Southeast LinuxFest 2012

All of you Linux folks: it's almost time again. Southeast LinuxFest 2012 is coming up on June 8-10, 2012, in Charlotte, NC. Go register to attend (there are both free and paid (supporter) options available) and/or submit a proposal to present if you're so inclined/qualified. Either way, if you want to spend a few days hanging out with other linux folks and learn some stuff in the process, plan to attend. :)

Southeast Linux Fest

It's coming up soon, folks - the Southeast Linux Fest in South Carolina at Clemson University, so mark your calendars and make plans to attend. This is a great opportunity to meet other linux users in the southeastern region of the US, and based on the list of presenters, it should be a very entertaining and educational experience as well.

For you Slackware users, this is an opportunity to meet other users and well as a few members of the Slackware and/or SlackBuilds.org development teams. I, Alan Hicks, David Somero, Chess Griffin, and perhaps several others will be in attendance, and I'll be doing a "Firewalling on Linux" presentation.

Slackware 12.1 Released!

Yep, it's official! :-)

From the ChangeLog:
Thu May 1 13:36:34 CDT 2008
Slackware 12.1 is released as -stable. :-) Again, huge thanks to everybody who pitched in and helped with bug reports, patches, testing, suggestions, other comments, and everything else. Without this valuable input, Slackware would be nowhere near what it is today. Special thanks to the CREW, to the people developing and testing for slackbuilds.org (where many of Slackware's future additions are first built and tested), and to everyone on linuxquestions.org, various #slackware or ##slackware IRC channels, other Slackware related web sites, and other places where the community shares their needs and concerns with the team. On behalf of everyone here, thanks.
We think you'll enjoy this new release, and hope that you'll find it to be much more than 0.1 better than Slackware 12.0. ;-)

Slackware 12.1 rc2 released!

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-4.0.1 on Slackware

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!

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! :-)

Alabama LUGFest

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 :-)

Making Linux "Easy" - Take 2

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 :-)

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.

Changes to the site

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 :)

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.

Lots of updates

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!

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.

Slackware Podcast

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).

OpenOffice.org 2.1.0 Released!

The OpenOffice.org team released version 2.1.0 a couple of days ago, and I've finally got my build script for it updated. I've not had a chance to do any heavy testing with the package yet, but I'm fairly certain that it's ready for production use. However, if it crashes your computer, drinks your beer, sleeps with your girlfriend, and sodomizes your cat, don't blame me - I warned you... ;-) If after all that you still want the package, it's in my /testing repo.

New udev and friends

PiterPunk has just released some new packages and source tarballs for udev-103, sysvinit-2.86, and sysfsutils-2.1.0. I have packages and sources available if you're interested in testing.

Updates coming soon...

The GnuPG guys have released gnupg-2.0.1rc1 and libassuan-1.0.1, so I've rebuilt all of the kmail-gpg stuff (and kdebase & kdepim) in /testing - they should be going up at some point tomorrow if all goes well.

DBus 1.0 Released; Xfce Rebuild Coming Soon

DBus 1.0 was released a few days ago (thanks to MagicMan for the heads-up), and I've finally got the kinks worked out of the init script for it, so packages of it and dbus-glib (rebuilt against dbus-1.0) are now available. If you were experiencing any bugs with it, be sure to upgrade to the newest version.

In other news, I'm currently recompiling and testing Xfce 4.4rc2 adding --with-sound=alsa to the configure script for the mixer, and preliminary results indicate success :) Thanks to all of you who emailed about it. I'm not entirely certain about this, but I'm guessing that the differences due to 2.4/2.6 kernel headers as they pertain to alsa are responsible for this - the autodetection routines in the configure script don't seem to work with the 2.4 kernel headers, but then, I've not tested it with 2.6 headers (nor do I plan to do so until Pat upgrades them in stock Slackware), so I may be totally off-base on that. Regardless of the cause, the moral of the story is that it should work now with that simple change to the build script. Assuming everything goes as planned, I should have new Xfce packages (in all flavors - with and without {dbus,dbus/gamin} dependencies - available within a day or two. Keep checking the ChangeLog for updates, because it probably won't be posted here.

Xfce 4.4rc2 Rebuilt - bugfix

For those monitoring this instead of (or maybe in addition to) my ChangeLog, I've rebuilt the Xfce 4.4rc2 packages with a patch I backported from the svn repository to fix the missing printer icons in the Settings menu.

For those interested, I'm also trying to find the least intrusive way to include "real-time" file change notification for xfdesktop, and it looks like gamin is going to fit the bill. I've built a gamin package as well as an Xfce 4.4rc2 package linked against it. The preliminary results of my testing here were inconsistent and unpredictable, but it seems to be stable and consistent now for whatever reason, so there is hope. Testing and feedback are encouraged... :-)

Xfce 4.4 RC2

The Xfce developers have released 4.4 Release Candidate 2!!!
Packages for Slackware 11.0 are available in my package repository, and there are also packages for the extra plugins as well.
Be sure to read the ChangeLog entry from today (20061105). If you prefer to build it yourself, feel free to get the SlackBuild Script and other needed files.
Testing and feedback are encouraged and appreciated; thanks to everyone who's already involved - I appreciate it!