SlackBlogs

Merging into /usr

2012-01-29T13:26:00.000+07:00

There has been a plan for some Linux distribution (started by Fedora) to follow what Solaris has been doing for the last 15 years (and fully completed with the release of Solaris 11) and that is the /usr merge process. In short, all directories containing binaries files should go to /usr and not being scattered in many places like what we had right now, such as /bin, /sbin, /lib, and many others. With this, /usr/bin and /bin will be the same position thus all binaries should be located on this directory.

So far, systemd is probably working on this process and it's being documented on this wiki page. I assume many other will follow once this concensus has been reached. As an addition, please have a look on this article as well: Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split.

What about Slackware? Well, it's kinda difficult to predict what will happen in Slackware since all the final decision is made by Patrick himself along with other Slackware team members, but as long as it's beneficial to Slackware Project and it doesn't give too much burden to the team or Pat himself to do this changes, i think it's still possible to have it on Slackware. Basically this applies to all kinds of technology/features, not just spesifically the /usr merge process.

This is just my personal opinion as a Slackware users. It doesn't reflect Pat or any other Slackware Team Member's opinion.

Google Earth 6.0.3 on Slackware

2012-01-28T18:55:00.000+07:00

It's just a few minutes after my previous post about a broken Google Earth 6.0.3 on Slackware and now i have found the solution for that kind of problem, so here's the solution to install the latest Google Earth on Linux (tested here on Slackware Linux):

./GoogleEarthLinux.bin --target /tmp/ge --noexec
cd /tmp/ge/setup.data/bin/Linux/x86/
cd /tmp/ge/setup.data/bin/Linux/x86_64/ (64-bit)
mv setup.gtk setup.gtk2
cd /tmp/ge
./setup.sh (it can be installed using root or normal account)

If for some reason you failed to launch the Google Earth, make sure you have created a symlink to comply with LSB that Google requires by running this as root:

ln -sf /lib/ld-linux.so.2 /lib/ld-lsb.so.3

Here's a screenshot to a working Google Earth installation on my desktop:

Updated Google Earth Stucked at LSB 4.0

2012-01-28T18:28:00.000+07:00

There's a new Google Earth release and it's now 6.2. Unfortunately, the same version is not available in Linux and the latest one in Linux is at 6.0.3.2197. I once covered on how to install Google Earth on Slackware and it's working fine up to Version 6.0.2.2074.

Today, i downloaded the latest version and i saw an update there : 6.0.3.2197. I tried to reproduce the same steps i have been using to perform the installation of Google Earth in Linux, but this time, it failed me.

/GoogleEarthLinux.bin --target /tmp/ge
Creating directory /tmp/ge
Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing Google Earth for GNU/Linux 6.0.3.2197.............................................................................................
This version of Google Earth requires LSB 4.0 support which you
do not seem to have.
./setup.sh: line 285: [: missing `]'
Unknown id: yum install redhat-lsb
I/O error : No such file or directory
setup.data/setup.xml:1: parser error : Document is empty

^
setup.data/setup.xml:1: parser error : Start tag expected, '<' not found

^
./setup.sh: line 158: 28089 Segmentation fault      "$setup" "$@"

I'm really sure that it was working in the previous version, but unfortunately, it's likely that Google changed it's requirement to have LSB 4.0 as the base

Updated digiKam SlackBuild

2012-01-27T10:38:00.000+07:00

digiKam is one of my favorite application in KDE since i can use it to export my photos to Facebook directly and it has a lot of interesting features. Unfortunately, this package is not yet part of Slackware default packages, but it's still available on SlackBuilds project.

Another problem is that the maintainer hasn't updated the SlackBuild script to the latest version (2.5.0) and stuck at 1.9.0 up to now.

For those who wanted to try the new digiKam, you can download the original SlackBuild for digiKam from SBo package and replace the .SlackBuild script with the modified SlackBuild from my Box.net account and also a patch file to make it compilable. Put them in the digikam directory and start your engine to compile.

Please read the requirements for the new digiKam package as it adds more dependencies in the process.

VMWare Workstation 8.0.2 and Linux Kernel 3.2 Patch

2012-01-27T07:00:00.003+07:00

Jérôme posted a comment on my post about VMWare and Linux Kernel patch, saying that the patch i mentioned is not working with VMWare Workstation 8.0.2, the latest VMWare released by the vendor. When a stable kernel is released, normally, the patch should work normally, but in this case, i was wrong (at least my assumption), since the changes in the kernel affected the patch.

So i started a discussion at the patcher's blog and finally the author of the patch confirmed that there's a change in kernel source code which applies to his patch. He fixed the patch and submit it again into his blog post.

Unfortunately, the script still failed on me if i tried to use his script, but Ted, another people confirmed that it's working on his system but instead of using the bash script to do the job, he patched it manually, so i tried and it worked.

So here's the solution:

Get the patch from the author's blog or from my Box account
Extract it (assume in /home/willysr)
Go to /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source
Extract the source file (tar xvf vmnet.tar)
Patch the source file (patch -p1 < /home/willysr/vmware3.2.0.patch)
Create a new source file (tar cvf vmnet.tar vmnet-only/)
Recompile VMWare again (vmware-modconfig --console --install-all)
Voila.... everything works normally again

This patch should also be working for future Linux Kernel 3.3, so you probably don't need to search for more patch when Linux Kernel 3.3 released by Linus.

Fixing Amarok Bug: Stop on Every Track

2012-01-26T23:49:00.000+07:00

I didn't remember when i started to have this problem, but it's very annoying bug. Amarok will stop playing after it completed playing one track even though there are still a lot of files in the playlist. I assume it's another bug due to transition from previous release of Amarok that might caused this problem to surface.

Thanks to UbuntuForums, i found the solution and i tried it on my desktop and yes, it worked like charm. It seems my predictions was right and the solution is very simple, which is to remove the old configuration of Amarok by doing this steps (you might loose all your Amarok configuration):

mkdir ~/.kde/share/config/backup
mv ~/.kde/share/config/amarok* ~/.kde/share/config/backup/

Restart your Amarok and voila.... it will start playing all the playlist tracks

Fixing Sound Startup on KDE

2012-01-26T22:44:00.000+07:00

For those who have been playing with KDE 4.8.0 that was released yesterday, you might noticed that your KDE will not ring any sound when you logged in anymore. I noticed this earlier, but i thought that there was some backend problem and i haven't had time to find the solutions for this.

AJ Field commented on Eric's blog post about KDE 4.8.0 and pointed a thread at ArchLinux Forum which should solve the problem. I tried to use the solution written there and it really work like a charm.

The problem only lies in the directory reading on Notification settings (System Settings -> Applications and System Notifications). Previously, you mentioned only the filename, but in KDE 4.8.0, i guess it should have been a complete path, so the solution is simple, just browse the file and pick the same file and it will give you the full path.

I'll show you before and after i changed the path using these two screenshots below. The first screenshot is the original condition:

This is what i got after i browse the file and pick the same filename.

I only need to save the changes and it will be back to normal again once you logged out and logged in again.

First Impression on KDE 4.8.0

2012-01-26T06:11:00.000+07:00

I have just finished upgrading my desktop to use KDE 4.8.0, which was just released by KDE team few hours ago while i was sleeping. Thanks to Eric Hameleers, i could get the early release of KDE packages and downloaded this packages as i slept last night. When i woke up this morning, all i have to do is to make sure everything is already up to date by running the rsync script once again.

Next on, performed the command written on the README and performed the upgrade. Don't forget to have a complete look on the README as there has been a renamed packages. After i rebooted my machine, KDE started to be loaded and there was a new splash screen called Air and Ariya Splash Screen which is very minimalistic, but it does look more professionals.

If you have been using KDE 4.7, you won't get too much drastic changes, as it's based on previous releases. According to the announcement, there are a lot of areas which has been improved on this release:

I do feel that KDE 4.8.0 is faster than previous release, probably due to updated Qt which is now bumped to 4.8.0 to sync with KDE release version. You can also have better performance when you enabled desktop effects as there has been a lot of improvements on this area as well.

I used Kate a lot and on this release, Kate also got several new features and one of the new feature i like a lot is the new Line Modification Indicators. It really helps for developers to work in collaboration.

Another nice improvement from KDE is the Power Management System Settings which has been redesigned for simplification. It really helps for users carrying portable devices, such as laptop or netbooks.

KSecretService is taking it's debut on this release to provide new framework for sharing saved passwords and other credentials between a wider range of applications.

So far, i have no problems with this release, but even if there is a problem, it will soon be sorted out in the next monthly release which should be out in February and months following.

For now, i'll enjoy Slackware and KDE 4.8.0

KDE 4.8.0 For Slackware

2012-01-26T04:22:00.003+07:00

KDE has been proven to be stable enough ever since they released the controversial 4.0 version few years ago. Since then, KDE has matured and i can say it's stable enough to be used in production machines (i used it on my desktop, laptop, and workstation). The previous current version was 4.7.4 and it was released on December 2011. This version was meant to be the last version of KDE 4.7.x series according to KDE

KDE communities never stop improving KDE and as the results, we could see KDE 4.8.0 by now and it's spreading to mirror sites around the world and most distribution vendors has started up to update KDE to the latest version to be included to the distribution packages.

Slackware at this point is still on hibernate status and there hasn't been any big changes on the public repository (-Current tree). Many people has feared that Pat will stop maintaining Slackware, but that's not true. We all know that Pat is very proud of Slackware and i'm sure he will try to maintain it as long as he can, but for now, he need to focus on other things besides Slackware and that results in the lack of updates in -Current. Hopefully that will change in the near future.

Meanwhile, Eric has continued to keep maintaining KDE packages for Slackware. He has done it for several releases back from KDE 4.0 up to 4.7.4 and now, he continues his tradition to provide KDE packages and this time, it's KDE 4.8.0, the latest version from KDE.

This new version of KDE has more packages then the previous version, thanks to the modularization made by the KDE release team. In total, Eric counted there are 90 tarball sources for this release, exploded from 71 sources from KDE 4.7. This gives more burden to the packagers, but it gives more flexibility to the users as they can pick which packages should be installed on their systems.

As always, KDE has been known to work without HAL and that will also likely to happen in Slackware, so try to stop depending to HAL for the time being until it's removed completely from Slackware which will be likely to be in the next release of Slackware since KDE and XFCE will be HAL-free for their next major release (KDE 4.8.0 and XFCE 4.8.0).

Eric mentioned that newer KDE needs mesa-7.10 or newer, and his KDE packages are built for -Current users, not for Slackware 13.37. The reason is simple. There has been a toolchain upgrade in -Current which affects the KDE packages shipped by Eric being incompatible with Slackware-13.37.

Due to a lot of changes in the package naming, it's suggested that you do exactly what's written on the README to perform this upgrade:

On Slackware 32-bit:
  # upgradepkg --reinstall --install-new x86/deps/*.t?z
  # upgradepkg --reinstall --install-new x86/kde/*.t?z
  # removepkg polkit-kde-1
  # removepkg kdeaccessibility
  # removepkg kdebase
  # removepkg kdebase-runtime
  # removepkg kdebase-workspace
  # removepkg kdebindings
  # removepkg kdeedu

# removepkg kdegraphics
  # removepkg kdeutils
  # removepkg konq-plugins

  On Slackware 64-bit:
  # upgradepkg --reinstall --install-new x86_64/deps/*.t?z
  # upgradepkg --reinstall --install-new x86_64/kde/*.t?z
  # removepkg polkit-kde-1
  # removepkg kdeaccessibility
  # removepkg kdebase
  # removepkg kdebase-runtime
  # removepkg kdebase-workspace
  # removepkg kdebindings
  # removepkg kdeedu

# removepkg kdegraphics
  # removepkg kdeutils
  # removepkg konq-plugins

You can remove the unneeded packages later on once it's proven to be running well.

If you upgrade from his previous packages (KDE 4.6 or 4.7), then please the end of the note about a change in the package's name:
* oxygen-gtk was renamed to oxygen-gtk2
* mobipocket was renamed to kdegraphics-mobipocket

In the end, credit should all go to Eric for his hard work of maintaining KDE packages for Slackware. I am only helping to distribute his work to Indonesian areas and for those who reads this blog.

If you need to keep KDE 4.7.4 on your system, please use the main repository (http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/) or put an "exclude" command on your rsync script to prevent them to be deleted since in other mirror sites, KDE 4.7.4 has been deleted.

This set of KDE 4.8.0 packages is now available at UKDW Repository as well. Enjoy KDE 4.8.0 for Slackware.

LibreOffice 3.4.5 Released

2012-01-18T06:42:00.000+07:00

LibreOffice 3.4.5 has been released by The Document Foundation. It's a maintenance release, so no new features added, but you can expect bug fixes on this release. If you have a bug reported on previous release, you might want to check the first and second changelogs.

