Your feedback (older)

Posted on by

Me

Do you have any questions with regard to my packages, SlackBuild scripts, other scripts, or my documentation? Or do you have a request to make? Please use this space to write down your ideas and I will try to answer. Other readers are of course also allowed to voice their thoughts about what you write.

Keep your posts on topic please. No flamewars, trolling, or other nastiness allowed. This is not meant to be a replacement for LinuxQuestions.org…

If the blog refuses to accept your post, then perhaps you are affected by a bug in the SQLite plugin. Check if your post contains a string of text which is enclosed by the characters ( ). Is there a pipe symbol or a comma inside those round brackets? Try to remove those and re-post your comment.

Note: this feedback page became too big and is slow to load. Therefore I disabled further comments, renamed the page and opened a new Feedback Page for you.

Or continue to my blog articles if you want.

Eric

1,092 thoughts on “Your feedback (older)”

  3. hi, just noticed the handbreak package in “restricted_slackbuilds” is still version 0.9.5 in 32/64 versions.

    Do I get all the features if I get the regular pkg from slackware.com server?

    best regards

  4. O… I forgot that I had to place the packages in restricted_slackbuilds due to the lame and faac encoders… I will set that right tonight and update the repositories.

    Actually, it is easy for you to build your own package from a SVN trunk checkout. I will stick to the official releases but you can grab the SlackBuild and edit it so that it has these two lines:

    VERSION=${VERSION:-r4883}
    RELREV=${RELREV:-“”}

    Which causes the script to checkout revision 4883 from trunk and build a package for that.

    Eric

  5. Thanks Bob. Unfortunately it’s not going to be that simple, because sourceforge.net only has the official releases. It looks like the only way to grab a nightly for a build is to use a subversion repository call, which is failing badly for me when I try it.

  6. Hm… I reread your post, and understand my confusion now. The current .build file contains no references to SVN, so it defaulted to sourceforge.

  7. Well, after a lengthy process of finding all the dependencies necessary for a compile in unRAID, I have a working executable. I’m not 100% of the best way to make it into a package, though. I ran “make install” in the build directory and that has me going for now, but is there a simple way to make the .build file?

  8. Hi Eric, slackpkg won’t blacklist last multilib update

    Mon Jul 30 20:12:24 UTC 2012
    current/gcc-4.7.1_multilib-x86_64-1fix1_alien.txz: Rebuilt.
    current/gcc-g++-4.7.1_multilib-x86_64-1fix1_alien.txz: Rebuilt.
    current/gcc-gfortran-4.7.1_multilib-x86_64-1fix1_alien.txz: Rebuilt. Fixed the
    64-bit libgfortranbegin.a library which got overwritten by the 32-bit
    version. Thanks to hiptobecubic for reporting this.
    current/gcc-gnat-4.7.1_multilib-x86_64-1fix1_alien.txz: Rebuilt.
    current/gcc-go-4.7.1_multilib-x86_64-1fix1_alien.txz: Rebuilt.
    current/gcc-java-4.7.1_multilib-x86_64-1fix1_alien.txz: Rebuilt.
    current/gcc-objc-4.7.1_multilib-x86_64-1fix1_alien.txz: Rebuilt.

    I had to add:

    “[0-9]+fix1_alien” to /etc/slackpkg/blacklist so they don’t get replace by slackware’s native pkg

    best regards

  9. Hi cesarion76

    I think I may have to rename the packages so that they end on “fix1_1alien” instead of “1fix1_alien” because having to add yet another line to the blacklist file of slackpkg is not an elegant solution. Thanks for mentioning it.

    Cheers, Eric

  10. aiden, I am a bit confused as to what you are trying. A “.build” file? Could you not just use the hints I gave 6 comments back and run the edited handbrake.SlackBuild with changed variable definitions? That will checkout a trunk snapshot and build that for you.

    Eric

  11. Bob, yes I tried that first, of course. But I got an “invalid scheme” error. So instead I went down the road of manually checking it out and compiling it locally based on Handbrake’s wiki instructions. What I would like to do is make a package out of that binary so I can post it on the unRAID forums for other users to download. I appreciate your patience, because I’m clearly a novice at these things.

  13. Hi. Are there any difficulties in building recent qemu-kvm-1.1.1 for slack 13.1 or 0.14 packages just left from old SlackBuild version?
    Thank you

  15. Hello Erik!

    Could you please create a package for virt-manager? Or create a howto how we can install it? I found some howtos on the net for slackware and virt-manager, but I was unable to make it.

    Thank you.
    Krisz

  16. Hi Krisz

    I have been looking at virt-manager, especially for the VNC viewer features, and it is possible that I will create packages and/or write an article about it, when I get some free time.

    Eric

  17. Alien, everyone would like to know how is your perfect Slackware installation, from beginning to end, partitioning, filesystem, packages, tweaks and also a screenshot of your computer, this can be an upcoming article.

  18. Hi willian

    My own computers are not all that interesting to talk about. They are functional but not shiny. I add only a few packages to a full Slackware install, depending on the needs (my laptop for work has some other stuff than the desktop I share with the family).
    Even the background on this laptop is the standard KDE bakground…

    Eric

  19. Hi Eric
    First of all I wish to thank you for the amazing packages you place and all the contribution you do for slackware.
    In your post about LibreOffice, you mentioned somewhere that packages under 13.37 might work for 14.0.
    I wonder if I should try it for lame and others, in the restricted packages, or wine, in the regular ones, and even for packages for older versions, like xawtv for 12.0 (I have multilib installed).
    I am using slackware 14.0.
    cheers!

  20. Hi Duodecimo.

    The golden rule for binary packages is, if they are not available for the Slackware release you are currently using, try a package for an older release. Often that will just work (but not always). If I find a package for Slackware 13.37 which fails on Slackware 14 then I will specifically compile a new package for Slackware 14.

    So, yes, you can use the “older” packages for lame and wine. If you encounter any issues, like library linking errors. let me know so that I can compile a new package!

    With sources it is different. You will find that often, the source for an older version of software will no longer compile on a newer Linux distribution. That is typically caused by updates to the gcc and glibc packages which introduce new library calls and interfaces which were not available at the time the older software was written. For successful compilation you would have to find patches or even use a newer version of the source. At the same time, a binary which was compiled from that old source, on an older Slackware release, will usually still work without issues on the new Slackware.

    Eric

  21. Hello Eric.

    Just to report that qemu-kvm 1.2.0 does not work on 14.0 (missing libgnutls.so.26). I had to recompile it in order to make it to function.

  22. Hi MartinOwaR

    Thanks for mentioning this. I have just finished uploading some fresh qemu-kvm and vde packages, built on Slackware 14.

    Cheers, Eric

  24. Hi Jean-Francois

    The new openjdk packages have been built already, and I will upload them soon. A blog article will have to wait until tonight.

    Cheers, Eric

  25. Hi Eric,

    Thanks for the openjdk upgrade. I installed the new package and it works great!

    Cheers, Jean-Francois

  26. Just saying thanks for all of the work you have done. I use Slackware for my own network and for work related things. And the work you and the others do is appreciated.

  32. Hello!
    Want to write howto page in docs.slackware .com, registerd, log in, try to “add page”, and got
    You are here: start » howtos » misc » sb_live_5.1
    Permission Denied

    Sorry, you don’t have enough rights to continue. Perhaps you forgot to login?

    what we can do?

  33. alienbob – Got one heck of a question for you. I’ve been tinkering, building a new system and in the name of keeping my wife happy, decided to take a stab at getting handbrake-gtk installed. So far, your build script is the only one I’ve found for the gui. Getting handbrake installed went without a hitch using a build script from elsewhere. But running your build script is causing my system to reboot.

    What the heck? Reboot while building software? There’s something really strange going on. Any ideas? Is your build dependent on multi-lib or something that I’m not providing?

    Any insight would be more than welcomed.

    BTW, loved the calibre build. Nice work.

  34. Hi OlPhart

    My handbrake.SlackBuild does not need multilib or anything else. I run that script on a “virgin” Slackware in order to compile a package.
    If your computer reboots during compilation then that might indicate an overheating issue. Software does not make your computer reboot just like that.
    Is there anything in the message log right before the reboot occurs? Can you try to monitor the case- and CPU-core temperatures during the compilation?

    Cheers, Eric

  35. Thanks Eric ,

    Temps are good. Don’t know what is going on but it’s certainly not temps that are doing it. Very abrupt reboot, no warning. Seems to occur at some point during ffmpeg build.

    At the time I was getting the reboots I had been exec’ing the build script rather than sourcing.

    When I try to source the script I get a rather cryptic kernel crash that freezes the system. Appears to be some sort of cpu related memory segmentation issue.

    That said, the thought occured to me that a “virgin” build may be the answer. When I get the chance I’ll try a clean build and see how it goes.

    When I get the chance to try a “clean” build I’ll get back to you and let you know how things go.

    In the meantime, I’m off to shovel 6″ of fresh heavy wet snow.

    Thanks,
    Drew.

  36. I brought this up in #slackbuilds a while back but thought I’d post it here because I wasn’t able to catch you online at the same time I was.

    I wanted to suggest that –enable-libvorbis be added to your restricted ffmpeg slackbuild. While ffmpeg does use libvorbis internally, certain applications which rely on ffmpeg to transcode (Amarok’s transcoding dialog that it gives you when you put music on a portable player being the first one that comes to mind) appear to require –enable-libvorbis to have been passed during compilation in order to transcode to ogg.

    I manually add it myself when I compile ffmpeg and it does not appear to cause any problems, and does not require any additional work for the user since libvorbis is included in a stock Slackware installation.

    Anyway, just my suggestion. Thanks!

  38. Pingback: Steam - Titans Attack - Slackware 14 64bit - no sound

  42. Just one question: You have to replay mysql with mariadb in compat32 stuff, have you?
    Best regards

  44. Just found your modified inet1 files for bridging. Once again AB does the hard work so I don’t have to. Thank you, your a star.

  45. Hi mickski

    Those bridge modifications for rc.inet1 were merged into Slackware 14. Are you running an older version still?

    Eric

  46. Hey Bob
    yeah still on 13.37, running kde 4.10.1 + lo 4 thanks to some slackbuilds I found somewhere :-). It really would be easier to just upgrade.
    Couldn’t agree more about the awful weather.
    Cheers 🙂

  47. Hi Eric, I wonder if you have reached to compile wvdial and wvstreams on your arm port. Because now I’m having problems on my raspberry-pi trying tu use wvdial.
    An error about:
    getcontext open parenthesis &get_stack_return closes parenthesis == 0.

    The error is not in the compile time, is in execution time. I didn’t have any problems compiling from the sources provide by slackbuilds.

    Searching in google point out that this is and old problem,since 2009 and so on, but I have not read anything about some that fixed the problem.

  49. Hi, Is there any easy way to make VLC link to libva installed in the system?

    What do I need to change in the slackbuild?

  50. If you want to link to the system libva, then do not let the vlc.SlackBuild script enter the routine that builds an internal static copy of libva.

    Eric

  52. Hi JKWood

    There was a small omission in my rsync_slackware_patches.sh script, some additional files were not being synced (FILELIST.TXT and CHECKSUMS.md5* in the main Slackware directory are updated whenever there are new patches).
    I uploaded a fixed script and also ran that script on taper, so that the Slackware repositories there should work with slackpkg again.

    Thanks for mentioning,

    Eric

  53. I just wanted to send you a small note to let you know how much I appreciate everything you do for the slackware community, and your continual efforts to make Slackware the most amazing distro available.
    Your work is always impeccable, and I hope to someday be able to give back to the community as much as you have generously given over and over again.

  54. Hi Bob.

    I need help. I want to install Cairo Dock in slackware 12.0 and not locate binary packages. you know where I can find them?

    Thank you.

  55. Hi raymundo

    I do not think you will find many binary 3rd party packages for Slackware 12.0 on the Internet. Most people only release for Slackware 14.0.
    A SlackBuild for ciro-dock was added to http://slackbuilds.org/ for Slackware version 13.1. I have no idea if cairo-dock will work on an old Slackware like 12.0.

    Eric

  57. Hi, Eric.

    Appreciate all your hard work on Slackware and your repositories for that. Not sure if you use SSD disks. But for those who uses SSD disks and running encrypted LVM setup, there is a need to add option –allow-discards for the cryptsetup lusOpen commad in the init file for initrd.

    Would appreciate if you update that.

    Thank you in advance.

  58. Hi dolphin77

    Using “–allow-discards” has a potential negative security impact (see the cryptsetup man page). I guess that if you want to use this parameter because you installed Slackware on an encrypted SSD, you will have to add that parameter yourself to the init script inside the initrd. Slackware’s mkinitrd command won’t overwrite /boot/initrd-tree-init unless you specidy “-c” to (re)create the initrd from scratch.

    Or you can submit a patch to introduce a variable which can be used to specify additional non-default cryptsetup parameters.

    Eric

  59. Eric, thank you for prompt reply.

    You are right, I didn’t think of possible security impact. Probably it is better to leave as is system wide. Anyway on-line trimming (mounting with discard option) is not a good choice. Thus it is better to boot up from external flash disk from time to time and manually mount encrypted partitions and to run fstrim manually.

    Thanks.

  60. Hello, Eric
    both 32-bit and 64-bit packages of kajongg-4.10.3 game are broken – there’s no executables in them.
    greetz, Alek

  61. Hi Alek

    You are right. I checked the build logfile and it appears that Kajongg requires pyhon-twisted (a networking library) which again depends on zope-interface.
    I do not think that zope will ever be integrated into Slackware, so I left a note for Pat to decide what to do about this.
    Basically there are two options:
    1) remove the kajongg package entirely from Slackware’s KDE package set
    2) Force the installation of the kajongg binaries (after all they are only python scripts) and leave it to the Slackware user to install python-twisted and zope-interface from SlackBuilds.org (they are both present there already).

    Eric

  63. Hi Eric,

    I know that you’re concentrating on Samsung Chromebook. But, would your Arm port of Slackware run on BeagleBone Black ?
    –William

  64. Hi William

    Unfortunately I can only test on hardware that I actually own. However, my ARM packages will work on any armv7 hardware. It’s usually just the kernel which you have to create for a new piece of hardware, and that will at least give you a bootable Slackware system. After that, there will usually be tweaks to get X.Org and sound fully functional but that will straighten out itself in time.

    You could try what I initially did for my ChromeBook: find a bootable SD card image for another distro, write that to an empty SD card, and then wipe the other distro’s filesystem. Then copy my mini root filesystem into the empty partition and see if that will boot your BeagleBone…
    A mini rootfs is here: http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alienarm/rootfs/armv7hl/chromebook/ . That rootfs does not contain a kernel or kernel modules, try copying those from a working BeagleBone distro image.

    Eric

  65. hi alienbob!

    any chance to see an update of your handbrake package to v0.9.9?

    alex

  67. Hi dolphin77

    Yeah, I guess that Pat uploaded his KDE packages around the time that I run my mirror script. Usually those two events are far apart.
    I re-ran my mirror script and all is well again.

    Cheers, Eric

  68. Hi Alexandre Jobin

    Handbrake has been upgraded last week. It took some time to create a patch to make the compilation succeed.

    Eric

  69. Hi Erik, just installed calibre in slack 14.0 x86_64 multilib with all dependencies get this error.

    $ calibre
    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File “/usr/bin/calibre”, line 20, in
    sys.exit(main())
    File “/usr/lib64/calibre/calibre/gui2/main.py”, line 415, in main
    app, opts, args, actions = init_qt(args)
    File “/usr/lib64/calibre/calibre/gui2/main.py”, line 85, in init_qt
    from calibre.gui2.ui import Main
    File “/usr/lib64/calibre/calibre/gui2/ui.py”, line 31, in
    from calibre.gui2.widgets import ProgressIndicator
    File “/usr/lib64/calibre/calibre/gui2/widgets.py”, line 21, in
    from calibre.gui2.progress_indicator import ProgressIndicator as _ProgressIndicator
    File “/usr/lib64/calibre/calibre/gui2/progress_indicator/__init__.py”, line 15, in
    pi_error)
    RuntimeError: Failed to load the Progress Indicator plugin: the sip module implements API v9.0 to v9.1 but the progress_indicator module requires API v8.1

    Do I need to recompile in 14.0 or is something missing?

    Thanx

  70. Hi César

    I thik you are not running Slackware 14. It seems that you added some newer software on top which replaced original Slackware packages. Are you running my KDE 4.10 for Slackware 14? Part of that is an upgrade to the Slackware ‘sip’ package which is incompatible with calibre’s Slackware 14 package.

    You have to recompile calibre to fix the sip error.

    Eric

  72. Hi Eric,
    I’ve tried your alienarm miniroot fs on a device with NAND flash. I’ve created an ubifs image for rootfs and booted it. It always stops at the fsck check. ubifs does not support fsck at all, so I have patched rc.S to skip fsck for certain file systems: http://pastebin.com/AEJyy8qE

    Thorsten

  77. Lightening speed on the update Bob.
    Thanks 🙂

    ps
    Don’t know where you find the time, but very much appreciated.

  79. I love slackware because I saw the birth of computer science. I’m sixty years and appreciates your work. It makes me very happy. I am Brazilian. Sorry my english. Congratulations!.
    Frederico

  82. Hi Eric!.
    I recently installed slackware64 (for the first time) on a Dell inspiron 14z, the thing is that it came with a hibryd video system, ati radeon plus intel graphics.
    I proceeded to install it’s driver, but in some way that is described in many tutorials (download the driver, run sh amd-ati-installer.sh –buildpkg, that generated a tgz file). The thing is that it didn’t work, I tried with the beta release and the stable one, but not success, after that I looked forward into the Xorg logs, because the message was ‘no screen founds’ and something related to libgl not found.
    So I started looking for that library and the result was that it was installed on /var/lib64 instead of /var/lib where it was looked for.
    So the the thing is, who I have to report this? To Patrick or to the people of ATI?
    I solved the problem just creating a link with ln -s of the folder fgl between the /var/lib and /var/lib64

  83. Hi p431i7o

    That sounds strange, the ATI driver looking for a file in /usr/lib on a 64-bit system which uses the lib64 convention for its library locations.
    I would guess that this is an issue you should report to ATI.

    Also, if you feel that this issue should be mentioned on http://docs.slackware.com/howtos:hardware:proprietary_graphics_drivers?s%5B%5D=ati#amd_ati_catalyst_driver_installation_and_configuration then you could use that article’s “Talk” page to document your findings and hope that a WIki editor picks it up.

