Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: June 2025

RFC: How to build my Wine package

June 29, 2025 / / 10 Comments

I have a question for you – hence the “Request For Comment” in this post’s title.

I have been compiling a Slackware package for the Wine emulator for a long time now. The 64bit wine package contains both the 64bit and the 32bit Wine binaries and libraries.  It therefore also requires that you made your 64bit Slackware into a multilib system.

For a while now, Wine can be built in another way than I have been doing it traditionally. The “WoW64” build aka “Windows on Windows64” allows you to run 32bit Windows binaries on a pure 64bit Slackware Linux OS, no multilib required.
Caveats of a switch to a WoW64 build of Wine for Slackware:

  • The WoW64 build does not support 16bit Windows binaries.
  • You may have to re-create your 32bit Wine prefixes.
    Meaning, the Windows programs which you already have installed on your computer have been written to what’s called a “Wine prefix”, basically a subdirectory in your homedirectory (the default location is ~/.wine/).
    Usually you would not bother with the concept of the Wine prefix, but it allows you to isolate various Windows programs from each other. Suppose you need to install additional Windows libraries via tools like winetricks (the same script is called ‘protontricks‘ if you use Valve’s Proton instead of Wine). but the DLL requirements are conflicting between Windows programs. Then you install each program into its own Wine prefix.
    Bottomline: it may cost you some one-time work to get your programs going again.
  • There’s some reports about performance regressions in Wine 9.x under WoW64 for 32bit Windows programs that invoke OpenGL calls directly. I can not confirm that this has been addressed in Wine 10.x
  • Valve’s Steam gaming platform still requires multilib on your computer.

Therefore I would like to hear your opinion about whether or not to switch from traditional multilib Wine to the new WoW64 Wine.
With “you” I mean actual users of my Wine packages. I am not interested in random replies.

Let me know below!
Eric

Migrating my infrastructure

June 19, 2025 / / 24 Comments

Roughly the last 12 months have been really hard on my server infrastructure – the servers that I rent and which host sites like slackware.nl, docs.slackware.com, download.liveslak.org, git.slackware.nl and several more.
An un-ending DDoS attack mostly by IP addresses from Chinese origin that keep requesting to download Slackware ISO files, many per second, effectively saturating bandwidth. Combine that with a massive onslaught of AI bots that roam the Internet scraping web content to feed to their LLM models. I have been mitigating these attacks and annoyances using web access control (because blocking all of China on IP level probably is exactly what the Chinese government is trying to achieve here: making sure that Chinese folks lose access to free and open source software).  Eventually these were also killing the Apache httpd daemon because that is where the access control is happening.
I am sure you’ve experienced that: when downloading an ISO from slackware.nl or running a “slackpkg upgrade-all” with slackware.nl as the package mirror, connections are aborted randomly.

So I had to make a decision: to deal with this in some way and improve the user experience for the average Slacker.

I have begun migrating my services away from the single physical host (and its hot standby) which has been running all these services sofar. They are being spread onto multiple (also more performant) new hosts.

Completed so far:

In progress; migrating slackware.nl, download.liveslak.org, git.slackware.nl, git.liveslak.org to a third server. Basically this affects all the mirror data that users want to download.
This part is actually more complex  and time-consuming due to the use of MSQL databases that need to be migrated as well (slakfinder for instance), multiple cron jobs to keep data in sync and backed-up and just a lot of data to shuffle around.

I aim to actually switch the various domains and hostnames to their new IP addresses somewhere in the next week. Expect a (hopefully) short downtime for the services mentioned above. If you get “file not found” errors or web sites go missing, just be patient and wait half an hour. If things take a concerning turn, leave your comments below this article and point me to the things that broke without me seeing it.

I hope to have informed you properly and timely 🙂

Cheers Eric

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