack 15:0

    • alienbob

      Either you are a spammer or you have something to ask. In that case, just ask, or else send an email to Pat. You forgot to leave an email address.

  87. Stefano Laporta

    I would like to signal a problem in chromium-98.0.4758.80 for 14.2. Starting it, in my system (AMD Athlon64X2, GEForce 9400GT) now the first page remain loading forever, with 100% cpu used. The problem seems to be that the hardware acceleration is no more activated (it was on 97.0 , and it is on 97.0-ungoogled). Apparently there are two files missing from the 98.0 package:
    /usr/lib64/chromium/swiftshader/libGLESv2.so
    /usr/lib64/chromium/libGLESv2.so
    which are present in the 97.0 and ungoogled 97.0.
    Is it possible to solve this?.
    If not, is the old chromium-97.0 package still available?
    I tried to rebuild but it failed because CMake 3.13.4 was available, and anyway it would require a very long time.

  88. Stefano Laporta

    I simply reinstalled chromium-98.0 and everything now works.
    Please disregard my previous message…

    • alienbob

      Well, good to hear that the problem was resolved so easily.

  89. gegechris99

    Hi Eric,
    Changelog mentions that chromium-ungoogled has been updated from 14.2 onwards (x86_64 only).
    It’s present in 14.2 and current repositories.
    But I could not find it in https://slackware.nl/people/alien/sbrepos/15.0/x86_64/
    I guess that’s due to some script not yet being updated with 15.0 repository.
    Hope this helps.

    • alienbob

      Indeed gegechris99. I will fix that omission asap.

  90. Henry Pfeil

    Having a spot of bother with your audacity pkg, 3.02, as well as 3.13 current. Works fine on my laptops, but the Ryzen 7 box generates “Audacity Startup Failure: The Audacity IPC server failed to initialize.” Tried a fresh slackware install with a new profile, same error. Something changed during the past couple of weeks to break this, it worked fine last month.
    I discovered that the 5.16 kernel does not initialize the audio device, but 5.15.19 does. This is only on one box, so I’m reluctant to ask Linuxquestions. Any idea what could cause this error that manifests only on the Ryzen box?

    • alienbob

      I think you’ll get better help on LQ. I don’t have any computers with Ryzen7, I never ran a 5.16 kernel and also refuse to take Audacity past 3.0.2.
      The only thing I can suggest is booting a Slackware Live ISO, install audacity in that OS and see what it does. Still that would not give you a 5.16 kernel to test on.

  91. Henry Pfeil

    I’m running 5.15.19 from current. Those were all experiments to try and isolate the issue. Must be a kernel upgrade, since all the installed apps are from slackware64-current. Searches on duckduckgo.com came up empty. It’s just me, I’ll go away now.

    • alienbob

      Hi Henry,
      I do hope you find what’s causing it. I was not trying to dismiss the issue, I just don’t have experience with it.

      • Henry Pfeil

        No joy with 5.15.22 (current). The code in AudacityApp.cpp has lots of references to wxWidgets, rebuilt wxGTK3, build and installed wxWidgets 3.1.6, audacity won’t start. The other slackware boxen works as advertised, only the Ryzen7 box refuses to budge. I’m using KWave now for talking books recording.
        Methinks audacity needs to be migrated to linux. It has code for windows and mac. Instead of using interprocess communication over an ad-hoc IPC server, it should be using dbus and threads. If it’s not broke, someone else can fix it.

        • alienbob

          My audacity package uses the sources of a somewhat customized wxWidgets which is maintained by the Audacity team, so the package does not require an external wxWidgets dependency. The developers indicate that using a system wxWidgets is not guaranteed to work properly with Audacity.

          • Henry Pfeil

            I traced the problem to the kernel. Your audacity package works fine with kernel 4.19.228. I do not know which recent kernel upgrade broke audacity on Ryzen 7. I’d stick with the 4.19 kernel, but it knows not of my wireless chip. Tried 5.15.22, 5.16.8, and 5.17, so whatever they did is there to stay. I don’t know where to report this. If there was a kernel archive, I could revert to recent versions, then look at the changelog to see who neglected to consider an unintended confluence of unlikely events. Fix something, break something else. It is not the Slackware Way.

          • alienbob

            The last 4.x kernel in Slackware post-14.2 was in November 2019. I have had several audacity packages since then and all of them were for Slackware with kernel 5.x. If you have been using any of my audacity packages, it will have been on -current or 15.0, all with a 5.x kernel.
            You can open bug reports on https://bugzilla.kernel.org/

          • Ricardo

            @Henry “If there was a kernel archive, I could revert to recent versions, then look at the changelog to see who neglected to consider an unintended confluence of unlikely events.”

            Here you go šŸ™‚

            http://slackware.uk/cumulative/slackware64-current/slackware64/k/

          • Henry Pfeil

            Thank you, Ricardo. A simple matter to download the source package and install it in /usr/src/linux, then chain the source/k kernel, headers and modules SlackBuilds. I couldn’t do a binary search for the culprit because the older kernel sources won’t compile because of thunk errors:

            arch/x86/entry/thunk_64.o: warning: objtool: missing symbol table
            make[2]: *** [scripts/Makefile.build:403: arch/x86/entry/thunk_64.o] Error 1
            make[2]: *** Deleting file ‘arch/x86/entry/thunk_64.o’
            make[1]: *** [scripts/Makefile.build:544: arch/x86/entry] Error 2
            I think the error was introduced in a ipc “fix”, something about holding a spinlock while sleeping in the changelog, but I don’t know which kernel introduced it.
            Audacity works fine in the DAW dvd, but the same kernel generates the IPC error when installed. Kernels released last month when audacity worked now generate the error. Color me baffled and/or stymied.

          • alienbob

            Audacity works when booting the Live DVD but you get an IPC error when the same kernel is installed on your computer. Do you have non-standard kernel boot parameters in your (e)lilo.conf or grub.conf that alter the kernel’s behavior?

        • Henry Pfeil

          Sorry for the red herring, the DAW live slack I found is kernel 5.10.3 with audacity 2.4.2. I didn’t install the 2020 kernel. Started with 5.15.19 and worked backward to Dec 2021 before audacity started throwing the IPC error. I’ll try a more recent DAW Live.

          • Henry Pfeil

            I really appreciate your efforts to help me in this matter. Your suggestions are quite valuable to me.
            I was preparing to do some audio recording again when I discovered that one of my tools stopped working. I can’t thank you enough for your encouraging words. Systems analysis can be quite tedious, but you’ve created the tools that make searching kernels easy. The kernel packages in the archive install kernel-source. I then use the slackware/source/k scripts to build the kernel, headers and modules using that version of /usr/src/linux.

          • Henry Pfeil

            Kernel 5.14.0. Audacity 3.1.3 appimage announces an unrecoverable error during startup. Same Gdk-CRITICAL error as -current.

            IA__gdk_screen_get_root_window: assertion ‘GDK_IS_SCREEN (screen)’ failed

            The kernel is from last autumn when I used audacity on a post-production project. Therefore, the issue is not based in the kernel. That was only one of the recent updates since audacity worked on the Ryzen7 box.

          • alienbob

            Have you already tried starting audacity from a fresh new user account? Perhaps there’s some corruption in your own user profile.

      • Henry Pfeil

        For future reference, should someone else corrupt their system, I found an installpkg folder in / with an audacity.desktop dated Jan 24, about the time audacity broke. All this nonsense was probably due to a faulty installation. Thank you for keeping me focused on this mystery.

        • alienbob

          Good that you found the root cause and thanks for sharing.

  92. gegechris99

    Hi Eric,

    Is there any issue with synching the 15.0 slackware64 repository?
    The first changelog dated Thu Feb 10 01:46:55 UTC 2022 is not available on slackware.nl for Slackware64. But it’s OK for Slackware 32bit.
    Thank you.

    • alienbob

      Yeah someone alerted me that the 32bit Slackware 15.0 tree was actually pre-15.0 and neither of the 15.0 trees were getting updates. I had forgotten to add them to my crontab.
      I fixed that this morning but the cronjob for 64bit had not yet triggered. I am doing that manually at the moment.

  93. Jen

    Thanks for WINE! I was feeling exceptionally lazy in building a new version of that one. Heh. šŸ™‚

  94. Eduardo

    Hi Eric, I have a request. I know this is cumbersome and thankless work. But I cannot run calibre anymore after -current’s Feb 24 update. The main app (repackaged from the developer) runs well enough, but the ebook viewer cannot show any ebooks because the renderer crashes.
    Would you consider building an updated calibre from source? This at least would give us time until upstream ships decent binaries again.

    Whatever you decide, thanks!!

    • alienbob

      Yeah, not going to happen any time soon. When the calibre switch from python2 to python3 happened, the required changes became too big to handle, since the calibre.SlackBuild essentially packs a truckload of python modules. Calibre was and is a fast-moving target and as long as the old 4.x version kept running I left it alone.
      Now my own package stopped working on -current also, and it’ll have to remain like that. There’s simply no time that I can free up. It would cost me a week of nightly labor to fix this.
      In the meantime, I read my EPUBs using Okular.

    • alienbob

      I could not resist and have updated my old ‘calibre’ package source. It resulted in a ‘calibre4’ package. I will soon upload to http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/calibre4/ and you will have to upgrade the existing ‘calibre’ package (if you have mine installed) with the command:

      # upgradepkg calibre%calibre4-4.15.0-x86_64-2alien.txz
      • Eduardo

        Hi Eric, just saw the new calibre package in your changelog. A HUGE THANK YOU!! Will try now if see if this resolves my woes. Meanwhile, upstream released 5.38 and I installed, with little luck yet. Thanks again. I really appreciate this Eric!

