Slack -current is public :)

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.

New kde-3.5.5 testing packages

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.

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.

New changes to -current

Well, Pat just committed a large batch of updates to the -current tree, and one of them was libpng 1.2.12. This version renumbers the shared object files in /usr/lib, and the only way to maintain compatibility with apps linking against the older number is a symlink. I experimented with upgrading libpng in troubleshooting some issues with xfce 4.4beta2, but I ran into this problem with quite a few apps, and like Pat, I wasn't happy with the idea of a symlink. I expect that link to be removed soon once he gets all the apps depending on libpng recompiled against the new version, so I'll be recompiling all of mine (including xfce 4.4beta2 and hplip, probably others) within the next few days. If I'm lucky, this might have some impact on the problem where icons for kde applications are not showing up in the xfce menu, but I'm doubtful - the more I look at the freedesktop.org standards, I'm coming closer to the conclusion that it's a kde problem (specifically, the separate directory for icons in /opt/kde/share/icons as opposed to using /usr/share/icons)...

Recent Developments

There are quite a few things going on right now:
1. I'm enrolled in graduate school working on my Master's degree in Educational Administration, and I'm taking four classes this summer - as should be readily obvious, I'm quite busy with those... :)
2. I'm working with a good group of people on a project (SlackBuilds.org) to provide build scripts for additional software applications not included with Slackware "out of the box." We're not at all happy with new users of Slackware becoming dependent upon third-party sources for precompiled packages, as they tend to introduce unnecessary dependencies on other applications (and occasionally security problems), and new users don't yet know enough to tell the difference. Our goal is to provide both scripts to compile the source code of those needed applications as well as educate new users on how to work with the scripts.
3. The release of Slackware 11.0 will be coming soon; Pat Volkerding (the maintainer) has indicated in the ChangeLog that the -current tree is stable and that a new release is close at hand...
4. I've been testing some experimental work on "bleeding-edge" udev | sysvinit | sysfsutils | pcmciautils stuff done largely by Roberto Batista (aka PiterPunk), and based on my results, it looks promising. The decision is ultimately up to Pat, but we're hoping it will be stable (and reliable) enough to hit -current sometime after 11.0 releases; if not, we'll keep working until it *is* stable enough... :)
I've recently done some hacking to the newest version of sysvinit (2.86) and forwarded the results to PiterPunk, so maybe it will hit the experimental tree at some point...
5. My preferred window manager, xfce, is approaching the release of version 4.4. The beta 2 was released yesterday, and after hacking around on Pat's script for the 4.2 series, I've got a package built for -current. While it's much more usable than the beta 1 release (in fact, I'm now using it exclusively), there's no hope of it being included in the 11.0 release of Slackware - it's nowhere near ready for that. There's still a problem where some kde icons don't show up in the various menus, and I've had one random crash that had no rhyme nor reason :)