    Cheers, Eric

  84. This isn’t a post to inform, complain, or anything like that.

    It’s fairly simple.

    Thanks, alienbob for all you do in the Slackware community. You are very appreciated by this guy —> Skinnable

    Although the only Slackware installation currently running in my household is on a server, I would have been completely lost without all the posts provided by you on the many pages floating around the internet.

    So, thanks so much for your help – and, I appreciate all you do.

    Skinnable

  87. With respect to your desire to have a tablet with Slackware on it, have you heard of the PengPod. I would love to have tablet with Linux on it but as I am not up to date on the politics of computer freedom, I find myself bouncing back and forth between the pengpod site and some of your articles on a port to the Arm architecture. Just Curious what your thoughts may be on the topic. Thanks.

  88. I’ve followed your work for quite awhile, and as a last resort as not to waste your time I’ve come to you. Somewhere down the line slackpkg has been corrupt on a newly installed Slack 14 system. I’ve reinstalled the system as well as slackpkg to no avail, I’m more then willing to open a SSH tunnel for you if you would be willing to assist in either assisting me to resolve this mattery or I’m more then willing to follow any and all direction.
    Thanks

  89. Hi Austin

    This blog is no replacement for the user forum at linuxquestions.org … problems like the one you describe are hard to diagnose without more than “slackpkg has been corrupt”.
    What I suggest you do, is open a thread on http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/ and describe your problem there. Please try to give more information than what you wrote here, because I can not even start diagnosing it. Error messages? Weird behaviour? How do you experience this corruptness? Did stuff stop working? Etc…

    I do not perform one-on-one support, so the ssh tunnel offer is nice but I am not going to follow up on it. I hope you understand that.

    Cheers, Eric

  90. Hi Charles

    I looked at the PengPod but I think its hardware is a generation too old for the price tag. Nice initiative though and I wish there were more like this. Tablet computer is not going away but the closed hardware / closed driver approach of most vendors _really_ annoys me.

    Cheers, Eric

  91. Hi,

    Eric, condolences for the lose of your dear friend ‘Sox’. I too lost a friend a few weeks back who would be at my side when working on the farm. ‘Mo’ will be remembered and loved for her unconditional love. Best dog!
    -Gary

  92. Thanks for your response. Yes, I just wish there was a tablet that had a basic linux os like slackware so I could practice writing scripts or programs. In some ways this closed hardware fight reminds of the early 90’s but from a different standpoint. The drivers didn’t exist, at least not the interconnectivity of machines. I still have my Macintosh Quadra 605 with 4 mb of ram 80 Mb HD, that I programmed in assembly, and pascal and c but that was a a long while back. I used a modem to connect to the university and did my work on a Unix mainframe. Those were the days. Appreciate greatly your response. Cheers.

  93. Hi Eric.

    Would it be possible to add support for OpenConnect VPN to the networkmanagement package in KDE?

    I successfully built the latest openconnect (5.01) and NetworkManager-openconnect (0.9.8.4) using the slackbuilds from slackbuilds.org (just had to bump version numbers). Unfortunately OpenConnect did not appear in the VPN list in the NetworkManager configuration. It seems the networkmanagent package depends on openconnect to be installed to build support for it. After installing openconnect I manually built the networkmanagent package using the KDE.SlackBuild and sources from the slackware64-current repo (4.10.5). Now it’s working like a charm. I guess this would add OpenConnect as a dependency to the KDE build.

    I need openconnect because my college uses Cisco AnyConnect VPN and it failed to install via the browser. Earlier I got OpenVPN working after installing NetworkManager-openvpn using Robby Workman’s slackbuild so I was led to believe the same would apply to NetworkManager-openconnect. Googling around only confused me but in the end I found the answer in the sources (networkmanagent-0.9.0.8/vpnplugins/openconnect/CMakeLists.txt).

    Cheers, Marius.

  94. Hi Marius

    I think the best course of action for you would be to write to Pat Volkerding (volkerdi at slackware dot com) asking for the inclusion of openconnect and NetworkManager-openconnect into Slackware.

    I am carefully aiming my KDE stuff at slackware-current and therefore not introducing new packages unless absolutely required for KDE. Openconnect is a bit of a grey area.

    The build-time dependency of networkmanagement on the presence of openconnect is unfortunate.

    Eric

  95. Thanks for your reply.

    I followed your advice and asked Pat Volkerdi to include openconnect into Slackware. I also wrote to Robby Workman because he is the maintainer of the openconnect and NetworkManager-openconnect packages at slackbuilds.org and there is no mention of this issue there.

    Cheers, Marius.

  97. Hi Eric,

    I’m a recent Slackware convert. Thanks for setting up this blog and putting up so much valuable information for sharing.

    Recently, I wanted to learn how to compile my own kernel and I followed your post here:
    http://alien.slackbook.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=linux:kernelbuilding&s%5B%5D=kernel&s%5B%5D=build

    unfortunately, I made a very silly mistake when creating the linux symlink. Instead of running:
    #ln -s /usr/src/ linux
    I did this:
    #ln -s /usr/src// linux
    with an additional “/”
    hence, my symlink linux -> /usr/src///
    notice the double “//” at the end.

    Upon boot up, I get a whole series of version magic error:
    version magic ‘3.2.29-custom SMP mod_unload PENTIUMIII ‘ should be ‘3.2.29-custom SMP mod_unload 486 ‘

    upon realising my mistake, I rm the symlink and source dir and start everything from scratch. However, the error persisted even though I select and rebuild all my modules with Pentium III settings.

    Could I have corrupted my entire system with the wrong linux symlink?
    Is there a big difference between
    linux -> /usr/src// and
    linux -> /usr/src///?

    Appreciate if you can provide some insights to this puzzle.

    Thanks in advance for your generousity!

    ck

  98. Hi Eric,

    Sorry that I had to repost this as I realised all my comments within “” were somehow truncated.

    I’m a recent Slackware convert. Thanks for setting up this blog and putting up so much valuable information for sharing.

    Recently, I wanted to learn how to compile my own kernel and I followed your post here:
    http://alien.slackbook.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=linux:kernelbuilding&s=kernel&s=build

    unfortunately, I made a very silly mistake when creating the linux symlink. Instead of running:
    #ln -s /usr/src/linux-3.2.29-custom linux
    I did this:
    #ln -s /usr/src/linux-3.2.29-custom/ linux
    with an additional “/”
    hence, my symlink linux -> /usr/src/linux-3.2.29-custom//
    notice the double “//” at the end.

    Upon boot up, I get a whole series of version magic error:
    version magic ’3.2.29-custom SMP mod_unload PENTIUMIII ‘ should be ’3.2.29-custom SMP mod_unload 486 ‘

    upon realising my mistake, I rm the symlink and source dir and start everything from scratch. However, the error persisted even though I select and rebuild all my modules with Pentium III settings.

    Could I have corrupted my entire system with the wrong linux symlink?
    Is there a big difference between
    linux -> /usr/src/linux-3.2.29-custom/ and
    linux -> /usr/src/linux-3.2.29-custom//?

    Appreciate if you can provide some insights to this puzzle.

    Thanks in advance for your generousity!

    ck

  100. Hi ck

    Apparently, the kernel you boot and the modules you are trying to load are not built from the same sources.
    The error you posted tells you that the modules which are being loaded are compiled for “PENTIUMIII” CPU architecture, while the kernel has been compiled for “486”

    The extra slash in the symlink should not have any effect on this.

    You need to recompile your kernel plus modules and install them all. Perhaps you forgot to install the new kernel which you built for PENTIUMIII ?

    Eric

  101. Hi Eric,

    Thanks for your advice.
    I double checked to confirm that the kernel was build for pentium III under the processor config. Still same error.

    So I rm and cp new source for the build using config seed from kernel-seeds.org.

    It works now. Thanks again!

    cheers
    ck

  102. hi eric,
    just had a question since i use your build of ffmpeg, is that includes the libavcodec also? ( I’m not sure but i would say it was in your ffmpeg, since after upgrade to 12-Jun-2013, i get the error that it is missing.)
    thank you,
    cheers,
    inman.

  103. Hi inman, what program is giving you issues? It’s most likely not FFmpeg but a progranm which uses FFmpeg.
    Check the exact error. It will probably say something like “libavcodec.so.53: not found”.
    My latest FFmpeg package contains “libavcodec.so.54”. Any program which you have compiled against an older version of FFmpeg will stop working because the SONAME of that library has changed. FFmpeg does that a lot.
    This is the reason why I bundle an internal copy of FFmpeg with the VLC package for instance… to avoid this kind of breakage.

    Eric

  104. Hi Eric,
    Thanks for referring me to slack-current and the samba 4 pkg. Upgraded to current, installed samba 4, needed kerberos5 so got the slackbuild from slackbuilds.org and the build failed. The reason is the tcl package has been upgraded to v.8.6 in slack-current
    and some test code in the kerberos5 package uses (Tcl_Interp *) interp->result, which is deprecated in Tcl 8.6
    and only defined when USE_INTERP_RESULT is defined.
    The fix is to breakout the offending file (tcl_kadmin5.c) and add the line:
    #define USE_INTERP_RESULT
    before the #include declaration. I.E.:

    /* -*- mode: c; c-basic-offset: 4; indent-tabs-mode: nil -*- */
    #include “autoconf.h”
    #include
    #include
    #if HAVE_TCL_H
    #define USE_INTERP_RESULT
    #include
    #elif HAVE_TCL_TCL_H
    #include
    #endif
    #define USE_KADM5_API_VERSION 2
    #include
    #include
    #include
    #include
    #include
    #include “tcl_kadm5.h”
    then replace the file in the archives and rerun the slackbuild.
    I can give the commands if anyone else has the problem and is interested.
    Thanks, – dr –

  105. For some reason in my above post, all the include statements had the greater-than “filename” less-than info removed.
    the #define statement had to be before the #include tcl.h statement.

  106. Mr. Hameleers, I wanted to thank you for all the documentation and support you provide for Slackware. I am writing today to see if I might be of some assistance. I discovered something neat while trying to install Slack on Apple products that might help others who encounter similar issues as myself.

    A while back, I was offered a chance to purchase an Apple Mac Pro for a crazy-reasonable price. I have never been a fan of over-priced, last-years hardware; however, this machine had really great specs and a very attractive price. I have quite a few systems in my home, for various purposes; however, I have always wanted a true dual CPU machine. So, I went ahead and bought the Mac. As expected, I wasn’t too enthralled with Mac OS. It had some really nice features; but overall, it seemed lacking in some features that now seem basic. I began to experiment with the Mac and noticed that I couldn’t boot most install disks on it. After working with, and learning, the ups and downs of the “Mac” EFI implementation, I discovered something.

    Out of all the distro’s I tried, the Ubuntu disk was the only one that started up and ran normally. It ran well, even in live mode. I did a little digging and started looking at the version of Grub on the Ubuntu boot disk, and it was unique. I tried many versions of Linux looking for one that gave me choice and also had a simple interface at boot. I found that Slackware was the best choice. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the system to boot with the Slackware64-14 disk. I believe I read somewhere that the Linux Kernel 3.2.29 in that version wasn’t yet compatible with EFI. So I cloned Slack64 current from a mirror, built an ISO and tried to boot. No joy. So then I started playing around with the images. After much trial and error, I was able to extract both images to a folder and make a working installer. I found that the Grub.cfg for the Ubuntu version loaded additional add-ons that the Slackware version did not. Some are realted specifically to EFI and Apple products. So I took the Slack, Grub.cfg and then the Ubuntu, Grub.cfg and made a hybrid. The only difference is that the new one includes the additional add-ons that the Ubuntu installer used. I replaced the version of grub (from the Slack disk) with the one included with Ubuntu and it worked. I was able to install from DVD as well as USB. I have pretty much perfected this method. I know that many would ask why would someone want to run Slackware on a Mac. Well, because it’s awesome, and because you can. Also, older Macs get no love or support from Apple. Ultimately, my main goal was to compare features and the usage of system resources. I also wanted to test what compiling with Dual Quad-Core Xeons with 16GB DDR3 ECC would be like. I have to say, very nice. Both CPU’s support hyper-threading. If I specify 16 threads, I can compile a kernel in about 3 minutes. Anyways, sorry for the long email. I just wanted to get this information to you. If you think this method could be helpful, please let me know and I will make a tut showing what I did so others can do the same. Also, I noticed this method worked with my other UEFI systems as well. Might help some other folks having issues.

    I was looking for an experience with Linux that I was unable to find other places. I want to learn the details of the OS and what makes it tick. Slackware forced me to learn in order to get what I wanted, and ultimately, that is exactly I needed.

    Thanks,

    Austin

  107. Hi Austin

    I do not think that this information you are able to supply will find its way into Slackware 14.1 (the doors are pretty much closed on that) but why don’t you request an account at http://docs.slackware.com/ and write a nice tutorial about what you had to do to Slackware’s grub in order to boot a Mac Pro?

    The Slackware Documentation Project would be the ideal location for hosting such information.

    Cheers, Eric

  110. I believe there is a general problem with vlc 2.1 tearing with x264 videos. Do you still have a 2.0 build somewhere until they fix it?.

  112. Hello. I would like to install latest transmission 2.82 n my current 64 box. Somehow it fails to compile when it comes to qt- part of compiling. If i comment qt-part on sb.script it goes well, but I would like to have qt as well. It fits nice to kde. Thanks.

  118. Hi Ferdi

    Don’t stress yourself 🙂
    Just click from time to time. Google’s adwords program recognizes abnormal click behaviour and discards those click-through actions…

    Eric

  121. Hi cwizardone

    Yeah you’re right. I have removed the redundant package from the repository.
    I also patched gecko-mediaplayer so that it works with the Chromium & Chrome browsers

    Eric

  122. Eric,
    I have used your multilib packages for some time. THANK YOU! However I recently installed MesaLib-9.2.3 on slackware 14.1 (graphics issues) and I am now ‘in between’ the 64 bit mesa library for 9.2.3 and the 32 bit library for the compat32-9.1.7 library. Is there a way that I can get both these libraries in sync?
    Thanks, jwc

  123. Hi john,

    What you can do is compile a 32-bit package for that MesaLib-9.2.3 (should be doable on your multilib computer or else ask someone with a 32-bit Slackware installation) and then use ‘convertpkg-compat32’ on the 32-bit package.

    Eric

  124. Eric, What command do I use to get a 32 bit compile? The plain vanilla configure and make commands give the the 64 bit version. Incidentally the resulting installation has gone into /usr/local/lib instead of /usr/lib. I don’t know if that is a problem or not, but is there a simple way to change it?
    Thanks, John

  125. Hi John

    The best way forward would be to remove the Mesa stuff in /usr/local (you can probably just run “make uninstall” in the source directory) afrter creating a proper new 64-bit mesa package.
    How to do that:
    * grab the mesa source directory from Slackware-current, edit the mesa.SlackBuild and change the VERSION number, and place the new MesaLib source tarball inside that same directory.
    * Then, run ./mesa.SlackBuild in that directory which will compile a mesa-9.2.3 package that will be placed in /tmp/
    * Use the command “upgradepkg –install-new /tmp/mesa-9.2.3-*.t?z” to install your new mesa package (upgrading anything that remains from the original Slackware mesa package)
    * Then proceed building a 32-bit package for mesa. Follow the guidelines here to accomplish that: http://docs.slackware.com/slackware:multilib#compiling_32-bit_programs
    * Finally, convert the 32-bit package to a “compat32” package and upgrade your computer with the result. Something like:

    # convertpkg-compat32 -i /tmp//mesa-9.2.3-i486-1.txz
    # upgradepkg –install-new /tmp//mesa-compat32-9.2.3-x86_64-1compat32.txz

    And do not forget to re-install your binary (Nvidia or Ati) graphics driver every time you upgrade the mesa package!!

    Eric

  126. “grab the mesa source directory from Slackware-current, edit the mesa.SlackBuild and change the VERSION number, and place the new MesaLib source tarball inside that same directory.
    * Then, run ./mesa.SlackBuild in that directory which will compile a mesa-9.2.3 package that will be placed in /tmp/”

    The mesa package that I get when I do that has all the lib files in /usr/local/lib and the header files in /usr/local/include. I don’t know how to change the slackBuild file so the files go to the right place.

  127. Do you know if anyone has written a more recent slackbuild script for rng-tools? The only one I find is from Slackware 12

  128. Hi q5sys

    This is a question about the rng-tools entry on slackbuilds.org , right? You should really be asking that on the slackbuilds-users mailing list or visit the #slackbuilds IRC channel on Freenode to get an answer.
    Nobody seemed to care about maintaining the SlackBuild script, why don’t you volunteer?

    Eric

  129. Hi Eric,
    I was introduced to Slackware and Linux on general when I built my unRAID server, and I firstly want to say a huge thank you for all your packages and scripts I’ve used the last couple of years!!

    I am a complete noob however when it comes to writing a slackbuild… I usually rely on botching together someone’s old script and thats what I ahve done for Makemkv(con).. until now! Theres a new dependency (libavcodec) required from ffmpeg, and I’m at a complete loss how to get that to compile for Slackware 13.1 (unRAID) to get the latest MakeMKV to compile with my (botched) slackbuild script. Any pointers would be massively appreciated!!

    Alex

  130. Alex, libavcodec is part of ffmpeg. Have you tried compiling my ffmpeg.SlackBuild on your Slackware 13.1 system?

    Btw – any reason why you are sticking with a relatively old Slackware version? Chances get bigger with every release that older releases no longer support compilation of newer software.

    When the ffmpeg package is installed, other software should be able to pick up libavcodec.

    Eric

    1. Thanks for your reply Eric!

      unRAID is built on Slackware 13.1 ( or possibly 13.37) so unfortunately I’m stuck with it!

      I tried your ffmpeg.Slackbuild tonight and it failed unfortunately :/. My laptop is busy running chkdsk so can’t tell you exactly what it failed on other than I remember it failed in line 1557!

      I’ll check what the actual failure was in the morning! If you ever fancy making a MakeMKV package in the meantime, I’d never complain! Haha. In all honesty tho I wouldn’t mind getting my head around it all a bit better!

      Alex

  132. Oops!
    Looks like after the crash on 5 november, a lock file was not removed and therefore the mirror process was stuck. I have deleted the lockfile and manually started the mirror script. It should be OK in a short while.
    Thanks for reporting this.