Eric has compiled LibreOffice 3.4.5 for Slackware users and upload it to his repository. Please enjoy this release as this might be the latest release for 3.4.x series as the developer are now working on the 3.5.x series and they even started the second bug hunting for LibreOffice 3.5 that will commence on January 21 and 22, 2012. The decided to put a second session after a successfull first session that generates 70 bug reports from over 150 volunteers.

The next major release of LibreOffice, 3.5.0 is scheduled to be released on February, meaning it's less than 3 weeks from now.

Fixing LibreOffice Printing Problem

2012-01-17T15:46:00.000+07:00

If you use LibreOffice and you are having problem to print in landscape mode, then you are not alone. Some people reported this on LQ and i myself also experienced this problem.

Some members reported a fix for this problem, but requires a lot of changes in the printer behaviour settings. Other member suggested that upgrading CUPS to 1.5.0 should fix this problem and this is what i choose.

Of course, it's not that smooth to upgrade to the latest cups. I had some problem building it and it was discussed on LQ, but finally i'm able to build cups by removing the old patches on Slackware-Current's SlackBuild script.

Now i'm able to build CUPS and fix the problem on LibreOffice. Hopefully this helps for those having same problems with me and with other Slackware users.

ScreenFetch

2012-01-12T08:14:00.002+07:00

Screenfetch is a bash script that shows your system information on the terminal as it's executed and also display your Linux distribution logos. Since it's a bash script, the only thing you need to do is to give it an execute permission and then put it on your PATH variables. In my case, i put it on my /usr/bin, but you can put it anywhere.

If you wanted to be displayed everytime you opened up your terminal, then put this line into the bottom part of your .bashrc (if you are using bash):

. /usr/bin/screenfetch

Notice the dot in front and there's a space gap between the dot and the executable script. Test it by close your terminal and fire up another one.

You can try to have a look on other distro's logo by using -D parameter, for example:

screenfetch -D 'ArchLinux'
screenfetch -D 'Mint'
screenfetch -D 'Ubuntu'

Accepting Unresolved Domains in Sendmail

2012-01-10T07:51:00.000+07:00

If you want to read your email messages from your local machine, you will need some packages to be installed:

Fetchmail
MTA (Mail Transfer Agent), it would be Sendmail in Slackware's default installation
MUA (Mail User Agent), it could be pine or mutt in Slackware

If you configured fetchmail properly, then in short time, you will be able to receive your messages through pine and mutt for offline view.

Sendmail by default will reject an email from unresolved domains, because it is suspected as a spam. However, if you have difficulties with your DNS server, it might treat normal messages as unresolved as well. So, how do i configure Sendmail to get all email messages, including from unresolved domains?

You must edit Slackware's sendmail configuration file, rebuilt it, and put the new configuration file into the proper place and restart Sendmail. Here's how to do it:

Open up /usr/share/sendmail/cf/cf/sendmail-slackware.mc
Add this line FEATURE(`accept_unresolvable_domains')dnl
Copy the file to /usr/share/sendmail/cf/cf/config.mc
Go to /usr/share/sendmail/cf/cf/
Execute sh Build config.mc
Copy config.cf to /etc/mail/sendmail.cf
Restart sendmail: /etc/rc.d/rc.sendmail restart

You will now receive any incoming email messages through your inbox, including from spammers, so please use this feature wisely.

VMWare Workstation 8 and Linux Kernel 3.2

2012-01-09T22:00:00.001+07:00

I have just completed compiling Linux Kernel 3.2, the latest release of Linux Kernel which was released early this month. Like always, new major release brings a lot of improvements which can be seen in KernelNewbies.

For those who would like to compile Linux Kernel 3.2, please pay attention when it comes to ethernet drivers. You must make sure that you have written down your ethernet card vendor as the configuration will ask you again and if you failed to answer (by typing no or picking the wrong vendor), you will end up with no ethernet driver loaded and if you are connected to the Internet using a wire, then you are out of connection. Luckily it can be solved by just recompiling the kernel and load the new module.

New kernel means new patch for VMWare and i have confirmed that a patch from Weltal's Blog is working like charm. All you need is to apply the patch included and it should go just fine. Please change the version according to the VMWare Workstation or VMWare Player version installed on your machine.

In case you find this error:

/tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmmon-only/linux/iommu.c: In function ‘IOMMU_AdjustMappings’:
/tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmmon-only/linux/iommu.c:180:4: error: implicit declaration of
function ‘iommu_found’ [-Werror=implicit-function-declaration]
/tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmmon-only/linux/iommu.c: In function ‘IOMMU_RegisterDevice’:
/tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmmon-only/linux/iommu.c:415:7: error: too few arguments to 
function ‘iommu_domain_alloc’
include/linux/iommu.h:68:29: note: declared here

Then, you can fix this problem by :

cd /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source
tar -xvf vmmon.tar
cd vmmon-only/linux/
vi iommu.c

add this lines on top of the file

#if LINUX_VERSION_CODE >= KERNEL_VERSION(3, 2, 0)
#include <linux/pci.h>
#define iommu_found() iommu_present(&pci_bus_type)
#define iommu_domain_alloc() iommu_domain_alloc(&pci_bus_type)
#endif

then finish it by saving it and then:

cd /usr/lib/vmware/modules/
rm vmmon.tar
tar -cvf vmmon.tar vmmon-only/
vmware-modconfig --console --install-all

That's it. You can start your VMWare and voila... it's working again.

GSB Repository Is Back

2012-01-09T06:54:00.000+07:00

After few days without any updates and also considered broken (missing packages), GSB repositories are now back serving all GSB users around the world. The mirror site has started to sync every packages that were previouly reported missing, including the updates found in the latest batch of updates.

You can start your sync again to GSB Repositories, including at UKDW

SlackBuild Submission Halted Temporary

2012-01-08T20:03:00.002+07:00

Submission to SlackBuild project is being halted temporary because they are now configuring a new machine that will replace the old machine. I hope the addition of this new hardware can improve this project's performance as more packages are being added into this repository.

Next in my queue line is an update to FileZilla which is now updated to 3.5.3. Please note that this update requires you to upgrade your WxGTK to 2.8.12 or higher in order to compile it from source. I have mentioned it on the README just in case you failed to compile.

Update (9 January 2012): They are back accepting submissions

OpenJDK Packages for Slackware

2012-01-08T15:24:00.000+07:00

Eric has posted his OpenJDK and OpenJRE packages into his repository for public testing. This package are created from source rather than wrapping the binary executable from Oracle, since Oracle has stopped giving permission for operating system vendors to re-distribute JDK as well as JRE.

Please note that these packages may ben given different name if it is accepted by Pat someday in the future as inclusion for Slackware official package replacing JDK and JRE which will be removed in the future release of Slackware. I think Pat will just give the SlackBuild scripts to build the binary into the native Slackware package, which shouldn't break Oracle's licenses.

GSB Repository Broken

2012-01-03T22:49:00.001+07:00

It has been reported that GSB repository is broken after some people reported that their local copy of the repository is now gone (or precisely deleted due to --delete parameter on rsync command) since the upstream repository was gone from the official repository server.

This problem was reported on LQ and also on the GSB mailing lists and the developer is now investigating this problem.

For temporary workaround, Ponce has a local copy of x86_64 version of GSB-3.2 for Slackware-13.37 that you can use (sorry, not 32 bit copy yet).

Once the problem has been resolved upstream, the mirror will likely to get the updates within 24 hours and you can start syncing again with your local copy.

Update (7 January 2012): 32 bit repositories are now back online on UKDW Repo server. Meanwhile, the 64 bit remains not available at this time. Please refer to Ponce's server until this problem has been solved

Good News From Eric

2012-01-02T07:54:00.000+07:00

Eric Hameleers, one of the Slackware Team has posted an update on his blog, giving updates on what he has done in the past month and what to expect from him in the future. Just like the others, Eric didn't release a lot of updates lately, except for monthly KDE release and also updates on his packages (mainly weekly Calibre release). But that's what we only see in the front door.

In the back door, he has managed to put his time working on the future KDE 4.8 release which should be out this month and also OpenJDK problem as i mentioned before in my previous post. He has managed to compile OpenJDK with gcc-java compiler and upload this set of packages to Pat's server so he can have a look later on and if he agrees, he will surely add this to Slackware-Current branch in the future and we can have a shinny OpenJDK package running on the next Slackware release.

His biggest goal is to add Java support on ARMedslack, Slackware porting project for ARM architecture, which is none currently. Why bother? Well, ARM is now getting more popular and with the future release of Rasberry Pi, it's all getting more interested to see Slackware running on those devices. So far, the progress shown a good sign even though there are still a lot of entries in their TODO list.

New Poll

2012-01-01T10:02:00.000+07:00

It's the first poll in this new year and i would like you (readers of this blog and of course, Slackware users) to rate Slackware's performance based on your own machine(s).

Slackware is known for it's fast performance (based on my own experience) and i would like to see whether it also exactly the same with others. I have been using Slackware since 2005 and used it in 2 desktops (running -Current), 1 laptop (-Current), 1 server (-Stable), and 2 virtual machines (-Current). I'm very impressed with it's performance so far.

Please do not compare to other Linux distributions such as ArchLinux, Gentoo, or any other optimized Linux distribution out there. Please rate Slackware as it is.

Poll Results

2012-01-01T09:39:00.000+07:00

It's been 2 months since last poll was announced and since it's already start of a new month and year, it's time to announce the results. Without further ado, here they are:
Desktop 43 (46%)
Multimedia 39 (42%)
Networking 24 (26%)
Drivers 27 (29%)
Development 21 (22%)
Office 27 (29%)
Internet 21 (22%)
Libraries 19 (20%)
Publishing 8 (8%)
Others 13 (14%)

Even though Slackware has been quite aggresive on desktop section, most of the voters (nearly half of the 92 voters) pick the Desktop section need to be improved, followed by Multimedia section.

In my opinion, Slackware is a great combination between a desktop, server, and multimedia box since you can have it all in one full installation, without adding more packages (even though it's possible since everybody has it's own preferences). What new surprises will Pat bring this year? Only time can tell...

No Present This Year

2011-12-25T07:35:00.000+07:00

Christmas time is today (in Indonesian time), and i still don't see any big progress within the -Current changelog since December 14. I guess there are no big present from Pat and from the Slackware team.

My predictions is that they are busy with other things that might surprise others, but it's not ready for the prime time yet, so he kept it within their private testing area.

Let's just hope that there should be a good present in the new year since last Slackware was released last May, so it's nearly 8 months since then. In normal cycle, Slackware-Current starts roughly 3 months after the Stable version released, but up to last update, there hasn't been a big progress, except for security updates and critical bug fixes only.

I believe there will be some changes in the next Slackware release, due to some problems encountered within the open source community, such as Oracle's JRE and JDK will no longer be distributable within Slackware since Oracle prohibited any distro-spesific release.

Another problem they may encountered is the new dependencies that are rising up along with new version released such as KDE, XFCE, GTK, GIMP, Amarok, etc. They must make sure that everything fits within 6 CDs (including the sources) or they will have to add another CD.

RHEL and CentOS has been using 2 DVDs for their latest release, but i'm not really sure Slackware will follow their method. It's not Slackware's way to pack those packages.

Only time can tell, so be patient guys... :)

Subversion Upgraded

2011-12-15T08:12:00.002+07:00

For those who is playing subversion and trying to work with GIT repository and failed on clone command, please upgrade to the latest version which should have fixed this problem.

Here's the latest change in the -Current branch

Wed Dec 14 16:22:29 UTC 2011
d/subversion-1.7.2-i486-1.txz: Upgraded.
This update fixes an issue with "git svn clone" being broken.

Last KDE 4.7 Series

2011-12-09T07:19:00.002+07:00

Eric has pushed the last KDE 4.7.x series into his KTown repository along with the instructions on how to install and upgrade them. There has been some changes in the notes though. These packages is guaranteed to work on -Current only as there has been a change in the glibc happening on ly in -Current branch that affects some people when building any packages that requires the old interface file (see LQ Thread for more information on how to solve this problem)

Fri Nov 11 18:58:21 UTC 2011
      Good 11-11-11, everyone!  Enjoy some fresh time.  :)
a/glibc-solibs-2.14.1-i486-1.txz:  Upgraded.
a/glibc-zoneinfo-2011i_2011n-noarch-1.txz:  Upgraded.
      New upstream homepage:  http://www.iana.org/time-zones
l/glibc-2.14.1-i486-1.txz:  Upgraded.
l/glibc-i18n-2.14.1-i486-1.txz:  Upgraded.
l/glibc-profile-2.14.1-i486-1.txz:  Upgraded.