        • Eduardo

          I’m happy to confirm that your calibre4 package works beautifully! Thanks Eric!!

  95. Leigh

    Hi Eric,

    Is there a problem with GnuPG signatures for a few multilib packages? For multilib packages which I downloaded from http://www.slackware.com/~alien/multilib/15.0/, I found BAD signatures for the following:
    slackware64-compat32/a-compat32/e2fsprogs-compat32-1.46.5-x86_64-1compat32
    slackware64-compat32/x-compat32/libinput-compat32-1.19.3-x86_64-1compat32
    slackware64-compat32/x-compat32/libwacom-compat32-1.12-x86_64-1compat32
    slackware64-compat32/l-compat32/libgphoto2-compat32-2.5.28-x86_64-1compat32
    slackware64-compat32/xap-compat32/sane-compat32-1.0.32-x86_64-1compat32

    All other packages I verified with correct signatures.

    • alienbob

      I checked the http://www.slackware.com/~alien/multilib/15.0/ repo by logging on to the server itself and running “tail +13 CHECKSUMS.md5 | md5sum –check |grep -v OK” which returned nothing.
      Try removing your complete local copy and re-downloading it. Rsync sometimes does weird things with my .md5 and .asc files, not recognizing that they changed.

    • alienbob

      Also to show the correctness of the GPG signature itself (one of the files you mention from the 15.0 repository):

      $ gpg --verify  slackware64-compat32/a-compat32/e2fsprogs-compat32-1.46.5-x86_64-1compat32.txz.asc 
      gpg: Signature made Sun 06 Feb 2022 02:40:07 AM PST using DSA key ID A75CBDA0
      gpg: Good signature from "Eric Hameleers "
      gpg:                 aka "Eric Hameleers (Thuis) "
      gpg:                 aka "Eric Hameleers (IBM Linux) "
      gpg:                 aka "Eric Hameleers "
      gpg:                 aka "Eric Hameleers "
    • Leigh

      Something strange is going on. I just directly downloaded these files using wget:
      http://www.slackware.com/~alien/multilib/15.0/slackware64-compat32/a-compat32/e2fsprogs-compat32-1.46.5-x86_64-1compat32.txz
      http://www.slackware.com/~alien/multilib/15.0/slackware64-compat32/a-compat32/e2fsprogs-compat32-1.46.5-x86_64-1compat32.txz.asc
      http://www.slackware.com/~alien/multilib/15.0/slackware64-compat32/a-compat32/e2fsprogs-compat32-1.46.5-x86_64-1compat32.txz.md5
      http://www.slackware.com/~alien/multilib/15.0/slackware64-compat32/x-compat32/libinput-compat32-1.19.3-x86_64-1compat32.txz
      http://www.slackware.com/~alien/multilib/15.0/slackware64-compat32/x-compat32/libinput-compat32-1.19.3-x86_64-1compat32.txz.md5
      http://www.slackware.com/~alien/multilib/15.0/slackware64-compat32/x-compat32/libinput-compat32-1.19.3-x86_64-1compat32.txz.asc

      I get failure for checks of both MD5 and GnuPG. Also note, the date of the .tgz files seems to be rather earlier than the signature and md5 files, is this a concern?

      $ md5sum -c e2fsprogs-compat32-1.46.5-x86_64-1compat32.txz.md5 libinput-compat32-1.19.3-x86_64-1compat32.txz.md5
      e2fsprogs-compat32-1.46.5-x86_64-1compat32.txz: FAILED
      md5sum: WARNING: 1 computed checksum did NOT match
      libinput-compat32-1.19.3-x86_64-1compat32.txz: FAILED
      md5sum: WARNING: 1 computed checksum did NOT match
      $ gpg2 e2fsprogs-compat32-1.46.5-x86_64-1compat32.txz.asc
      gpg: enabled debug flags: memstat
      gpg: WARNING: no command supplied. Trying to guess what you mean …
      gpg: assuming signed data in ‘e2fsprogs-compat32-1.46.5-x86_64-1compat32.txz’
      gpg: Signature made Sun 06 Feb 2022 21:40:07 AEDT
      gpg: using DSA key 0x5E56AAAFA75CBDA0
      gpg: BAD signature from “Eric Hameleers ” [undefined]
      $ gpg2 libinput-compat32-1.19.3-x86_64-1compat32.txz.asc
      gpg: enabled debug flags: memstat
      gpg: WARNING: no command supplied. Trying to guess what you mean …
      gpg: assuming signed data in ‘libinput-compat32-1.19.3-x86_64-1compat32.txz’
      gpg: Signature made Sun 06 Feb 2022 21:40:49 AEDT
      gpg: using DSA key 0x5E56AAAFA75CBDA0
      gpg: BAD signature from “Eric Hameleers ” [undefined]
      $ ls -l
      total 552
      -rw-r–r– 1 lwedding users 396148 Jan 5 19:02 e2fsprogs-compat32-1.46.5-x86_64-1compat32.txz
      -rw-r–r– 1 lwedding users 163 Feb 6 21:37 e2fsprogs-compat32-1.46.5-x86_64-1compat32.txz.asc
      -rw-r–r– 1 lwedding users 81 Feb 6 21:37 e2fsprogs-compat32-1.46.5-x86_64-1compat32.txz.md5
      -rw-r–r– 1 lwedding users 144928 Dec 20 07:53 libinput-compat32-1.19.3-x86_64-1compat32.txz
      -rw-r–r– 1 lwedding users 163 Feb 6 21:37 libinput-compat32-1.19.3-x86_64-1compat32.txz.asc
      -rw-r–r– 1 lwedding users 80 Feb 6 21:37 libinput-compat32-1.19.3-x86_64-1compat32.txz.md5

      • alienbob

        Looks like a caching issue indeed. The slackware.com server is hidden behind an Akamai cache and whereas the original files check out OK, the ones you are downloading (and I experienced the same) are older cached versions.

        I tried circumventing the cache by adding some gibberish at the end of the URL and indeed I get the correct MD5 file like that:

        wget "http://www.slackware.com/~alien/multilib/15.0/slackware64-compat32/a-compat32/e2fsprogs-compat32-1.46.5-x86_64-1compat32.txz.md5?version=1"
        mv -i e2fsprogs-compat32-1.46.5-x86_64-1compat32.txz.md5\?version\=1 e2fsprogs-compat32-1.46.5-x86_64-1compat32.txz.md5
        md5sum -c e2fsprogs-compat32-1.46.5-x86_64-1compat32.txz.md5

        I have asked my Akamai friend how the cache for my multilib files on slackware.com can be invalidated.
        In the meantime, use slackware.nl or slackware.uk to download.

    • Leigh

      Issue looks to be resolved now. I just refreshed the downloads again using lftp and mirror, GnuPG signatures and MD5 checks are all good.

      • alienbob

        Yes, I have asked for all Akamai cached content to be invalidated and that request was executed.

  96. Gourdot

    Hello, I tried to install your libreoffice packages on a fresh Slackware 15.0 (KDE5). lowriter crashes with this message “Unspecified Application Error”. Was there something else to be installed?
    Regards

    • alienbob

      It’s now been asked so many times that I will simply reply to you with: run a Google search for “site:alien.slackbook.org libreoffice unspecified application error”

      • gourdot

        I did export MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=i965 and it seems to work for me. Thank you very much!
        Regards

  97. Martin Dowd

    I did a wget to get slackware 15.0 an used usbimg2disk with -s to create a USB boot drive. Everything went fine, except rsync complained about a lot of files with a name “index.html? …” and didn’t copy them. I couldn’t find out what these are and if it’s safe to delete them first.

    • alienbob

      Perhaps it’s the way you downloaded the Slackware package tree from an online mirror using ‘wget’ that created all sorts of index files in your download? I never use wget to mirror an online directory tree, ‘lftp’ works better for getting an exact mirror:
      $ mkdir -p slackware64-15.0/slackware64
      $ cd slackware64-15.0/slackware64
      $ lftp -c “open https://slackware.nl/slackware/slackware64-15.0/slackware64/ ; mirror .”

      • Martin Dowd

        When I used lftp, first I had to put “set ssl:verify-certificate no” in ~/.lftprc. The download created a file FILE.mirrorlist for each file. These seem to have something th do with MirrorBrain. Anyway it’s easier to delete these than the wget extra files.

  98. Cwizard

    Installed your latest jdk package and applications would take well over a minutes to start. Specifically, Thunderbird and Basilisk. Tried opening from a terminal, but there was no error message, and, as I said, eventually, they would start. At that point I reverted to the previous version of jdk and all went back to normal. Just FYI

    • alienbob

      Hi!
      I have not been using openjdk for a long while now, and provide the package because people want it. So unfortunately I can not test it to validate these startup delays, I have no software to test against.
      All I know is that the icedtea project changed from Mercury to Git since the previous release and the source tarballs are created rather differently now. Perhaps this introduced an issue I failed to address in my SlackBuild script?

  99. Iain Nicholson

    Hi Eric,

    Thanks very much for all your work over the years!

    I’ve been using slackware64-current for a few years and recently installed 15.0. I installed your multilib packages (I need to run VitualBox). However, I am having trouble when trying to compile some software using the gcc in the multilib packages.

