Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

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A Slackware theme for your Grub

August 16, 2025 / / 12 Comments

Long ago, when all we had was 32bit Slackware and I was working on realizing the 64bit variant of Slackware, I created a ’64bit’ lilo bitmap with the Slackware  logo, to make it more obvious to your friends that your computer is booting 64bit Slackware and not some obscure other distro.

Lilo is getting a bit old in the tooth though. Mdern computers come with UEFI instead of good old BIOS, and that computer cannot boot on lilo. You’ll have to use elilo or grub instead.
Until now, Slackware supported elilo in the distro installer, but if you wanted to give your computer a Grub bootloader instead of elilo, you would have to do that manually right after the installation of Slackware is completed. Or you could swap out elilo for grub at any later time of course – it is not difficult.

Slackware-current is working its way toward making Grub the default bootloader. The process of installing or upgrading kernels is now automated to the level that if you have Grub installed as the bootloader, there’s nothing you need to do yourself: an initrd is generated based on your preferences (preferences can be written to the files /etc/default/grub , /etc/default/geninitrd and /etc/mkinitrd.conf), the grub bootmenu is refreshed and that’s it!

Recently I switched to Grub on this laptop which until then had been happily booting via elilo. As you may have seen, I use a nice graphical boot screen in liveslak and when I booted this laptop via Grub the first time, I was a bit disappointed by the text-only boot menu much like the boot experience I had with elilo.

But I like my liveslak boot screen!

So I set myself to finding out how I  could install and enable that same boot screen in regular Slackware.

The result is in the ZIP archive http://www.slackware.com/~alien/liveslak-grub2-theme.zip . Here’s how to use it to get a nice boot splash on your Slackware computer with Grub (the prior installation of Grub is something I leave to you):

  •  Extract the archive containing the Grub theme into directory /boot/grub/themes/
  • You will now have a new directory /boot/grub/themes/liveslak-grub2-theme – change its name to /boot/grub/themes/liveslak
  • In the file ‘/etc/default/grub‘ add or modify the following lines:
    GRUB_THEME=/boot/grub/themes/liveslak/theme.txt
    GRUB_FONT=/boot/grub/themes/liveslak/dejavusansmono12.pf2
    GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768,800x600,640x480,auto
    GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep
  • Then run (as root) the command: update-grub
  • Now, reboot. You should be greeted by a Slackware logo and the Grub boot menu.

Let me know in the comments section what you think of this!

Cheers and enjoy the weekend, 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.

RFC: How to build my Wine package

June 29, 2025 / / 8 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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