As always, the updated package has been mirrored (Eric delayed the announcement after giving us the repo maintainer to sync with his first) into :

http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.7.4/
rsync URI: rsync://alien.slackbook.org/alien/ktown/4.7.4/
http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.7.4/
rsync URI: rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.7.4/
http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.7.4/
rsync URI: rsync://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.7.4/
http://scw.net.br/alien-ktown/4.7.4/
rsync URI: rsync://rsync.scw.net.br/alien-ktown/4.7.4/

Enjoy the last series of KDE 4.7 and we shall see KDE 4.8 on January next year

Thunderbird Beta in Testing

2011-11-29T19:12:00.002+07:00

After following Firefox's early release cycle in testing/, right now Pat decided to follow Thunderbird as well since they shared the same base code. Thunderbird 9.0 Beta 2 is now included in testing/ directory.

Please note that you are NOT forced to install/upgrade to this version. It's only used for early adopters or for those who needed to check whether your extensions should work in future release of Firefox/Thunderbird because they now release a major release every 3 months, following Google Chrome's release cycle.

Security Update: Firefox, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird

2011-11-27T17:12:00.003+07:00

Bunch of Mozilla products were part of the latest security update happening on both -Current and -Stable. Seamonkey, Firefox, and Thunderbird are upgraded to the latest version (plus one Beta on testing/) along with a single package outside Mozilla's product, which is yasm.

So far, the only basic toolchain that has been updated recently was glibc. GCC and the Linux Kernel were upgraded, but it was in May, almost half a year ago, so i think Pat is still deciding which version of the GCC and Linux kernel should be used for the upcoming Slackware release. These two components are so vital because the Kernel controls everything within the system and GCC is the default compiler that will be used to compile many other applications residing on that system. Picking a wrong combination might hurt the performance or even stability of the system.

LibreOffice Fixes

2011-11-27T06:17:00.003+07:00

For those who uses KDE and LibreOffice packages from Eric, you might be happy to hear the good news that Eric is willing to rebuilt his LibreOffice package to fix some minor annoyance related to tooltips and also unused horizontal scrollbar.

You should see the updates in this repositories below soon enough:

Wrong Architecture Package

2011-11-23T12:31:00.002+07:00

I think Pat uploaded a wrong package in the last batch of update. He put x86_64 package into x86 architecture. This only applies for make package, while Firefox 9 Beta 2 is still correct since he was building for i486 architecture.

For now, please wait for the next batch of update before upgrading make since you will be using incorrect version built for another architecture

Security Update: BIND

2011-11-19T11:50:00.002+07:00

I'm so sorry for having a late post about the latest security update in Slackware. I had some top priority errand to do and i couldn't have proper Internet connection while i'm away, but i bet most of you guys had watched the ChangeLog and read about the news, so it's not too important anymore.

Anyways, a new package of bind has been pushed to the public following a new release of bind which should fix some security-related problems.

Glibc Updates

2011-11-14T06:42:00.002+07:00

Pat has merged a patch from LFS to fix the broken glibc from the last update. So, it's time to upgrade to the latest glibc since it's safe for now.

Meanwhile, on testing/, Pat also includes the latest Firefox 9 Beta 1. Slackware will be ready when the final version is ready to ship

Special Update on Special Date

2011-11-12T06:32:00.002+07:00

Pat has updated glibc packages on a special date: 11-11-11. What a perfect timing

Fri Nov 11 18:58:21 UTC 2011
Good 11-11-11, everyone! Enjoy some fresh time. :)
a/glibc-solibs-2.14.1-i486-1.txz: Upgraded.
a/glibc-zoneinfo-2011i_2011n-noarch-1.txz: Upgraded.
New upstream homepage: http://www.iana.org/time-zones
l/glibc-2.14.1-i486-1.txz: Upgraded.
l/glibc-i18n-2.14.1-i486-1.txz: Upgraded.
l/glibc-profile-2.14.1-i486-1.txz: Upgraded.

Update (10:35 PM): Some people (including me) had some problems after upgrading to this version. MPlayer, LibreOffice, and Firefox are three of the known applications that are affected by this update and i suspect it could be more. I have sent the patches that were posted in LQ to Pat. Hopefully he is willing to patch glibc packages and push the updates into -Current soon.

LibreOffice Update: 3.4.4

2011-11-11T20:03:00.002+07:00

The Document Foundation has released an update to LibreOffice package and Eric Hameleers has released package for Slackware-13.37 (and -Current) in his repository and several other mirror sites.

You will be able to get the updated LibreOffice packages from one of this following repositories:

Updates on -Current

2011-11-08T17:26:00.002+07:00

For those who wanted to have bigger updates on -Current, be ready to get dissappointed, as Pat doesn't release (yet) any HUGE update as it was predicted before, but he's releasing some small updates on -Current and also in -Stable (13.37).

He rebuilt openSSH package and now upgrade Firefox to the latest version which has just been released yesterday, which is Firefox 8.

I think Pat is taking his time testing packages internally with his team before launching it for public to make sure that the branch keeps stable even though it's named after -Current

Enjoy the small updates on -Current for now

KDE 4.7.3 Monthly Updates

2011-11-03T10:06:00.003+07:00

Monthly KDE packages update has been released by KDE Team (read the announcement of KDE 4.7.3) and soon after that Eric Hameleers posted a set of KDE packages for Slackware-Current users in his blog as usuall.

All those packages are now being mirrored to several mirrors, including the mirror i maintained at UKDW repository server.

Those KDE packages can be obtained from this repositories:

http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.7.3/
rsync URI: rsync://alien.slackbook.org/alien/ktown/4.7.3/
http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.7.3/
rsync URI: rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.7.3/
http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.7.3/
rsync URI: rsync://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.7.3/
http://scw.net.br/alien-ktown/4.7.3/
rsync URI: rsync://rsync.scw.net.br/alien-ktown/4.7.3/

Enjoy the latest work from KDE team

New Poll

2011-11-03T10:03:00.004+07:00

Since Slackware-Current hasn't started yet, i would like to know what improvement that most Slackware users are eager to see on the next development tree that will be the next Slackware release.

I hope the answer can be used to help Pat to focus on those areas.

I'm sorry if the options are so limited in certain areas.

You can pick multiple options available!!

Give your votes until the end of this year

Pool Results

2011-11-03T09:40:00.002+07:00

Two months have passed since the poll was posted and it's November, so it's time to move to another poll, but before that, i wanted to post the results of the previous poll.

Here are the results:
Alpine 6 (3%)
Mutt 24 (15%)
Thunderbird 62 (38%)
KMail 20 (12%)
SeaMonkey 6 (3%)
I don't use any email client 41 (25%)

Every email client applications that were supported in Slackware are being used. Most of them are using Thunderbird and KMail as GUI-based applications and Mutt as the preffered console-based application rather than Alpine.

Since Alpine is no longer developed by the upstream developer in University of Washington, i wanted to take this opportunity to ask Slackware users whether they are still using Alpine or not and based on this poll, Alpine is still being used (i'm also using Alpine for my office mail account) in small number of users. It's now up to Pat to decide whether to remove Alpine or continue to support it by moving to Re-Alpine project which is the continuation project of Alpine.

Planet Slackware-ID Redirection

2011-11-01T15:21:00.003+07:00

Since October 14, our Slackware-ID Planet no longer fetch feeds from the blogroll and shows any activities due to (possibly) cronjob not started on the hosting side. I have contacted the hosting provider, but i think they have their own problem, so i didn't ask the owner again (he gave free hosting for this domain, so i can't ask for more. He has been too generous for us).

Later, some member asked and i decided to send an email to the list asking whether we need an alternative hosting site for our domain. Several members responded positively and one of the member suggested Kavalinux and Kambing from UI (University of Indonesia). I asked for certain service and they gave me a trial period in Kavalinux in no time (less than 3 hours after i sent the email, i already got a username/password for their server).

I quickly installed PlanetPlanet into this server and managed to install it in no time. Then i uploaded the old configuration taken from our previous Planet Planet, but it ended with an error saying that it couldn't find the template file, even though the file exists. The same configuration works in my desktop, so i'm a little bit confused with it

As the last attempt, i tried to use the basic template and it worked . I wonder what's going on with the template since it's definitely working on the old hosting, but not working on the new hosting. I will try to investigate it later, but for now, you can see the work in our new (temporary) URL: http://kavalinux.com/slackid/.

Big thanks to Kavalinux for their hosting donations to the Indonesian Slackware Community

Linux Kernel 3.1 and VMWare Workstation Patch

2011-10-25T10:31:00.004+07:00

Yesterday, i posted about upgrading to VMWare Workstation 8 and today, i decided to upgrade to Linux Kernel 3.1, the latest Linux Kernel released by Linus Torvald after having 10 RC releases. I had to say i'm impressed with the new kernel as it took less time to build this new kernel. In the past, i usually spend around 1 hour to build and now it takes roughly 35 minutes to build

When i rebooted, i reinstalled NVidia driver (285.05.09), VirtualBox, and also re-probing my sound card. One thing that confused me was that i had no sound after i logged in to my KDE. After searching a bit, it seems that the new kernel modified my sound level, so i have to re-adjust it again with alsamixer and set the Headphone to have bigger number and we're back in business.

Last configuration i had to take is to find a patch for my new VMWare Workstation 8 which is not yet fully compatible with Linux Kernel 3.1. Some of the modules are buildable, but not all of them. I quickly browsed and found a working patch, thanks to ArchLinux communities who had updated their Wiki to include a patch for Linux Kernel 3.1rc (it's working fine in the final release as well).

Here's the step by step

cd /tmp
wget http://88.191.137.189/vmware3.1rc.sh
chmod +x vmware3.1rc.sh
./vmware3.1rc.sh (as root)

It's now working flawlessly with the new shinny Linux Kernel 3.1

Upgrading to VMWare Workstation 8

2011-10-23T07:34:00.003+07:00

I have tried to upgrade to VMWare Workstation 8 in the past, but it failed with standard installation, even after i removed the previous installation. I couldn't pass the installation phase where it asked for a HTTPS port that will be used to connect to the server. It threw me an error.

Today, i found a discussion at LQ and tried Darth Vader's post and i have successfully upgraded my VMWare Workstation to the latest version, 8 using the standard installation, except that i changed the HTTPS port to 444 in order to avoid conflicts with the other applications that might be using the standard HTTPS port in 443.

The parameter i missed was --ignore-errors, so if you have installed VMWare Workstation 7 and wanted to upgrade to VMWare Workstation 8, you no longer have to remove the previous installation and just go with the new version and install it with this command (remember to use root account):
./VMware-Workstation-Full-8.0.0-471780.i386.bundle --ignore-errors

The new UI is now slicker and more fancy than the previous version, but without doubt, it's the new features that i'm interested about. It's a worthed upgrade if you use all of it's features mentioned below:

Remote Connections – VMware Workstation 8 provides a seamless way to establish remote connections to hosts running in Workstation, VMware vSphere, and VMware vCenter™.
"Share" VMs – New in Workstation 8, users can share VMs so they can be accessed by teammates providing a quick way to test applications in a more production-like environment.
Upload to vSphere –Workstation 8 enables users to drag and drop a VM from a user's desktop to VMware vSphere. This feature allows users to deploy a complete application environment from a PC to a server for further testing, demoing, and analysis.
New User Interface –The VMware Workstation 8 user interface has been revamped with simplified menus, live thumbnails, improved preferences screens, and a new virtual machine library with enhanced searching. Users can now search and access a large library of virtual machines that can reside on your desktop, a server, or on another PC running VMware Workstation.
Improved Virtual Machine Capabilities – With support for HD audio with 7.1 surround sound, USB 3 and Bluetooth devices, Workstation 8 delivers new levels of virtual machine performance. In addition, improvements to virtual SMP, 3D graphics performance and new support for 64-GB RAM allows users to run the most demanding applications in a virtual machine.

Security Updates: httpd, Firefox, Thunderbird, and Seamonkey

2011-10-15T08:13:00.004+07:00

Slackware has released another security advisories related to security vulnerabilities that has been discovered and fixed upstream. I believe this update came a little bit late, but finally it came out. The updates includes fixes for Apache, Firefox, Thunderbird, and Seamonkey which are now updated to the latest version that should fix the holes.

As of -Current, there's nothing big expected on this batch. Only two packages are being upgraded besides the normal security packages and they are file and Firefox on testing which is now include Firefox 8 Beta 2. Since Firefox's rapid release cycle come into a play, Pat always build the latest one and include them in testing/ directory. The final version of Firefox 8 will be released next year, but by looking at the numbering (which is now on Beta 2), there's a chance that it might be released by the end of this year (and we will have another major upgrade again)

NetworkManager in KDE

2011-10-12T11:39:00.004+07:00

Many Linux distribution has been using NetworkManager as their default application to configure networking (both wired and wireless). Why don't Slackware use this as well and stick with WICD? The simple answer might be "Since it works", but the more technical answer might be "Since NM (NetworkManager) depends on GNOME packages", which is not suitable to be included in Slackware since it has abandoned GNOME since 10.2 and the work of GNOME in Slackware has been delivered by the communities.