    Eric

  133. Hi Eric,
    Sorry for the late reply! Still having issues and any help would be greatly appreciated!

    I’ve installed your latest FFmpeg pkg ( 13.37 version) and I’m running the slackbuild script from here:http://slackbuilds.org/repository/13.37/multimedia/makemkv/ (Version Number changed).

    I keep getting the error “checking LIBAVCODEC_VERSION_MAJOR… failed
    configure: error: in /tmp/SBo/makemkv-oss-1.8.7′:
    configure: error: LIBAVCODEC_VERSION_MAJOR is not known at compile time in libavcodec.h
    See config.log’ for more details”

    There is a libavcodec.pc file in /usr/lib/pkgconfig so unsure what the problem is?! For info the build instructions for MakeMKV is here: http://www.makemkv.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=224

  134. “convertpkg-compat32” converts incorrectly “lesstif-0.95.2-i486-1.txz” package. “installpkg” throws message:
    “install/doinst.sh: line 23: syntax error: unexpected end of file”.
    Keyword “fi” is missing (line 5) in doinst.sh script…

  135. Hi Rysio

    Yes I am aware of that, it has always been there since the first multilib packages.
    But I did not care to write a shell script parser just for the converting… and the error is harmless.

    Eric

  136. Hi Eric. It has been a long time since I visit your site. I feel I should spend more time here and with you. How do you join the blog? I can’t find a register button anywhere. I’m getting old (62 tomorrow).

    Thank you.

  137. Hi moonstroller.

    There is no need to register to this site, posting comments is always allowed.
    If you want to be kept informed of new posts you can use a RSS feed reader (thunderbird will do the job) and subscribe to the RSS feeds for my posts and/or comments (the links are at the bottom of every page).
    Happy birthday!

    Cheers, Eric

  138. Hello, Eric!

    First off, THANK YOU for all of your hard work. I’ve been using Slackware Linux for over 12 years now, and what you’ve done for Slack makes the overall Slackware experience that much quicker, easier, and enjoyable.

    THANK YOU.

    So, I’m writing to let you know that a problem seems to exist in your new LibreOffice 4.1 packages when attempting to start/play a slide show in Impress (Pressing F5 to start the show to present the slides in full screen mode). The screen freezes and will not present the slides. Pressing ESC will get you out of the freeze, but you still cannot present.

    Happy Holidays.

  140. Hi Alien Bob I just wanted to take some time out to say a big thank you to you I have used slackware now since about 1998/9 and built lots of my own pkgs over the years, then children arrived and my time diminished your packages and fixes have saved me so many hours of work time I have used well. I just found your cure for dropbox now I can make real use of it from my linux systems. I run your firewall to jolly nice and secure BT my isp said we cant see any thing you have connected to our system thats good I said Alien Bobs firewall’s working a treat gob smacked they were lol. any way have a great 2014 when the kids are a bit bigger I will be back in the circles time I gave back to slackware. Sam

  143. I am not interested in those Infinality font patches since they are mostly targeting MS WIndows font usage. If you use the default Slackware open source fonts you should not have a need for these patches IMHO.

    Eric

  144. Actually you can target Linux too or even Mac OS X fonts (bash /etc/fonts/infinality/infctl.sh setstyle). Anyway keep up the good work.

  145. Hi,

    Are you using Slackware in virtualised environment (most precisely in Citrix XenServer)?
    I’m trying to install XenServer Tools in Slackware 14.1, but unfortunately Slackware is not officially supported.
    If you have any experiences with this, or if you know anybody running Slackware on XenServer, please let me know. (I already tried to ask for help on linuxquestions.org, but I got no response.)

    Thanks,
    kukukk

  147. Hi, and thanks for the quick reply.

    I was almost sure that when you are creating/testing packages for different Slackware versions, you use them in a virtualised environment, and I hoped that it’s XenServer.

    I did not added any other details because I don’t have :}. Converting and installing the Red Hat package went without any error message, but after restarting the guest XenServer still complained about missing XenServer Tools. Probably it’s because the different internal structures of the systems (something is not started, is not the right folder, etc). I don’t know, unfortunately I’m not a Linux expert. I hoped that somebody already went trough this and knows the steps required for installing XenServer Tools.

    Anyway, Slackware is working fine as guest in Citrix XenServer, I just don’t have some information in the Management Console, like memory and cpu usage.

  148. Alternatively, try installing that RPM directly in Slackware, not converting it to a Slackware package first. That way, the RPM pre- and post-install scripts will be executed.

    Use the command “rpm –nodeps” to avoid getting a ton of missing dependency errors.

    Eric

  149. Hi Eric,

    I hope you can help me to find out what is wrong with my installation of pipelight.

    I have followed the instructions from http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/pipelight-using-silverlight-in-linux-browsers/.

    when I run Pipelight diagnostic page, I get:

    Pipelight diagnostic:
    Please select the Plugin you want to test:

    User agent (Javascript)
    Checking for Windows user agent …okay
    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0
    Please note: not every user agent works on every site, try multiple ones if something doesn’t work!

    Silverlight (as seen by a website)
    Checking for Silverlight …failed

    Pipelight
    Checking for Pipelight …okay

    Configuration of Pipelight
    Checking if config exists …okay
    /usr/share/pipelight/pipelight-silverlight5.1
    Checking if pluginLoaderPath is set and exists …okay
    /usr/share/pipelight/pluginloader.exe
    Checking if winePath is set and exists …okay
    /usr/libexec/wine-pipelight/bin/wine
    Checking if wine exists …okay
    /usr/libexec/wine-pipelight/bin/wine
    Checking if winePrefix is set and exists …okay
    /home/duo/.wine-pipelight/
    Checking if dllPath/dllname is set and exists …failed
    You need to define either a valid dllPath/dllName or regKey
    Unable to verify if the DLL exists, please check this manually!
    (dllPath = c:\Program Files\Silverlight\5.1.20913.0\)
    (dllName = npctrl.dll)
    Checking if dependencyInstaller is set and exists …okay
    /usr/share/pipelight/install-dependency
    Checking if dependencies are defined …okay

    Distribution
    Loading file /etc/issue …okay

    Welcome to \s \r (\l)

    Content of file: /usr/share/pipelight/pipelight-silverlight5.1
    Loading file /usr/share/pipelight/pipelight-silverlight5.1 …okay
    #
    # Enables a diagnostic mode which might be helpful to find an
    # error in the configuration or installation.
    # To get the error messages go to: http://fds-team.de/pipelight
    #
    # Information for advanced users: The diagnostic page embeds the plugin
    # of type “application/x-pipelight-error” to trigger the output of some
    # debug information. The plugin cannot be triggered if everything is
    # working, so this only affects users with a broken installation.
    # The debug output will include paths on the local filesystem and the
    # linux distribution used. If you don’t want to leak this information
    # accidentially in case of a broken installation please either uninstall
    # Pipelight or disable the diagnosticMode. [default: false]
    #
    diagnosticMode = true

    #
    # Path to the wine directory or the wine executable. When you
    # specify a directory it should contain /bin/wine.
    #
    winePath = /usr/libexec/wine-pipelight

    #
    # Path to the wine prefix containing Silverlight
    #
    winePrefix = $HOME/.wine-pipelight/

    #
    # The wine architecture for the wine prefix containing Silverlight
    #
    wineArch = win32

    #
    # DLLs to overwrite in Wine
    # (prevents Wine from asking for Gecko, Mono or winegstreamer)
    #
    wineDLLOverrides = mscoree,mshtml,winegstreamer,winemenubuilder.exe=

    #
    # Path to the plugin loader executable
    # (Should be set correctly by the make script)
    #
    pluginLoaderPath = /usr/share/pipelight/pluginloader.exe

    #
    # Path to the runtime DLLs (libgcc_s_sjlj-1.dll, libspp-0.dll,
    # libstdc++-6.dll). Only necessary when these DLLs are not in the same
    # directory as the pluginloader executable.
    #
    gccRuntimeDlls =

    #
    # Path and name to the Silverlight directory
    # You should prefer using regKey to make it easier to switch between
    # different versions.
    #
    dllPath = c:\Program Files\Silverlight\5.1.20913.0\
    dllName = npctrl.dll

    #
    # Name of the registry key at HKCU\Software\MozillaPlugins\ or
    # HKLM\Software\MozillaPlugins\ where to search for the plugin path.
    #
    # You should use this option instead of dllPath/dllName in most cases
    # since you do not need to alter dllPath on a program update.
    #
    # regKey = @Microsoft.com/NpCtrl,version=1.0

    #
    # fakeVersion allows to fake the version string of Silverlight
    # Allows to get around some version checks done by some websites
    # when using an old version of Silverlight.
    #
    # fakeVersion = 5.1.20913.0

    #
    # overwriteArg allows to overwrite/add initialization arguments
    # passed by websites to Silverlight applications. You can
    # use this option as often as you want to overwrite multiple
    # parameters. The GPU acceleration state of Silverlight can be controlled
    # by setting:
    #
    # enableGPUAcceleration=false # disable GPU acceleration
    # comment out # let the application decide (default)
    # enableGPUAcceleration=true # force GPU acceleration
    #
    # You may need to overwrite the minimum runtime version if
    # you use an old Silverlight version as some websites set
    # an artificial limit for the version number although it
    # would work with older versions.
    #
    # overwriteArg = minRuntimeVersion=5.0.61118.0
    # overwriteArg = enableGPUAcceleration=false
    # overwriteArg = enableGPUAcceleration=true
    #

    #
    # windowlessmode refers to a term of the Netscape Plugin API and
    # defines a different mode of drawing and handling events.
    # On some desktop enviroments you may have problems using the
    # keyboard in windowless mode, on the other hand the drawing is
    # more efficient when this mode is enabled. Just choose what works
    # best for you. [default: false]
    #
    windowlessMode = false

    #
    # embed defines whether the Silverlight plugin should be shown
    # inside the browser (true) or an external window (false).
    # [default: true]
    #
    embed = true

    #
    # Path to the dependency installer script provided by the compholio
    # package. (optional)
    #
    dependencyInstaller = /usr/share/pipelight/install-dependency

    #
    # Dependencies which should be installed for this plugin via the
    # dependencyInstaller, can be used multiple times. (optional)
    #
    # Useful values for Silverlight are:
    #
    # -> Silverlight versions (you need to adjust dllPath):
    # wine-silverlight5.1-installer
    # wine-silverlight5.0-installer
    # wine-silverlight4-installer
    #
    # -> optional depependencies (required by some streaming sites)
    # wine-mpg2splt-installer
    #
    dependency = wine-silverlight5.1-installer
    dependency = wine-mpg2splt-installer
    dependency = wine-wininet-installer

    #
    # Doesn’t show any dialogs which require manual confirmation during
    # the installation process, like EULA or DRM dialogs.
    # [default: true]
    #
    quietInstallation = true

    #
    # In order to support browsers without NPAPI timer support
    # (like Midori) we’ve implemented a fallback to
    # NPN_PluginThreadAsyncCall. In the default configuration
    # a timer based approach is preferred over async calls and the
    # plugin decides by itself which method to use depending on the
    # browser capabilities. Setting the following option to true
    # forces the plugin to use async calls. This might be mainly
    # useful for testing the difference between both event handling
    # approaches. [default: false]
    #
    # eventAsyncCall = true

    #
    # The opera browser claims to provide timer functions, but they
    # don’t seem to work properly. When the opera detection is
    # enabled Pipelight will switch to eventAsyncCall automatically
    # based on the user agent string. [default: true]
    #
    operaDetection = true

    #
    # Minimal JavaScript user agent switcher. If your page doesn’t check
    # the user agent before loading a Silverlight instance, you can use
    # this trick to overwrite the useragent or execute any other Java-
    # Script you want. You can use this command multiple times.
    # Uncomment the following 4 lines for FF15 spoofing.
    #
    # executejavascript = var __originalNavigator = navigator;
    # executejavascript = navigator = new Object();
    # executejavascript = navigator.__proto__ = __originalNavigator;
    # executejavascript = navigator.__defineGetter__(‘userAgent’, function () { return ‘Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:15.0) Gecko/20120427 Firefox/15.0a1’; });

    #
    # We are currently implementing hardware acceleration support, which
    # can cause problems on some systems as especially specific open source
    # drivers render only garbage when hardware acceleration is enabled.
    # To prevent breaking any working solutions, we are currently
    # implementing a whitelist system, which will enable hardware
    # acceleration by default if the specified shell scripts returns 0.
    # Otherwise we will disable it. You can still use
    #
    # overwriteArg = enableGPUAcceleration=false/true
    #
    # to overwrite the check results. If you really want to skip this test
    # you can use: silverlightGraphicDriverCheck = /bin/true
    #
    silverlightGraphicDriverCheck = /usr/share/pipelight/hw-accel-default

    #————————- EXPERIMENTAL ————————-
    # Watch out: The following section contains highly experimental
    # stuff! These functions are likely not working properly yet and
    # might be removed at any time.

    #
    # Silverlight uses a lot of timer stuff do to the window redrawing
    # . In order to speed this up a bit the following switch enables
    # some API hooks to do most of timer stuff in user mode (without
    # having to call wine-server each time). It is still unclear
    # if this option has any significant effect on the performance.
    # [default: false]
    #
    # experimental-userModeTimer = true

    #
    # In order to make it possible to let a window stay opened in fullscreen, even
    # if the user clicks somewhere else it is necessary to install a window class
    # hook. With some plugins this could lead to other problems! [default: false]
    experimental-windowClassHook = true

    #
    # A sandbox is a method to isolate an untrusted program from the rest of
    # the system to prevent damage in case of a virus, program errors or
    # similar issues. We’ve been developing the ability to use a (self-created)
    # sandbox, but this feature still has to be considered experimental.
    # The feature will only be used when the sandbox path exists.
    #
    sandboxPath = /usr/share/pipelight/sandbox

    On the terminal window running firefox I get:
    [PIPELIGHT:LIN:unknown] attached to process.
    [PIPELIGHT:LIN:unknown] checking environment variable PIPELIGHT_SILVERLIGHT5_1_CONFIG.
    [PIPELIGHT:LIN:unknown] searching for config file pipelight-silverlight5.1.
    [PIPELIGHT:LIN:unknown] trying to load config file from ‘/home/duo/.config/pipelight-silverlight5.1’.
    [PIPELIGHT:LIN:unknown] trying to load config file from ‘/etc/pipelight-silverlight5.1’.
    [PIPELIGHT:LIN:unknown] trying to load config file from ‘/usr/share/pipelight/pipelight-silverlight5.1’.
    [PIPELIGHT:LIN:silverlight5.1] GPU driver check – Your driver is supported, hardware acceleration enabled.
    [PIPELIGHT:LIN:silverlight5.1] using wine prefix directory /home/duo/.wine-pipelight/.
    [PIPELIGHT:LIN:silverlight5.1] checking plugin installation – this might take some time.
    [PIPELIGHT:LIN:silverlight5.1] basicplugin.c:373:checkPluginInstallation(): error in execvp command – probably dependencyInstaller/sandbox not found or missing execute permission.
    [PIPELIGHT:LIN:silverlight5.1] basicplugin.c:383:checkPluginInstallation(): Plugin installer did not run correctly (exitcode = 1).
    [PIPELIGHT:LIN:silverlight5.1] basicplugin.c:142:attach(): plugin not correctly installed – aborting

    Same problem happens when I change silverlight plugin version.

    Cheers, Duodecimo.

  150. Hi Eric,

    Oops, I forgot to mention on the previous message that I use Slackware 14.0 64 bits multilib.

    Cheers, Duodecimo.

  151. Hi Duodecimo

    Did you execute the command (under your own user account):

    pipelight-plugin –enable silverlight

    Also, you should check the enabled plugins by running:

    pipelight-plugin –list-enabled

    Do you see Silverlight mentioned there?

    The very first time that the pipelight plugin loads you should see a Wine dialog mentioning that SilverLight is being downloaded and installed.

    Eric

  152. Hi Eric,

    yes, the pipelight-plugin commands runs ok, and I checked on my user home that .mozilla/plugin gets the correct link to silverlight library.
    As with wine dialog mentionning that silverlight is being downloaded, well, I remember it showing up the first time I installed pipelight. As I had got problems, I did try to reinstall all over again, as I foun out I had to versions of the Alsa package, the converted one that I installed following your pipelight page instructions, and a previous one (an alien version, maybe from slackpkg+ with multilib settings). In fact I thought about cleaning out stuff in order to have wine downloading silverlight again to see if it fixes my problem, but I didnt know what I should erase.

    thanks, Duodecimo.

  153. Hi Eric,

    Are you aware that your avidemux 2.6.x package creates a bin named ‘avidemux3’ but the avidemux.desktop entry still calls ‘avidemux2’? It’s not a big thing, but just in case you didn’t realized that.

    And about your RSS. It’s great and I’ve subribed and use lots of your packages. Are you thoght on adding the link to the specific package in each RSS entry instead of linking to the whole repository? Just and idea.

    Anyway, thanks for your work and happy New Year!

  154. Hi, yes I am aware of that bug in avidemux which I did not spot at first (someone else pointed it out in another comment). I have a fixed SlackBuild but that won’t be used until there is a new version of avidemux probably.

    I’ll give your RSS request some consideration.

    Eric

  155. Eric,
    I have been spending the post couple of days recovering from something (that I probably did!) that erased the partition table from sda on my desktop machine. (At least it didn’t get my data drive. Anyway, when reloading calibre & all of its deps, I noticed that you have a “python-imaging” package & Slackware-current already has “pil”. Both seem to package the same digital libraries. I did not install your package, just to see what would happen. Calibre starts & performs simple tasks properly. Will I miss out on something more obscure by not having your package? If I do install your package, should I upgrade Slackwares package or put them in side by side?
    Regards,
    Bill

  157. Hi Eric,
    i have installed the current slacky 14.1 and build a handbrake package with your script.
    With the “Video Encoder” = x264 i get the error message “Segmentation fault”. So other encoder goes.
    I read something about “Miscompilation with gcc 4.8”
    Have you an idea for patch/workaround ?
    Thanks, Björn

  158. What if you use my package for handbrake instead of compiling it yourself? I can create H.264 videos on Slackware64-current without any segfault.

    And what is “the current slacky”? The name of the distro is Slackware.