    Today I am trying to compile qemu-6.2.0 and it fails during linking. It’s apparently looking for a library that isn’t there (something obscure to do with encryption?):

    changing dir to build for make “”…
    make[1]: Entering directory ‘/home/iain/builds/qemu-6.2.0/build’
    [1/8759] Generating qemu-version.h with a custom command (wrapped by meson to capture output)
    [2/8757] Linking target tests/unit/test-bdrv-drain
    FAILED: tests/unit/test-bdrv-drain
    cc -m64 -mcx16 -o tests/unit/test-bdrv-drain tests/unit/test-bdrv-drain.p/test-bdrv-drain.c.o tests/unit/test-bdrv-drain.p/iothread.c.o -Wl,–as-needed -Wl,–no-undefined -pie -Wl,–whole-archive libblock.fa libcrypto.fa libauthz.fa libqom.fa libio.fa -Wl,–no-whole-archive -Wl,–warn-common -Wl,-z,relro -Wl,-z,now -fstack-protector-strong -Wl,–start-group libqemuutil.a subprojects/libvhost-user/libvhost-user-glib.a subprojects/libvhost-user/libvhost-user.a libblock.fa libcrypto.fa libauthz.fa libqom.fa libio.fa @block.syms /usr/lib64/liburing.so -lutil -lgio-2.0 -lgobject-2.0 -lglib-2.0 -lgio-2.0 -lgobject-2.0 -lglib-2.0 -pthread -lgmodule-2.0 -lglib-2.0 /usr/lib64/libgnutls.so -lm /usr/lib64/libpixman-1.so -lgmodule-2.0 -lglib-2.0 /usr/lib64/gcc/x86_64-slackware-linux/11.2.0/../../../../lib64/libzstd.so /usr/lib64/libz.so /usr/lib64/libxml2.so -laio /usr/lib64/libcurl.so -lgmodule-2.0 -lglib-2.0 -lbz2 -lssh -lpam -Wl,–end-group
    /usr/bin/ld: libblock.fa(block_qcow2-threads.c.o): in function `qcow2_zlib_compress’:
    /home/iain/builds/qemu-6.2.0/build/../block/qcow2-threads.c:101: undefined reference to `brl_deflateInit2_’
    /usr/bin/ld: /home/iain/builds/qemu-6.2.0/build/../block/qcow2-threads.c:116: undefined reference to `brl_deflate’
    /usr/bin/ld: /home/iain/builds/qemu-6.2.0/build/../block/qcow2-threads.c:123: undefined reference to `brl_deflateEnd’
    /usr/bin/ld: libblock.fa(block_qcow2-threads.c.o): in function `qcow2_zlib_decompress’:
    /home/iain/builds/qemu-6.2.0/build/../block/qcow2-threads.c:152: undefined reference to `brl_inflateInit2_’
    /usr/bin/ld: /home/iain/builds/qemu-6.2.0/build/../block/qcow2-threads.c:157: undefined reference to `brl_inflate’
    /usr/bin/ld: /home/iain/builds/qemu-6.2.0/build/../block/qcow2-threads.c:169: undefined reference to `brl_inflateEnd’
    /usr/bin/ld: libblock.fa(block_vmdk.c.o): in function `vmdk_write_extent’:
    /home/iain/builds/qemu-6.2.0/build/../block/vmdk.c:1777: undefined reference to `brl_compress’
    /usr/bin/ld: libblock.fa(block_vmdk.c.o): in function `vmdk_read_extent’:
    /home/iain/builds/qemu-6.2.0/build/../block/vmdk.c:1871: undefined reference to `brl_uncompress’
    /usr/bin/ld: libblock.fa(block_qcow.c.o): in function `decompress_buffer’:
    /home/iain/builds/qemu-6.2.0/build/../block/qcow.c:574: undefined reference to `brl_inflateInit2_’
    /usr/bin/ld: /home/iain/builds/qemu-6.2.0/build/../block/qcow.c:577: undefined reference to `brl_inflate’
    /usr/bin/ld: /home/iain/builds/qemu-6.2.0/build/../block/qcow.c:584: undefined reference to `brl_inflateEnd’
    /usr/bin/ld: /home/iain/builds/qemu-6.2.0/build/../block/qcow.c:581: undefined reference to `brl_inflateEnd’
    /usr/bin/ld: libblock.fa(block_qcow.c.o): in function `qcow_co_pwritev_compressed’:
    /home/iain/builds/qemu-6.2.0/build/../block/qcow.c:1076: undefined reference to `brl_deflateInit2_’
    /usr/bin/ld: /home/iain/builds/qemu-6.2.0/build/../block/qcow.c:1089: undefined reference to `brl_deflate’
    /usr/bin/ld: /home/iain/builds/qemu-6.2.0/build/../block/qcow.c:1097: undefined reference to `brl_deflateEnd’
    /usr/bin/ld: /home/iain/builds/qemu-6.2.0/build/../block/qcow.c:1091: undefined reference to `brl_deflateEnd’
    /usr/bin/ld: libblock.fa(block_cloop.c.o): in function `cloop_read_block’:
    /home/iain/builds/qemu-6.2.0/build/../block/cloop.c:233: undefined reference to `brl_inflateReset’
    /usr/bin/ld: /home/iain/builds/qemu-6.2.0/build/../block/cloop.c:237: undefined reference to `brl_inflate’
    /usr/bin/ld: libblock.fa(block_cloop.c.o): in function `cloop_open’:
    /home/iain/builds/qemu-6.2.0/build/../block/cloop.c:192: undefined reference to `brl_inflateInit_’
    /usr/bin/ld: libblock.fa(block_cloop.c.o): in function `cloop_close’:
    /home/iain/builds/qemu-6.2.0/build/../block/cloop.c:288: undefined reference to `brl_inflateEnd’
    /usr/bin/ld: libblock.fa(block_dmg.c.o): in function `dmg_read_chunk’:
    /home/iain/builds/qemu-6.2.0/build/../block/dmg.c:621: undefined reference to `brl_inflateReset’
    /usr/bin/ld: /home/iain/builds/qemu-6.2.0/build/../block/dmg.c:625: undefined reference to `brl_inflate’
    /usr/bin/ld: libblock.fa(block_dmg.c.o): in function `dmg_open’:
    /home/iain/builds/qemu-6.2.0/build/../block/dmg.c:536: undefined reference to `brl_inflateInit_’
    /usr/bin/ld: libblock.fa(block_dmg.c.o): in function `dmg_close’:
    /home/iain/builds/qemu-6.2.0/build/../block/dmg.c:744: undefined reference to `brl_inflateEnd’
    collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
    ninja: build stopped: subcommand failed.
    make[1]: *** [Makefile:162: run-ninja] Error 1
    make[1]: Leaving directory ‘/home/iain/builds/qemu-6.2.0/build’
    make: *** [GNUmakefile:11: all] Error 2

    I saw exactly the same error when trying to compile wxWidgets a few weeks ago.

    Searching with google showed precisely nothing! It’s the only time I’ve ever seen google return “no results found” in a search.

    I’d be really grateful if you could advise me. Meantime, I think I might have to remove the multilib packages and live without VirtualBox for a while or install 15.0 without multilib in a VM and build qemu in there.

    By the way, do you have a Patreon account or similar where we can send you something as an appreciation of your work?

  100. Iain Nicholson

    Hi Eric,

    I tried to post a question about the multilib gcc for Slackaware64 15.0 but I think it may have been intercepted by your spam filter.

    When compiling qemu 6.2.0 (and wxWidgets) I get linker errors about missing functions such as brl_deflate and brl_deflateEnd. I have googled and this returns no results! I have tried to find out what libraries these functions are in and why they are being linked in multilib and not found.

    Any ideas?

    • alienbob

      Hi Iain,

      Anyone’s first post gets queued and needs to wait for my approval, this is my defense against spammers, and it has proven to be very effective.

      I have a qemu 6.2.0 package in my repository, obviously it did not encounter these compilation issues you are having. My 64bit Slackware VM where I compile my packages has the multilib versions of glibc and gcc installed, so it is not the multilib compiler which is giving your this issue. I also do not think you are using my SlackBuild script and suspect you have some custom software installed on that system which is picked up during compilation (indirect dependencies perhaps?). And no, I have no idea where these brl_* functions are coming from, they sound like a custom compression library. All the missing function names are part of zlib if you remove that “brl_” prefix.

      • Iain Nicholson

        Thanks very much for your helpful advice Eric. I have built qemu using pristine Slackware64 15.0 in a VM. I then installed your multilib packages and built it again, successfully. I need to figure out what rubbish I have polluting my system causing these linker errors.
        I like to build things from scratch myself (but I do appreciate your Slackware packages too, they save a lot of time) to keep my skills sharp and to learn what has changed with time.

  101. attilio

    Hello.
    I have a problem with current/15. The action is to mount a remote samba disk.

    If I mount with mount -t cifs ……. it’s immediately, instead from gui or else from command “gio mount smb://servername/share”, it makes 40 seconds!!!

    From another distro (MX), instead it’s very fast: about 1 second.

    I try from some slackware and i didn’t found a solution.

    Thanks

  102. Jesus M Diaz

    Hi Eric,

    is slackware.nl having problems tonight?

    thanks

    • alienbob

      I noticed in the server connectivity stats that there seems to have been a period of 4 hours roughly a day ago, where no data was transferred to/from the Internet, must have been a data center outage but I did not receive an email about it.

  103. lockywolf

    I think there is something wrong with the calibre package.

    It has the file

    /usr/lib64/python3.8/site-packages/init_calibre.py , but calibre has its own built-in python, in /usr/lib64/calibre/

    Apart from this file, nothing on Slackware 15 should have anything under /usr/lib64/python3.8

    • alienbob

      Hi lockywolf, thanks, I had overlooked that. I will try to address this together with the linking error which was reported in the comments section of my recent Calibre post.

