Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Category: Me (Page 1 of 28)

Building Chromium for Slackware

November 8, 2025 / / 4 Comments

I thought it would be helpful, and in any case insightful, to describe how I build the Chromium (also -ungoogled) packages for Slackware.

It is not a trivial task but a necessary one I believe. Slackware users should have a choice of browsers – some prefer Mozilla Firefox, others Google Chrome, and then there’s LibreWolf and Chromium that are built on the same code base as respectively Firefox and Chrome. There are others too, but I decided to stick with packages for Librewolf  and Chromium (-ungoogled). This article will focus on Chromium because Librewolf is pretty trivial to compile into a package.

Google develops the Chromium source code using tools which it partly created and maintains itself and for another part extends and patches them from the originals. Most notorious are the heavily customized Clang and Rust compilers used inside Google. The Chromium code reflects those compiler customizations because its codebase contains sections that will fail to compile using the official releases from the LLVM Project and the Rust Team (on which Slackware bases its own llvm and rust packages).

Google formally stopped supporting 32bit releases for their binary distribution of Chrome as long ago as 2015 (that’s ten years ago!) but indicated that the Chromium source code would still be compilable on 32bit platforms. Over time it became clear that internal code reviews and checks only happen on 64bit OS-es and the 32bit compatibility has been susceptible to “code-rot” ever since. As evidenced in my SlackBuild script where more and more patches and code modifications have been added to keep the ability to compile Chromium sourcecode into 32bit binaries.

Google provides binary snapshots of their internally used versions of Clang and Rust which reduces the need for patches a lot. Unfortunately Google at some point in time stopped providing 32bit binaries and so these binaries are nowadays only provided for 64bit machine architectures. In the past I relied on these binary snapshots to compile Chromium for Slackware.
After Google stopped providing those 32bit binaries, I have been putting a lot of effort in making Chromium compilable using the Slackware stock Clang and Rust compilers.

Note: I compile Chromium and Chromium-ungoogled on Slackware 15.0 and make these packages available in repositories for both Slackware 15.0 and -current. The challenge with Slackware 15 is that the provided llvm and rust compiler packages are way too old to be able to compile Chromium. Therefore Patrick Volkerding provides newer llvm and rust packages in the ‘extra’ section of the Slackware 15.0 repository. From time to time I run into new issues with clang and upon request, Patrick then builds and uploads a newer version of llvm into the repository.

Let’s have a look at the required updates for a Slackware 15.0 system (Slackware-current is up-to-date on all these package versions):

  • nodejs >= 20.13.0
  • llvm >= 21
  • rust >= 1.88.0
  • nasm >= 2.14
  • cmake >= 3.30.1

Some of these updates for Slackware 15.0 are in my own package repository (cmake, nodejs, nasm), some others in the ‘extra’ section of the official Slackware 15.0 package tree (llvm and rust).

When these updates are applied to Slackware 15, or in case you are running Slackware-current, compiling a Chromium package is simply:

# ./chromium.SlackBuild

… and compiling Chromium-ungoogled needs this commandline:

# USE_UNGOOGLED=1 ./chromium.SlackBuild

Note: you will need an enormous amount of RAM and lots of free disk space (in the filesystem which $TMP is pointing to) to run this build successfully, and then a lot of patience for that build to complete (my QEMU virtual machine needs about 12 hours to complete this build – per package).

From time to time, usually when the major version number of Chromium makes a jump, the source code has been modified to such an extent that the Slackware compilers will fail to build the binaries successfully. In that case (and if you are creating a 64bit package) you can force the SlackBuild to download and use Google’s binary clang and rust compiler snapshots using this commandline:

# BUILD_CLANG=1 ./chromium.SlackBuild

# BUILD_CLANG=1 USE_UNGOOGLED=1 ./chromium.SlackBuild

Usually this way the compilation will be successful.

Attribution:
Next to the Arch Linux PKGBUILD maintainer for Chromium, I depend more and more on the unparalleled knowledge of the NixOS package maintainers, to find the proper patches for my SlackBuild.
I would have been forced to drop the 32bit package support a long time ago if it were not for emilylange and networkException (NixOS) and Christian Heusel and Evangelos Foutras (Arch Linux).

I hope this article gave some insight into the life of a package maintainer.

Cheers, Eric

No Kings! Power belongs to the people

October 18, 2025 /

To my friends and their friends and family in the USA: stand up against blatant corruption, greed and power grabs. Fight the corrosion of your democracy and the rise of authoritarianism and fascism in the “land of the free”.

I stand with you.

New URL: blog.slackware.nl

August 17, 2025 / / 15 Comments

Me

Hi all.
It was time to migrate my blog to a new server. The URL ‘alien.slackbook.org/blog/’ has changed to ‘blog.slackware.nl’.