For those who have used NM and like it very much, Eric Hameleers has given you hope by rebuilding KDE (yes, KDE only guys) package (kde-workspace) to include support for NM in form of plasmoid (KDE widget) with all the GUI networkmanagement package. Everything you need is being placed under a test directory in his KTown repository. Why test? since it's still in early testing phase, even though it's stable enough.

Please note that you need to UPGRADE kde-workspace, not INSTALL. For the rest of the packages, you can safely install them using installpkg command.

As always, you can find those packages in these repositories:

http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.7.2/
rsync URI: rsync://alien.slackbook.org/alien/ktown/4.7.2/
http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.7.2/
rsync URI: rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.7.2/
http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.7.2/
rsync URI: rsync://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.7.2/
http://scw.net.br/alien-ktown/4.7.2/
rsync URI: rsync://rsync.scw.net.br/alien-ktown/4.7.2/

KDE Updates

2011-10-10T21:41:00.003+07:00

I have just got back from my honeymoon and i missed several updates on KDE, including the just-released KDE 4.7.2. I read it on Eric's twitter post, but i didn't have time to update it on this blog even though the repository keeps updating itself with the latest release.

Anyways, i'm now at home and i have just completed an upgrade process to KDE 4.7.2, including the latest update to kdepim and kdelibs which Eric has just updated few hours ago to fix a severe problem related with unicode and KMail component in kdepim package.

Remember, those KDE stocks are compiled for Slackware-Current and there are no warranty if you want to use it outside Slackware-Current

Slackware-Current Hidden Activities

2011-09-30T06:59:00.004+07:00

There hasn't been any public activities in the -Current tree. The last update committed was in September 6 and since then, there has been a lot of changes happening in the open source world. Some people might ask "Why wouldn't Slackware development tree gets updated lately?"

In the past, when i first learned about Slackware and started to follow Slackware-Current tree few years ago, i had the same feeling. The main reason why i pick Slackware-Current so that i will get the most bleeding-edge system filled with the latest version of every applications that are supported in Slackware. In fact, this is not what Slackware-Current idea is all about. Slackware-Current is the place where development of the next release of Slackware is being cooked, baked, tested by many people around the world to produce another great release of Slackware when the time come.

Even though Pat has gave a warning about using -Current as your base system, i find that -Current is as stable as the -Stable release. In fact, some fixes will be incorporated in -Current first and then in some cases it will be backported to -Stable (mostly deals with security fixes). Sometimes -Current does break some system when a faulty package being added, but it's just a special case. I only had problems with -Current when a new modular XOrg packages were introduced and since then, i never had any problems with -Current.

Back to the topic about Slackware-Current public activities. Even though the changelog doesn't show anything at all, it doesn't mean that the development of Slackware stopped. In fact, the Core team (Pat and Slackware Crews) works day to day to internally test the packages before releasing it to public to ensure that the packages won't break user's system when they try it.

Looking at the long inactivity of the -Current tree, i suspect a huge batch of updates is coming up with lots of new applications being updated to the latest version and probably some new applications will be added (for example if Pat decided to upgrade to KDE 4.7.1, then lots of new applications and libraries will need to be added into the repository). Be prepared for the big surprises by Pat.

Since i'm leaving on Monday until the next ten days for travelling with my new wife, i may not be able to post anything if the prize has been unveiled by Pat, so stay tune to the Changelogs if you want to see the big changes happening in Slackware-Current

Kdepim Updated

2011-09-24T08:37:00.001+07:00

For those who have a problem using KMail (included in kdepim package), which caused their email to be incorrectly deleted by KMail, a new remedy package has been released by Eric on his KTown repository. The patched package is kdepim-runtime which contains the akonadi libraries that stores the related data (your email and many other data related).

If you still use the old KDE 4.7.0, it's time to make an upgrade since this bug is introduced in KDE 4.7.0 and it will be part of the next KDE 4.7.2 monthly update, but if you are using KMail so often, probably it's better to update to the latest kdepim-runtime package as soon as possible

Minor KDE Updates

2011-09-11T01:36:00.003+07:00

Eric has updated his KDE packages with small changes related to virtuoso that can caused a misleading encoding information in unicode pathnames. He followed this bug report and then applied this patch to fix the problem. If you used Eric's KDE 4.7.1 packages, make sure you sync with the latest update and update your packages.

Another change in KDE packages is libbluedevil. He forgot to add alien as the suffix into this package to make it different with official Slackware package. He fixed this in the latest update along with the virtuoso package.

Update (20:29 PM): Eric has made a new post regarding this new update and it seems i missed one package which was added after i made this post. The new package is kde-workspace and it was added because there's a serious bug affecting KDE's performance when more windows are open on the desktop. Eric applied a patch from Martin Graesslin to fix the problem. This bug affects all KDE 4 version back to KDE 4.0, which is considered quite serious to KDE developers.

KDE 4.7.1 Arrives

2011-09-08T06:18:00.005+07:00

A month has passed since KDE 4.7.0 got released, so it's time for a monthly update for KDE 4.7.x branch providing maintenance updates and translations updates for people who have used KDE 4.7.0 releases.

Even though KDE 4.7.1 hasn't yet shipped within Slackware-Current, you can try this packages by downloading them from Eric Hameleer's KTown repository since he already announced it on his blog. He has added a warning for those who wanted to try this packages under Slackware 13.37 or older: use it on your own risk. He didn't test it outside Slackware-Current.

There were some updates in the deps/ directory compared to previous KDE 4.7.0 release and this has been mentioned by Eric as well on the README file.

One interesting package that Eric added was Quanta Plus that came as a plugin for KDevelop package. This will surely brings past memories about Quanta that was shipped under KDE 3 and many people like this tool and they surely miss this package when migrating to KDE 4. It took a long time to have this package reborn again, but i guess it's a worthed updated. Try this tool if you used it in the past.

As usual, KDE 4.7.1 packages can be downloaded from this repositories:

http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.7.1/
rsync URI: rsync://alien.slackbook.org/alien/ktown/4.7.1/
http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.7.1/
rsync URI: rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.7.1/
http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.7.1/
rsync URI: rsync://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.7.1/

My repository is now complete, so you should be able to start syncing from UKDW's repository if you are located in Indonesia

Security Update: Firefox, Thunderbird, Seamonkey, Apache

2011-09-07T06:30:00.003+07:00

Slackware has released several updated packaged that are considered security update, but no advisory has been released yet (probably in the next few hours). They are Apache, Firefox, Thunderbird, and Seamonkey. The update were released in different version. For example, Slackware 12.2 only received Apache update, while Slackware 13.0 and later received Apache, Firefox (3.6.x branch) and Thunderbird.

Slackware 13.37 users can now be relieved as Pat upgraded Firefox support to 6.0.x branch. Unfortunately, the same situation doesn't happen on Thunderbird. It's still using 3.1.x branch for now.

Slackware-Current received the biggest update with Apache, Firefox (6.0.x branch), Thunderbird (6.0.x branch), Seamonkey, and there's a new upgraded package for OpenSSH 5.9 which has been released few days ago plus one new package in testing/ for Firefox 7 Beta 4.

There's still no sign of major changes happening in -Current, but we know that Pat is up to something and he plans to announce it when it has passed his thorough testing phase. I'm guesing he's aiming for KDE 4.7.x and XFCE 4.8 for the this release and he must deals with all the dependencies before uploading all the packages to the mirrors.

We will have to wait for that time to come

New Poll

2011-09-02T23:10:00.002+07:00

As September comes, a new poll has been released on SlackBlogs. This time, i wanted to know which email client do most people (especially Slackware users) use for their daily activities. Some of them are text-based email clients and the rest are GUI-based email clients.

Please give your votes and hopefully this poll can be used to determine whether those packages are really still needed in Slackware's default packages or not. If no one is using it, then perhaps it's time to drop it from Slackware since one of those email clients is no longer maintained nor developed by the upstream developers, even though there are some continuation project that arose to make sure it's still being developed and new features are still being delivered for the users.

Can you guess which one?

Poll Results

2011-09-02T23:05:00.002+07:00

Two months has passed since the last poll and the result are here:

5uP3r C0o1 32(59%)
Nothing special 13(24%)
I haven't bought it yet 9(16%)
It hasn't arrived yet 0(0%) Even though the new t-shirt only adds a little cosmetic on the backside, almost 60% of the voters said it was a cool one and they like it very much. I'm hoping for more items in Slackware Store so more people will be attracted to buy more items from it and they can also help the Slackware Project.

LibreOffice 3.4.3 for Slackware

2011-09-02T22:58:00.000+07:00

Few days ago LibreOffice 3.4.3 has been released by upstream developers, The Document Foundation to tackle more bugs that was found or long-standing bugs that still are available in the previous 3.4.2 release.

As always, Eric provided a set of LibreOffice packages for Slackware 13.37 and -Current users. Please note that at this release, Eric decided to split the browser plugin into a separate plugin package called libreoffice-mozplugin. This is due to some reports on LQ which stated that a new session of LibreOffice will start when Firefox browser is closed. Personally, i have never experienced this before, but since it may come from several people, Eric decided to split them up.

You know the routine, all LibreOffice packages from Eric can be downloaded from this mirrors:

Please note that most of the mirrors described above has rsync capabilities, so you can create your own mirror if you need to setup your own local packages to be used on your organizations or departments.

ArchLinux vs Slackware

2011-09-01T11:47:00.002+07:00

This posting is not meant to start another flame war between these two great Linux distribution. It's just meant to be my personal opinion after trying ArchLinux for several days and compare it with the distribution i have been using for the last six years. I know it's not completely fair to compare few days experience with six years, but i will try to be as fair as possible.

Let's start with the history. Why would i try ArchLinux when i'm already comfortable with Slackware for the last few years? The answer is simple: curiousity. I had a discussion with my friend who lived in the US and he was a Slackware users as well, but migrated to ArchLinux and he said that i would like the disto as well since it's similar with Slackware. He told me lots of things about ArchLinux that i wouldn't find in Slackware. At the end, i promised him that i would someday try ArchLinux, but i didn't say when. That discussion was held in 2009/2010 (i forget the precise moment).

Since i have a one full week vacation due to national holiday in Indonesia (Eid), i decided to try ArchLinux to fulfil my promise to my friend. What a lucky me, ArchLinux has just released a new ISO few days ago that contains more up to date packages since they have migrated to the new Linux Kernel 3.0.x branch and that causes the netinstall ISO were broken, so they decided to release a new ISO. I downloaded this ISO and burnt it into a blank CD.

At first, i wanted to try it first on my Virtual Machine (I have Virtual Box and VMWare running on my machine), but that wouldn't reflect how optimum Arch is (i have read numerous article about how fast it is), so i decided to install it on my old laptop which has Fedora 14 on it. I haven't use the laptop for a while since i have a busy schedule this semester, so i think it's time to put a new Linux distro on it.

So, i installed ArchLinux on my old laptop. Most of the installation process was similar to Slackware's installation method. All you get is ncurses-based installer and since i'm already used to Slackware installation, i found no difficulties installing ArchLinux on my laptop. Everything works flawlessly. It's one of the advantage of learning to use Slackware: it will become easier to install other Linux distribution (except for some hard core Linux distribution, for example Gentoo or LFS).

Once i reboot the system, it showed a nice GRUB with ArchLinux logo on it and it simply has two entries: ArchLinux and ArchLinux Fallback (for recovery). Simple and elegant, just like Slackware with it's famous LILO boot loader covered up with a simple Slackware logo with dark background. I pushed the ENTER button on ArchLinux and i was truly amazed. I can have my login prompt in under 10s, something i can't achive with Slackware. My laptop is not a fast one. It only has Intel Pentium M 1.5 GHz as the processor and 1 GB of RAM with 60 GB of hard drive. It's an Acer TravelMate 4150L which i bought just when i was about to graduate in 2005.

Next, i create the normal username which i will use for my daily activities and start configuring the network since the ISO only contains basic packages and even NO GUI at all. It doesn't have any DE (Desktop Environment) or even XOrg packages, so i definitely need an Internet connection to grab all those packages. I plugged in my cable and start downloading some basic packages that i need to get a nice desktop, like XOrg, GNOME, and KDE. Since it was already past midnight, i went to bed while the laptop was still downloading the packages (full KDE installation requires about 600 MB alone).

In the morning, everything is already installed and i tried to login to GNOME, but it stucked. I don't know why. It doesn't give me any error messages, only a blue-stripped wallpaper and that's all. So i decided to abort it and re-login into KDE and this time, it works. After that, i start adding normal applications i use daily, such as LibreOffice, Firefox, Pidgin, xCHM, Flash Player, etc.