  104. Henry Pfeil

    Having a spot of bother over LibreOffice. There are a couple of libraries that were upgraded from so.69 to so.71.1. I wonder if, instead of looking for a particular version of, say, libicui18n.so.69, it linked to the soft link libicui18n.so, which always points to the installed version?

    • alienbob

      Ask the libreoffice guys. Software usually links to specific versions of libraries because they need to use that specific ABI.

  105. Henry Pfeil

    Sorry, thought it just needed to be re-compiled against current. Using your slackpackage. I’ll use SlackBuild from slackbuilds.

    • alienbob

      Ah, I misinterpreted your question then. I thought you wanted to know why libreoffice links to a specific version of the library instead of using the version-less symlink. It was not clear from your post that you actually have a problem.

      Yes, -current saw some updates in packages, that happens almost every day, and especially updates of boost, icu4c and poppler break many self-compiled and 3rd-party binaries.
      For that reason I have boost-compat, icu4c-compat and poppler-compat packages in my own repository. These three packages contain older versions of boost, icu4c and poppler which have already been removed from Slackware-current while some software like libreoffice still depends on them.

      I thought (you being a regular poster here on the blog) that you were aware of these three compat packages, it is mentioned almost every time there is an update in Slackware that breaks libreoffice. Apparently you do not read other people’s comments here.
      Simply installing icu4c-compat will fix your libreoffice library errors. I will no recompile this version of libreoffice, there will be a new release soon and then that will work again on -current without the need for a ‘icu4c-compat’ package.
      But it seems you have already set your mind to using the binaries that are re-packages by the slackbuilds.org script.
      Pick whatever suits you.

  106. Henry Pfeil

    Thank you, Eric, for your kind explanation. This is a huge page, I did not read them all. I rebuilt against current so I could make some shipping labels. I’ll go away now..

    • alienbob

      I have articles about LibreOffice almost every month, you should read those *and* post there if you have questions about my libreoffice packages.
      The ‘your feedback’ page is not the correct place for this discussion.

  107. Jen

    Happy birthday!

    • alienbob

      Thanks, and I will soon also look into that new Frescobaldi you mentioned in the email.

      • Jen

        Cool! Not sure who’s using it. The atom packages I’m using to recreate it are: altLilyPond (syntax highlighting), lilycompile, pdf-view, and vim-mode-plus. No MIDI playback that I can tell, but vlc will play MIDI files, if you give it a soundfont. (On current atom crashes, unless you launch it with –no-sandbox. Known issue that’s allegedly fixed in 1.61 that’s coming.)

        • alienbob

          Well, you prompted me to add a Frescobaldi package; so if you were its only user and you have moved on since then, I see no reason to keep the package in my repository.

          • Jen

            That’s totally fine with me, and thanks for maintaining it as long as you did! (Not sure if anyone else is using it, though?)

          • alienbob

            I’ll upgrade frescobaldi one last time and unless someone steps up here in the comments section that they are actually using it, that’ll be the end of that package.

  108. gegechris99

    Hi Eric,

    qemu was recompiled to remove jack2 dependency.
    However, it seems that it’s still needed for some executables.

    $ find /var/log/packages/ -iname “qemu*”
    /var/log/packages/qemu-6.2.0-x86_64-2alien
    $ ldd /usr/bin/qemu-system-x86_64 | grep “not found”
    libjack.so.0 => not found

    • alienbob

      Indeed I rebuilt the 64bit version on my own system at first, to test, and then forgot to recompile it in a clean VM.
      I will upload a fixed package soon.

  109. gegechris99

    Thanks Eric for updated qemu package.

    Strange, I still have the jack2 dependency issue:

    $ find /var/log/packages/ -iname “qemu*”
    /var/log/packages/qemu-6.2.0-x86_64-3alien
    $ ldd /usr/bin/qemu-system-x86_64 | grep “libjack”
    libjack.so.0 => not found

    • alienbob

      That’s insane. I get the same thing. I need to check my Slackware VM which should not even contain traces of Jack2. I cannot explain what creates this dependency.

    • alienbob

      Found the answer, my ‘clean’ VM actually had a jack2 package installed to it, so naturally the QEMU compile picked it up. I’ll recompile yet again…

      • gegechris99

        The latest (4th) build of qemu works for me now without jack dependency.

        Thank you

  110. igadoter

    Hi, after a year of using -current it is time to upgrade. With of course your -current live, great thanks for your work! Job extremely well done.

    • alienbob

      Hi igadoter, long time no read.
      Nice to hear that the upgrade was painless.

  111. Paulo

    Hi Eric, I was testing the new slackpkg+ feature that solves deps and installs them, and when installing ardour I found (or better saying zerouno found) that raptor2 is missing in …/current/liblrdf-0.6.1-x86_64-1alien.meta.

    • alienbob

      I think that some of the .meta files may be outdated. When I update the dependencies in the slack-required file, usually the .meta file will have the correct change. In the case of liblrdf, I may have updated the slack-required and .dep files manually but forgot to update .meta. I do not remember, so I am now re-generating all .meta files as a safety precaution.

      • Paulo

        Thank you Eric, and thank you very much for your work.

  112. Eduardo

    Hi Eric, after the latest Oct 10 Changelog, calibre’s ebook viewer no longer work:

    Failed to import PyQt module: PyQt5.QtWebEngineCore with error: libavcodec.so.59: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File “/usr/bin/calibre-parallel”, line 21, in
    sys.exit(main())
    File “/usr/lib64/calibre/calibre/utils/ipc/worker.py”, line 215, in main
    result = func(*args, **kwargs)
    File “/usr/lib64/calibre/calibre/gui_launch.py”, line 69, in ebook_viewer
    from calibre.gui2.viewer.main import main
    File “/usr/lib64/calibre/calibre/gui2/viewer/main.py”, line 9, in
    from qt.webengine import QWebEngineUrlScheme
    ImportError: cannot import name ‘QWebEngineUrlScheme’ from ‘qt.webengine’ (/usr/lib64/calibre/qt/webengine.py)

    In addition, there was an upgrade to ffmpeg and thus I had to switch to Slackware’s restricted ffmpeg in the meanwhile.

    Thanks for everything!

    • alienbob

      I know. The perks of running Slackware-current is that you get to pick up all the pieces.

    • alienbob

      I have now uploaded new packages for calibre and ffmpeg that work with the latest slackware-current.

      • Jen

        Thanks!

  113. Jen

    Have you had much luck with obs-studio? I’m using your slackbuild to try to build 28.0.3, since it’s got a push-to-talk bugfix the 27 series didn’t have. (And needs rebuilding to the update of ffmpeg.) Here’s where it breaks for me: https://pastebin.com/Uifb3Bxi

    Thing is, it shouldn’t even be configuring the browser, since it’s set to off in DBUILD_BROWSER.

    Here’s CMakeOutput.log: https://pastebin.com/Sc9DDB2X

    • Jen

      obs-vst plugins are now part of the source directory, so I’d disabled overwriting them with the downloaded obs-vst plugin source. That and the version are the only things I’d changed.

    • alienbob

      Yeah it’s somewhere high up on the TODO. Thanks for your preliminary feedback, that will certainly help.

      • Jen

        No worries! I think it changed to -DENABLE_BROWSER=OFF, and the slackbuild on SBo has “-DENABLE_NEW_MPEGTS_OUTPUT=OFF. I could get it to build fine just via CLI and the portable version here: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/wiki/build-instructions-for-linux. (Would be nice if they documented config changes…)

      • Jen

        Hey cool, saw it updated. Peeking at your build… http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/obs-studio/build/patches/obs-studio_ignore_unused_submodules.patch Looks like this makes a big difference. Not sure why the portable version built for me without it, though? Anyway, thanks for the update! Ready to go for Extra Life game day this year. :^)

        • alienbob

          Yeah, the “-DENABLE_BROWSER=OFF” did not have any effect so I had to use this patch. The cmake also informed that “ENABLE_BROWSER” was defined but not used.

          • Jen

            That’s really weird, but I guess that’s why it’s a bug. šŸ™‚

  114. Eduardo

    Hi Eric. Saw you added these two packages yesterday. Thanks!!

  115. Marco

    Hi,
    is there a chance to have QT6 as a separate package (from Calibre 6)?

    • alienbob

      Calibre6 contains only a sub-set of the Qt6 components, just the ones that Calibre requires. I will consider a full Qt6 package once I encounter another piece of software that depends on it. In order to really make it useful, I would also have to add packages for sip6, PyQt6 and Qt6WebEngine.
      Perhaps it will happen earlier than that, but it depends on the time that I have available.

      • Marco

        Thanks for your reply.
        For example I use scribus, which now require QT6.

  116. Ricardo

    Hi Eric!

    Today I read that now ghostwriter is, or is going to be, a KDE app (https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-devel/2022-September/001351.html) and since I could use a nice markdown editor at work, I remembered that I had your package installed.

    Unfortunately, on Slackware64 -current I got this error when starting it:

    ghostwriter: error while loading shared libraries: libhunspell-1.6.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

    Also, the version in your repo (1.8.1) is a bit old, so you might want to directly compile the latest version (2.1.6 at the time of this post).

    FWIW, the slackbuild on SBo for version 2.1.6 compiled fine on my system.

    Thank you for all you do for Sackware and have a great weekend!

    • alienbob

      I’ll have a look at it, but I assume that it will turn up in KDE Applications soon then.