    Eric

  159. I compiling it self with your build files and get the error.
    Now i found your package and have no problems with H.264. Thanks, Björn

  160. Are you going to upload the 64 bit version of fbreader for -current? The folder is empty on both slackware.com & taper.alienbase.nl.
    Regards,
    Bill

  162. Hi,

    Just a small update regarding to XenServer Tools on Slackware. Finally I managed to get it working. I had to make the following changes:
    – recompile the kernel with Xen guest support enabled in Linux guest support (it was a bit tricky to add it to lilo, because my device changed from /dev/sda to /dev/xvda)
    – modify the distribution detection script in XenServer Tools to support detecting Slackware
    – modify the guest parameters updater script, because “ifconfig” seems to have different output format on Slackware.

    A future request for Slackware: Xen guest support enabled by default :}

    Best regards,
    kukukk

  163. Hi Eric,
    i am a brazilian user of slackware since longe time ago.
    This days i try to figure out a way to start a diskless Slackware 14.1 client from a PXE + DHCP + NFS, without success. I can do this using a specific old 2.6 kernel, but in Slackware 14.1, i can’t figure out a way.

    My PXE config sounds like:
    DEFAULT pxelinux.cfg/vmlinuz-2.6 ip=dhcp root=/dev/nfs nfsroot=192.168.0.80:/tftpboot/nova-distro vga=791 init=/etc/rc.d/rc.S quiet rw

    So if i change the old specific kernel (vmlinuz-2.6) to the new one Slackware 14.1 kernel (vmlinuz-huge-3.10.17) on PXE server, clients cant start due to a kernel panic error.

    In Slackware 14.1 i will need a initrd?

    Using the old “vmlinuz-2.6” i dont need any extra ramdisk, just the kernel.

    Can you help me to solve this?

    Thanks to you attention and sorry to my bad english.

  165. Hi JKWood

    Yes, a lock file was left (perhaps after a crashed mirror action) and it prevented further mirror actions.
    I deleted the lockfile and the mirrors are syncing again.
    Thanks for spotting and reporting!

    Eric

  166. Hello Eric,

    is there a reason why your KDE packages don’t come with Kolab libraries anymore? I’ve tried and created build-scripts based on SlackBuilds-templates and your last build-scripts from 4.8 (or was it 4.9?) and got Kolab support for Kontact after compiling your KDE 4.12.3 packages. Additional dependencies are xerces-c (available on slackbuilds.org) and xsd (just created my own slackbuilds-script).
    If you are interested in adding Kolab support again I could help if needed, otherwise I would simply submit my scripts to SlackBuilds. Personally I think it would be better if KDE would come with all needed dependencies, though.

    Mike

  167. Hi Mike

    I wrote about how to re-add Kolab support here:
    http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/kde-4-9-5-was-released-next-should-be-4-10/ which was well before Slackware adopted KDE 4.10. At that time, I discussed it with Patrick and we decided not to add the Kolab support packages to the distro.

    You can still find the sources for libkolab and libkolabxml here: http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/source/4.10.5/deps/ . A package for xerces-c is in my mail repository: http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/xerces-c/

    Unless new dependencies have been added in the meantime, these three packages should allow you to add Kolab support by recompiling kdepim-runtime.

    Eric

  168. Hello! In multilib, I noticed that two packages have to be updated! openssl-1.0.1f and openssl-solibs-1.0.1f are vulnerables to Heartbleed. Many thanks for you excellent job.
    Best regards,raffaele

  171. I know it ain’t your fault but there is a error in LibreImpress that prevents the slides from showing unless hardware acceleration is turned off. It was quite alarming and I installed slackware on another machine and found the same problem with the latest update.

    Appreciate all your work.

    I am going to build a new machine and upgrade to the 64 bit Slackware. I suppose I should go with 14.1?

  172. Ah, I live in Beijing so Chinese language support is useful for me. I got SCIM running about halfway- not very acceptable.

    I fiddled with ibus for awhile some time back and finally couldnt make it perk. fcitx i got going for awhile but it was very unstable.

    Any further thoughts? I am not going to try another Linux version. I am committed to being a slacker.

  175. scim doesnt seem to work with some software like firefox. havent tried it with chromium though.

  176. When I used scim it only seemed to be able to input chinese pinyin for qt4 applications. I then tried fcitx but it wasnt much better because it was erratic. I finally did a clean install to start over.

    I am going to tear into the chinese thing full bore when I get time. Will probably go to Slackware 64 bit first though because I am wanting to build a i7 machine in a small portable itx size box for a project I am working on.

    Any advice on Chinese input would be appreciated.

  177. I installed the new KDE update, but now find that my audio does not work. Slackware finds the card and tests are ok but audio applications dont find the audio device.

  178. Hi Eric. First of all, thanks for your *great* jobs for Slackware.
    I’ running –current (64bit) with your multilib packages and last kde-4.13.0. On kde i’ve found that “baloo” ( the new semantic-indexing tool) eats lots of resources and eats lot of disk space ( for example, before i killed it, 7,9G of my homedir were filled by its stuff).
    Removepkg-ed it, no chance to have dolpin so reinstallet baloo package but “chmod -x” its binaries.
    Is there a chance to have dolpin not linked to baloo libraries?

    Ah: my machine has a Amd-8core, 32G of ram and 5 hardisk ( my /home is on a raid-1 two 1G disks).

    Thankyou again for your works…

    HP

  179. Hi Hubert,

    Baloo libraries will remain linked to KDE binaries, but you can disable the indexing preocess in two ways: by removing the binaries “baloo_file_extractor” and “baloo_file_cleaner”.
    OR, add your homedirectory to the list of excluded directories for indexing. If Baloo finds that you have excluded your $HOME, then it will disable itself. In “System Settings -> Desktop Search” add your home to the blacklist.

    If you do not want the index-based search menu in dolphin, you can do the following:
    $ cp /usr/share/autostart/baloo_file.desktop ~/.kde4/share/autostart/
    $ echo “Hidden=True” >> ~/.kde4/share/autostart/baloo_file.desktop

    There was a heated discussion on the KDE packagers mailing list about the bright idea of the developer, *not* to add a “disable indexing” button in the System Settings. I guess such a button will appear at some point in the future.

    Eric

  180. Hi Regnad

    The updates to KDE should not have an influence on your audio… is there something else you have changed or updated recently?

    Eric

  181. Regnad, I would have to check using SCIM with pinyin input methods, to see how it affects Firefox. It used to work in the past, I have not paid attention to it recently.

    Eric

  182. TY alienbob…
    Putting $HOME in the blacklist didn’t have effects on my machine, i dont’ know why.
    And there is a bug ( as the developer writes in his blog) regarding Maildir directories ( i’ve such a dir, of course …) that can bring to a loop in indexing.
    Anyway, “chmod -x” the binaries is good for me and i hope developers will put ASAP that damn button to stop their crappy software and that they will stop to think like Gnome’s developers do.

    Have a funny WE
    😉

    HP

  183. Hi Huber

    I very much agree with your observation “stop to think like Gnome’s developers do”. The lack of the “disable indexing” button because the developer wanted to decide for the user that indexing is a “good thing” and therefore must be enabled always, strikes me as a worrisome example of how KDE software should _not_ work.
    While the GNOME paradigm is “dumb down the interface, let the developer / UI designer make the decisions for the user” I have always though that the KDE philosophy was “if it can be tweaked, show a tweak button in the UI and leave the choice to the user”.

    Eric

  185. Hi Mickski56,

    Well, the patch I used is https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kde-workspace/repository/revisions/e1724800ecf3c6a7035dfa7bcaa50b2a8f48688f/diff but it is the same issue that it fixes (the KDE patch is better than the Gentoo patch).

    I was already compiling a new kde-worlspace package after this patch was announced on the kde-packagers mailing list and I am taking the opportunity to fulfill a request from Willy Sudiarto Raharjo to move the KDE sessions files to /usr/share/xsessions/ where XFCE installs its own session definition file already, so that other login managers can see these desktop session choices too.

    Thanks for being alert.

    Eric

  186. hi – i am a longtime slack user. i was running 14.0 and using the ftdi_sio to talk to a printer and it was working fine, then i upgraded to 14.1 and the ftdi_sio now goes into an infinite connect/disconnect loop on the device. did 14.1 add something that is competing with ftdi_sio for the device? i can’t figure it out. the ftdi_sio source code hasn’t changed…

  188. hello again, i have had this posted in LQ for several days now, but nobody has replied to it. i am thinking there is some configuration change in 14.1 that is now fighting for the ttyUSB0 connection, but i don’t know where to look to find it. do you see anything in these logs that might identify the culprit? This device connects fine to putty, so the device is good, but i need to use my minicom!

    http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-software-2/ftdi_sio-connects-and-disconnects-forever-4175504613/

  189. Hi eric

    If this is a Slackware-specific issue, then you should request that the moderators move your post to the Slackware forum (http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/) where there will be more knowledgeable people than in the generic forums.

    The first line I read in your post, “I have slack 14.1, kernel 3.14.3” means that you are not running a stock Slackware 14.1 (which contains kernel 3.10.17 instead).

    Eric

  190. Hi Eric,
    I just install your new chromium package and I have issues with the keyboard.
    More details: I’m using a QWERTY keyboard with an IT layout and it’s impossible to type every accented letter:
    à is ‘
    è is [
    ì is =
    ò is ;
    ù is nothing.
    It’s a chromium issue because everywhere in the system typing is good and I tested this on two 64bit slackware one with kernel 3.10.17 and one with 3.14.1.
    With the previous version of chromium all was good.
    What would suggest to do?

  194. Upgraded just know: no problems at all with “italian” letters ( or keyboard).
    I’m on 64–current with the entire Aliens’ stuff (multilib, kde, eccecc).
    I have:

    export LOCALE=it_IT.UTF-8
    export LANG=it_IT.UTF-8

    in /etc/profile.d/lang.sh

    italian keyboard in Kde and:

    Option “XkbLayout” “it”

    in the InputDevice section of my /etc/X11/xorg.conf

    HP

  197. I guess standard ones. Anyway, after rebooting everything works fine. Thanks for your suggestion =)
    Sadly there’s another problem: after updating, chromium doesn’t see java.
    Worst release ever =(

    P.S. In firefox everything works fine.

  198. Hi Eric
    Tried updating weekly version of calibre, but according to slackpkg+ there are no updates. Checked around various mirror sites and it seems that only the master has been updated.

  199. Hi Alberto

    Starting with chrome and chromium 35, Google has removed support for NPAPI plugins (Netscape Plugin API i.e. the mozilla browser compatible plugins). This means that things like the icedtea-web Java plugin stopped being supported, but also the Pipelight plugin and several others that do not “talk” Google’s own PPAPI (Pepper Plugin API).
    It sucks.

    Eric

  200. Hi Phil

    If everybody mirrors from my “taper” mirror then nobody will have had new packages. It looks like the mirror cron job had become stuck.
    It’s been repaired now.

    Eric

  201. Hi Eric,
    thanks for your reply.
    I don’t use openJDK, but Oracle’s official jdk (repackaged with the slackbuild included in Slackware).
    Does it make any difference?

  203. Hi Alberto

    The closed-source Oracle Java browser plugin uses the same NPAPI protocol as the opensource icedtea-web browser plugin. Both are incompatible with Chrome and Chromium 35 and higher.

    Eric

  206. I tried with the last one (version 5.4.1.0 – according to what the SBo slackbuild extracted) and it is not visible among plugins =(
    If you succeed in making it work, let me know =)
    Thanks again!

  207. Hi Alberto

    The google-talkplugin 5.4.1.0 installs both the NPAPI and the PPAPI libraries. It takes a small change to make the PPAPI library available in chromium if you are using the SBo script to create a package.
    Below is the patch I applied to the google-talkplugin.SlackBuild :

    Eric

    # —–8< ---------------------------------- 26c26 < VERSION=${VERSION:-4.9.1.0} --- > VERSION=${VERSION:-5.4.1.0}
    37a38
    >
    42a44
    > # Just in case:
    65,66c67,75
    < chmod 0755 $PKG # Put this back. < rm -rf etc/ # The cron job is debian/ubuntu only. --- > # Put this back.
    > chmod 0755 $PKG
    >
    > # change /usr/lib/chromium-browser to /usr/lib/chromium
    > mv ${PKG}/usr/lib/chromium-browser ${PKG}/usr/lib/chromium
    >
    > # Remove cron update script:
    > rm -rf ${PKG}/opt/google/talkplugin/cron
    > rm -rf ${PKG}/etc
    # —–8< ----------------------------------

  209. Hi Eric,

    since Chromium 35 doesn’t support NPAPI plugins any more, could you make available again your last Chromium 34 package?

    Thanks a lot!!

  210. I get an error when I try ann open a book on the command line with fbreader 0.99.4.

    Gentoo had the following patch that works for me:

    — fbreader-0.99.4-pristine/zlibrary/ui/src/qt4/filesystem/ZLQtFSManager.cpp
    +++ fbreader-0.99.4/zlibrary/ui/src/qt4/filesystem/ZLQtFSManager.cpp
    @@ -49,3 +49,4 @@
    path = replacement + path.substr(1);
    – }
    + }
    + ZLUnixFSManager::normalizeRealPath(path);

  211. Hi Brad

    Ah, weird! I see the same crash, and indeed only happens when you try to open a book on the commandline.
    I am going to look at that patch, thanks.

    Eric

  213. Hi Eric! I’d like to thank you for your build of Chromium 35. It feels much lighter and faster than the previous versions.

    However, there is a problem and I’d like to troubleshoot it in order to know whether the issue lies in the build, or the software itself, or my own configuration.

    My keyboard layout is US International, which has dead keys. Now, starting from Chromium 35 I cannot produce some characters with dead keys, but I can produce others. Among the characters that I can write are: á é ñ, and among the characters that I cannot produce are: « » ¿ ç. Some of them (like ¿) are essential to write proper Spanish.

    Thus: Is this due to some ./configure parameter? Is this because the software itself (I understand they’re using a new toolkit).

    My own configuration may also be the culprit, but I doubt it because I had no problems until Chromium 34.

    Thanks again,

    Eduardo

  214. Some comments:
    1. I got SCIM to work in chinese and it works very well indeed and I have a fully functional bilingual (for me) system.

    2. The latest version of Libre Office is quite good and I am transitioning completely away from microsoft office except for shared edits with stored changes (just because I dont feel completely comfortable with this feature in microsoft office.)

    I still have to disable hardware acceleration manually otherwise Libre Impress hangs on slide shows.

    3. I recently had a horrid experience with adding a 3rd hard drive to my machine which has to be added to an SATA slot number smaller than the boot drive. Finally i got it going using UUID and mkinitrd and lilo.conf editing. This really was a pain and took a lot of time to figure out and I almost despaired of adding the 3rd hdd. The documentation on this was not so clear and I had to dig. Others might not be so determined as me.

  216. Hi Eric
    Please I need chromium-33.0.1750.152-i486.txz you have this package? Please post link!

  217. Hi Eric, I noticed you upgraded chromium to 36. I use Slack64-current multilib. I’m thinking about switching to firefox because since the latest X.org upgrade in current, chromium in Slack64-current began to be really sluggish when typing text. This began to be apparent in chromium 35 (after the X.org upgrade) and continued in chromium 36. To this add the known issue with dead keys and foreign languages.

    I’ll continue to upgrade chromium as you provides releases, but for now it will become my second browser, not the default. The typing issue makes it very uncomfortable to use it.

    Thanks again for all your effort. I hope this gets solved soon.

    Regards,

    Eduardo

  218. Hi Eric,
    as always great work with the new chromium release.
    I’d like to report a bug that wasn’t there in previous releases: it is not possible to set it as default browser.
    I don’t know if it is due to the build process or to chromium itself.

  219. Hi Alberto,

    Works here with Chromium 36.0.1985.125 and running Slackware (almost-)current and KDE 4.13.1.

    Note that setting it as the default browser changes the xdg-open behaviour.

  220. How -current does -current need to be? I am running multilib -current but havent updated to the most recent -current. I notice that you are also not-quite-current. The latest KDE and chromium are up and working ok. I find some problem with KDE occasionally (kwin blows up and gives and error message but I can keep working) and LibreCalc does weird stuff sometimes but it’s all tolerable.

    Actually I am a bit leery of the latest -current with the display problems.

  221. Hi Eric, I’m happy to say that Chromium behaved itself again after the latest X.org update (I use Intel chips). The issue with international characters continue, though. Thanks for everything!

  222. Hi,

    Thank you for providing this site and your slackware packages.

    My apologies if this should be posted to the LibreOffice dev group. I searched for a ticket on this but couldn’t find one.

    I have been using LibreOffice from your slackbuilds (slackware64-14.1) and have had no issues until the 4.3.0 release. Just recently, I tried saving in MS *.xls and *.xlsx formats and received an error from LibreOffice stating that saving failed. The export works with OpenOffice 4 and previous versions of LibreOffice.

    Just wondered if you or anyone else has had this issue.

    Cheers,

    Fred

  223. i regularly save in those formats .xls .xlsx from libreoffice calc and dont have any trouble.

    i am running slackware 64 -current (linux 3.14.16) and the latest libre office. i had some issues with calc blowing up after font changes a couple versions back but it works fine now.

  224. Hi Eric,
    I just installed the last version of your pepperflash package (15.0.0.152) and I noticed a weird thing.
    In chrome://plugins page I have the following flash version (but the path is the pepper’s one): http://imgur.com/lXLPNzk
    I’m using chromium 37.0.2062.94.
    Is this normal?

  225. There is nothing wrong with the way the plugin reports its version to web sites. Just check http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/
    The problem is in the /etc/default/chromium file where I try to determine the flash version. The string in the binary changed so it’s reporting nothing now, and in chroime://plugins that translates to this weird 11..2.999.999 version.

    Make sure the version determination string in /etc/default/chromium is changed to:

    flashversion=$(strings $flashso|grep “LNX “|sed -e “s/.*LNX //”|sed -e “s/,/./g”)

    It’s really only cosmetics, but I refreshed my package anyway to fix this.

  226. Hi Eric, just wanted to ask you if you could update your scripts regarding SimpleScreenRecording. The changes are quite important imo.
    Building from git works pretty well, the “simple-build-and-install”+”postinstall” scripts do all the magic (just needed to disable pulseaudio).
    Sorry I couldn’t send you proper patches for such an easy task to save you the minutes, I lack knowledge on the topic.