I tried to explore how ArchLinux works with daemon service, and in most part, it's similar to Slackware. ArchLinux also stores all it's service scripts in /etc/rc.d and we can start the service by using /etc/rc.d/httpd start for example (similar in Slackware). You can use rc.d command to start/stop service though. This is something that Slackware doesn't have.

One thing my friend told me that makes him loves ArchLinux was pacman, ArchLinux's package management tool. It works similarly like pkgtool, but it can solve dependencies as well just like apt-get used in Debian and Ubuntu. Since packages in ArchLinux are grouped, it will become easier for common users to install a full set of packages, such as kde, libreoffice, gnome, etc. You will have a choice to install them one by one, or even to all packages belong to that group. For example, i can use pacman -S kde to install all kde-related applications and libraries.

For a moment, i enjoyed pacman since it finds all the dependencies related to the application i need to install, but when i analyze it further, it also shares the problems i dislike when dealing with apt-get or any other tools that resolve dependencies: bloated system and upstream-dependency. I still prefer the Slackware method of pkgtool to handle dependency: leave it to users who has the absolute control of the system and not relying to the upstream developers.

Since ArchLinux is a rolling release, it's more likely a Slackware-Current in many ways, but the difference is the speed of updates. ArchLinux main repository is updated very often. Sometimes even once every five minutes or so. Meanwhile, Slackware-Current usually being updated on daily basis since there's only one man who does all the job on Slackware and that's Patrick himself. Rolling release means every new version of a package is being added into the main repository. Slackware-Current shares the same philosophy, but sometimes takes more traditional approach if the performance of the new version is worst than the old version. If you need a bleeding-edge systems, Arch might be suitable for you, but if you need a bleeding-edge with more stability on top of it, Slackware-Current might be the option you are looking for.

Slackware has SlackBuilds project and so does ArchLinux with it's AUR (ArchLinux User Repository). Both are user-contributed scripts which convert source codes into their native format (tgz/txz in Slackware and tar.gz in ArchLinux). If you need packages which are not yet or no longer supported in the main repository, you can try to find them on SlackBuilds or AUR project.

This conclude my initial review of ArchLinux after using it for several days. It's a great Linux distribution which challenges it's user with it's rolling release model, but for a production system that requires stability over new features, i would prefer Slackware. I myself will use ArchLinux only in my old laptop and i don't have plan to use it for my daily operational desktop/laptop until i know more about ArchLinux in the future.

Security Update: PHP

2011-08-26T00:50:00.003+07:00

PHP has just released two updates in the last few days and the last update was a quick update due to two serious regressions that was found after PHP 5.3.7 has been released to the public, which is fixed in the later 5.3.8.

Slackware responded this update by upgrading all PHP packages to the PHP-5.3.8 and this update travels back to Slackware-11.0. The reason for this is because PHP-5.2.x branch is no longer being supported by the upstream and nor the Slackware team is able to maintain it as well, so they decided to move forward by supporting the latest PHP package available from the source.

Another interesting news in -Current is the new package called soma, a command-line based radio player which is now an official Slackware package and also Firefox 7 Beta 1 gets included as well in testing/. By the time next Slackware is released, this version will eventually become stable, so it would be great to have this version available on testing/ for now.

Java has been updated to Update 27 as well, but i'm hoping that Slackware will support Java 7 by the time it's released. Java 7 brings more features and so far, i don't see any regression found after installing Java 7 by using a BIN package from Oracle. In most of the cases, it's backward-compatible release.

Last thing, a new updated kernel-firmware package has been taken from the GIT and compiled for -Current users. It should brings some fresh updated firmware from the latest revision from the kernel developers.

Firefox 6 on -Current

2011-08-15T06:43:00.002+07:00

Even though the final and official announcement will be made around Tuesday (Wednesday in Indonesian time), the source of Mozilla Firefox 6 is already being put on the FTP and the news has spread to many people, including Patrick himself, thus he builds the Firefox 6 for Slackware users and put them on -Current branch. It's not a common release by Pat to release a package before the main official announcement, but i think it's a worthed and safe upgrade for most users.

wget package is also being upgraded to the latest version. It's a new update after around two years without any update from the wget developers. The last release was made on September 22, 2009

Security Update: BIND

2011-08-13T08:41:00.004+07:00

ICS has released a new advisory regarding BIND package, thus a new Slackware Security Advisory (SSA:2011-224-01) is also released to fix this problem. This update will be available for Slackware-Current and way back up to Slackware 8.1, since some people still uses this version on their server machine.

Binutil package is also upgraded on this small batch of update and it's a preliminary step before more updated packages coming up in the next following days/weeks.

And the last one is the missing htop package on 32 bit systems is now being re-added again on the public repository.

New Start

2011-08-12T14:50:00.002+07:00

Slackware-Current has been stalling for some time, but a new start is now progressing as of today. The default boot loader used in Slackware, lilo is now upgraded as well as sqlite. It is now compiled using two additional parameters as described in the Changelog.

Htop package is now being included in the default package in -Current after being suggested by Michal Dorocinski. It's a nice and simple application to watch process-related on your system without having to use any GUI apps since it's ncurses-based. Emacs is also upgraded to the latest version.

Several Mozilla products (Firefox, Thunderbird, Seamonkey) are now being upgraded, but since it's still in Beta version, it's still placed under /testing. Please be careful if you decided to play with it, even though i'm pretty sure it's a safe upgrade for most people (except for some people who used an old extensions).

It's a slow start, but i believe more packages will come in the next few days (or weeks)

Linux Kernel 3.0.1 and VMWare Patch

2011-08-09T06:18:00.003+07:00

Last night, i attempted to build my first Linux Kernel 3.0.1 on my desktop at home. This is my third attempt on Linux Kernel 3.0 build after the previous two attempts on my workstation ended with a kernel panic message even though i follows the standard procedure i used to do in the past. Probably a misconfiguration problem. This time, i tried a different method. I build the kernel as much the same with the one i used in Linux Kernel 2.6.39, so i minimized the changes. In most questions answered, i pick N(o) as the answer, except for the RTC (Real Time Clock) which happened to be needed for Linux Kernel 3.0.x to build.

Since i have work to do last night, i didn't have time to reboot the computer, so i went to bed afterwards. This morning, i woke up and tried to reboot the machine and it boots back normally when i picked Linux-3.0.1. I was so happy and after logged in, i reinstalled my VirtualBox (stayed with 4.0.12 since having issues with 4.1 for now) and NVidia drivers (upgraded to 280.13). All went well and the last thing to do is to find VMWare patch for Linux Kernel 3.0.x branch.

So far, the only patch i could found is located on this blog. There are several versions of the patch, but the one working on my machine is patch version 3. Since this patch is a well-refined patch for Linux Kernel 2.6.39, you will have some FAILED message while patching if you have previously patched your VMWare source against Linux Kernel 2.6.39, but that's fine.

After patching it, you can try to run this command to recompile VMWare on your terminal

vmware-modconfig --icon="vmware-workstation" --appname="vmware"

This is on my machine

willysr@desktop:~$ uname -a

Linux desktop 3.0.1-smp #2 SMP Mon Aug 8 21:26:31 WIT 2011 i686 Pentium(R) 

Dual-Core  CPU E5300 @ 2.60GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

LibreOffice 3.4.2 Package for Slackware

2011-08-02T22:21:00.004+07:00

In the last few days, i have been mentioning Eric's work on Slackware and that doesn't stop yet, as i'm about to inform you guys about his latest work on updated LibreOffice packages for Slackware 13.37 and -Current.

As you recall, LibreOffice 3.4.2 has been released by The Document Foundation and it's now targetting for Enterprise users as this version is now on Rock-Solid phase. Even though it's just another monthly update from TDF, it has fixed some problems that were considered a showstopper for this product to be considered rock-solid release. With two months since the initial release of 3.4.0 branch, it's now considered safe for all users to use this version.

Eric has silently pushed his work onto his repository, but i noticed it so i start mirroring it few hours ago, but i waited for the official announcement before i started to post this on my blog. Since Eric has announced it, i will just go with this post as well.

You can now grab the LibreOffice 3.4.2 for Slackware 13.37 and -Current from this following mirrors:

Facebook Export on Digikam 2.0

2011-08-02T13:53:00.004+07:00

One of the feature i like from digiKam is it's ability to export to Facebook directly thanks to Kipi-Plugins. I don't have to upload them one by one, but i can do bulk upload and leave them uploading while i'm sleeping.

On digiKam 2.0.0 release, Kipi-Plugins are now being included in the digiKam 2.0.0 source, so there's no need to compile two packages anymore. Today, i checked my digiKam 2.0.0 and see if there's new plugins, but i realized that Export to Facebook menu is no longer exist. Then i checked digiKam README but found no information about it. Next, i checked Kipi-Plugins README and i found out that i need qjson as the requirement to Export to Facebook.

In the end, i have to recompile digiKam after installing qjson (thanks to SlackBuilds) in order to recognize the library and thus it enables Export to Facebook plugin again

So if you decided to upgrade to digiKam 2.0.0 and above, please have a look on both README (mostly the Kipi-Plugin README) to make sure your previous Kipi-Plugins dependencies has been met to save your time recompiling digiKam.

KDE 4.7.0 for Slackware-Current

2011-08-02T06:31:00.005+07:00

I said in my previous post that there's some hope for KDE 4.7.0 for Slackware users and guess what? In less than 24 hours, the new shinny KDE 4.7.0 packages has arrived from Eric's KTown repository.

Please note that this packages are built against Slackware-Current, so an upgrade to -Current is recommended if you don't want to have problems with some language binding (mostly with PERL).

There's also some changes in the way you install these packages, so please READ the README carefully before you attempt to upgrade/install your new KDE 4.7.0. Those README were created to ease your migration, so please don't waste Eric's efforts.

Eric also mentioned some note about problems that you might encounter if you use Slackware 13.37. KWin requires Mesa 7.10.2 as their minimum requirements and Slackware 13.37 does provide that package, but it's available on testing/, so if you want to try KDE 4.7.0 in Slackware 13.37, you MUST upgrade to mesa-7.10.2.

You can get the packages by getting it through several mirrors:

http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.7.0/
rsync://alien.slackbook.org/alien/ktown/4.7.0/
http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.7.0/
rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.7.0/
http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.7.0/
rsync://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.7.0/

There's Hope for KDE 4.7.0 in Slackware

2011-08-01T09:09:00.003+07:00

Few months ago there was a doubt that Slackware will abandon KDE just as it abandoned GNOME few years ago due to maintenance burden. Eric, who maintained KDE SlackBuild posted a question about KDE's release policy to split the big packages into modular releases that creates more burden to the packagers (including him) and decided not to create any KDE SlackBuild at the moment until the final decision is out.

KDE 4.7.0 is out for few weeks and still no sign of KDE 4.7.0 will make it into Slackware-Current until today as Eric has posted a great news for KDE fans that he is working on it and testing his KDE SlackBuild as we speak and he's already running on KDE 4.7.0 on his Slackware64-Current machine. Besides the usual packages, KDE 4.7.0 will have quite a lot of new packages. I was hoping to have DigiKam included on his set of KDE packages even though i have built them myself. It's such a nice and great open source application that you shouldn't miss.

If there are no showstoppers, it will be out next week at Desktop Summit event in Berlin. It should be a great presents from Eric to Slackware users around the world.

Again, thank you Eric for your big efforts on compiling, testing, and debugging KDE SlackBuild

Security Update: libpng, samba, dhcpcd

2011-07-30T07:17:00.002+07:00

Slackware has released three security updates on -Current (not all of them goes into -Stable release though) and also one update on -Current. The affected packages are libpng which is now upgraded to libpng-1.2.46 and libpng-1.4.8, dhcpcd upgraded to 5.2.12, and Samba upgraded to 3.5.10.

On -Current, screen is rebuilt to use a larger buffer for the termtype variable to fix crashes with long names. It's probably an annoying bugs, so Pat decided to release it early on -Current.

Digikam 2.0.0 SlackBuild Update

2011-07-30T00:28:00.006+07:00

I love photos and i love Digikam that can manage my photos very well. I like it even more since it's open source and very customizable. It also has SlackBuild script for creating a native Slackware package, thanks to the SlackBuilds project and also to Frank Caraballo who maintained the script.

The SlackBuild was submitted when Digikam was still in 1.9.0 and now 2.0.0 has come up. What happened if i used it to compile 2.0.0? Does it work? The answer is YES!!! It does work, but there's some modifications that you need to do to make it even better. The new Digikam 2.0.0 come up with less documentation, so you can delete them in the SlackBuild or you will see several errors saying that it cannot stats the file.

