Roblog

Podcast on SlackBuilds.org and sbopkg

2008-05-02T08:09:00.002-05:00

In a talk about his sbopkg project, Chess Griffin talked a bit about Slackware and SlackBuilds.org in general. It's a good discussion for anyone with a bit of free time to listen, so grab it at The Bad Apples site.

kde-4.0.70

2008-04-23T09:52:00.003-05:00

I pushed out packages of kde 4.0.70 yesterday; this is intended to be the last snapshot before the 4.1.0 alpha1 release (according to the kde team).

The packages (and sources) are at http://kde4.rlworkman.net/; also, be sure to read the _README file for installation/upgrade instructions and known bugs/workarounds.

Slackware 12.1 rc2 released!

2008-04-23T09:50:00.001-05:00

It's close, folks... :)

From the ChangeLog:
Mon Apr 21 16:47:32 CDT 2008
We have now reached the Slackware 12.1 RC2 milestone. :-) We're beyond updating packages or fixing minor cosmetic bugs at this point (actually, we had hoped to be past that with RC1, but there were still items in need of attention). What we have here now has proven to be stable for our testers, so unless some real showstoppers are found we'll be releasing this as Slackware 12.1-final soon.

kde-4.0.2 packages

2008-03-24T10:53:00.002-05:00

Thanks to a bit of gentle prodding from Benoit Beauchamp over at Recycled Space :) and a bit of spare time, I've finally got kde-4.0.2 packaged for Slackware -current (soon to be 12.1, we think) :)

It's in the same place as before -- http://kde4.rlworkman.net/, and there are new builds of *every* package in the tree, as well as some rearrangement of the source tree.

As I mentioned before, I can't offer rsync or ftp access from the box hosting these package, so http is all I can do... Enjoy! -RW

kde-4.0.1 on Slackware

2008-02-13T14:14:00.004-06:00

I just pushed some updates to the kde4 packages for Slackware -current; now we have kde-4.0.1 packs.

The download location has moved though - I decided to take advantage of some previously unused bandwidth and space on my 1and1.com shared hosting account.

Get them at http://kde4.rlworkman.net/.

KDE4 Release Event

2008-01-20T01:30:00.000-06:00

Well, Alan and I are sitting in the airport at San Jose waiting on our flight (it's been delayed due to weather conditions in Atlanta). The KDE4 Release Event was outstanding!

We met quite a few kde developers, and they gave several very interesting talks on new functionality present in the kde 4.x series. We all typically think of kde as a linux and bsd thing, but now it's a valid option on both Windows and MacOSX - we saw it running natively on both of those.

Of course, it was nice meeting some kde developers and other free software users and developers from around the world, but one of the highlights was hanging out with Patrick Volkerding and a few other Slackware team members. Fred Emmott, the developer of Slamd64 (an unofficial port of Slackware to 64 bit systems) also made the trip from England - it was an interesting task handling translation for him and Alan to be able to communicate ;-)

Big thanks to the KDE project and Google for hosting this event, and to Pat, Amrit, Alan, and Fred: it was great meeting you guys and being able to put faces with IRC nicks! Same to Chess Griffin - I'm glad you accidentally found us :)

For everyone out there reading this, I know you want a pic of everyone, so here you are:

KDE4!

2008-01-15T13:43:00.000-06:00

Two announcements...

First, I've just pushed some long-awaited packages of kde-4.0.0 for Slackware. They are only for Slackware -current (this is the development version of Slackware, not the latest stable release), and no, that doesn't mean that the next release of Slackware will have kde-4.0.0 in it.
See the latest post on my ChangeLog:
http://rlworkman.net/pkgs/current/ChangeLog.txt
(Tue Jan 15 17:06:38 UTC 2008).

Second, I'll be attending the release event at Google this weekend, along with Pat, Alan, and Amrit. Fred (slamd64) is also going to be there, so we plan to have a grand time! :-)

Slackware -current is public! :-)

2007-10-17T16:13:00.000-05:00

After (hopefully) squashing all of the big bugs, -current development leading to Slackware 12.1 has been made public - see the Change Log for details.

Eric Hameleers and I have also got the vast majority of our unofficial add-on packages ready for use on -current -- see http://slackware.com/~alien/ for Eric's or http://rlworkman.net/pkgs/current/ for mine.

Alabama LUGFest

2007-09-22T12:13:00.000-05:00

Greetings from the Alabama LUG Fest 2007 at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. There are only fifteen of us here right now, but among those in attendance are me and Alan Hicks :-)

I'll be doing a presentation on Introduction to Netfilter and Iptables at some point today, so wish me luck :-)

Makenna Lillian Workman :-)

2007-08-07T17:17:00.001-05:00

Greetings and good hello!