      • Ricardo

        Yesterday I noticed you uploaded new packages for ghostwriter and ungoogled-chromium, I updated both and they’re working great, thank you!

  117. Andrey

    Hi, Alien,
    Several years we have error related to kde session.
    If we logout from kde after long work, the session is stoped but black screen is freeze and have no reaction on keyboard.
    To resolve this situation we have to login by ssh from another host and reboot freezed machine.
    This is a truble for users who periodicaly work with kde using startx.
    This issue related to X server because openbox also freeze after logout.
    Please explane root cause of this.

    Thank in advance.

    • alienbob

      It’s better if you post this question on linuxquestions.org.

  118. Bob Geer

    Back on June 12, 2020 at 03:26 I reported liveslack installed on SSD booted succesfully when connected using USB2 cable but failed to boot using USB3 cable. Liveslack 1.6.0.1 (slackware64-live-current.iso) downloaded Nov 25 does indeed boot with USB3 as well as USB2 cables. Yippee! Now to get Calibre running… Much Obliged for your efforts.

  119. Tonus

    Satisfying solstice and logical new year M. Hameleers.
    And happy slacking !

    • alienbob

      Thanks Tonus. All the best for 2023 to you too.

  120. Tomas M

    I’ve installed full clean slackware-current today (32 bit)
    I am running X without any problem.
    Then I downloaded chromium txz package from your website, and it does not want to work under regular user.
    The root user can start it with chromium –no-sandbox, and in this case it works just fine. But if I start it with a regular user, the chromium window appears, but it does not load any pages, even the default chromium page. It shows “Ah Snap” and it is not possible to browse any websites. Console prints lots of error messages regarding missing file /sys/device/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq … well the file indeed is missing.

    So my question: did you try your chromium package in Slackware current with regular user?
    Does it work for you just fine?
    Did you add your regular user to any specific groups?
    Thank you!

    • alienbob

      Hi Tomas,
      The issue of Chromium crashing on a 32bit OS has come up several times on this blog in the past. I have given up discussing with the Google developers to fix this properly, if you search the blog you will find some more info about that.
      On 32bit OS, you need to add a flag to Chromium that disables the seccomp functionality. The flag is “--disable-seccomp-filter-sandbox“. You can for instance add a configuration file to /etc/chromium/ to add the above flag to the CHROMIUM_FLAGS environment variable.
      With that flag set, Chromium will work just fine.

  121. DLCBurggraaff

    Dear Eric,
    The last few weeks I noticed that your slackware64-{15.0,current}-live ISOs were falling behind Patrick’s changes.
    Today I see that the 15.0 one is catching up, but the current ISO is still at 12/28.
    I assume things have to do with the freeing up space on slackware.com endeavour.
    Regards, Dick

    • alienbob

      No, I had issues with the Live ISO generation of -current, the squashfs process would be incredibly slow. I did not find a root cause so I disabled the ISO creation completely.
      On my US server ‘taper’, I do not have this issue and there you’ll find an up-to-date ISO: https://us.slackware.nl/slackware-live/slackware64-current-live/

      I will revisit the Live ISO creation on ‘martin’ soon-ish.

  122. Tomas M

    Thank you very much for your answer.
    When using this flag, every time I start chrome it will show a message saying
    You are using an unsupported command-line flag
    I have no problem using it, since I don’t care, but the error message always appears repeatedly, which annoys me. If I privide you a patch for chromium source codes, which would suppress this error message, would you be willing to include it in your build process? So the chromium binary from your Slackware package wont print this warning.

    Thanks for consideration.

    • alienbob

      I’d rather have this seccomp issue fixed for 32bit of course šŸ™‚
      But yes I will accept a patch that quells this warning.

      • Tomas M

        Thank you
        I wonder how debian compiles their 32bit chromium, since it works just fine for debian.
        They ship chromium-sandbox package separately, not sure if this has something to do with this.

        Anyway, to suppress the warning infobar, this patch should do it. I did not test this patch since I do not have resources here to compile chromium myself, but I guess it is what I am looking for:

        diff –git a/chrome/browser/ui/startup/bad_flags_prompt.cc b/chrome/browser/ui/startup/bad_flags_prompt.cc
        index c918686..c1c5d8b 100644
        — a/chrome/browser/ui/startup/bad_flags_prompt.cc
        +++ b/chrome/browser/ui/startup/bad_flags_prompt.cc
        @@ -192,11 +192,6 @@ void ShowBadFlagsInfoBarHelper(content::WebContents* web_contents,
        // animate the infobar to reduce noise in perf benchmarks because they pass
        // –ignore-certificate-errors-spki-list. This infobar only appears at
        // startup so the animation isn’t visible to users anyway.
        – CreateSimpleAlertInfoBar(
        – infobars::ContentInfoBarManager::FromWebContents(web_contents),
        – infobars::InfoBarDelegate::BAD_FLAGS_INFOBAR_DELEGATE, nullptr,
        – l10n_util::GetStringFUTF16(message_id, base::UTF8ToUTF16(flag)),
        – /*auto_expire=*/false, /*should_animate=*/false);
        }

        } // namespace

  123. DLCBurggraaff

    Eric:
    Indeed the Current ISO on your US server was (and is) up-to-date. Downloading took noticeably longer than from your NL server and the UK mirror, but things remained acceptible.
    In the meantime I noticed that the Current ISO on your NL server is up-to-date again. Thanks!

    The following is something that I never came around to reporting: USB sticks your Slackware64-{15.0,current}-ISOs are dd’ed to (via dd, balenaEtcher or Rufus in dd-mode) boot OK on my desktops in MBR as well as in EFI non-secure-boot mode but boot straight into a Grub shell on my HP I5 EFI non-secure-boot only laptop. USB sticks created with your iso2usb.sh script or via Rufus in ISO mode boot OK on that laptop.
    As this is not my typical use case this report is just a heads up, not a request for resolution.
    Vrgr. Dick

  124. Jen

    So I built Supercollider 3.13 today, and it’s fine…except the help documentation. Loading the IDE, it throws an error, but if you search for something (look up documentation) it pops up. I’m thinking that’s a bug on them. I’ll open an issue on the github later today, when I’ve got some time.

    • Jen

      It was an easy fix–copy the files from /usr/src/Supercollider/HelpSource to .local/share/Supercollider/Help, but that it wasn’t automatically copying is still a bug on their part. (Had some time to poke on my lunch break.)

    • alienbob

      I’ll wait until they fix the bug you are reporting šŸ™‚

  125. Eduardo

    Hi Eric!
    After the latest updates, the EPUB viewer of Calibre stopped working. Would you please consider a rebuild?

    Thanks in advance!

    • alienbob

      Yeah calibre needs an upgrade anyway.

  126. slackartist

    vlc slackbuild link for libdvdcss file. vlc is having issues with hardware at the moment. though after a short while this link :
    https://opencolo.mm.fcix.net/videolan-ftp/libdvdcss/1.4.3/libdvdcss-1.4.3.tar.bz2
    in vlc slackbuild
    1116:SRCURL[57]=”http://download.videolan.org/pub/libdvdcss/${DVDCSS}/libdvdcss-${DVDCSS}.tar.bz2″

    Not sure if they’ll revert back to the original hyperlink. Good work building vlc now

  127. Eduardo

    Hi Eric, thanks for the calibre rebuild (at least on 64-bit). I can confirm it works very well and no issues so far. Thanks again!!

  128. Boris

    Hello Eric. Really appreciate your chromium-ungoogled package builds. Just noticed that today’s package of ungoogled version 110.0.5481.177 was not uploaded for current x64; still version .100, but is there for 15, and standard chromium.

    Thanks

    • alienbob

      I’ll fix that, thanks.

  129. Jen

    Did libcroco get removed from multilib? Not seeing its removals in either the slackware or multilib changelogs, but it’s showing up in clean-system’s list? (I saw it was added back in February.)

    • alienbob

      From Slackware 15.0 ChangeLog.txt:

      +--------------------------+
      Sat Aug 15 19:54:20 UTC 2020
      l/libcroco-0.6.13-x86_64-1.txz: Removed.

      • Jen

        Cool, thanks! šŸ™‚

  130. Userx-bw

    vlc-3.0.17.4-x86_64-1alien date: Fri Apr 14 15:24:37 CDT 2023. Slackware 15 current

    that program has lately a few weeks now has not been playing videos like it should. I get a blue screen and one that shows crap colors pallet . I can;t post images to show you. I’ve checked you page as best I could find and don’t see anything missing as it is only that package and it has been working fine until a few weeks ago perhaos as I jump around in my OS’s on my laptop so i am not always using slack. and it does not seem to be the videos as they all play fine in MPV.

    just thought I’d bring that to your attention.

    • alienbob

      VLC works just fine on my T460 laptop and its Intel GPU, running Slackware64-current.
      The problem is somewhere on your computer, most likely the graphics driver you are using.

  131. edorig (as in linuxquestions.org)

    I have installed chromium-ungoogled-112.0.5615.121-i586-1alien.txz on a Toshiba Satellite M40-307 under Slackware 15.0. If I try to run the program, it dies receiving a SIGILL signal.
    The Toshiba has 512Mb of memory, and a32bit Intel Celeron M processor. Does chromium require more memory or does it require an instruction that does not exist on the Celeron M ?
    I tried to locate the subroutine causing the SIGILL with gdb but I was unsuccessful since the executable is stripped.