  229. hi Eric, three (four?) years ago I downloaded a package of yours — Shisen — built without all the (KDE) cruft. I used to love playing it and, having a new 2nd-hand computer, looked to download the game again. alas, cannot find it onsite, search returned no useful results. can you help? thank you.

  230. Hi jr

    I never had a “shisen” package separately in my repository. Shisen is part of KDE, can not be shipped separately.
    Perhaps you are thinking about another Mahjongg game? In my repository I have xmahjongg (quite old, just a 32-bit Slackware 12.1 package).

  231. hi Eric, thanks. I played kShisen a few days ago (love these tile matching games) and must have got mixed-up. I’d appreciate an url for the mahjonng game, it’s the one with the flowery(?) background image, right? thank you in advance.

    regards, jr.

  232. Hi Eric,

    few week ago you talked about the 2.x release of Calibre and the doubts you had about embedding Qt5 libraries or keep them separate. In the meanwhile your Calibre package would remain un-updated. Have you made a choice?

    Thanks!

  233. Hi JesusM

    I am too busy with work (the kind that earns money) to spend a lot of time on Slackware at this moment. I have decided not to try and build a calibre 2 package for the moment because it needs research time which I do not have right now.

  234. Hi Eric,
    Thanks for your packages.
    I’ve tried your Chromium package on my Slackware-14.0 (release: 37.0.2062.94).

    But I noticed the omnibox doesn’t work as usual: if I put there, for example “hello world”… well nothing happens!
    I expected to be redirect to:
    “w w w . g o o g l e . c o m/search?q=hello world”.

    I’ve tried to change search engine and noticed that the matter is in “%s” variabile not expanded regularly.
    For example if I create a new serch engine called with following string:

    myengineaddress/search?q=%s

    Then if I put something in omnibox and press enter, appears the address:
    “myengineaddress/search?q=”
    …without “%s” expanded.

    Now, default search engine string (related to google engine) is made of just variabiles:
    “{google:baseURL}search?q=%s{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}{google:assistedQueryStats}{google:searchFieldtrialParameter}{google:bookmarkBarPinned}{google:searchClient}{google:sourceId}{google:instantExtendedEnabledParameter}{google:omniboxStartMarginParameter}ie={inputEncoding}”

    So here the answer to why nothing happened when I tried to search something using omnibox.

    Can you confirm this release behavior?
    Or pheraps could be a my local system matter?

    Are you going to update chromium package also for slackware 14.0?

    Thanks in advance! 🙂

  235. Since I recently bought a new laptop I had to upgrade to Slackware current just to get it to boot. Since I did that I thought I’d try your kde upgrade to 4.14.2. Worked fine except for Okular which could no longer read mobipocket format. I had to back out to Slack 14.1 to get it working.

    Just to not only complain here… I really really really find your multi-libraries handy. Thank you for that hard work and saving me from the aggravation. 🙂

  236. I looked at your remark about Okular and I have found the culprit.
    There is an issue with the order in which some packages are built.
    I have fixed that order and the next KDE 4.14 release will have an Okular with mobipocket support.

    In the meantime, you could install calibre or FBreader which both support .mobi.

  237. Hi,
    installed package wireshark on my slackware but after installation when I try to run the following error occurs:

    bash-4.2 # wireshark
    wireshark: error while loading shared libraries: libgnutls.so.26: can not open shared object file: No such file or directory

    Can you help me?

    Thank you

  238. You probably installed my wireshark package on Slackware 14.1 which I built for Slackware 13.37. The glutls package was updated since Slackware 13.37 and the package needs a recompilation.
    You can download the wireshark “build” directory and run the wireshark.SlackBuild script. The package should be available in /tmp when the compilation finished.

  239. A request. In a future update of ffmpeg package would it be possible to add libfdk_aac to the encoders? And thank you very much for your hard work. Obrigado!!

  241. hi eric,
    i wanted to ask u this question quiet longtime. I have a lenovo t400 and i can recall u use to have the same! … i have always run SC on it, and everything was quiet fine, minor problems but they could be easily fixed … since pat updated “x/*” on July 15, which messed up almost everything. Despite all my efforts i couldn’t get the issue with graphic fixed … openGL got massive problems, the lcd is partially colored with blue or black till refreshing opened windows, VSync cusses freezing and etc … i just wanna know if u have had also the same problem on ur t400? any solution to this? (of course if u still have ur t400!) … and do u know any way to upgrade Slackware Current to the version before July 15? (Just to mentioned i don’t have any of those problem on S14.1)
    thank u in advance,
    bests

  242. Hi Inman

    I still have that T400 and use it daily – it is my main workstation for work and home.
    I am running Slackware64-current on it and have never experienced the problems you are describing. Could it be that you missed some new packages that you forgot to install, or else have not deleted some package that was removed in Slackware-current? A properly configured slackpkg will offer to install all missing packages when you run “slackpkg update ; slackpkg install-new”.

    By the way, “slackware-current” does not have backup versions. You either have what’s available today, or you have to go back to Slackware 14.1 which is the most recent stable release available.

  243. Thanks for the chromium src scripts. Just a small thing to say. I don’t use printing and so cups is not installed. The chromium build fails when it tries to do the gyp stuff and after a lot of digging I found that I needed to add -Duse_cups=0 and then all worked. I don’t enable NaCL (sodium chloride I use) and I don’t even know what advantage there is using NaCL (other than food tastes better with it, but might be cooks fault and not food’s fault).

  245. I understand the full-installation aspect of Slackware and it is a key thing for anyone using Slackware to understand, especially newcomers. I mentioned the cups config in case someone else might stumble into it. Thanks again.
    (FWIW I don’t need the NaCL)

  246. Just noticed the update on ffmpeg. Thank for the new decoders/encoders. I know you have a real life, and taking the time to include requests was very kind of you.

  247. Hi Eric,

    RE; ip-address proxying

    This was posted from the Mistress of the house’s computer
    and if this got through, your explanation of my ISP proxying traffic from my computer through somewhere else, is verified.

    Will expand further off-line from your feedback-of-blog.

    Regards,

    mike.

  248. Thanks so much for the great works that you have done. I have been redirected countless times from searches to your works and every time they work!

    Thanks again!
    Ed

  249. Hi Eric,
    First of all I have to say that you’re one of the main forces that help me to stay and develop using Slackware. I’m running current-64, multilib and a lot of alien packages absolutely updated. I start using qemu and vde networking from your first packages. My present issue is on vde. For some reason rc.vdenetwork (nat option) could not start dnsmasq and serve my qemu VMs. The error message is: “dnsmasq: failed to create listening socket for 10.111.111.254: address already in use”. Could you give me some hint ?
    Cheers
    Gilcio

  251. You’re right. I did a ps ax | grep dhcp and results: “6476 ? S 0:00 /sbin/dhcpcd -B -K -L -G -c /usr/libexec/nm-dhcp-client.action -h orion eth1” but I have no idea of what program could have started it?. I will look at it in more detail. As always thanks for the fast answer in a sunday afternoon.

  252. How do I make these stop? I get emails but there’s no info on how to make them stop. If I subscribed I made a mistake.

  253. Gilcio – the dhcpcd is the “DHCP client daemon” which manages your computer’s IP address. It is not a DHCP server.
    If there is a DHCP server, it will be listening on port 67 and you should find its process with the command (as root): “netstat -panel | grep :67”

  254. R.H. – all the emails you receive from this blog are because you checked a subscription checkbox below one or more articles. I do not send them myself.

    The emails you are getting should contain a link that allows you to manage your subscriptions.

  255. I figured out what’s happening. Some emails from your blog show the unsubscribe and some do not.

    emails with subject [New comment] do not show the unsubscribe and those with [New post] do.

  257. Eric, sorry for a late acknowledge of your answer. I did a fresh reinstall of slack64 current and all my problems disappear. Thanks for your time

  259. Will the updates on glibc (both stable and current) trigger an update in the multilib set? yes, it is a request. thanks Eric.

  261. You guys don’t seem to realize that I do all this Slackware stuff in my spare time. If you start demanding that I must do things I will start demanding money in return.
    The updates will arrive as soon as I have time at home to build them.

  262. in my defense: 1 – You created the space for requests and 2 i asked politely, not demanded. 3 if i had money you wouldn’t have to demand. It would be my pleasure due to the great work you do for us all. sorry to bother man, but you are always so fast that we grew spoiled hehe.

  263. Requets for new stuff is one thing. Requests to work faster is not acceptible to me. Yes, you were polite about it, fabio, and it was on the planning list anyway. My comment was more directed at Alex and MajorLunaC – I am well aware of glibc updates. This GHOST vulnerability is hard to exploit, actually there are no real-life exploits yet (apart from one for Exim which Slackware does not ship). You should try not to be so paranoid. And if you are, you know where the source code is.

  264. Wow. So the words “please”, “as soon as you can”, and “Thanks” now mean “Work faster slave! Right now, damit!” in modern internet lingo? Let me interpret for those who think everyone is demanding instant results for a completely free repository made in spare time, and that everyone is ready to take a bite out of you. Maybe we use different dictionaries:

    “please” = “I beg of you”. “I ask of you kindly”. Even “I seek your help”.

    “as soon as you can” = “Whenever you are willing and able”. “I now you work hard, and you do in your spare luxury time in which you could be having fun, so if you happen to find the time, anytime in the distant future”. “Whenever you see fit”.

    “Thanks” = “I am in your debt”. “I really appreciate it”. “I don’t think I could have done it without you”.

    **As for your comments:

    “I am well aware of glibc updates”: First I’ve heard you mention it.

    “it was on the planning list anyway”: I would love to see that list. If I had known you knew of it and it was set to be updated, I would never have posted except a “Thank You for such a quick fix! Nice Work! You work too hard! Take it easy!”

    “actually there are no real-life exploits yet”: A vulnerability is a vulnerability, no matter how small it is. In my opinion, vulnerabilities get their own level of priority far above anything else. Disclosure of the vulnerability increases the chance that someone will try to exploit it 10 fold or more, which is why vulnerabilities are usually disclosed privately, quite some time before the public disclosure, to those who can and do fix them. Once the vulnerability is publicly popularized, new ways to exploit it are often explored.

    I need to come up with something to say to those who consider me paranoid, like “Wait till you see what I got off your computer …”

  265. now that i saw the guy before me had asked the same, i fell quite stupid for posting before reading everything. As for the vulnerability itself, my primary concern was about getting the applications that rely on multilib working again, since few mortals have the solid knowledge in programming to really exploit it. Thanks for the updates and as for me, will wait quietly next time.

  266. MajorLunaC, and a good day to you too.

    Actually, no one gets to see my TODO list. And if you would go looking at historical data of the multilib ChangeLog.txt you would notice that I am usually only hours or a day behind on Slackware proper. However, these were glib updates for 13.37, 14.0 and 14.1 combined with the KDE5 which cost me six weeks of multile hours per day work. At some point there is a decision to make about the balance of hobby work (which this is) and tending to family. The multilib glibc updates would come, if you were doubting that, you are quite new to Slackware and this community.

    As for vulnerabilities: they are real but overrated. A vulnerability must be exploitable to be a vulnerability. And exploitable does not mean that it is exploitable _on Slackware_

    Nevertheless, if it bothers you (and I respect your point of view) there is always the option to go back to Slackware’s patched glibc – temporarily – until the time that I release new multilib versions. All you lose is the capability to run 32-bit programs. You gain peace of mind by knowing your system is patched against a vulnerability.

    Finally: you do not get so say what I have to do, unless you are my employer. And when you do, even if accompanied with please and thank you – you can rub me the wrong way if I just came home from a bad day at work and don’t need more people on my back.
    End of statement.

  267. Quick suggestion for when you get the time (if you feel like doing it, of course). A bump on LXQT to the 0.9 version. And thanks for the 0.7 version. Excellent for “reviving” old machines with slackware.

  268. Hi fabio

    Building LxQt 0.9 is somewhere on my TODO. Their migration to Qt 5 and (some) KDE Frameworks made the update non-trivial and I wanted a stable KDE 5 before looking closer at LxQt.

  269. First of all a heartfelt thanks for your sterling work producing reliable slackware packages 🙂

    However, your latest vlc package (2.2.0) doesn’t handle HD (720p and above) as well as the older 2.1.5 version: video stutters or freezes.
    I downgraded to your 2.1.4 package (in the slackware-14.0 repo) and everything was back to normal.
    I know that building vlc packages is a PITA. It could also be that my slightly outdated hardware could cause the malfunctioning. Still, if you can find the time to look into it, it would be highly appreciated.

  270. Hi KG

    Start “vlc -vv” (or with one v, or with three, depending on the amount of debug info you need) and see if there are any hardware acceleration related errors when you play a video.
    I have no problems with playback of HD video here.

  271. Hi Eric and thanks for a swift reply!

    Embarrasing: after a new upgrade, the videoclip that caused trouble yesterday ran OK…

    vlc -vv creates a huge amount of info, and repeated entries like this:
    “[b5487e98] avcodec decoder warning: More than 4 late frames, dropping frame
    [h264 @ 0xb549cf40] Frame num gap 19 17”

    Maybe it should be put down to hardware. I’m on an old netbook with a Celeron processor, and when playing the HD clip in question the CPU load is as high as 80%. No wonder if there’s a bit of stuttering.

    So for now I’ll stick to the latest version 🙂

  272. diff for new version of google-chrome.SlackBuild

    77c77
    ar p $CWD/google-chrome-${RELEASE}_current_${DEBARCH}.deb data.tar.lzma | lzma -d | tar xv || exit 1

  274. Is there any chance that the latest “slackware-current” might no longer work with the files you have in the “current” directory of the multilib feed? I have been doing multilib upgrades with your packages for quite a while, but now when I run everything–with a fresh download and the same commands as before, glibc seems to get hosed, and the system is then unusable. I’ve tried twice, both times with the same result–can’t get at any commands and have to start the install over.

  275. Hi Brian

    The multilib packages in the “current” directory of my repository are the ones for slackware-current as you can download it from any Slackware mirror. Check the package versions and BUILD numbers, they should match the versions of Slackware64-current (except my packages have the “alien” tag added to the BUILD number).
    Can you double-check that you are indeed downloading the right packages, and that they have not been corrupted?
    If you can’t find what’s wrong perhaps you can share:
    – where you are downloading those packages
    – what their md5sums are
    – whether the gpg check is OK
    – what commands you are using to upgrade glibc and in which order you issue these commands.

  277. Hi David

    The primary mirror which I use is http://slackware.osuosl.org/slackware64-current/source and its contents are correct.
    However the rsync URI which is rsync.osuosl.org::slackware/slackware64-current/ does not offer the same content: it still shows the old packages which should have been removed.
    I use the rsync URI which is why my taper mirror shows all these redundant packages.

    I am sure that this is an initial sync issue and that the primary mirror will be sanitized soon. Then taper’s contents will go back to normal too.

  278. Good Afternoon,
    Early this morning, my time, I went to download your latest -current iso and noticed it was 4.3 gigs in size.
    Is that correct? I had thought the size of the iso had been reduced to somewhere over 2 gigs?
    Thanks.

  279. cwizardone, it takes time to properly sync the mirrors. And if you sync at the same time it’s possible to get the old AND the new packages all together…
    My taoer mirror had that issue, and as a result that ISO image also contained all the original as well as the updated and new packages, causing the filesize to explode
    The mirror has been re-synced and the ISO re-created. It is now a proper 2.6 GB in size.

  280. 1st off, thanks alienbob.

    Since we’re on the topic of multilib is there an https location for multilib files? I did look around and try some urls but none worked. I wonder if osuosl or kernel.org would or could do that hosting.

    hey also I see you’re a sci-fi reader & collector, I have some and would be willing to donate one to you if interested. I have pohl, poul, lem, asimov, et.al. I could ship it whatever’s cheapest i can find to anywhere that usps goes I guess.

  281. Hi R.H.

    Currently there is no https:// URL for download of multilib files that I am aware of. Downloading packages over HTTPS only adds strain to the server because it has to encrypt all the data. It adds no security… if you want to have security you can use the GPG signature files to verify your downloads.
    Thanks for your offer to donate a Sci-Fi book but I think it will cost you too much in shipping. I have a wall full of books and no room anymore 😉 I switched to reading e-books because that is space-saving.

  282. Just to inform, Libreoffice won’t start after the last batch upgrades on -current.
    symbol lookup error: /usr/lib64/libreoffice/program/libi18nutil.so: undefined symbol

    as well as other libs missing. Thanks for your work on the updates!

  283. Hi fabio, I know. I have new (and working!) 64-bit LibreOffice packages ready and the 32-bit package is still compiling (will take the rest of the day while I am at work).

  284. Your speed is amazing man!!! libreoffice working perfectly. I know it’s minor and the focus now is kde5 but just to inform, in kde settings on -current it’s impossible to get new themes and window decorations, by clicking the option an API error occurs. Thanks again for the lightning fast libreoffice packages.

  285. Note on my email of April 18:

    I just fetched a new slackware-current ISO over the weekend, and using your guide’s lftp URL things worked perfectly. So it must have been some kind of hysteresis in the two feeds at the time I was doing my previous work.

    Thanks for your wonderful work!

  286. about kde themes not working, if someone got the same. Just delete .kde folder in your home. worked for me. sorry about the noise early.

  287. Dear Alien,

    Thank you for all your great packages and work on Slackware. I have two questions about some of the packages you host:

    First one is regarding Chromium. I use Chromium mainly for Netflix and some other small audio related things (works very well with ALSA emulation), but I’ve been unable to use it for a month or two now due to an unexplained “Segmentation Fault” on any webpage load. I’ve tried several different new versions, deleted all Chromium config files, and even with an upgraded kernel (I’m now on 3.18.11) it still segfaults. Any idea what could be the cause?

    Second question I have is regarding the multilib versions of Mesa. I recently have been trying out the nouveau drivers because they bring a lot of nice features that the nVidia drivers don’t and in combination with the new kernel, they now work great with my laptop. However, the problem is that despite the 64 bit versions of Mesa packages for Slackware are OpenGL 3.0, the 32-bit packages spit out OpenGL 1.4. This is very annoying considering that Source games can’t even run with such an old version, and Wine always uses the 32 bit version of Mesa even in 64 bit prefixes. Is there anyway to get the 32 bit libraries to utilize OpenGL 3.0?