Basically, you only need to change the VERSION line and also change

cp -a \
AUTHORS ChangeLog COPYING* DESIGN HACKING INSTALL NEWS README tips TODO \
$PKG/usr/doc/$PRGNAM-$VERSION

into

cp -a \
NEWS README  \
$PKG/usr/doc/$PRGNAM-$VERSION

After that, you could start compiling by running the updated SlackBuild to compile Digikam 2.0.0.

Lots of new features has been integrated in Digikam 2.0.0 and most of the dependencies are already contained within the Digikam source, so no more third party libraries, except for OpenCV in which you need to install it by yourself (SlackBuild script is available though). It's all included in extra/ directory inside the source. This includes libkdcraw, libkface, libkipi, libmediawiki, kipi-plugins, libkexiv2, libkgeomap, and libksane. If you don't have those libraries on your system, it will use it's internal version, so just a single source of Digikam will be sufficient to build.

FYI, i used FFMPEG-0.6.3 from AlienBOB's repository and OpenCV-2.3.0, the latest version available nowadays to build this package. Suppose you want to have a successful build, try the same combination i used.

KDE SC 4.7.0 Released

2011-07-28T06:17:00.003+07:00

As planned, KDE SC 4.7.0 is now officially released!!!

It's another major upgrade for KDE and this release will have a monthly updates as usual, so if you don't really think .0 release is stable enough for you, you can wait for their first update next month to bring you bug fixes and translations updates which should be sufficient for you to consider and wait for others to review and test this release first.

KDE SC 4.7.0 brings quite a lot of improvements compared to KDE 4.6.x. Here are some of them:

Plasma Workspaces Become More Portable and able to run on OpenGL ES supporting hardware
Better KDE/GTK integration and well polished icons through Oxygen icons and Oxygen GTK
Experimental support for NetworkManager 0.9
KDE-Telepathy is being integrated into desktop
Dolphin receive lots of improvements, including deeper integration with source code management systems
Marble has voice navigation support, a map creation wizard, and new plug-ins
Gwenview is now able to compare images
KDevelop gained support for predefined indentation styles, Python interpreter using Kross, improved Python auto-completion and support for lex/yacc file extensions.
Improved Kate with more plugins
DigiKam 2.0 brings face detection and recognition, image versioning support, and geotagging
VLC is now considered a stable and preferred back-ends and so does GStreamer (Linux only)
GRUB2 support on KDM, enables users to pick which OS to boot on the next boot sequence
Improved KIO Proxy, including SOCKS proxy support and multiple proxy URL addresses

It might take some time before Eric or Pat releases KDE 4.7.0 packages for Slackware-Current users as KDE is now partly switching to modular release (the full migration will likely be done in KDE SC 4.8), thus it requires more time to adapt the SlackBuild scripts to build KDE SC 4.7.0.

Be patient. Give Eric some time to work on KDE SC 4.7.0

KCalc Fixed

2011-07-27T21:34:00.002+07:00

KCalc issue for not receiving any digit input is now fixed as Eric has included the patch for kdeutils and rebuilt it for Slackware users. He posted the announcement on his blog soon after he came back from his vacations (no wonders he didn't update VLC even though there was a security vulnerabilities previously).

Beware that the rsync module for some of Eric's work has been changed. Here are the new list:

KTown: rsync://alien.slackbook.org/alien/ktown/
Multilib: rsync://alien.slackbook.org/alien/multilib/

Please update your rsync script if you use the old rsync module

Slackware Turns 18

2011-07-17T07:28:00.006+07:00

Slackware 1.0 was released by Patrick Volkerding exactly 18 years ago in 16 July 1993 in an official release when he was still a student. At that time, it was distributed under 24 disks (yes, floppy disks) and it only has two series, A and X. No one will ever thought that it's now being the oldest maintained Linux distribution up to now

In 1993, there wasn't much Linux distribution. Slackware is one of the first batch of Linux Distribution at that time along with SLS, Debian Linux, YggDrasil, and MCC Interim. It turned out good so that many Linux distributions are now based on Slackware, such as SuSE (turned OpenSUSE), VectorLinux, Slax, ZenWalk, Salix, and many more.

Today, it's released using a DVD (and an option of using 6 CDs) and it has so many directories inside. It supports so many hardwares thanks to the Linux 2.6.x (soon to be replaced by 3.0 series) series being developed by great developers around the world under the command of Linus Torvalds and also utilizes the best open source applications available provided by upstreams. Slackware follows the tradition of being a fully open source Linux distribution by providing the source available both on the CD/DVD medias and the official repositories.

Slackware still has Patrick Volkerding as the BDFL, but some of the long contributor of Slackware Linux has now become part of Slackware Crew, such as Robby Workman and Eric Hameleers. Both are respected Slackware Contributor who has done so many great contribution projects to Slackware development, such as XFCE and XOrg project by Robby and also KDE and Multilib by Eric. Both are also working as admin in SlackBuilds project where thousands of SlackBuild script are maintained in order to provide the best solution to install software applications that are not (yet) included in the official Slackware Linux.

It's been a long 18 years, but i still think Slackware still is the best Linux distribution i have ever used so far. I have tried several Linux distribution, including Mandrake (now turned into Mandriva), OpenSUSE, Debian, Red Hat (now turned into Fedora), Knoppix, and many more, but at the end (exactly in 2005), i fully migrated to Slackware and i have been using it since then. It's now becoming my primary operating system on all of my desktops and laptops, including the servers i maintained on my office. You can say i'm a Slackware addicts

Happy Birthday to Slackware Linux and congratulation for Patrick Volkerding who has become a GREAT father for this 18 years. We hope you keep enjoying this position and release more and better Slackware versions in the future

How to Merge .001 Files

2011-07-15T21:45:00.004+07:00

Sometimes, when we downloaded a file which has big size (say over 500 MB), the provider often split them into several parts using a splitter program. There are a lot of applications that can do this so easily. The problem is how to merge them back?

Today, i downloaded a file which was split and comes with .001 and .002 format. From the format, i can see that it was a file that was split by using HJSplit tool (or any tool that results with the same format) and since it was on my server, it doesn't come up with GUI and i can only use SSH to remotely connect to the server. I couldn't ran any HJSplit tool since it doesn't have any X Server, so i have to think of another option.

Well, it seems that there is a command line version of HJSplit called LXSplit made by Richard Stellingwerff and O. Sezer. I used the SlackBuild script to compile and install them as usual using installpkg and by using this simple command line, i'm able to merge the .001 and .002 files together:
lxsplit -j filename.001

If you want to split a big file (say slackware.bin with 1GB in size) into 100MB part each, you can use this command
lxsplit -s slackware.bin 100MB

Simple right?

Who says that you can't do much in command line?

Security Update: Firefox and Seamonkey

2011-07-15T10:21:00.002+07:00

There are two security updates released today, but each update belongs to different Slackware version.

The first one is Seamonkey which is now updated to Seamonkey 2.2 and aimed for Slackware 13.37 and -Current only. Older version of Slackware still shipped with previous version of Seamonkey.

The second update was Mozilla Firefox which is upgraded to 3.6.19 and it aimed for Slackware 13.0 and 13.1 only. Firefox on -Current is upgraded to 5.0.1, the latest stable even though it was supposed to be a Mac OS X fixes only.

The only surprise is that Thunderbird 5 is now included in -Current. Only last week Thunderbird gets upgraded on -Current and it was still using the previous 3.x series and 6 six days later, it moves on to Thunderbird 5

Adobe Flash Player for 64 bit

2011-07-14T11:05:00.003+07:00

For those who have been waiting for an official release of Adobe Flash Player for 64 bit systems, well, it's time to party as Adobe has officially released Adobe Flash Player 11 which is now on Beta version. Although it's still not the final release, a beta version is way better than the previous Preview Release (Square).
Citing from Phoronix:

It hasn't supports the VA-API acceleration interface available to the open-source Intel driver and AMD Catalyst users, among other drivers/hardware. Nor does it support XvBA. It appears that for hardware-assisted video playback that, for the moment at least, it's still bound to NVIDIA VDPAU under Linux.

Here are the new features in Adobe Flash Player 11 taken from the Release Notes:

Stage3D Accelerated Graphics Rendering
H.264/AVC Software Encoding for Cameras (desktop)
Native JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) Support
G.711 Audio Compression for Telephony
Garbage Collection Advice
Cubic Bezier Curves
Secure Random Number Generator
Protected HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) and Flash Access Enhancements
Socket Progress Events
JPEG-XR support
Enhanced high resolution bitmap support
High efficiency SWF compression support
DisplayObjectContainer.removeChildren and MovieClip.isPlaying
Native 64-bit Support (Flash Player desktop)
Asynchronous Bitmap Decoding (new for Flash Player)
TLS Secure Sockets Support (new for Flash Player)

KCalc is Not Accepting Numbers

2011-07-13T12:28:00.002+07:00

If you upgraded to KDE 4.6.5 from Eric Hameleers and you have been using KCalc, you might have noticed that it doesn't accept inputs from the keyboard and only works with mouse clicks. This is a regression found on KDE 4.6.5 and also in the development version of KDE 4.7, so it's not Eric's fault. It's upstream code, and not due to compilation process.

If you want to fix this, you will have to recompile kdeutils package with the patch described on KDE Bug Tracking System.

Actually i realized this few days ago and i thought there was a problem with my keyboard, but today i realized that it was a regression from the upstream code itself and it's not my keyboard's whose faulty

GSB Repository Changes

2011-07-12T22:40:00.002+07:00

There has been a slight changes on GSB directory naming for GSB 3.0. In the past, it was using current as the Slackware version, but since -Current is slipping away from Slackware 13.37, GSB developers think it would be wise to rename the directory so that users will not be confused.

GSB 3.0 is meant for Slackware 13.37, so if you use Slackware-Current, you *might* have some problems in the future since more and more packages will be upgraded in the development version of Slackware and that could bring some incompatibilities to your system.

If you happened to use UKDW's repository, please have a look on the repository again and please rename your local directory to the same name before starting a new rsync session so that you won't have to resync everything again

Security Update: Bind + Thunderbird

2011-07-09T07:47:00.002+07:00

There are two new security updates coming up this weekend. They are BIND package which affects only Slackware 13.37 and -Current, while Thunderbird packages are being updated back to Slackware 13.0.

While Mozilla has released Thunderbird 5, it seems it will take a while before that version comes up in Slackware-Current. I think Pat is still evaluating Thunderbird 5 before he decided to include it in -Current. It's a nice update though, because it's now based on Firefox 5 codes, which has previously included in Slackware also.

KDE 4.6.5 Released

2011-07-08T00:08:00.003+07:00

Another KDE monthly update and this time, it will KDE 4.6.5 and this release should be the last release of KDE 4.6.x series before KDE starts focusing on KDE 4.7 in the future.

As usual, Eric Hameleers has been so generously providing Slackware users with a precompiled KDE 4.6.5 Slackware packages on his mirrors and now it has been mirrored in several places.

Since Slackware-Current has moved on and there were some incompatible changes (mostly in Perl), it's safer for you to upgrade to Slackware-Current if you want to use Eric's packages or if you want to be safe, you can compile KDE by downloading the sources only and start the SlackBuild script (beware, it's very time and resource consuming).

You can start downloading/mirroring those packages from these repositories:

http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.6.5/
rsync://alien.slackbook.org/alien-kde/4.6.5/
http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.6.5/
rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.6.5/
http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.6.5/
rsync://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.6.5/

LibreOffice 3.4.1: Near Rock-Solid Release

2011-07-07T07:25:00.004+07:00

The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 3.4.1 after a month since their initial release of LibreOffice 3.4.0. This release brings many updates compared to previous release and also translations update, but the developers still added a little warning for those who wanted to use this version on corporate/enterprise level.

The stable version for both enterprise and desktop users are planned in the next release: LibreOffice 3.4.2 and it should be released next month. But that doesn't stop you to use LibreOffice 3.4.1 for now. From my experience, it's working well and it's very stable. Also, you can have a look on the new features on LibreOffice 3.4.x series.

As usual, Eric is the one who provided a precompiled package for Slackware Linux on his repository and now it has been mirrored on several mirror sites below:

Below is the milestone list for LibreOffice development. It should give you a better schedule if you are planning to adapt LibreOffice on your working environment.

New Poll

2011-07-02T08:12:00.003+07:00

Along with the release announcement of Slackware 13.37, Pat also announced that there's a new limited edition of Slackware T-Shirt in Slackware Store. I would like to know what's your opinion about that new item in Slackware Store. The poll will be running for another two months (it's just another laziness of my side) and i hope you can give your votes too

Happy Voting

Poll Results

2011-07-02T07:56:00.002+07:00

It's been two months and now it's time to recap the poll results. There are 134 voters for this poll and i thank you all who have voted for this, so without further ado, here are the final results:
2.6.35.12 2 (1%)
2.6.37.6 64 (47%)
2.6.38.4 33 (24%)
2.6.39-rc4 2 (1%)
Custom Kernel 33 (24%)

Nearly 50% of the voters decided to use the default kernel shipped with Slackware 13.37. It seems that they believe in Pat's choice. I also believe this is the best option at the time Slackware 13.37 was released, even though 2.6.38 has been released.