I've been mostly off the net for several days, but it's been well worth the wait.
Makenna was born on August 4th, 2007 at 1214 hours, and both mom and baby are doing well.
Pics and such at http://rlworkman.net/makenna/.

Happy Birthday, Slackware!

2007-07-16T16:36:00.000-05:00

Slackware 1.0 was released on July 16th, 1993 - so Slackware is now 14 years old (and the oldest Linux distribution still in active development and use).

Congratulations to Pat and the rest of the Slackware team for continuing to produce a great product!

Slackware 12.0 Released!

2007-07-02T15:44:00.000-05:00

Sun Jul 1 22:30:42 CDT 2007
http://slackware.osuosl.org/slackware-12.0/RELEASE_NOTES

Baby Name? :)

2007-06-03T20:25:00.000-05:00

Well, we've been crafty about avoiding inquiries of the upcoming baby's name until now, but we made an official announcement today at the baby shower my family gave: Makenna Lillian Workman will be her name. makenna AT rlworkman.net ;-)

Making Linux "Easy" - Take 2

2007-05-10T13:18:00.000-05:00

Names have been hidden to protect the guilty, but while lurking in the Hardware Abstraction Layer channel on Freenode (#hal), I saw this:

I'm looking for a command line program to mount and unmount as opposed 
to having icons show up on my KDE or Gnome desktop, as I don't use KDE 
or Gnome, or even have a Desktop.

Now, maybe I'm just a purist, but as I see it, this is manifestation of a disturbing trend in making linux "easy" for new users. The fact that a linux user can be completely unaware of the existence of mount(8) really bothers me. Viva la Slackware!

Linux for Newbs :-)

2007-04-16T15:47:00.000-05:00

Well, here's a change from the usual posts - I'm going to do a bit of a rant, I guess...
Taken from DistroWatch:

Speaking about downloads, here is an interesting piece of statistics found in the latest Linux Mint weekly newsletter: "Seven mirrors were made available for [Linux Mint 2.2] Bianca. Three of them counted 592,950 downloads." Linux Mint has been climbing rather dramatically on the DistroWatch's Page Hit Ranking statistics and the download figures -- nearly 600,000 (!) downloads recorded by just three of the seven available mirrors -- confirm the simple truth: many Linux users are looking for a distribution that works out of the box, without any post-install installation of device drivers, multimedia codecs and browser plugins. Linux Mint has delivered exactly that. And although the advocates of Free Software will not be pleased by this fact, there is little doubt that many computer users are attracted to Linux not because it offers the freedom to modify the source code, but because it's good, it's fun, and it's free of cost.

My thoughts:
How exactly does this "Linux Mint" help the overall state of free software? They are catering to new users, and perhaps by doing so, they are getting more "market share" (whatever that means). Perhaps I'm being a bit harsh, but as a whole, those "new users" are most likely lazy - they don't want to have to do any research on their own or figure out how anything works. Furthermore, since they're drawn more to the lack of cost as opposed to the open nature of the software, those users are almost certainly not going to be contributing financially to their distribution of choice. Maybe I'm missing something, but what's the point? So you've got users who are too clueless to help with development and too cheap to pay for it. Congratulations - I hope you're proud.

SlackWorld Feature!

2007-04-15T13:56:00.000-05:00

For whatever reason, the guys over at The Slack World thought I was worthy of this month's "Persona Grata" feature, so they fired off a few questions and gathered some responses. You can find it on their home page (linked above) or go directly to the interview.

It's a girl!

2007-03-19T00:40:00.000-05:00

Well, it *will* be a girl when it arrives :D

As I announced back in December, my wife and I are expecting our first child in early August, and we found out last week that it will be a little girl. That's not official yet, so it's subject to change, but the ultrasound images are rather unequivocal. :-)

Changes to the site

2007-03-19T00:36:00.000-05:00

Now that Slackware -current is moving again, most (if not all) of my work hosted here will be aimed at the -current development branch. I plan to maintain stable release versions of (most of) the packages hosted here now, but don't expect any new applications for 11.0 - the only work I'll be doing on 11.0 will be testing build scripts associated with SlackBuilds.org.

Over the next couple of weeks, I plan to get -current packages for everything already on my site - be patient... :)

Slack -current is public :)

2007-03-19T00:01:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the long hiatus - there has been (and still is) a lot going on, and it's tough to find the time required to update a blog via a dialup connection...