    Appreciate any help or response. Thanks.

  288. Hi Xylemon

    You don’t tell what version of Slackware you are running, and on what type of hardware. If Chromium segfaults for you, perhaps you are able to attach a debugger to the session to get a backttrace? Or else, try adding the commandline parameter “–bwsi” to Chromium (“browse without sign in” which is Guest Mode with disabled extensions). If that makes Chromium run again, it may be one of your extensions which is causing the crash.

    About your OpenGL question – you do not provide any example commands that you’ve tried inclusing literal copy/paste of the command output. I can not start guessing at what’s happening.

  289. Thanks for the reply,

    I am on Slackware 14.1 64-bit with Kernel 3.18.11 and I generally use the current packages with your multilib repo. I have a GT 755M card, and this is the rest of my system specs: http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/lenovo/y-series/y510p/#tab-tech_specs

    Regarding Chromium, I have tried removing any type of configuration file and install. Trying it with “-bwsi” has no effect. I’ll look into a backtrace or debugging soon. If it’s worth anything, I think the problem started when that version released which supposedly did not work on 3.10 kernels or something of the sort.

    On the Mesa/OpenGL topic, the info I get regarding the 32 bit version of Mesa is this:

    /usr/bin/32/glxinfo | grep “OpenGL”

    Which in return spits out:

    libGL error: unable to load driver: i965_dri.so
    libGL error: driver pointer missing
    libGL error: failed to load driver: i965
    libGL error: unable to load driver: swrast_dri.so
    libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast
    OpenGL vendor string: Intel Open Source Technology Center
    OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) Haswell Mobile
    OpenGL version string: 1.4 (3.0 Mesa 10.5.3)
    OpenGL extensions:

    From what I understand, I should see 3.0 for the OpenGL version just like what the 64 bit version of glxinfo spits out:

    OpenGL vendor string: Intel Open Source Technology Center
    OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) Haswell Mobile
    OpenGL core profile version string: 3.3 (Core Profile) Mesa 10.5.3
    OpenGL core profile shading language version string: 3.30
    OpenGL core profile context flags: (none)
    OpenGL core profile profile mask: core profile
    OpenGL core profile extensions:
    OpenGL version string: 3.0 Mesa 10.5.3
    OpenGL shading language version string: 1.30
    OpenGL context flags: (none)
    OpenGL extensions:
    OpenGL ES profile version string: OpenGL ES 3.0 Mesa 10.5.3
    OpenGL ES profile shading language version string: OpenGL ES GLSL ES 3.00
    OpenGL ES profile extensions:

    Hope this is more insightful than my last comment.

  290. Hi Eric,

    surely it is my mistake, but I dont’ see where …

    you have announced Calibre 2x for both Slackware 14.1 and -current. Indeed, today I saw at the RSS channel the notice for Calibre 2.30.

    But when I try to update using ‘slackpkg update’ I still see Calibre 1.48.

    I did update to Calibre 2.28 by downloading directly your pack from the repository, not using ‘slackpkg’.

    What am I doing wrong?

    Thanks once mor time for your job!

  291. Hi JesusM,

    I guess it is an issue with slackpkg, because the newer calibre package is there in the 14.1 repository, next to the 1.x version of the package.

    To end the confusion, I will rename the calibre-1 package for Slackware 14.1 to “calibre1” like I did in the slackware-current repository.

  292. Howdy AlienBob

    Sorry for posting my question on “Parental control on the Linux desktop”…I misunderstood you statement above(“This is not meant to be a replacement for…). I stand corrected.

    To the point. I often worry about the timeliness of many articles seen on the web with the fast pace of change that we live in. Your post on creating a safety net for our children is wonderful and meets my expectations quite well. Wishing to avoid a false sense of security, however, before implementing your suggestions I was wondering if there is anything you would change or add six years later, if that is in fact when you wrote the post.

    So, any comments, changes, suggestions?

  293. Hi senecum,

    My son grew up in those six years so I am no longer using parental control, but the concept is unchanged and the software you can use is also still the same.
    The most recent release of tinyproxy is four years ago, but a lack of new releases does not mean that the sofware has become unusable or unfit. Some programs work well enough, especially if they are small and focused on one task, that they do not require a continuation of upgrades. Just comple the most recent version of tinyproxy for your computer and try it out.
    Squid is the bigger brother of tinyproxy and of course you can consider that as an alternive – it’s just a bit more complex to setup.
    Dansguardian or squidguard are the programs that do the actual content checking and filtering, those are still current.
    If you implement this solution yourself and find that the article needs a refresher or requires fixing, please let me know so we can discuss it; or leave your comments in the “talk” section of the Wiki page. Credit where credit is due of course.

  294. Thank you, AlienBob – I would say Eric but I like AlienBob too much… every time I see the name the tune from Sponge Bob invades my senses, I get “happy feet” and brings a smile to my face, a side effect of having small kids :?)

    I will let you know if I come across any issues that need your attention.

    Best

  295. Howdy, again AlienBob

    In the spirit of trying to give something back, unable to offer anything else of value, I want to share this great little gem I came across today (the performance, not the song itself, which is well known already). I hope it will be of your liking and that it will shed some sunlight on those “rainy days”, or after one of those “wonderful” days at work…

    Best
    P.S. the blog includes “life and everything” so I hope this post is not terribly inappropriate…delete at your discretion if it is.

  296. Hi Eric,
    I am very impressed, that you have mastered integrating the WideVine-Plugin into the Open-Source Chromium browser, and even to playback Netflix videos!!
    So, I am trying to do the same for my Raspberry Pi (with Raspbian OS). The official Chrome browser does not work there, because it is not built for ARM architecture.
    Chromium does work, but without the EME extensions.
    So, do you have any tipps for me how to get it working on the Raspi, or even could provide a ARM build of your WideVine plugin?
    Would be greatly appreciated 😉
    Cheers, Chris

  297. Hi Chris

    I do not think that’s going to work. I do not compile the Widevine CDM library, becuuse that is a piece of closed-source technology. What I do is compile the “adapter library” which interfaces Chromium with the Widevine Content Decryption Module. The Widevine CDM itself is then extracted from the official Google Chrome RPM binary.
    For an ARM platform, you will require a binary Widevine CDM library which is made available by Google.
    ChromeOS is available for ARM (my Samsung Chromebook runs it) so there *is* a version of Chrome that works on ARM. I have no idea (never tested) if Netflix works on the Chromebook, but if it works it might be possible to extract the Widevine libraries from the ARM archive of Chrome.

  299. Hi Eric,
    I would like to report that something went wrong with your latest Chromium release (the one without the OK Google binary blob, v. 43.0.2357.125-x86_64-2alien)

    Chromium suddenly appeared big and blurry, as if I were using a 800×600 screen. Totally ugly.

    Only after launching Chromium with the ‘–force-device-scale-factor=1’ gives me a normal appearance.

    For the record, I am not enlarging or forcing any scaling on the display at all. All previous Chromium versions looked fine.

    Thank you again for all your efforts.

  300. Eduardo, the only change to the package is the patch to remove the hotwording feature. No other changes were introduced to the SlackBuild, the source code remained the same.
    It’s weird that for this release, the Key Fix was:
    “[498426] Resolved browser font magnification/scaling issue.”

    It appears that this bug was not properly fixed. If you read recent comments (of some hours ago) in https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=498426 you’ll notice that even the newest stable release which I am still compiling (will take until tomorrow) still has this scaling bug.

  305. Hi Ed

    Yes, there was an issue with the interaction between the slackware.com server and the Akamai contentserving front-end. We had to reboot the server in order to fix that. Should be OK now.

  308. Hi again Eric,

    What is the possibility of getting you to look at building VeraCrypt for Slackware-current?

  309. Hi Ed.

    I can do that.
    In fact, I have just done so… veracrypt packages uploaded to the repository. Please tell me if they work.
    Note that I added not just the veracrypt binary (the combined gui/console program which links against a lot of X libraries) but also a pure console binary “veracrypt-nox” which does not link against any X libraries at all and therefore can be used on headless servers that have no X installed.

  310. Wow, thanks a lot!

    I have installed it on -current/MATE and it works great! (Using GUI)

    I have never experienced support like that which you give for Slackware. I am going to be making a donation to you and PV soon!

  312. I am writing to report a bug in konqueror 4.14.6 in slackware64 current. I go to my wordpress.com admin page, then to the “freshly pressed” page, and soon after the browser crashes.

  314. Hello! The multilib openssl and openssl-solibs were not upgraded to correspond 64-bit versions.
    Best regards and many thanks!

  317. Question about qemu

    I installed Slack current from your repository, and it works very fine. thanks for that.
    I would like to have virtualization env, and for that i installed latest qemu and virt-manager packages from Slackbuild. that works, but seems a more complicated and i have some problems with networking.
    I read your wiki pages about qemu and Hardware virtualization with QEMU, but there’s some dead links to your packages. So can you tell me if theses howto are applicables for current Slackware.

    Thanks in advance

  318. Hi antuan –

    Years ago I changed the package name in my repository from qemu to qem-kvm to indicate that this fork of qemu was the one to be used instead of qemu itself. Looking back at my archive, I had packaged qemu-1.3.0 in December 2012 because that was the first release of QEMU that incorporates all the improvements of qemu-kvm. And then apparently I never released that qemu-1.3.0 package. I cannot remember why… and I am still using qemu-kvm-1.2.0 here at home.

    Essentially I am still using QEMU (read: qemu-kvm) as explained on that Wiki page. The server running the virtual machines is Slackware 13.37 however – not slackware-current.

    This blog is not the best medium for troubleshooting sessions. I think it may be better to open a thread on http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/

  319. Hi Alienbob

    I resolve all with Slackbuilds from repository and every thing works perfect. I just have one Question. Do you know how to do for getting updated queues file for sbopkg. Link to Gitorious don’t work at all.
    And just one word to say to you that appreciate very well your work. Just Fine.

    Regards

  322. Hi Eric,

    can you tell me if your article on qemu is of actuality. if yes, I don’t understood which packets must be installed due to dead links. I already have intalled qemu and virt-manager since slackbuilds, but I would like to try your resolution with vde. this seems more less complicated to set up. Nowadays my install works but with some problemes as for the resolutions of addresses with dnsmask and avahi which I which i cannot resolve..
    Could you just to say to me quickly how you would be taken you there?

    Regards

  323. antuan, the combination of qemu and vde is what I still use, every day, when I compile a package in one of my virtual machines.
    I do not use a version of qemu which needs libvirt or even avahi (how would qemu require avahi??).

  324. Yes, concerning avahi, i quickly deleted it. I realized by consulting my syslog. Dnsmask done the job rather well, i had incorrectly configured it at the outset. Therefore everything is back in order. But I come back to my first question; if I want to go by your solution, what do I need to install? And then, why don’t you do you serve not libvirt?

  325. HI Eric. Regarding the last packages for qbittorrent and libtorrentrasterbar (Aug 17th 2015) I have noticed that the column with FILENAMES has disappeared on qbittorrent. Would it be a bug? I have Qt5 as recommended and didn’t have this problem with the previous versions of qbittorrent. Thank you for your time.

  326. the “Name” column disappeared from the default view indeed. Right-click the column headers and place a checkmark in the box next to Name”, that will make the “Name” column re-appear.
    You might want to open a bug report to ask the developer to restore the old default.

  328. Using slackyd -d installed from SBo I noticed a possible problem with one of your current mulitlib packages.

    libssl.so.0 required by:
    –> Package: aaa_elflibs-compat32-14.2-x86_64-1compat32 (/usr/lib/libcurl.so.2.0.2)
    –> Package: aaa_elflibs-compat32-14.2-x86_64-1compat32 (/usr/lib/libcurl.so.3.0.0)
    libcrypto.so.0 required by:
    –> Package: aaa_elflibs-compat32-14.2-x86_64-1compat32 (/usr/lib/libcurl.so.2.0.2)
    –> Package: aaa_elflibs-compat32-14.2-x86_64-1compat32 (/usr/lib/libcurl.so.3.0.0)

    What are the implications of this?

    -d does “-d: Search missing shared libraries of installed packages.”, more info about slackyd can be found in the link below:
    http://old.slax.org/forum.php?action=view&parentID=75894

  330. Thanks for the reply and helpful link, I have read it before and have been only updating aaa_elflibs during the bigger updates when Pat updates it.

  332. Geremia, I have several blog posts specifically about KDE5. Please discuss anything related to KDE5 in the comments section of a KDE5 post and not in the general feedback.
    By the way, my kwalletmanager5 shows (and uses) my single wallet. Never used more than one.

  333. Hi Eric. Looking at the packages i noticed -current ships with fluxbox 1.3.7 (the latest) and 14.1 ships with 1.3.5 (two releases behind). would it be possible a slackbuild of 1.3.7 for 14.1? thanks for your time and efforts.

  334. Hi fabio.

    Slackware releases only get critical security updates in their /patches directory. A newer version of fluxbox for Slackware 14.1 is something you’ll have to compile yourself.

  335. Hello Eric, I have been reading the post “feedback” of your blog and I have learned that there are difficulties in communication when using translators of languages for the comments.I also use these translators because they don’t know English writing,read until I can but to speak and write I have no security or training good. However I see that I am using now is of good quality and I will continue to comment on using the translations but if it is difficult to understand let me know that I will try another solution

  336. Hello Eric,
    your ffmpeg package is just awesome.
    The only thing it misses, IMHO, is ssl support. For example, mpv cannot play youtube videos if ffmpeg doesn’t support ssl (and, in general, all https urls). I always need to compile ffmpeg for this very reason.

    Have you ever considered building it with ssl enabled? I know openssl is not feasible due to licensing problem, but what about using gnutls instead (like Arch does, for example)?

    Thanks!

  337. Hi luca

    What would be needed in the SlackBuild script to add SSL support to the ffmpeg package? I have not consciously left this out, I just had not realized that this was something people could need.
    Don’t worry about licensing issues, I will take openssl or gnutls, whatever is most useful.

  338. Hello Eric,
    thanks for the quick response.

    it just takes to pass “–enable-gnutls” to configure to enable gnutls and “–enable-openssl” and “–enable-nonfree” for openssl.
    So I think it will be forced to stay in the restricted repository if openssl is used.

    I think the two are equivalent in term of functionality.

  339. Hi luca

    That will indeed be easy to add, and it also allows to compare openssl with gnutls if I add openssl only to the restricted build.
    Good idea.

  340. Hello Eric

    I’ve noticed that your SlackBuild for Libreoffice 5.0.2.2 in Slackware Current includes a patch to exclude the test CppunitTest_sc_ucalc.

    The failure of this test can also be replicated in calc from the GUI by following these steps –

    1.
    Start Calc

    2.
    Select a range of cells from G4 to G10

    3.
    Edit -> Fill -> Series

    4.
    Push the radio button

    5.
    Start Value: 5

    6.
    Increment: 2

    7.
    Expected results 5, 10, 20, 40, 80, 160, 320 in cells G4 thru G10

    8.
    Edit -> Undo:Fill

    9.
    All cells in G4 thru G10 range should now empty

    I have observed the following –

    A.
    In LO 4.4.5 in Slackware 14.1 the above test passes

    B.
    In your version of LO 5.0.2.2 in Slackware Current the test fails.

    C.
    Using the SBO version of LO 5.0.2.2 in Slackware Current the test passes.

    D.
    If I compile from GIT in Slackware Current the test fails.

    E.
    If I compile from GIT In Lubuntu 14:04 the test passes.

    Any thoughts on what might me missing in Slackware Current that might be causing this problem.

    Alex

  341. Alex, interesting issue. Indeed I could not make the compilation finish unless I disabled the unittest for sc_ucalc.
    I noticed that the Fedora SPEC file for libreoffice (http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/libreoffice.git/tree/libreoffice.spec) mentions “system mdds 0.10.3 causes a crash in sc_ucalc unit test” but Slackware does not have mdds and my build uses the mdds tarball which libreoffice downloads.
    Perhaps you find the cause yourself, in that case let me know. Otherwise I will re-visit this issue when LO 5.0.3 gets released.

  342. Eric

    OK, I’ll bisect the code.

    Firstly, I was wrong about stating that LO 4.4.5 in Slackware 14.1 passes it in fact fails!

    What does pass is 4.3.0.3 whereas 4.4.0.3 fails.

    As you can appreciate, if I do find an answer it will take some time to discover as at each bisect point I have to recompile. Can’t think of any shortcuts.

    Alex

  343. The results of the bisect, which appears to be in the right ballpark, are –

    8e4dc1d760d85e09bbc3f3bbb5b8be2947db1b63 is the first bad commit
    commit 8e4dc1d760d85e09bbc3f3bbb5b8be2947db1b63
    Author: Noel Grandin
    Date: Fri Aug 22 15:15:17 2014 +0200

    create type-safe bitfield for sc insert/delete flags

    The most important part of the change is in sc/inc/global.hxx

    It creates a type-safe struct that prevents the accidental interaction
    between regular integer types and the flags struct.
    It also provides utility methods that make combining and testing the
    flags type-safe.

    Change-Id: Ibc5b20058b1655df913490682b679afd1297b36d
    Reviewed-on: https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/11071
    Reviewed-by: Eike Rathke
    Tested-by: Eike Rathke

    :040000 040000 f9f6a67e9269712bb1997ee6ba9fb49d21e4455e 494c585ff088b7980af64f28e556a58b2afcc35b M sc

  344. Eric

    I posted a message reporting my findings to the Libreoffice developers list on 24/10/2015 regarding the patch “create type-safe bitfield for sc insert/delete flags” not working on Slackware but was working on Lubuntu.

    Low and behold a complete rewrite of the patch appeared 2 days later 26/10/2015 called “convert InsertDeleteFlags to use o3tl::typed_flags”.

    I’ve compiled and tested in master. Now all tests pass in Slackware. Can’t find a bug report for it so don’t know what version of LO will end up with the patch.

    Alex

  346. Hi Eric

    Not quite out of the woods yet.

    Tracked down 2 regressions in LO 5.0.2 still got two more to go before I can move off of LO 4.4.5.

    The one here was quite trivial, the other three are show stoppers for me.

    One I’ve raised a bug for and that’s been fixed – 93618.

    One of the unreported bugs locks up my virtual machine in virtual box. Have to go to tty1 to kill it.

    Every time they bring out a major release my base application stops working. The bugs get fixed by about x.0.4, If I report them that is.