    • alienbob

      You should have posted this under the blog post about Chromium 112. It will drown here in the “Your feedback” page. Anyway, your hardware is unsupported if it does not support SSE3. Earlier models of the Celeron M CPU did indeed not support that instruction set.
      See also this 2021 article> https://mspoweruser.com/google-chrome-is-dropping-support-for-some-really-old-cpus/

      • edorig (as in linuxquestions.org)

        I have found the answer I needed, chrome is useless for old 32bit Intel processors.
        The computer can still access the web with seamonkey + noscript (and of course Lynx/Links) for now.

  132. Bob Geer

    Back on December 4, 2022 at 22:44 I posted success writing liveslack-current to a USB3 connected SSD & booting. Well, bummer of bummers, Linux doesn’t consider a USB-connected SSD “removeable” thus iso2usb.sh won’t write to it. Any thooughts?

    • alienbob

      What is the command you are using and what is the exact error?
      The iso2usb.sh script accepts any valid block device using the “-o” parameter.
      How does that USB-connected SSD present itself in the “/sys/block/” directory?

  133. Bob Geer

    After considerable “hacking” iso2usb.sh including removing the “removable” requirement the faiilure occurs during execution of “sgdisk -og /dev/sdc || true”. I’ll look in /sys/block for more info.

    My list of block devices:
    ls –indicator-style=none /sys/block/ |grep -Ev ‘(ram|loop|dm-)’
    sda
    sdb
    sdc

    sda = internal drive
    sdb = memory card device
    sdc = USB-connected SSD

    ripple:20230421$ cat /sys/block/sdb/removable
    1
    ripple:20230421$ cat /sys/block/sdc/removable
    0

    ripple:20230421$ sudo ./iso2usb.sh -i slackware64-live-current.iso -o /dev/sdc
    Password:
    #
    # We are going to format this device (erase all data) – ‘/dev/sdc’:
    # —————————————————————————
    # Vendor : Disk
    # Model : Name
    # Size : 114473 MB
    # —————————————————————————
    #
    # FDISK OUTPUT:
    # GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 1.0.9
    #
    # Partition table scan:
    # MBR: not present
    # BSD: not present
    # APM: not present
    # GPT: not present
    #
    # Creating new GPT entries in memory.
    # Disk /dev/sdc: 234441648 sectors, 111.8 GiB
    # Model: Name
    # Sector size (logical/physical): 512/512 bytes
    # Disk identifier (GUID): B32BD93C-4BEA-929E-F9E3-804C86115A60
    # Partition table holds up to 128 entries
    # Main partition table begins at sector 2 and ends at sector 33
    # First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 234441614
    # Partitions will be aligned on 2048-sector boundaries
    # Total free space is 234441581 sectors (111.8 GiB)
    #
    # Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name

    *** ***
    *** If this is the wrong drive, then press CONTROL-C now! ***
    *** ***

    Or press ENTER to continue:
    1+0 records in
    1+0 records out
    512 bytes copied, 0.00808237 s, 63.3 kB/s
    Problem opening Ć¢ for reading! Error is 2.
    The specified file does not exist!
    Warning! Unable to generate a proper UUID! Creating an improper one as a last
    resort! Windows 7 may crash if you save this partition table!
    Information: Creating fresh partition table; will override earlier problems!
    Caution! Secondary header was placed beyond the disk’s limits! Moving the
    header, but other problems may occur!
    Unable to open device ” for writing! Errno is 2! Aborting write!
    Problem opening y for reading! Error is 2.
    The specified file does not exist!
    *** ./iso2usb.sh FAILED at line 645 ***
    — Cleaning up the staging area…

    • alienbob

      First.
      Run this script as root, do not use “sudo”. This is not Ubuntu. I do not know how you configured sudo but I can guarantee that its out-of-the-box use on Slackware does not have the same effects as on other distros.

      Second.
      What’s that with all the “Ć¢” “” and “y” for device names? Have you been changing the script’s output before you pasted it here? Useless this way.

      Also.
      Since you modified iso2usb.sh please upload your modified version to a pastebin and share the URL so that I can see what you changed.

    • alienbob

      This is what happens I think: https://bugs.gentoo.org/844073

  134. Bob Geer

    GACK! Who broke gfdisk running on AMD64? My little AMD64 netbook has been really reliable until now. I scrounged up an intel sys & everything just WORKED! Apology for the inconvenience & THANKS for your help, patience, & especially liveslack & alien Slackbuilds. Best Wishes

    • alienbob

      By the way, gptfdisk on Slackware 15.0 does not experience this bug, and gptfdisk on Slackware -current is patched against that bug.
      Which leads me to believe that you were running iso2usb.sh on a non-Slackware OS, correct?

  135. Bob Geer

    My AMD64 netbook is Slackware-current unfortunately not updated since September 18, 2022. It is seldom used except for traveling. Updating it now, tho. FYI I mostly use it to create a wifi access point when off grid, useful for exchanging files among devices.

  136. Jose Angel Caso Sanchez

    Slackware multiach cross compiler suite:

    I have developped a compiler suite for slackware, multiarch (and multilibc) capable:

    https://github.com/altomaltes/crossbootstrap

    There is binaries for Slackware64 15.0

    Basically this means the basic cross compile tools ( libc, binutils, gcc and kernel headers ) for a dozen of architectures and both musl and glibc. Two years ago, I ported slackware to a couple of arches, both over glibc and musl and this is the first step. The layout allows the cohabitation of all of them ( multiarch allows this ) in the root filesystem.

    The goal is to have an early port on this tiny jewell:

    https://sipeed.com/licheepi4a

    I have already done the ports, but not pubished them because it need a little hand work and it is not a good idea to release scripts with flaws

    Enjoy.

  137. Veerei

    Hello, Alien. Thanks for the great projects for slackware!

    I’ve recently noticed that there’s always a checksum error when I rsync your multilib repo. Could you please investigate it?

    tail +13 CHECKSUMS.md5 | md5sum –check –quiet
    ./slackware64-compat32/a-compat32/aaa_libraries-compat32-15.0-x86_64-19compat32.txz.asc: FAILED
    ./slackware64-compat32/l-compat32/lcms2-compat32-2.13-x86_64-2compat32.txz.asc: FAILED
    md5sum: WARNING: 2 computed checksums did NOT match

    I’ve tried it multiple times on multiple drives on 2 laptops. Always got the same error. Seems like the problem is in the CHECKSUM file.

    Cheers.

    • alienbob

      Hi,

      I can not reproduce that MD5SUM error. What is the mirror URL you are using? I control slackware.nl us.slackware.nl martin.alienbase.nl and slackware.com/~alien – perhaps you are using another mirror?

      • Veerei

        Sorry for long answer. I swear I thought I’ve checked “Notify me of new posts by email” option.

        I use rsync://slackware.uk/people/alien/multilib/15.0. I’ve just tested rsync with mirrors you provided. It doesn’t work. Seems like these mirrors do not support rsync.

        • Veerei

          Ok, I found in README you suggest to use lftp to get files from ftp. I rebuilt my script to sync packages over ftp and check gpg signature and hashes. As far as I was wrong and the problem with checksums doesn’t relate to you, I close the question. Thanks!

        • alienbob

          The three hosts slackware.nl, us.slackware.nl and martin.alienbase.nl all support rsync. They export the “/mirrors” module where you can find mirrors for Slackware releases, SlackBuilds.org, my own personal repositories and more.

  138. Dave

    Hello! I’m trying to make a custom ISO using liveslak (thanks for all the documentation!) but was wondering if the any custom package lists I add to /pkglists are made into addon modules when the ISO is generated, or if they’re bundled with the system modules, or some alternative?
    I’d love to have my own packages automatically bundled as addons and separated from the core system packages, but I’m not sure if I can list them under /pkglists, or if I need to run the makemod script to turn them into modules first and work from there.

    • alienbob

      If you want to create a custom module outside of make_slackware_live.sh then you can get inspiration from this script: https://git.liveslak.org/liveslak/tree/contrib/scripts/makemod_wine .
      Basically: use “installpkg –root” to install any number of packages into a staging directory, and then run makemod using that staging directory to create the squashfs module which you can then copy inside addons/ or optional/ directory of your USB Live.

  139. Boris

    Back on March 9th with Libreoffice 7.5.1 the Slackbuilds Changelog mentions the compat libraries are no longer required on current. In the newest 7.5.5 update from a few days ago, the Changelog mentions to install the compat libraries once again. Is this a mistype? In my case libreoffice is functioning without them.

    • alienbob

      You are of course completely correct. Apparently I was not fully conscious when writing that ChangeLog entry.
      I have now also updated the SlackBuild script and the slack-required file to reflect this. Next LibreOffice update in my repository, all will be well. Thanks!

  140. Jen

    I think there’s an issue with pipewire-jack building against pipewire-0.3.78 and the addition of lua. I recall Pat saying that pipewire was still built against the patched version of lua. Does your pipewire-jack package dump a log when it’s building? (I’m not familiar with meson/ninja)

    • Jen

      https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/using-pipewire-instead-of-pulseaudio-in-slackware-15-a-4175693980/page35.html OK, not sure what’s up. I’ve tried with my build of pipewire-jack, I rebuilt Pat’s pipewire, enabling jack, and I just tried your new version of pipewire-jack, and the same thing happens.

      I’m not 100% convinced it isn’t a supercollider problem. Finishing my iced coffee and I’ll open a bug report there.

      • alienbob

        A few months ago I tried upgrading Jack and SuperCollider (and several other packages) and I had similar issues with the latest release of SuperCollider. I reverted my upgrades and never pushed anything into my repository.
        Do you have this issue with SuperCollider 3.13.0 also?