After several months of heavy development out of the public spotlight, Slackware -current is now ready for a wider audience. See the ChangeLog for the latest changes, and be sure to read the Changes and Hints page if you're doing an upgrade from Slackware 11.

Changes to site

2007-01-11T00:00:00.000-06:00

As indicated on the main page, I've mostly finished some major overhaul of the site backend - everything has been modularized using PHP (but still no dynamic content - no need for it). The may be some broken links in a few places, and some of your existing bookmarks may no longer be valid, but otherwise, everything should be fully functional now. By the way, everything you see is now hosted on cardinal, but the DNS records haven't been moved yet. Until I (and rob0) can find time to get the mail aliases set up properly, I'm going to leave the DNS and MX at 1and1...

Move of cardinal

2007-01-07T13:36:00.000-06:00

Over the Christmas holidays, Alan Hicks and I moved cardinal, a Slackware server which we share ownership with three other guys, to the Simple Communications facility here in Tuscaloosa. Simple Communications is the parent company of M3Server, a web/email/dedicated server hosting company which provides the actual network infrastructure for cardinal. In our short time there so far, the guys at SimpleCom/M3Server have been very supportive and easy to work with. They use, understand, and support open-source software, so if you're looking for dedicated server hosting with good rates and good support, I can *highly* recommend giving them a call. Be sure to tell them we sent you :)

Lots of updates

2007-01-07T13:11:00.000-06:00

PiterPUNK has released updated packages and sources of udev-104 and sysvinit-2.86 for testing on Slackware 11.0 - nearly identical packages are also hosted here.

I've released updated packages of Xfce-4.4rc2 with vte split from the main package; you will need to install the vte package after upgrading to the new Xfce package. If you were using the Xfce package built against dbus and dbus-glib, it's been removed - the Xfce /testing package now requires all of dbus, dbus-glib, and gamin (plus the common dependency of vte), so be sure to get all of those if you want all of the "bells and whistles" in the new 4.4 release candidates. I debated moving this out of /testing into the main repository, as it seems very stable and usable here and in feedback I've gotten, but for the time being, I'm going to leave it in /testing.

I've also rebuilt quite a few packages in the last few days after cleaning up the build scripts; I caught at least one bug in my patch to apcupsd, so that was a productive exercise. Check the ChangeLog to see the full list.

I've rearranged the site a fair amount over the last few days too - the SlackBuilds Section is now much less populated, as package sources are no longer placed there. Instead, I moved all of the package sources here to maintain better compliance with the GPL (which means I don't have to bother with email requests for sources any more) :).

Finally, we've been busy over at SlackBuilds.org too - we had more than 25 new commits in the last ChangeLog there. Thanks to all of the other admins and all the submitters for the great work!

Pitter-patter of little feet...

2006-12-25T21:41:00.000-06:00

To the enormous delight of our families, Marla and I announced today that we are expecting a new addition in or around early August 2007. We've known about this for approximately a month now, but we wanted to surprise our families with an announcement at Christmas. Look out world - there's another geek on the way! ;-)

New kde-3.5.5 testing packages

2006-12-22T22:54:00.000-06:00

The last several days have been quite busy! :) I've posted some testing packages of kde-3.5.5. They are compiled with dbus, dbus-glib bindings, dbus-qt3 bindings, gamin, and all of the kmail-gpg integration packages, as the goal is to test all of those things as a whole. In other words, if you're just wanting a shiny new kde version number for whatever reason, then these packages are not for you - these are intended for intermediate/advanced Slackware users who are interested in and capable of testing things that are slated for possible inclusion in Slackware -current (of course, whether they are is ultimately Pat's decision, but he is aware of this ongoing project).
Anyway, these need lots of testing, and we'd like to get as much feedback (whether positive or negative) as possible.
There is one bug in konqueror with devices not showing up in it if they're mounted and then subsequently unmounted and remounted (see KDE Bug 136123), but there's little I can do about it until/unless the Konqueror developers address it.
Thanks in advance to everyone who's willing to help out on this.

This will almost certainly be my last post until the holidays are over, so here's wishing happy times to everyone during them.

Slackware Podcast

2006-12-14T21:38:00.000-06:00

Thanks to Chess Griffin over at Linux Reality for a nice podcast on Slackware! It's a good discussion geared toward new Linux users (or maybe just new to Slackware), but it's a good listen even for more advanced users. A special thanks is in order for his mention of our SlackBuilds.org project in the interview; Chess has contributed a few good scripts himself to our project... :-)

Also, there's a new version of dbus out (1.0.2), and I've got new packages of it and dbus-glib. Be sure to update them, as there's a security fix included (it's not remotely exploitable though, so no huge hurry).