    Alex

  347. Hello Eric.

    Yesturday I had odd stoper when tryed to update slackware 14.1 x86_64. After both apr*txz packages in xterm shows somthing was gine wrong and there is no /bin/sh. After that system just become dead. I reinstalled compleatly system and trayed agayn update and got same result. 🙁 So for now I instaled slackware64-current.

    I wonders is this issue just striked me?

    P.S but anyway thanks for grate and stable distro. 🙂

  348. Hi Renars
    What was the Slackware mirror where you got your slackware64-14.1 packages from? This issue should not occur with the packages in the slackware64-14.1 tree unless the package tree got corrupted.
    Unless you mistakenly used a 32-bit package repository when installing these updates, instead of the required 64-bit repository.

  349. Shame on me!!! 🙁 I really mistakenly used 32bit packages. Well than tahnx for Your time and effort to answer for so fullish mistakes 🙂

  351. Hello, I just finished trying to build your SlackBuild for ffmpeg. It seems like it’s got some problems. I’ll paste in the last part of the terminal output so perhaps that will be of some help. I think this is the first one of your SlackBuilds that hasn’t compiled for me. Hope this helps.

    Oh, btw, I downloaded everything in the build directory and kept the directory structure exactly the same as you have it on the site.

    make[1]: Leaving directory `/tmp/build/tmp-ffmpeg/zvbi-0.2.35/po’
    Making install in doc
    make[1]: Entering directory `/tmp/build/tmp-ffmpeg/zvbi-0.2.35/doc’
    make[2]: Entering directory `/tmp/build/tmp-ffmpeg/zvbi-0.2.35/doc’
    make[2]: Nothing to be done for `install-exec-am’.
    make[2]: Nothing to be done for `install-data-am’.
    make[2]: Leaving directory `/tmp/build/tmp-ffmpeg/zvbi-0.2.35/doc’
    make[1]: Leaving directory `/tmp/build/tmp-ffmpeg/zvbi-0.2.35/doc’
    make[1]: Entering directory `/tmp/build/tmp-ffmpeg/zvbi-0.2.35′
    make[2]: Entering directory `/tmp/build/tmp-ffmpeg/zvbi-0.2.35′
    make[2]: Nothing to be done for `install-exec-am’.
    test -z “/tmp/build/tmp-ffmpeg/ffmpegdeps/usr/lib64/pkgconfig” || mkdir -p — “/tmp/build/tmp-ffmpeg/ffmpegdeps/usr/lib64/pkgconfig”
    /usr/bin/ginstall -c -m 644 ‘zvbi-0.2.pc’ ‘/tmp/build/tmp-ffmpeg/ffmpegdeps/usr/lib64/pkgconfig/zvbi-0.2.pc’
    make[2]: Leaving directory `/tmp/build/tmp-ffmpeg/zvbi-0.2.35′
    make[1]: Leaving directory `/tmp/build/tmp-ffmpeg/zvbi-0.2.35′
    /tmp/build/tmp-ffmpeg
    **
    ** ffmpeg …
    **
    ERROR: libass not found using pkg-config

    If you think configure made a mistake, make sure you are using the latest
    version from Git. If the latest version fails, report the problem to the
    ffmpeg-user@ffmpeg.org mailing list or IRC #ffmpeg on irc.freenode.net.
    Include the log file “config.log” produced by configure as this will help
    solve the problem.
    Makefile:2: config.mak: No such file or directory
    Makefile:62: /common.mak: No such file or directory
    Makefile:104: /libavutil/Makefile: No such file or directory
    Makefile:104: /library.mak: No such file or directory
    Makefile:106: /doc/Makefile: No such file or directory
    Makefile:189: /tests/Makefile: No such file or directory
    make: *** No rule to make target `/tests/Makefile’. Stop.
    Makefile:2: config.mak: No such file or directory
    Makefile:62: /common.mak: No such file or directory
    Makefile:104: /libavutil/Makefile: No such file or directory
    Makefile:104: /library.mak: No such file or directory
    Makefile:106: /doc/Makefile: No such file or directory
    Makefile:189: /tests/Makefile: No such file or directory
    make: *** No rule to make target `/tests/Makefile’. Stop.
    ** Adding ffmpeg presets:
    ** Fixing up pkgconfig files:
    ls: cannot access /tmp/build/package-ffmpeg/usr/lib64/pkgconfig/*.pc: No such file or directory
    cp: cannot stat ‘doc/TODO’: No such file or directory
    cp: cannot stat ‘doc/*.html’: No such file or directory
    ./ffmpeg.SlackBuild FAILED at line 1765!
    bash-4.2$

  352. The only relevant message shown in that bit of text is “ERROR: libass not found using pkg-config”. This means something was not well, a lot earlier in the compilation process. Try finding out what happened when libass was being compiled.

  353. Build ffmpeg from the Github repo; it builds flawlessly, and has the advantage that it is compatible with the GH repo for vlc, too, and it was the only way I could get the latter to build successfuly.

  356. Hi

    Before raising it with you I posted a message to the developers list. Didn’t get anything useful back.

    Then bisected the code got it down to a specific patch. Raised it again on the developers’ list and another patch was raised, a couple of days later, against master which fixed the problem.

    I’ve never managed to find a bug report so don’t know which branch/release the patch was aimed at.

    I’ve asked on the Developer’s list.

    Alex

  358. Either I missed parts of the patch in git or something else is not compatible. This is the error I get:

    414461 :/tmp/build/tmp-libreoffice/libreoffice-5.0.3.2/sc/inc/global.hxx:152:11:
    error: 'fromInt' is not a member of 'InsertDeleteFlags'
    414464 :/tmp/build/tmp-libreoffice/libreoffice-5.0.3.2/sc/inc/global.hxx:152:38:
    error: 'lhs' was not declared in this scope
    414467 :/tmp/build/tmp-libreoffice/libreoffice-5.0.3.2/sc/inc/global.hxx:152:50:
    error: 'rhs' was not declared in this scope

    The patch I used is here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2329942/libreoffice5.failing_unittest.patch

  359. Hi Eric

    the response from the developers is

    “as it was pushed to master only recently, it will only appear in the next release spawned off master, i.e., LO 5.1 ”

    So I suppose we should leave it to spawn out in the way the developers intended.

    Maybe if I’d raised a bug report immediately I encountered the problem the developer may have back ported.

    Alex

  360. Dear Alien Bob,
    Would you mind update Qt on stable repo?
    It’s a long time that Qt is updated to 5.5 on slackbuilds.

    Also Qt has been updated to 5.5.1 about 30 days ago, If it’s possible, would you mind udpate to this version?

    Thanks a lot,

  361. Hi Eric! It will be nice if you will also make a persistent Slackware Live edition.
    People like the idea of having a stable and powerfull live operating system stored on an usb stick.

  363. Hi! After some years of being away from Slackware (I got seduced away by Debian and the lazy ease of apt-get update) I find myself not loving the news of systemd and looking to return to Slack.
    BUT! The question is how long can systemd be held at bay? Estimates? My current laptop is nearly dead and I’d hate to buy a new one and find myself hamstrung by systemd issues. If I must be punished for using a computer I’ll give in and go Apple. But if you figure systemd can be held off 3-5 years I can hold off on such decisions.

  364. Systemd will never be a requirement to run a computer. Slackware current recently replaced its old udev with eudev, so its seems like slackware will not have systemd in the near future if ever.

  365. Chris, honestly.
    I can not look 5 years into the future of Slackware. Make up your mind about what you _want_ to use and then stick with that decision.

  366. Fair enough, then Mr Hamleers! I over-reached with that phrasing. I was more after seeing what someone like yourself with more insight into the development side of things felt about the potential down the road. I am comforted seeing the work being done by Slackware, XFCE, Gentoo and (I think) Funtoo.

    @orbea – Originally I wasn’t particularly afraid of systemd – I figured it was one init system amongst many and linux tends to allow multiple choices. But it seems like (looking at KDE and GNOME) that some of the DEs are hooking too much into systemd and every other distro has jumped on the bandwagon shouting “Newer and shinier!”
    And sytemd has long since shot past being a simple init system and taking over other functionality. So it started to feel a bit inevitable.

  367. Hey alienbob, maybe you can consider adding lzo and libaio to your multilib repo? I was investigating /usr/lib with ldd and found that libcairo-script-interpreter.so.2.11400.4 owned by cairo and libmysqld.so.18 owned by mariadb link against liblzo2.so.2 and and libaio.so.1 respectively owned by lzo and libaio. Using convertpkg-compat32 on both and then installing them fixed the issue as far as ldd can see.

  368. Hi orbea,

    Sure. I added the two to my script, and I wanted to do an update before the weekend anyway. So hopefully these two new compat32 packages will be available for download by the end of the day.

  369. So I was investigating with ldd more, then I found this old script to find missing libraries.
    https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=6460

    Which I then touched up slightly for slackware.
    http://pastebin.com/kWYVT0cu

    So in short, these compat32 packages in your repo have missing libraries which you might want to consider fixing.

    alsa-lib
    cups-filters
    flac
    gnome-keyring
    gnutls
    gst-plugins-base
    gst-plugins-base0
    gst-plugins-good
    gst-plugins-good0
    libgphoto
    libxml2
    libxslt
    mariadb
    qt
    util-linux

    So I then used convertpkg-compat32 to create packages containing all the missing libraries listed and then repeated a few times to make sure I had them all. In the end installing these compat32 packages resolve all missing multilib libraries.

    GConf
    aalib
    at-spi2-atk
    at-spi2-core
    cdparanoia
    db48
    gc
    gcr
    gd
    glib
    gtk+
    gtk+3
    guile
    judy
    libcaca
    libiodbc
    libsoup
    libtheora
    libunistring
    libvisual
    libvpx
    poppler
    python
    qpdf
    taglib
    tcl
    tk
    wavpack
    xmms

    And here are more notes for this which might help.
    http://pastebin.com/skq3urqp

  370. Hi orbea,

    The compat32 packages are not meant to be satisfying all possible library dependencies. They are meant to get your proprietary 32bit programs running, and those programs will not tap into all the functionality. Whenever someone asks to add a package to the list because some 32bit program refuses to run otherwise, I do that. By following the path you entered above, you will eventually end up with a huge list of packages to install, to a point where you might consider just installing full 32bit Slackware in a chroot and be done with it.

  372. Hello alienbob,

    I think this article is about slackware.

    I think the guys are very happy with slackware in Enterprise, and give some advises, good ones.

    Slack won\’t — and shouldn\’t — play IT\’s game

    http://www.infoworld.com/article/3012118/saas/slack-wont-and-shouldnt-play-it-game.html

    I think he is just carrying about business and enterprise, as Slackware is growing in a new land (that is awesome).

    I think Pat and you will be happy with this article.

    If is not about Slackware, feel at it was.

    Only knows that, everybody root for Slackware, and I hope back to use it soon.

  374. Hi, Eric. I wrote a few months ago about problems I’d been having running Chromium after version … uhm, it’s been so long, I forgot. Anyway, after installing your latest Chromium (47.0.2526.73), here I am, writing you in Chromium! No more “Aw, snap!”, and no more having to resort to “chromium –disable-seccomp-filter-sandbox &”. As a Bugs Bunny character once siad, “I don’t know what yuz done, but I know yuz done it.” 🙂 Thanks, man!

  375. Hi alienbob,

    Have you ever thought about supplying an extra multilib repo for packages on SBo that might be needed as a multilib version? One example is pcsx2 (Playstation 2 emulator) requires multilib versions of wxGTK/wxPython, nvidia-cg-toolkit, portaudio and soundtouch which I suspect is the main reason that its not on SBo yet.

    I could just make a 32-bit chroot to either run pcsx2 in or make the required multlib packages myself, but you might be in a better position to do this for a greater number of people?

  376. Hi orbea

    Thanks but no… I am busy enough with just my own stuff. People will have to build their own “compat32” versions of SBo packages if they need that – it is not difficult.

  377. I downloaded the 64bit slackware-current ISO on 12/13, and there has been a big change for me: I can’t get it to boot, either on my laptop or as virtual machine instances, unless I add the line “maxcpus=1” to the LILO append options. I haven’t been able to find any documentation as to why this is, whether it’s a worry, or if it is what to do about it. Once I do that all else seems to be just fine.

  378. Hi Capouch; I never heard that before. There has not been a change in how the ISO is being generated, but it is of course using a newer kernel to boot than in the past. Perhaps this is a kernel issue? What kind of errors did you get when booting from the ISO without the “maxcpus=1” parameter?
    Also curious about how the installed system is behaving. Is the “maxcpus=1” parameter not required there?
    The ISO boots a “huge” kernel, is this the same kernel you are using on the installed computer, or did you switch to a generic kernel plus initrd?

  379. It is the default kernel to boot (huge) and whatever kernel is installed in a full install, I suspect the same one.

    I can send a screenshot via URL of the screen as it boots? Although I’ll have to take a picture of it–it is something about detecting CPUS then a new line then #1 some spaces #2 and a freeze. I can see no ill effects of the maxcpus. We refresh our current pretty often. The late October one was just fine, but the mid-December one, as I said, requires that append for both the original install and the same ISO installed under VirtualBox.

  380. Hi again alienbob,

    In short: Any chance you could add libnotify and xz to your compat32 repo?

    Explanation: Pcsx2’s last stable tarball is ~1,500 commits behind and does not work well, so I made a git version of the slackbuild which does work. However it requires two Slackware compat32 packages you do not already include in your repo. Pcsx2 requires xz and wxGTK3 builds against libnotify which will result in pcsx2 failing to compile on a multilib environment without it.

    They are both easy to make by the user, so I just included them in the slackbuild’s README. The slackbuild is available in my small notabug SlackBuilds-git repo in the following link.

    https://notabug.org/orbea/SlackBuilds-git/src/master/pcsx2

  381. Hi Eric,

    I just wanted to pass on that your vlc-2.2.1 build script failed to complete on Slackware64-current until I added the following patch.
    — a/vlc.SlackBuild 2016-01-03 21:16:39.782066543 +1100
    +++ b/vlc.SlackBuild 2016-01-03 21:17:02.035064258 +1100
    @@ -2924,7 +2924,7 @@
    {
    echo -e “**\n** dvbpsi …\n**”
    cd $TMP/tmp-$PRGNAM/libdvbpsi-${DVBPSI}
    -CFLAGS=”$SLKCFLAGS” \
    +CFLAGS=”$SLKCFLAGS -Wno-error=bool-compare” \
    CXXFLAGS=”$SLKCFLAGS” \
    LDFLAGS=”$SLKLDFLAGS” \
    ./configure \

    As always, my grateful thanks for all you do for the Slackware community.

  382. Hi Eric,
    this is a question on Slack 14.1 Installation with UEFI/secure boot disabled. Is there a link to understand why write fails?

    cgdisk 0.8.7
    Disk drive /dev/sda
    Size …

    Partition # Size PartitionType Partition
    1007.0KiB free space
    1 400MiB Windows RE Basic Data Partition
    2 260MiB EFI System EFI System Partition
    3 240MiB Microsoft Reserved Microsoft Reserved Partition
    4 345.4GiB Microsoft Basic Data Basic Data Partition
    7 168.3GiB Linux filesystem Slack14.1
    9 736.0KiB Linux swap
    8 168.2GiB Linux filesystem (I intend to also use another Linux distribution here)
    5 450.0MiB Windows RE
    6 15.3GiB Microsoft Basic Data Basic Data Partition
    871.5KiB free space

    After setting up partition 7, verify was ok and then write says: Problem saving data! Your partition table may be damaged!

  388. Hi _metic

    My son has grown up and we are no longer in need of parental controls here, but if I had to do it again, I would start with my old instructions and see how far I would get. I hope that the old Wiki article is still 100% valid but I cannot give you a guarantee.

    What I learnt over the years is that installing parental controls is the start, not the end.
    The more important part of acquainting your kids with the Internet and keeping them away from its dangers is to keep the dialogue with your kids open. Talk with them about what they are doing with their computer, be genuinely interested and hope that your interest will keep them informing you of what they do.
    Once they start getting the feeling that you are tieing them down they will start exploring without telling you. And smart kids will eventually find their way around the parental controls.
    Still, these parental controls helped a lot.

  393. Hi alienbob.. i love your contribution to slackware comunity.. but i had a problem installing multilib on my slack64 with your tutorial.. once i completed the installation all of the 32bit programs worked.. but when i restarted my Xorg i couldn’t get back in.. no matter what config i used everytime i run startx all it did was post a list of libraries and thats it.. so i had to reinstall the system all over because had no idea what the problem was. do you know what did i do wrong? using 14.1 slack with kde installed from the latest dvd

  394. Anze – you are running Slackware64 14.1 with the KDE 4.10.5 from that same Slackware?
    And after you installed the multilib packages, your X session would no longer start? The most common reason for that is that you installed glibc for the wrong Slackware version. From what exact URL did you download these multilib packages? And again, is it Slackware 14.1 or -current or a mix of the two that you have installed?

  395. hi bob.. i was following your tutorial http://alien.slackbook.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=slackware:multilib
    yes all from same slackware. and was downloading slackware 14.1 packages.

    i ran a command:
    # SLACKVER=14.1
    # mkdir multilib
    # cd multilib
    # lftp -c “open http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/multilib/ ; mirror -c -e ${SLACKVER}”
    # cd ${SLACKVER}

    and all of the files were downloaded for 14.1 version of slack. i followed exactly your tutorial and xorg failed. now i’m afraid to do it again

  396. Anze, does not sound wrong what you did. But again, what exact version of Slackware are you running? What medium did you use to install? The official Slackware 14.1 DVD ISO image?

  397. hi bob. i am running slack 64bit 14.1 installed from official kde dvd downloaded from slackware website.

  398. Hello.
    Your last change log is time stamped about 12 or 13 hours ago, butt none of the packages have hit the mirrors I’ve looked at.
    Just FYI.

  400. Understand. I’m in my 5th week of the flu. The doctor said there is a strain going around that has hit the elderly (moi) very hard and there isn’t much that can be done about, but tough it out. The worst is over, but the cough won’t go away….. Getting real tired of it.
    🙂

  402. Hi

    Icedta 2.6.4 is released; however the repository version of icedtea is stopped at 1.6.1 which is out of date and is not designed to work with opendjdk 7. I would be grateful if you update the iceadtea package.

    Thank you for all your effort.