24% chose to pick 2.6.38.4, which supports better hardware and also provides better performance if combined with the correct xorg, mesa, and intel driver package, but there's a power consumption problem spotted on this release by Michael Larabel of Phoronix.

Another 24% picked to build custom kernel for their machine. I think Slackware's kernel configuration is nearly perfect for day to day configuration, but some people (like me for example) wanted to optimize the kernel or even trimming down the unneeded modules or filesystems, so we end up tweaking the kernel configuration to have different configuration and build it by ourself.

I would like to thank to all voters and see you in the next poll

Security Update: pidgin

2011-06-28T12:27:00.003+07:00

Slackware has released two updates on -Current and one of them is marked as security update. Pidgin is upgraded to 2.9.0 and it travels back to Slackware 12.2. For some time, Pidgin package in previous Slackware version didn't receive any update, but for this update, i think it's quite severe so that Pat decided to upgrade it as well.

On -Current, gnutls is upgraded as well.

Security Update: Firefox

2011-06-25T08:00:00.002+07:00

Firefox 5 has been released and now it's being included in Slackware 13.37 (comes in patches/ directory) and also in -Current, while the previous version gets an older Firefox version (3.6.18). This update is considered a security update.

Java Runtime and Development Kit are now upgraded to Update 26 as well. This should fix several problems mentioned on my previous post. Unfortunately, these updates goes only at -Current, so if you want to apply for previous version of Slackware, you will have to grab the source and recompile it on your own system.

Another improvements made to -Current is ghostscript, which is now upgraded to 9.02. Pat is welcoming any reports about this update suppose you find any problems with this new version. Some people has reported that this version has lots of improvements compared to the previous one, so he's considering to apply this in Slackware 13.37 as well if nothing goes wrong in -Current.

LibreOffice 3.3.3 for Stable Users

2011-06-22T13:07:00.004+07:00

Eric has released the updated LibreOffice 3.3.3 branch for those who seeks for stability over new features in LibreOffice 3.4.0. It's still on the default location, but you should go to pkg/13.1/ directory as these packages are built in 13.1, although it **should** work on 13.37 as well

Give it a try and see if it has a compatibility problem when running on top of Slackware 13.37

You can get them from below's repository:

http://connie.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/pkg/13.1/
http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/pkg/13.1/
http://slackware.org.uk/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/pkg/13.1/
http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-libreoffice/pkg/13.1/

PAE Support on VirtualBox

2011-06-21T13:41:00.004+07:00

This morning, i decided to upgrade one of my virtual machine running Slackware 13.37 into -Current. I started by editing /etc/slackpkg/mirrors and switch to Slackware-Current tree and i start updating by issuing

slackpkg update
slackpkg upgrade-all

I skipped slackpkg install-new since there are no new packages yet at this moment. I also installed the new kernel, 2.6.38.7 on this virtual machine.

Once i make sure everything is properly set up, i restarted the machine (it has been running for about 34 days non stop), and waited until it boots. Since it's a headless system, i have no interaction until the OpenSSH daemon is started and then i can login to that system. On my case, after waiting for 20 seconds or so, i tried to connect to the system, but i have no login prompt. I waited another 10 seconds and still no responds.

At this time, i realize there is a problem with the new kernel, so i fired up KRDC and loggin using VRDE extension on the VirtualBox and i saw that it requires PAE support on VirtualBox. I haven't enabled this when i set up this virtual machine, so i had to enable it in order to make it bootable again since the new kernel configuration in Slackware-Current enables HIGHMEM64G support which also enables PAE automatically.

So i shut down the virtual machine and i issued:
VBoxManage modifyvm SlackVM2 --pae on
This enables PAE support and afterwards, it boots normally again

I hope you will take notice when you decided to move on to -Current using VirtualBox

Security Update: Fetchmail

2011-06-21T06:39:00.001+07:00

Slackware has released a new package to fix security vulnerabilities in Fetchmail package. This update is not only for -Current, back it travels back up to Slackware 8.1. It shows how Slackware maintain a release for a long period compared to other distributions.

In -Current, Seamonkey packages are upgraded as well. The latest beta has been superceeded by a final version of 2.1. Along with fetchmail update, getmail is also upgraded to the latest version.

Important Java Update

2011-06-18T17:54:00.004+07:00

As you probably know, Oracle has released an update for Java 6 SE (JDK/JRE) Update 26 which contains a security fixes according to the release notes and more detail information can be seen on Oracle's website here and here. You might ask, why Slackware hasn't release any update for this packages on -Stable and also on -Current?

Actually there's someone who asked me this question few days ago via email. At first, i didn't see the security fixes mentioned at the release note, so i said to him that Slackware's policy is not to update any packages in -Stable unless there's a security vulnerabilities (moreover when they have CVE entries). He sent me another page (which was those two URL in Oracle's website above) that described the cumulative update for for JDK/JRE package and it affects previous Java 6 Update 25 and it has 17 CVEs . Yes, 17 CVEs, but some (or most) of it only exists on Windows platform, so i don't mind about it too much.

Later on, i found out that Slackware's policy is not to update blob packages (like those JDK/JRE) in -Stable releases (Thanks to Pat for the info). It will be updated on -Current only. Users of -Stable releases will have to work on their own to fix this problem. Actually, it's super duper easy to do that. As you know, users can always get the SlackBuild script on the source/ directory and get the source for the new JDK/JRE package and edit the VERSION line to build the new package for their own need. It's that simple

Since it contains quite a lot of security fixes, it's recommended to upgrade to the latest version if you happened to use Java applications or often browsing to websites which uses Java applet frequently.

Monitor Traffic Usage Using darkstat

2011-06-17T08:32:00.002+07:00

Sometimes, we wanted to monitor our network traffic usage daily or even hourly. There are a lot of tools out there and most of them are based on RRD Tools, which is a great application, but it adds more maintenance as there are more packages to install in order to satisfy the requirements.

What i need is a simple application that shows the traffic usage and i need it displayed on a web based interface so i can monitor it anywhere as long as there's a browser and Internet connection without having to login to that machine and following the log files.

I searched a bit and doing trial and error and finally i made up my mind that i picked darkstat. It's simple, no hassle, and it solves my needs.

INSTALLATION

Download the latest version from their official website (3.0.714 at this moment)
Download the SlackBuild script for darkstat
Extract the SlackBuild script
Edit the VERSION line to match the version you downloaded
Switch to root and execute the SlackBuild script. The final package will be placed on /tmp (by default)
Install the package using installpkg
Finish the installation procedure

CONFIGURATION
There's not much to configure actually. You can start darkstat by issuing darkstat -i ethX (replace X with your ethernet device)

By default, it will bind to port 667, so you can have a look on the stats by browsing to http://youripaddress:667

If you want to bind it to other port, just add -p portnumber parameter, for example darkstat -i eth0 -p 4444

There are some filtering in darkstat, but in most cases, you want to have a look on all traffic, so we skip this step. If you need more information about filtering the output, check the man page for darkstat.

This application doesn't add itself to the crontab or even at startup files, so if you wanted to run this application everytime your machine is booted, you can add this line to /etc/rc.d/rc.local:

# Start DarkStat Monitoring Tool
/usr/sbin/darkstat -i eth0 -p 4444

That's it!!! So simple and you can even finish this tutorial in less than 5 minutes

New Linux NVidia Driver

2011-06-15T00:01:00.001+07:00

NVidia has been working on a new driver for some time and they even release several Beta release, but now it has been unveiled to public that a new stable version is out. Please welcome 275.09.07. It brings a lot of bug fixes along with new extensions. Here are the highlights:

Fixed a bug that caused desktop corruption in GNOME 3 after a VT-switch or suspend/resume cycle.
Added support for the following GPUs:
GeForce GTX 560
GeForce GT 545
GeForce GTX 560M
GeForce 410M
GeForce 320M
GeForce 315M
Quadro 5010M
Quadro 3000M
Quadro 4000M
Fixed a bug that caused freezes and crashes when resizing windows in KDE 4 with desktop effects enabled using X.Org X server version 1.10 or later.
Modified the X driver to request that hardware inform the audio driver whenever a display is disabled. This will allow the audio driver to generate the appropriate jack unplug events to applications.
Added support for the GL_EXT_x11_sync_object extension. See the extension specification in the OpenGL registry here:
http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/EXT/x11_sync_object.txt for more details.
Improved performance of window resize operations in KDE 4 on systems with slow CPUs.
Added support for hardware button based pairing to NVIDIA 3D Vision Pro. Single click button on the hub to enter into a pairing mode which pairs one pair of glasses at a time. Double click the same button on the hub to enter into a pairing mode which pairs multiple pairs of glasses at a time.
Added unofficial GLX protocol support (i.e., for GLX indirect rendering) for the following OpenGL extensions:
GL_NV_framebuffer_multisample_coverage
GL_NV_texture_barrier
Added GLX protocol support (i.e., for GLX indirect rendering) for the following OpenGL extension:
GL_NV_register_combiners2
Fixed a bug that caused the pop-out and external DVI displays to go blank on Lenovo ThinkPad W701 laptops.
Fixed a bug that caused corruption on the menus in OpenOffice.org when the screen is rotated.
Improved performance of certain memory allocations.
Fixed a bug that caused Java2D widgets to disappear when Java is configured to render using FBOs.
Fixed a bug that caused nvidia-settings to crash while saving the X configuration file on some Linux distributions.
Added a new X configuration option "BaseMosaic" which can be used to extend a single X screen transparently across all of the available display outputs on each GPU. See "Appendix B. X Config Options" in the README for more information.

I have just upgraded to this version

KDE 4.6.4 Goes Public

2011-06-11T00:51:00.003+07:00

The calendar has switched to June and it's time for the monthly maintenance update of KDE SC. Once again, Eric stepped up providing KDE 4.6.4 packages for Slackware 13.37 and -Current on his repositories, which has been mirrored on several other servers, including my server.

Even though there hasn't been any confirmation whether KDE SC 4.7 will be included in the next Slackware release or not (due to the packaging policy), Eric has made clear that he likes KDE and he will keep maintaining KDE SC 4.6.x series for the time being.

So, without further ado, start grabbing KDE SC 4.6.4 while it's hot from the kitchen

There are several places than you can visit, but if you live in Indonesia, it would be faster if you grab it from Indonesian mirror :

http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.6.4/
rsync://alien.slackbook.org/alien-kde/4.6.4/
http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.6.4/
rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.6.4/
http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.6.4/
rsync://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.6.4/

Remember to read the README before proceeding with upgrading/installing these packages.

Kudos to Eric Hameleers and also to KDE team

LinuxToday Effect

2011-06-08T07:24:00.003+07:00

I was browsing LinuxToday this morning and i was kinda surprised to see my previous post would come up on that site. It's the post about KDE's Future on Slackware. It seems that the news about Slackware and KDE is quite hot, so that some people decided to post it on LinuxToday.

And the result is a big load of traffic coming to this blog on that day. Luckily, this blog is hosted at Google's infrastructure, so i don't have to have to pay additional cost for the high load and not getting a LinuxToday effect (just like Slashdot Effect) I usually gets around 400-600 pageviews everyday based on Blogspot's stats, but on the day it was posted, the traffic went up exponentially just like the screenshot below

LibreOffice 3.4.0 for Slackware 13.37

2011-06-05T22:01:00.002+07:00

LibreOffice 3.4.0 has been released yesterday and for those who uses Slackware Linux distribution, you can enjoy the package which is built for Slackware 13.37 from AlienBOB. There are several places where you can download from:
http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/
http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/
http://slackware.org.uk/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/
http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-libreoffice/

Please note that LibreOffice 3.4.0 is more likely intended for contributors and power users, even though Eric has mentioned that Slackware users are most likely power users . If you still like the stable version and not taking the risk (and fun of a new version), you can still have 3.3.x series which will still be maintained by LibreOffice and also Eric himself for some time until the upstream decided to abandoned 3.3.x series.

Enjoy LibreOffice and thanks to Eric Hameleers for his hard work compiling them for Slackware users

KDE Future on Slackware

2011-06-04T08:56:00.004+07:00

There has been a hot discussion on KDE's packager mailing list about KDE's new policy of splitting up the big packages into several small packages as you can see as in KDE's FTP site. In the past, KDE only break them into several packages, depending on the category, such as kdeadmin, kdemultimedia, kdepim, etc.

What's the impact? Well, for Slackware's KDE maintainer point of view, this breaks almost every SlackBuild script that they have created in the past, since now they have to rework it again from the scratch and that would requires a lot of time and efforts to create the best SlackBuild script in order to compile KDE into Slackware's native packages. Eric Hameleers aka AlienBOB wrote this on his blog and it refers to the discussion on KDE's mailing list where the discussion happened (it was on another private mailing list, but this one is the public mailing list for the release team).

