Jade Memorial Stone

Three weeks after her untimely death, Jade now has a memorial stone to mark her final resting place. Thanks to Nancy McComas at Carved Graphics for working with us on it. She agreed to place a custom image on it for us, and we are very pleased with the result. I certainly hope that none of you find yourself in a similar situation with losing a beloved pet, but if you do, I can recommend Carved Graphics without reservation.

Interview with Volkerding

Pat Volkerding, the Slackware maintainer, was interviewed by The Linux Link Tech Show last night - it's available in OGG (preferred) or MP3 format.

OpenOffice.org 2.0.4 Released!

...and I've got a good package for Slackware! I had to work around a bug in Xfce to get the Menu entries to work properly in Xfce, but that's settled now, and this package was built with what is almost certainly the cleanest script I've ever used for it - it just keeps getting better with time... :) Thanks to the numerous people who've provided feedback on both the script and packages. Also, updates to wine-0.9.23 and gqview-2.1.2 should be coming soon.

I've got a new stable version of vte (which is bundled with Xfce for Terminal) pulled down, but I'm going to hold off until the Xfce developers release 4.4rc2 before I rebuild Xfce - they've got the xfdesktop mess with dbus/dbus-glib sorted out, and those dependencies will no longer be required, so I can make packages available for a stock Slackware 11.0 system without adding other deps. For those who want the added functionality (and bugs) of dbus, I'll continue to offer builds against it as well.

OpenOffice.org 2.0.4 RC3

I've posted some new OpenOffice.org 2.0.4 RC3 packages in my /testing repository - give it a try and see what you think. Among the many bugfixes and feature enhancements slated for 2.0.4, two are notable. First, 2.0.4 will have an 'online update' feature similar to what's available in Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird; exactly how this will work and how/if it will be compatible with repackaged binaries remains to be seen. Second, OOo will now honor proxy settings and default mail client settings configured in kde. Feedback is certainly encouraged; if you would prefer to build the package yourself with the build script, here it is.

Slackware 11.0 Released!

After an unusually long development cycle, Slackware 11.0 has been released. There are a lot of changes since the 10.2 release, so if you're upgrading from a previous version, be sure to read up on them.