        • Jen

          Yes…both 3.12 and 3.13. I rolled back to 3.12, and had the same problem. I’m rolling back pipewire next, but need to rebuild pipewire-jack for 0.3.77.

  141. Jen

    OK, here’s what I found out: supercollider 3.12 and 3.13 both work with pipewire 0.3.77. They won’t with 0.3.78. I tried with both your pipewire-jack packages and building pat’s package with jack enabled. (So it’s not the lua change.) Now to play “whose bug is it, anyway?” šŸ™‚

    could pipewire-compat be a problem? It’s on 0.3.77, but in the past it doesn’t matter because supercollider is a 64-bit application.

  142. rastos

    Can it be that somewhere glibc 2.35 and 2.38 the file /lib64/ld-2.3*.so lost the debug symbols (became stripped)?
    I’m asking because with 2.38 valgrind is moaning:

    valgrind: Fatal error at startup: a function redirection
    valgrind: which is mandatory for this platform-tool combination
    valgrind: cannot be set up. Details of the redirection are:
    valgrind:
    valgrind: A must-be-redirected function
    valgrind: whose name matches the pattern: strlen
    valgrind: in an object with soname matching: ld-linux-x86-64.so.2
    valgrind: was not found whilst processing
    valgrind: symbols from the object with soname: ld-linux-x86-64.so.2

    Would you be so kind and look into that?

    • alienbob

      The glibc package in Slackware has a ld-2.38.so binary which is stripped whereas previous versions of glibc ship this binary un-stripped. Those do indeed contain the “strlen” symbol.
      My multilib glibc has the exaxt same changes.
      There’s not so much I can do; the Slackware package needs to be updated first. I checked the modifications in glibc.SlackBuild and the applied patches and there’s nothing that stands out to me as the reason behind the sudden stripping of the linker binary.

      • alienbob

        Update: Pat found the root cause (the new libxcrypt.build script) and he will fix the stripping in an update of the glibc packages. Then I can do the same for the multilib version.

      • alienbob

        l/glibc-2.38-x86_64-3.txz: Rebuilt.
        Don't strip ld-2.38.so as this breaks valgrind.
        Thanks to rastos and alienBOB.

        • rastos

          Awesome! Thank you very much.

  143. ArTourter

    Hi Eric,
    I think `at-spi-atk-compat32` and `atk-compat32` should be removed from -current multilib as they have been merged into `at-spi-core` back in September
    Cheers
    Greg

    • alienbob

      You’re right… I thought I had already taken care of that but apparently only in my mind.

  144. JohnK

    Hi Eric,
    Thank you for so many programs I use daily!
    MY PROBLEM:
    I use your vlc and I cannot get vlc to do spdif passthrough.
    Do you have any thoughts? I use VLC with alsa, not pulseuadio — which does not work either.

    Here I hope is relevant information:

    My audio ;soundcard; is a USB external box.
    aplay -L
    iec958:CARD=UA25EX,DEV=0
    UA-25EX, USB Audio
    IEC958 (S/PDIF) Digital Audio Output

    # ‘test.mp4’ is a TV recording with ac3 audio
    vlc test.mp4 –alsa-audio-device iec958:CARD=UA25EX,DEV=0

    [0000000001112a30] main audio output error: module not functional
    [00007fc79b92a760] main decoder error: failed to create audio output
    [0000000001112a30] alsa audio output error: no supported sample format

    –Using the menu choices vlc presents does not work, either.

    vlc -v –list | grep spdif
    VLC media player 3.0.17.4 Vetinari (revision 3.0.13-8-g41878ff4f2)
    spdif S/PDIF pass-through decoder
    tospdif Audio filter for A/52/DTS->S/PDIF encapsulation

    • Marco

      Not an expert in this field, just a guess, but have you installed ffmeg restricted from alienbobs repository?
      If not, could you try it with that version?

      • Marco

        ffmpeg

    • alienbob

      Hi!
      I build packages but generally do not offer functional support for them. I only know about the stuff I use myself and the ways I use that stuff.
      You may be better off with the FFmpeg own support forum.

  145. Andrey

    Hi Eric,

    Thanks a lot for your work on Slackware.

    I want to suggect you to consider the credated daemon which created as a replacemrnt of systemd-timedated to control org.freedesktop.timedate1 D-Bus interface. As in your system there are elogind and eudev probably you will untereds to ass timedated into Slackware (somebody uses DE such as MATE but some utility want to control time on desktop environment. For example, mate-time-admin works well with timedated).
    https://github.com/radix-linux/timedated

    Best Regards,
    Andrey K.

    • alienbob

      Hi Andrey,

      Suggestions to improve the Slackware distribution with new software have more effect if you post it in the place where all these requests come together and are read by Patrick Volkerding: https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/requests-for-current-next-15-0-15-1-a-4175706801/
      He usually will not add new software unless it is a requirement for other software in Slackware. Therefore in case you decide to post your request on LinuxQuestions.org can you give an example of another Slackware program which will benefit from it?

  146. DLCBurggraaff

    Dear Eric: Am I the only one not seeing the comments to your newly themed blog articles?
    Regards, Dick

    • DLCBurggraaff

      Never mind, I now noticed the comments button just below the articles title.

  147. C.Wizard

    Just FYI, the change log for Multilib (right side of the blog main page and below the calendar), has not updated since 20 December.
    šŸ™‚

    • alienbob

      That is because the slackware.com server’s datacenter had issues at the time I updated multilib. My mirrors at slackware.nl and us.slackware.nl do have the updates pushed automatically but for Slackware’s server I always perform manual updates.
      When slackware.com came back online I forgot to push those updates. I have done that now, thanks for noticing.

  148. slackdruid

    I donated Eric. Thank you for your hard work. Especially with the flatpak and audio production packages. Thank you for helping keep Slackware alive and quickly accessible for said packages.
    Oh and yes LibreOffice too!

    Nothing beats Slackware, nothing. At least in my world.

    • alienbob

      Thanks šŸ™‚

  149. pc2005

    Hello, first I need to thank you for great work šŸ™‚

    I was updating an old slackware machine and I’ve found some dependencies broken, x264-20211120-x86_64-1alien requires:

    libavformat.so.58 => not found
    libavcodec.so.58 => not found
    libavutil.so.56 => not found
    libswscale.so.5 => not found

    but available ffmpeg package:

    [inst] restricted : ffmpeg-6.1.1-x86_64-2alien

    already has v60 (libavformat.so.60) and ffmpeg3-compat-3.4.6-x86_64-1alien has only v57 (libavformat.so.57)

    Also for lua package, slackpkg+ tries to update the newer version in vanilla repo with one from alienbob repo:

    [upgr] alienbob : slackware64:lua-5.4.6-x86_64-5 –> lua-5.1.5-x86_64-3alien
    [unin] alienbob : lua53-5.3.6-x86_64-1alien

    Would it be possible to make something like lua51 package if 5.1 is still necessary? I was using 5.1 because wireshark didn’t work with newer, but it seems it works now (maybe other packages work now too).

    • alienbob

      Hi pc2005,

      Thanks for the feedback. I have removed my stale ‘lua’ package for Slackware-current and have uploaded a fresh x264 package for Slackware 15.0 and -current.

  150. pc2005

    Hi again,

    Packages:

    xz-compat32-5.6.0-x86_64-1compat32
    aaa_libraries-compat32-15.1-x86_64-27compat32

    seems to contain liblzma 5.6.0 which was discovered to contain a backdoor few days ago. Even though it seems the backdoor only works on 64bit systemd distros (so not in compat32 slackware) it would be probably wise to drop github version tarball (if used). Vanilla slackware64 seems to use xz-5.6.1-x86_64-3 where backdoor changes were reverted.

    https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2024/q1/268
    https://gynvael.coldwind.pl/?lang=en&id=782
    https://boehs.org/node/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdoor

    • alienbob

      The backdoor does not exist in Slackware.

      • pc2005

        Ah OK mea culpa, I was probably too “cautious” šŸ™‚ seeing debian even revert back to 5.4.5 (I think someone stated, they cannot be sure if there isn’t yet undiscovered problem).

  151. Richard Narron

    Thanks for all the nice Slackware packages!

    I downloaded vlc from
    https://slackware.uk/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/
    for both x86_64 and i586 for Slackware 15.0

    VLC 3.0.19 runs well on x86_64, but on i586 there was a problem playing a DVD (but I found a work around).

    $vlc dvd://
    [08f809a0] main libvlc: Running vlc with the default interface. Use ‘cvlc’ to use vlc without interface.
    [08ff8890] main playlist: playlist is empty
    [a7898730] dvdnav demux: DVD Title: STARGATE_SG1_SEASON_10_D1_US
    [a7898730] dvdnav demux: DVD Serial Number: ABCDEFGHI
    [a7898730] dvdnav demux: DVD Title (Alternative): STARGATE_SG1_SEASON_10_D1_US
    [a7898730] dvdnav demux: DVD disk reports itself with Region mask 0x00fe0000. Regions: 01
    [a7898730] dvdnav demux: Attempting to retrieve all CSS keys
    [a7898730] dvdnav demux: This can take a _long_ time, please be patient
    libdvdnav: Suspected RCE Region Protection!!!
    libdvdnav: Suspected RCE Region Protection!!!
    [a78daf70] main decoder error: buffer deadlock prevented
    [afd20f80] gl gl: Initialized libplacebo v5.264.1 (API v264)
    [a78daf70] avcodec decoder: Using Mesa Gallium driver 21.3.5 for AMD RV710 (DRM 2.50.0 / 5.15.153-smp-mine, LLVM 13.0.0)
    for hardware decoding
    Segmentation fault

    The problem seems to be with Hardware accelerated decoding.
    When it is set to “automatic” the Segmentation fault occurs.