Not only it breaks the SlackBuilds script, but it also causes more burden to the maintainer to maintain the packages. The situation is similar with what happened in GNOME in the past. They required a lot of efforts to maintain the packages since they were split into a lot of small packages, thus requiring the maintainer to track every released version. If you don't believe me, take a look on GSB-3.0's ChangeLog and you will understand. It's a rolling release, means it continues to change over time, unlike KDE which usually release set of changes on a monthly period. IMHO, a rolling release has it's own benefit, but for the maintainer, it would be a nightmare as they have to catch up with the latest update all the time.

So, what will happen with KDE on Slackware in future releases? We still don't have a definite answer yet, as the discussion on KDE's mailing list still on progress and also we have a discussion at LQ where Pat, Eric, and most of Slackware users shares their thoughts. If you have any ideas, thoughts, please post it on LQ as well.

One positive reaction from Pat is the fact that KDE is his favorite DE at this moment and i really hope that it would remain the same in the future. I personally a KDE lover as well and i don't really want KDE to be removed from Slackware just like what happened with GNOME on Slackware 10.2.

Slackware Goodies Shipment

2011-06-01T08:18:00.003+07:00

Since last week, Slackware goodies that we (Indonesian Slackware Communities) has arrived safely at my house even though it took longer than i thought (6 days instead of 3 days) and since then, i began to distribute them to the buyers around Indonesia (Palembang, Makassar, Jakarta, Surabaya, Cirebon, Magelang, Kalimantan).

Since i used TIKI and it has a tracking number, it's so easy to track the progress of the shipment, just like what we used for international shipping from Slackware Store by using UPS. Right now, only five shipments left. Two will be delivered since the receiver will take it today, and the rest will be delivered by today or tomorrow at most since it has been shipped since like two days ago.

I'm so relieved that all the shipment has arrived safely, since i had a bad experience when i bought Smashing Magazine. They sent it using air mail and it didn't arrive until they decided to resent the book using upgraded shipping method that provide tracking number

Again, thanks to Theresa from Slackware Store for taking care our orders and also for Indonesian Slackware Community. I hope the new SlackwareT-Shirt fits you well

Please Welcome Linux Kernel 3.0

2011-05-30T09:10:00.005+07:00

There has been a lot of debates whether Linus will release the next major Kernel as 2.6.40, 2.8, or 3.0. Well, the answer is now definite. Linus will use a new naming as Linux Kernel 3.0 for the next release as he already tagged 3.0-rc1. The reason is because the number in the current 2.6.x series has reached 39 and the development has grown so much. In fact, previous 2.2 and 2.4 didn't get this big, so he thought it would be nice to bump the kernel version to a fresh one and thus it goes to 3.0.

So, the next Slackware release will likely use Linux Kernel 3.0 for it's default kernel. It has big improvements to previous kernel releases, but there might be some drawbacks. The 3.0 kernel will likely to remove some old hardware supports, so if you are using an old hardware, this is probably the perfect timing to invest for new hardware in the future.

If Slackware keeps using SLACKWARE_VERSION.KERNEL_VERSION naming scheme, then the next Slackware release could be 14.30 14.0 (Thanks to Pat for correcting this)

GCC Recompiled

2011-05-29T12:53:00.003+07:00

GCC is being rebuilt to enable Garbage Collection feature on Objective-C. Even though it only affects gcc-objc package, all of the GCC packages must be rebuilt to syncronize the version number.

Meanwhile, file has been upgraded to 5.0.7. I hope this fixes a problem described in LQ

Security Update: BIND

2011-05-28T10:52:00.002+07:00

Another security update has been released. The latest advisory is related to BIND. ISC has released an advisory that describe the attack details and also the workaround on their home page. This security update is released for -Current and back to older Slackware release. Since i only host up to Slackware 12.2, i can only tell that it's propagated back to 12.2, but further version might be updated as well.

Security Update and -Current Development

2011-05-26T07:33:00.004+07:00

Two security updates were released and this updates were similar to the previous security updates regarding apr-* and httpd packages. If you are using -Current, then there's more interesting news besides normal security updates.

Pat has started to upgrade several basic packages in -Current tree. This means that -Current development is now starting again (it's a warm up level as far as i can see, as there are no major changes besides the Kernel for now).

Gentleman, start your engine for -Current again

Some notable highlights:

Kernel upgraded to 2.6.38.7 with some changes in the configuration
GCC upgraded to 4.5.3, still no luck with GCC 4.6
Glibc is rebuilt, no further release yet
Some development tools are upgraded (Perl 5.14, GIT 1.7.5.1)
Mesa is upgraded to latest stable 7.10.2 along with libdrm 2.4.25

The other were minor upgrade and may not be that interesting for most people.

VMWare Restored and Patch for Linux Kernel 2.6.39

2011-05-25T03:15:00.003+07:00

After being frustated for few months due to my VMWare not functioning, i finally able to revive it again. It seems the culprit was the removal of HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer). VMWare still depends on HAL, so by removing HAL, it would break the application.

In order to get it working again, i trace the syscall of VWware, but found nothing. At last, i found it in VMWare's log called ui.log in /tmp/vmware-<username> directory. It clearly said that i should start hald as root. I checked my /etc/rc.d/rc.hald script and it didn't have any execute permission, meaning that it wasn't started at boot. So, what i did was add an execute permission and start it manually. After that, i re-run VMWare and voila... it works

Also, if you need to patch your VMWare in Linux Kernel 2.6.39, get the patch from here.

Using Kernel Linux 2.6.39

2011-05-22T05:41:00.005+07:00

As soon as the new stable kernel has been released by Linus Torvalds, i downloaded them and install it on my workstation few days ago. It was a nice release, and one thing i would like to test is the new EXT 4 SMP scalability and also further performance improvements after they removed the BKL (Big Kernel Lock) and many other patches from the kernel developers. At that time, i didn't install it on my desktop first, since i'm not really sure whether the current NVidia driver already supported this new kernel or not.

Since few days ago NVidia launched a new driver, 270.41.19, i quickly downloaded this driver and then compile the new kernel on my desktop and at the moment, i'm compiling it on my laptop as i'm writing this post. The new NVidia driver already have support for Linux Kernel 2.6.39, so if you are curious about the new kernel and you are using NVidia, go for it

Here's the result on my workstation:
Linux office 2.6.39-smp #1 SMP Thu May 19 21:31:28 WIT 2011 i686 Intel(R) Core(TM) i3 CPU 540 @ 3.07GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

and here's on my desktop
Linux desktop 2.6.39-smp #1 SMP Sat May 21 06:50:01 WIT 2011 i686 Pentium(R) Dual-Core CPU E5300 @ 2.60GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

and lastly, my laptop
Linux laptop 2.6.39-smp #1 SMP Sun May 22 05:17:13 WIT 2011 i686 Genuine Intel(R) CPU U7300 @ 1.30GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

Donation Target Acquired

2011-05-18T00:28:00.004+07:00

Less than a week. That's the time required to collect the money needed to replace the server that is hosting several Slackware-related projects in http://cardinal.lizella.net/. What an amazing progress and this are contributed work of a lot of people in SBo, LQ, and many other communities around Slackware users

Robby Workman has just announced that they have acquired enough money to get a better server than what they planned before and yet, they still can send substantial money to Pat

It's a great achievement from Slackware community and this again shows how Slackware communities are so loyal to it's main project, Slackware Linux and also their beloved BDFL, Patrick Volkerding

Security Update: apr

2011-05-14T15:54:00.002+07:00

Apr library is reported to have a security vulnerabilities and for that reason, it has been upgraded to the latest version and so does apr-util package and also httpd package even though it's only a bug fix release. The httpd must be recompiled since there's a change in the apr, so it's included by this batch of update as well.

Support Needed

2011-05-14T00:27:00.003+07:00

Most of the Slackware Crew's work that we enjoyed nowadays are hosted at http://cardinal.lizella.net/. There are SlackBook, Slackpkg, Sbopkg, Robby Workman's web, AlienBOB's Wiki and Blog, an official mirror for XFCE, netfilter/iptables tutorial, mailing lists for SlackBuilds.org, DNS and email for SlackBuilds.org, and many more.

There was no problem with the hosting server, but recently, the old server was having a rough time maintaining it's availability and it's causing more and more problems to the maintainers, so the Crew thought it is probably the right time to migrate to a new server. Check Robby's post on SlackBuilds-User mailing list.

FYI, Cardinal is an old 1u server with dual P3 Coppermine procs and 3G of ram and it's running Slackware 13.37. Check the personal system information page if you don't believe me

Alan Hicks is making a new spec for new server and it would cost around USD 1000++ (They are going to add more disk storage onto it so that it could host more Slackware-related projects in the future). The new machine will have a three years of hardware warranty, which is a good post-sales offer since it will be running 24/7.

The Crew hates to say this, but they need a lot of donations from the community to buy the new server. If you feel that the above projects had helped you in the past or in your current situation, you can repay them back by donating some of your money for the new server deployment. The Crew will not make any profit from it because they also wanted to give back to the free software world. When the donation gets beyond their spendings for the server, the rest of the money will be donated to Slackware Linux Project, which is a good way to make Slackware Linux keeps running.

You can start donating by visiting Cardinal's Website and click on the Donate button. You will see Robby's PayPal account there and you can start donating

Better GTK/KDE Integration

2011-05-10T08:22:00.005+07:00

If you are KDE users but you used a lot of GTK-based applications, there is a solution for you to make the look-n-feel much likely the same. Eric has build a new package called oxygen-gtk, a port of the default KDE widget theme to GTK. By installing this package, all GTK-based applications will have the same look-n-feel as in KDE apps.

Don't forget to copy /usr/share/themes/oxygen-gtk/gtk-2.0/gtkrc configuration file to your home directory into the file ~/.gtkrc-2.0 and make sure you logged out and logged in again to see the effect.

KDE 4.6.3 for Slackware 13.37

2011-05-09T05:43:00.004+07:00

While Slackware-Current development has not publicly visible, Eric keeps maintaining KDE 4.6.x series in his KTown repository and now releasing KDE 4.6.3 series for Slackware 13.37 and -Current (basically they are still in the same level for now). It's another monthly maintenance version of KDE, so it's safe to upgrade since there are no new features on this update, only bug fixes and translations updates.

UKDW Repository has finished mirroring the packages and it's ready to be downloaded through this url: http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/. Please note that there is a new package on this release besides the regular one in deps, which is bluedevil. This notes are taken from Eric's blog post:

Bluedevil is the new bluetooth connection manager for KDE. It integrates well with KDE (you will find a “send to bluetooth device” in Dolphin’s context menu for instance). The old “kbluetooth” application is no longer developed and the GTK application in Slackware “blueman” is not as featureful.

Enjoy KDE 4.6.3 and again, thanks to Eric Hameleers for his work of providing this packages

What's Next?

2011-05-08T21:39:00.005+07:00

Slackware 13.37 has been proven to be a stable and secure release. But that won't stop Slackware development towards next release (even though we might not see the next release in short time). Slackware is evolving as the upstream goes since it tries to deliver a complete Linux distribution that is up to date without sacrificing it's motto of keeping it simple, secure, and stable.
I have no idea what will the next Slackware codename be. It could be 14.0 (back to the old Slackware naming style) or probably it will use the current SLACKWARE_VERSION.KERNEL_VERSION naming just what we have in Slackware 13.37. What i'm quite positive is that it will be a major upgrade, so it will have a Slackware version of 14.

So here's what i had in my mind about what should be in the next Slackware release. Remember that this is my personal wishlist, not Pat's mind, so the final outcome will definitely NOT 100% accurate:

KDE 4.7.x
XFCE 4.8.x
Linux Kernel 2.6.40.x/2.6.41.x
Python 2.7.x/3.1.x
Perl 5.14.x
Glibc 2.13/2.14
Completely removal of HAL and replace it with udev and udisk
Slackbook 3.0 (this is out of Slackware development, but it's still related)
Removal of Bittorrent (it's outdated and no longer updated since 2008)
Support of GRUB 2.0 (1.99 currently the latest release)

If you have any good ideas for next Slackware, please write it down in comment area. Hopefully Pat sees your ideas and who knows he might include it in the next Slackware

Update (15 May 2011): Added Perl 5.14 as a new wishlist as it has been marked as stable and a .1 release will be out in a month, which is enough to mark it as stable for production usage.

Update (15 May 2011): Added GRUB 2.0 support in /testing. The latest release is GRUB 1.99 which is just released by Vladimir Serbinenko. I personally never used GRUB, but other users prefer to use GRUB instead of LILO, so it's a good idea to support them as well