  403. Mehran you should check your facts better before you post here. I do not have an “icedtea-1.6.1” package at all.

    I have a package called “icedtea-web” at version 1.6.1 and that contains the browser plugin for Java applets. There was a newer release last week (1.6.2) which is on my TODO but not with a high priority.

    I do not have a separate “icedtea” package, that would be useless. I have an “openjdk” package which is currently at version 7u95_b00 and which I compiled using icedtea 2.6.4.

  405. Hi bob. i think i found a solution to my problem. Faulty fglrx driver. I tried one more time to make my 64bit multilib and xorg failed yet again.. i had enough of it and installed 32bit slack… i updated the system with slackpkg and when it was done i rebooted the system. when it booted back into slack i started Xorg and bam the same problem allover again.. than just for kicks i rerun the amd video card drivers installation script and xorg started working again..so now everytime a mess with lib files i have to rerun script to make xorg working again.. so thanks for your time trying to find a solution for me.

  406. Hi,
    Just wondering if you had my e-mail to alien at slackware dot com about a possible mirror. I haven’t any error but don’t know how often you check it. (it’s from another e-mail address)

  407. Hi Tonus, I think I received your email, and another too with a mirror proposal. Currently busy due to real-life situation but I _will_ respond. Thanks!

  409. Adding to Slackware core would be out of the question, looking at the plethora of dependencies that need to be fulfilled first. But it should be feasible to build this and its deps and put it in a 3rd-party repository.
    Interesting, because open source voice/video capable peer-to-peer applications are rare in Linux world.

  410. @alienbob, I am looking into nix pkg manager to see if that can be used but so far it has given me a headache. And yes ring.cx is a rare thing and is why I watched the fosdem talk.

  411. Eric,

    Four years ago I convinced my school to let me teach the 8th graders about computers by doing a 3 week course — 2hours/morning. We had no computers, and no budget for software, so I solicited laptop donations from the community. I was a former IT professional who used Unix (some) at work. I had never used Linux, but I knew I could get it for free (which was perfect for my budget). I wiped the laptops and wanted to laod Slackware 13.37 on them. I received everything from a 1999 IBM ThinkPad to a ASUS EEE netbook. Back then, I was totally stuck how to get slackware installed since I had no disks, had never heard of an iso image, and didn’t have a Linux installation on any computer. Your http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/welcome-windows-user/ link helped me quite a bit. I was able to create a USB stick that loaded my motley collection of PCs. (OK, I had to figure how to burn disks for the Thinkpad). The course was a great success. I taught the kids the basics of programming using only bash and a litle python. The kids loved it, and the course continues even though I am no longer teaching there.

    This year I am teaching the course in a new city to more 8th graders. Familiar with the process, a couple of weeks ago, I started collecting old laptops to load them with Slackware. Two days ago my USB stick died. (It was 3 years old.) Reluctantly, I sought to re-create the bootable install stick. I had hot-wired the first one with a universal linux installer and your advice. I was never quite sure how I got it to work, so I was very unhappy about re-creating it. However, I now have several laptops with Linux on them, so I could create bootable USB from that, right?

    This led me to your post http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/installing-slackware-using-usb-thumb-drive/. I used the information there to create new stick. Note, I got hung up along the way because I specified -o /dev/sdb1 in the usbimg2disk.sh command, but I found my mistake in your response to a comment on May 29th, 2010. I also had to install the rsync package as you suggested on October 7, 2010.

    So you never even had to talk to me to help me. I just thought you should know that you, like Richard Stallman and Linux Torvalds, made my work possible. So far, you’ve helped bring progamming to more than 85 middle schoolers that you never even knew about (and who knows how many more in the future).

    So, thank you.

    Who knows how many people you are helping every day without even knowing about it?

    Sincerely,
    Randy Evans

    PS I don’t actaully have a question or problem. You’ve answered all of them (so far).

  412. Hi Randy

    Nice of you to drop a note and tell us about your endeavors. Nice story! I think teaching kids the art of computer programming at a young age will create brilliant people when they grow up. It’s like with the Raspberry Pi which was conceived for exactly the same reason: create an affordable platform where kids can be introduced to computer programming in a playful manner. the world will need these kids sooner or later.
    The world is getting dumber by the day and tracks like yours are fighting that awful trend to kill creativity by turning young people into consumers instead of thinkers.

    Did you write your course program from scratch or could you use existing coursework?

  413. I made it up/make it up as I go a long. It’s very discovery based which, for me, gets the best results. It’s all command line. On day one, for example, they power on the laptop, I give them a username and paswword and ask them to make the computer do something. Every year, I amazed at what they figure out from that. New info is traded up and down the rows, and a few reboots become necessary. Eventually, I have to give them some direction, but once you get hooked on the notion that there are secrets in there that you can master, the computer becomes an interactive trial and error machine.

    As a teacher, I can’t resist imposing some structure and having some markers along the way, but the more open-ended it is the more the kids are engaged and the more they learn.

    I’ve been thinking that the Rasperry Pi would be the way to go long term. I’d love for the students to see the guts a bit more to help disple the magic box myth, but a laptops is self-contained, less breakable, and so far free. Kids can take them to and from school quite easily. Pi would be hard to handle with all the peripherals.

    Thanks again for your help.

  414. hi eric, do u noticed the last chromium-dev-pepperflash-plugin-20.0.0.248-x86_64-1alien.txz causes noisy and distorted audio on chromium flash video players?

  415. Hi inman; to be honest, I do not use Flash myself so I can not comment on distorted audio. I wonder, are you running it on Slackware 14.1 or on -current? Or alternatively phrased: is your computer using ALSA, or PulseAudio, or perhaps even JackD?

  416. Openshot is one of the best free video editors out. unfortunately, the one provided at SBo has a quite extensive list of dependencies and optional dependencies. I really would like, if possible, to see it built in a single txz package. And thanks for the new liveslack, using it as pocket os with full disk encryption.

  417. hi, tanx for the response here …
    I’m using the SC with pulseaudio, so probably the chromium-dev uses alsa playback plugin. The html5 players (eg youtube) are working perfectly.
    The noisy and distorted audio ( like audio glitch, sounds like corrupted mp3) is only there if a flash video or audio is being played using chromium-dev. With seamonkey the problem isn’t there at all. So probably it has not to do with pulseaudio but the flash plugins.

    The flashplayer-plugin-11.2.202.569-x86_64-1alien and seamonkey doing well, while the chromium-dev-pepperflash-plugin-20.0.0.248-x86_64-1alien and chromium-dev-49.0.2593.0-x86_64-1alien have some problem.
    I have some guesses about f_s, but i couldn’t figure out how to check or configure that.

    If u do not use the flash-player at all, how to you mange to play the video players of those creepy old fashioned website? … is there anything out there that im not aware of!

    thank u as always, for all you do for slackware and its community.
    bests

  418. inman, some people do not visit creepy websites with flash video.
    And if I visit pages with flash-based advertisements, they usually do not come with audio so I would not notice that something is wrong with the audio…

  419. Even if it is bbc.co.uk? i mean where can you find unbiased news with html5 player? 🙁 😀

  421. Thanks for all of your hard work on Slackware. Are we going to see LibreSSL enter the main repository, if not replace OpenSSL outright? Also, will the Lumina desktop environment ever make its way into the repositories? Thanks, Ryan.

  423. @alienbob

    THANK YOU…to you and all those that make slackware what it is !
    Keep up the great work !!

  425. Hello Alien .. you are a legend;)
    I would like to ask you how can I make a non-root user login on KDE 5_16.02
    Thanks Francesco

  426. darkstaring , that is not limited to KDE, it is a Slackware feature to create a non-root login right after installation of the OS.
    Read http://docs.slackware.com/start?id=slackware:beginners_guide#create_a_user_account
    Once you have a non-root user it should be able to login to the SDDM session manager, or if you are in runlevel 3 (console login) you first run “xwmconfig” (once) to select xinitrc.plasma as your session type. Then run “startx” everytime you want to start an X session.

  427. Hi Eric
    Thought you would be interested to know that a member of the Puppy Linux community has found a way to obtain 32-bit pepperflash updates from Google Chrome. How long this will continue to work is of course unknown but its has worked for 21.0.0.182.

    The thread describing the process is: http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=894322#894322

    BTW – your update process seems to have deleted the 32-bit pepperflash in your repository.

    Thanks for all you do to provide software for the Linux community.
    Cheers
    peebee

  428. peebee – the 32-bit PepperFlash in my repository was vulnerable to attack. That is why I removed it.
    Interesting thought that the older 32-bit Chrome still downloads an uptodate PepperFlash library from somewhere.

  429. Hey Eric, I put up a mirror of slackware live last fall but it stopped syncing last month.

    I’m getting: "@ERROR: access denied to mirrors from UNKNOWN " when I try to run sync manually.

    Do you need to whitelist my IP (208.91.197.168) or do you have enough mirrors and I should take it down?

    (this isn’t really a comment… I just didn’t know how else to reach you)

    Cheers,
    Paul

  430. Hi paul, this was discussed in several recent blog articles. The server’s rsync has been made unavailable because it was not able to cope with the rise in download requests and my hoster started complaining about the bandwidth cost.
    I have brought a new server online in its stead and you should start mirroring from that one: rsync://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/

  431. I am engaged in some back-and-forth about Slackware’s "inferiority" over the issue that is pitching this error on a build:

    ** snip **
    /usr/bin/ld: this linker was not configured to use sysroots
    **
    The folks on the mailing list say, "The linkers on all the other distros will do this. Your problem is Slackware. I hope you can comment–I’m not familiar with the concepts that are being discussed. Thanks.

  432. brianc – without any context I can not give you a meaningful answer. I never saw the error, I also do not know what triggers it.

    BUt… if you are in a discussion with some developer morons who use phrases like "inferiority" there is little chance that I will have a second look at what their crappy code does.

    FYI, please do not post complete build logs in this blog, I will delete your posts. Use a pastebin if you want to share large chunks of text.

  434. It’s OK to use bear.alienbase.nl for downloading EVERYTHING it carries. This server has taken over all the repositories from taper.alienbase.nl (except for the historical Slackware releases) and this weekend I also plan on moving docs.slackware.com from taper to bear.

  436. I solved my issue by rebuilding ld from source, version 2.26.20160125. The older version was 2.25.1. I built with vanilla configure, so I wonder if the default has changed to include the sysroots feature? In any event, it looks like it will work itself out in later releases of Slack, and I am now good to go. Thanks.

  437. i know there’s a lot of things to do in your real life sr. That said, there is a new version of veracrypt out. no serious bugs for linux found, but there are speed improvements according to the release notes. So, here’s my request for a slackbuild of that.

  438. Thx for the pkgs.

    After painting myself in and out of dual version Qt hell a couple times I discovered your stuff.
    I had heard of your pkg’s but ‘old hunt for dependencies and compile’ habits die hard.

    I got so far into the corner that I reblasted 14.1 and re-slackpkg’d myself back to ‘current’.
    (tolip hangs head in shame for using default microsoft troubleshooting procedure)

    I noticed a difference between your Qt5 and the .run file version that throws everything in /opt.

    Symptom:
    When starting a Qt5 app it fails with,
    This application failed to start because it could not find or load the Qt platform plugin "xcb"

    Investigate:
    root#> ldd /usr/lib64/qt5/plugins/platforms/libqxcb.so

    It listed 4 file not found issues involving
    libxkbcommon

    Solution:
    git and make libxkbcommon
    I just copied them to /usr/lib64 manually once built.
    root#> ldconfig

    Summary:
    I have no idea if this is ‘as expected’ or what, but it’s what I did to make it go. I’m moving on but I figured I document what I did, here, just in case it is relevant to your endeavor.

    Now I’m off to play with the must have Qt5 app that started this snowball rolling 🙂

  440. Hi,
    Am not new to Slackware as it was my first linux back around 1998 or so. Am running current64. Took the time today to follow your directions to change to KDE 5. For some reason when I used:
    # upgradepkg –reinstall –install-new x86_64/ . . .
    it ended up bellyaching to me that it can’t find any installed files to upgrade so it skipped them. Not all of them but lots so I just waited until everything was done and then went back to just installpkg all. It worked for me.
    Also, just found that dolphin has very few icons in the icon view. Don’t know what to do about that.
    Plasma is breathtaking. Thanks for your hard work

  441. Nitesky, "upgradepkg –reinstall –install-new" will install all packages that were not installed before (the "–install-new" parameter takes care of that) so additionally running "installpkg" should not be necessary. Check your /varlog/packages directory for duplicate packages, pretty sure that all of the new Plasma packages will show up.

    If you have zero duplicate packages then the following command should have zero output:

    ls /var/log/packages/ |rev |cut -d/ -f1 |cut -d- -f4- |rev |sort |uniq -d

  442. Ya, got zero when using that command.
    "upgradepkg –reinstall –install-new" for some reason doesn’t work for me so I just cover after by installpkg with everything. All new packages just install and all previously installed packages install over top again. Just a way to get the result I need.
    Found konqueror lacks a menu entry. Had to make one

  443. The command
    ls /var/log/packages/ |rev |cut -d/ -f1 |cut -d- -f4- |rev |sort |uniq -d
    produced zero results.
    I don’t know why the command
    upgradepkg –reinstall –install-new
    does not install new programs for me but that is the reality. Been like that for a long time now and through a couple of clean full installs. No biggie. My way works for me

  444. If there is a better way to report problems just let me know.

    Can’t find a launcher for Dolphin

  445. This is a KDE problem so I will ask it here. Since the last upgrade to -current I have a problem that KDE thinks that my time zone is "Troll/Antarctica". My local time zone in Slackware is set to Asia/Chongqing, which is correct (I’m in Beijing). XFCE has the correct time and time zone is "local", but KDE thinks local is Troll, Antarctica, and sets my local time 8 hours ahead, which does interesting things to my email.

  446. I had this time zone problem before but it was easily corrected, but now KDE keeps switching me back to Troll. Humourous it is but now I am ready to have it back to droll normality.

  448. I seem to have fixed it by a combination of running hwclock –show which said that I was on UTC time although I had just a little while before run pkgtool to set the time. I then ran timeconfig directly from root, then hwclock –systohc –localtime which fixed it. I did timeconfig through pkgtool previously but didnt fix it for me.

  449. My question concerns whether it is possible to have a local keyfile for a luks encrypted disk. I have an X200 with libreboot. The advantage of libreboot is that grub is my bootloader and permits full disk encryption including the /boot directory. I was able to follow your guide and have everything working great. The only tiny quirk is I have to enter my luks password twice. Once when grub first boots, and a second time during the kernel boot process. I followed a modified version of the instructions here https://libreboot.org/docs/gnulinux/encrypted_parabola.html to get grub booting. Towards the bottom of the page there is a Bonus section. It shows how to use mkinitcpio to permit a luks keyfile to sit on the local drive and be used to decrypt the drive during boot with the help of grub. The issue of course is Slackware has mkinitrd; which from what I understand requires a separate drive that’s a FAT partition for this to work. Is there a way to place the luks keyfile locally and somehow specify it with mkinitrd; or a way around this?

  450. Boris, anything is possible with the init script in the initrd image. You should be able to add support for a LUKS keyfile on any filesystem that can be read by the init script at boot. If the /boot partition is already unlocked at that time you should be able to mount it and read the keyfile.

  451. Eric, how would I change this line to make it work?

    mkinitrd -c -k 4.4.8-smp -m ext4 -f ext4 -r /dev/cryptvg/root -C /dev/sdx2 -L -K LABEL=TRAVELSTICK:/keys/alien.luks

    Even the instructions of mkinitrd say use a FAT filesystem

  452. You have to work this out yourself.
    The mkinitrd command is not what you need to change.
    It is the package source. You have to edit the “init” script which is part of the mkinitrd source, add support for a LUKS keyfile on another filesystem than a (v)FAT USB stick, make sure the init script mounts that filesystem and uses your keyfile; and then you have to rebuild the mkinitrd package and install it to your computer,

    An exercise I will leave to you.

  453. don’t know if I’m misunderstanding, but all the partitions are encrypted including /boot. I can’t mount any devices unless I provide a password or keyfile first. So don’t I have to add the created keyfile into the initrd package? ; because I wouldn’t be able to access it locally.

  454. I do not know how the full disk encryption (including /boot) works with GRUB, but you need to enter your LUKS password to let GRUB access the kernel and initrd on the /boot partition, right? Doesn’t that mean that from that point onwards, /boot is unlocked? Or is /boot only accessible to GRUB during initial boot? If that is the case then indeed you have to add your LUKS keyfile into the initrd because that is the only accessible fileystem after GRUB boots the kernel and tells it to load the initrd into its memory space.

  455. Asked in #grub. /boot is only accessible to grub for the initial boot, after that only the files provided within the initrd are available. Any suggestions for the best way to do this? From what I understand I would have to modify the Slackbuild to add a provided lukskey into the package, and the init file so it knows to use the file for cryptsetup luksOpen.

  456. No you do not have to update the SlackBuild and the package.

    What you need to do is run the command “mkinitrd -c ” once. Afterwards there will be a directory tree /boot/inintrd-tree .

    In that directory tree you make all the modifications you want.

    You end with running the command “mkinitrd” (without any additional parameter). The mkinitrd command will compress directory /boot/initrd-tree into a new /boot/initrd.gz file which GRUB will pass to the kernel.

    In the /boot/initrd-tree you need to:
    – copy your LUKS keyfile to some directory below /boot/initrd-tree/ ; this directory is what you will use in the next step.
    – edit the script ./init ; it is the initialization script where you will find the cryptsetup calls that use a keyfile to unlock the root filesystem. You need to make sure you change that call to use the path to your own keyfile (which you stored in /boot/initrd-tree so that it will be embedded in your new initrd.gz image).

    This is just thinking out loud. I believe this is how it should work, but it is unproven.

  460. > Mon, 16 May 2016 18:53:44 GMT
    > veracrypt: updated to 1.17.

    Thank you very much!

  461. Love your work. I just upgraded to slackware64-current (soon to be 14.2) Do you have the multi-lib package for that? Let me know if you need help building them. I’d love to get my hands in there.

  463. Hi. Was just looking around the applications on the Plasma 5 KDE. I tried Plasma Media Centre and it takes over the entire desktop. No way to exit so I had to use ctrl, alt, esc to kill it.
    Is this normal or have I done something wrong somehow?
    Thanks in advance for your answer