For years, my hosting server has been https://harrier.slackbuilds.org/ – ever since I had to move away from the original host, the slackware.com server (Pat does not trust PHP code).
I am eternally grateful to the team of people (Robby Workman and friends) who purchased its hardware and have been maintaining it in a US datacenter for all that time. They gave me full root rights over my virtual machine. Also many thanks to Teklinks for offering colocation and bandwidth!
Check out harrier‘s frontpage to get an idea of all the Slackware community services are hosted on that iron.

But the QEMU VM which runs on harrier and which essentially hosted my blog, is still on Slackware 14.2. Over time I had to upgrade httpd, mariadb and php to keep the WordPress code happy, but now WordPress is again nagging me about not having PHP 8 and to be honest, Slackware 14.2 has not received security updates for two years now. I am not feeling comfortable with that.
I had a short chat with Robby and he indicated that there’s just too much to be done and too little time to do it. I fully understand that and I have not bothered him with my worries.

I decided to migrate the blog to a new Slackware -current host. I have done a few trial runs over the years; it is not trivial to move a WordPress blog to a new domain and at the same time to a new host. But I think I figured out the challenges and ironed out the kinks.

Also, this was a good opportunity to reconsider the hosting location. Harrier runs in a US datacenter. I am not at all happy with the racist and autocratic direction the US is taking under Trump and his MAGA cult. I’ve seen people being detained and/or sent back at airport border control checkpoints simply because they have written online posts that are unfavorable to Trump. Look at my previous posts here on the blog – I will not attempt to enter the US as long as Trump is its dictator. And therefore it makes sense to choose the European Union as the new location for my blog server.

Welcome to blog.slackware.nl! Please update your bookmarks.
I am creating a redirect for alien.slackbook.org/blog/ to get that forwarded to the new URL, but it never hurts to spread the word to your friends.

Cheers, Eric

Heads-up: I am migrating slackware.nl to a different host on 14-aug

August 13, 2025 / / 11 Comments

Before the summer holiday ends and people start hammering my download servers again, I am going to that which I announced a while ago. In order to deal with increasing load on my main server I have been planning a re-distribution of its services to multiple new hosts.
The most important one – docs.slackware.com – was moved on June 17th. But the main package mirror and the git repositories still reside on the old host.

Therefore, tomorrow 14 August I am going to migrate the remaining services from old host “martin’ to new host “vance” which is more powerful.

Specifically, the services that will migrate are:

Expect some downtime while the hostnames move to their new IP address. I have a 10 minute TTL configured in DNS for the current DNS mappings. But I have noticed with earlier migrations that the propagation of my DNS changes across the globe sometimes take *much* longer than 10 minutes. The Cloudflare DNS (1.1.1.1) is usually pretty fast picking up those changes but Google DNS (8.8.8.8) sometimes takes an hour.
I also need to validate that I actually migrated all of the content and configuration properly.

If you wanted to use tomorrow, August 14th, as a perfect day to upgrade your Slackware computer or download a Live ISO from slackware.nl – wait another day please or use another mirror this once.

I understand this is an inconvenience but the service will improve! I expect more bandwidth, faster response time and no more aborted transfers.

Cheers, Eric

Final report-out 2025-aug-15:
The new server is up and running and there are no remaining issues to be resolved as far as I can see.
The migration to the new server also meant an upgrade from Slackware64 15.0 to -current. That caused a few unforeseen issues:

  • Segfaults in the ‘cgit’ web interface to my git repositories (as evidenced in ‘dmesg’ output) which turned out to be caused by a race condition in Lua version incompatibilities: cgit was compiled against luajit which is compatible with Lua 5.1, whereas lua-md5 which is used by cgit was compiled against the Slackware lua package (version 5.4).
    Resolved by recompiling cgit against Lua 5.4.
  • Crashes in the slakfinder database updater. The PHP and MariaDB on Slackware 15.0 were fine with ISO-8859 text inside slack-desc files, but on -current that throws an exception.
    Resolved by converting all imported text from slack-desc files to UTF-8 first.

Levi

July 11, 2025 / / 8 Comments

Animals enrich our life. Caring for pets makes you a better person. Letting your kids grow up together with animals in/around the house helps them learn the value of care and compassion.

We’ve had cats for almost 30 years now. The original sisterhood – two Holy Birman sisters – passed away ten and twelve years ago, and we adopted two Holy Birman half-brothers soon after, along with all their neuroses and traumas accumulated while being with their first family.
They were already more than eight years old when we took them into our care, and we knew that their time with us might not be that extensive. Still, we embraced them, they fully became part of our little circle and they in turn accepted us as their new humans.

Eventually old age takes its toll and today we had to euthanize Levi. He was deaf, demented, unable to care for and groom himself any longer, and his health had been deteriorating rapidly those last few months.

Levi was a beautiful cat, with a character made of gold. Never raised a claw against us, protesting only with his voice.
The gentle giant (he was almost 6 kilograms in his prime, almost twice the size of the females we had before) – he is no more. And I will miss him.

« Older posts

© 2025 Alien Pastures

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