    But when Hardware accelerated decoding is set to “disable”
    it works fine!

    Again this problem only appears for the i586 version of vlc 3.0.19.

    • alienbob

      Thanks for telling about the problem *and* the fix, even if it reduces the functionality of VLC somewhat. I couldn’t tell you why this happens. I assume that software developers test their code less and less on 32bit operating systems.

  152. Marco

    Maybe the VLC forum would be a better place to search or ask?

    https://forum.videolan.org/search.php?keywords=%22Segmentation+fault%22+Mesa+Gallium+&terms=all&author=&sc=1&sf=all&sr=posts&sk=t&sd=d&st=0&ch=300&t=0&submit=Search

    Do you have the latest AMD display drivers?

  153. Marco

    Hi Eric,
    Hope you’re doing ok.
    Do you know why http://www.slackware.com is not using HTTPS?
    Regards. Marco

    • alienbob

      HTTPS is overkill for a site that only serves static content. Also you will notice that many repository servers offer HTTP because adding SSL encryption adds a load to the server when it needs to serve a lot of content in parallel.

    • Marco

      Hee Eric. Thanks for your answer. I was under the assumption that all sites should use HTTPS nowadays.
      I understand now that since packages are signed, HTTPS is not “really” necessary. Some interesting discussion about it here:
      https://askubuntu.com/questions/352952/are-repository-lists-secure-is-there-an-https-version
      Still HTTPS offers more security and as I understand it the extra server load is minimal nowadays, especially with modern hardware.

      • alienbob

        The slackware.com site does not offer Slackware core packages anyway. It hosts my own repository but for that, multiple https mirrors are also available.

  154. Carmen

    Dear Eric,
    I hope you are well.
    Thank you for all the great posts and scripts, I always learn a lot from them.
    Lately, I’ve been using liveslak and found that I couldn’t load any module I placed in optional. The problem seems to be due to a misplaced round bracket in line 659 of the liveinit.tpl file. I think that SUBSYSSET is taken as a second argument to find_mod. So, I placed the last round bracket before the expansion of SUBSYSSET and problem solved.
    Best regards,
    Carmen

    • alienbob

      Hi Carmen,

      Your analysis is correct, that round bracket needs to be moved.
      I will fix it immediately so that the 15.0 and -current ISOs will get the fix – at least those that get recreated on every update to the Slackware ChangeLog.txt.
      At some point in future I also need find time to create a new batch of ISO variants.

  155. patricio

    hi eric. the changelog mentions that on july 12 google-go-lang was updated from 1.20.5 to 1.22.5 but the packages in the repo are still from the old version šŸ™

    https://slackware.nl/people/alien/slackbuilds/ChangeLog.txt#:~:text=google%2Dgo%2Dlang%3A%20updated%20to%201.22.5
    https://slackware.nl/people/alien/slackbuilds/google-go-lang/pkg64/15.0/google-go-lang-1.20.5-x86_64-1alien.meta

  156. patricio

    hi eric. the changelog mentions that on july 12 google-go-lang was updated from 1.20.5 to 1.22.5 but the packages in the repo are still from the old version šŸ™

    • alienbob

      Indeed, thanks for reporting.
      I have now *really* uploaded the new google-go-lang packages into my repository.

  157. DLCBurggraaff

    Dear Eric: Is not it time to update the kernel for your 15.0 live ISO? The current (ugh) 15.0 kernel is 5.15.161 (Jun 16, 2024), whereas yours is still 5.15.145 (Dec 24, 2023).
    See e.g. patches/packages/ for linux* and old-linux*
    Regards, Dick

    • alienbob

      I would have expected the new kernel packages to be inserted but indeed when I check the log file I see:

      -- kernel-generic found in patches
      kernel-generic-5.15.145-x86_64-1: a general purpose SMP Linux kernel ... [ 13M]
      -- kernel-firmware found in patches
      kernel-firmware-20240606_90df68d-noarch-1: Firmware for the kernel ..... [ 1.1G]
      -- kernel-headers found in patches
      kernel-headers-5.15.145-x86-1: Linux kernel include files .............. [ 5.8M]
      -- kernel-modules found in patches
      kernel-modules-5.15.145-x86_64-1: Linux kernel modules ................. [ 304M]

      Other packages that are “found in patches” are actually installed from the patches directory… but not the kernel packages. I need to investigate because this is unexpected behaviour from the script.

    • alienbob

      Weirder even: my US server creates its own ISOs independently from the NL server, using the exact same scripts (checked out from git) and here it installs the correct kernel from /patches: https://us.slackware.nl/slackware-live/slackware64-15.0-live/liveslak.log

      It must be something in the local package repository I think/hope.

  158. DLCBurggraaff

    And indeed the “US” ISO boots with kernel 5.15.161.
    I will download that version (it just takes somewhat longer) until you fixed the problem. So there is no hurry.
    Have a nice day, Dick
    šŸ˜€

  159. DLCBurggraaff

    Indeed today’s “Dutch” ISO boots with kernel 5.15.161.
    Hartelijk dank,
    Dick šŸ˜€

  160. Eduardo

    Hi Eric. Thanks for the LibreOffice updates to 24.8.1. They run well but they display an artifact: when typing with justified margins, when you get near the right margin the text becomes garbled and dislocated, until the line breaks into a newline.

    This is not related to your builds. I tested it in RPMs from The Document Foundation and they display the same artifact.

    Downgrading to 24.8.0 fixes the issue. Thus, I would ask if you could consider reverting to 24.8.0 or pointing, if there’s any, to a cumulative archive of yours where one could download the previous release? Thanks!!

    • alienbob

      Hi Eduardo,

      I do not see this problem here on my Slackware64-current laptop with Plasma5.

      • alienbob

        Ah, yes i see this too. When you mentioned “garbled” I could not see any garbled text, but indeed while typing and passing half-way a line, lowriter attempts to justify the already written text every time I hit the spacebar.
        A bug indeed, did you already create a bug report?

      • Marco

        From https://mastodon.social/@wilhelm@fedia.social/113130167600442660 :

        “Turned out this is known as bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162220 already and was fixed recently. Sadly the fix didn’t make it in time for 24.8.1 but will be part of 24.8.2.”

        • Eduardo

          The problem is that when you approach the middle of the line, lowriter begins to clear the line and justify it. Then another character is inserted, the line is cleared again and then justified. When you type fast, the practical result is a line garbled and with artifacts up and until you hit a new line.

          Thanks, Marco, for the confirmation and the feedback.

          Eric: is there a possibility to get your old 24.8.0 builds? Thanks again!

  161. Marco

    By the way Eric, slackfinder says with your Libreoffice version 24.2.5, although it is 24.8.1, so somehow it’s not reading the version correctly.

  162. Marco

    I would help you if I was any good in programming.
    This is the only thing I could find:
    https://security.snyk.io/vuln/SNYK-SLES151-PHP7BZ2-3135287

    • alienbob

      It seems that slakfinder can not deal with empty MANIFEST files (in Slackware-current testing area there are currently no packages) and keeps looping the download and uncompress without success in finding a package to enter into its database.
      I don’t have the PHP skills and don’t understand the slakfinder code well enough to fix that, so I simply disabled updates for the ‘testing’ repositories of -current.
      FYI this is the line of code from which the program never returns and keeps looping instead: https://github.com/alienbob/slakfinder/blob/alienbob/htdocs/libs/repository.inc.php#L82

    • Marco

      Thanks, it’s working again!

      • alienbob

        Thanks also to you Marco, for taking the time to report those issues you find. I cannot keep an eye on everything, so I am glad to be informed where stuff needs fixing.

        • Marco

          You’re welcome. It’s the least I can do.

  163. Brian Capouch

    I just downloaded the slackware64-curent-install-dvd.iso, burned it onto a USB stick, and tried to do my usual steps to install Slackware on an older laptop I just purchased.

    It fails rather dramatically–none of the /proc filesystem appears to be available, so at the end of boot about 20 lines of “Cannot find /proc/cmdline” and when I look at /proc it’s empty.

    Removed the USB stick and replaced it with one I used to do an install about a year and a half ago–worked perfectly.

    So I installed that way, but sure wonder what bit me on the latest download.

    Thanks!

  164. Jesus M Diaz-Perez

    Hello!

    I recently notice a problem with one of my scripts, which was calling jq, installed from your repo (jq-1.6-x86_64-1alien). The issue was that jq was overflowing with big integers. I also notice that your package has a cosmetic problem, not properly showing the version.

    I just upgraded it to jq-1.7.1-x86_64-2_SBo and it works fine now. Just FYI, in case you want/can upgrade your own package.

    Examples of the bad behaviour:
    # jq –version
    jq–
    # echo ‘{ “Id”:630904198251609372 }’ | jq
    {
    “Id”: 630904198251609300
    }

    And good behaviour:
    # jq –version
    jq-1.7.1
    # echo ‘{ “Id”:630904198251609372 }’ | jq
    {
    “Id”: 630904198251609372
    }

    Thanks!!

  165. D.L.C. Burggraaff

    Eric: I downloaded your 240925 Current Live ISO, dd’ed it to a USB stick and booted that stick in MBR as well as in EFI mode. In both cases I did not see the problems Brian did.
    However, since 240925 there has not been a newer Current Live ISO so something might be the matter.
    Please enlighten me.
    Regards, Dick

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