Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: maintenance

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.

KDE 4.11.5 for Slackware 14.1

January 7, 2014 / / 5 Comments

Last month I made packages available for KDE 4.12, for those of you who are adventurous and are running Slackware-current. But the older 4.11 series is also getting updated still. Today we are at release 4.11.5. If you are really curious, you can examine the list of changes and fixes in this release. This will not be the last update, either. The maintenance cycle ends with 4.11.9, to appear somewhere in April 2014. However the Workspaces (package name: kde-workspace) will get long-term support, until August 2015. This package is also used in KDE 4.12.x which does not have a versioned kde-workspace package itself (yes, I will update KDE 4.12 soon with a kde-workspace-4.11.5 package).

This is how it goes during the next couple of months: I will keep building packages for newer versions of KDE 4.12, and they will target Slackware-current. I will probably be building all the KDE 4.11 releases as well, but targeting Slackware 14.1 with these. I want to be a bit more conservative with KDE packages for the stable Slackware release.

With KDE 4.11 and 4.12 releases alternating, it may be possible that I do not have the time to build all the 4.11 updates, but I definitely will do the final 4.11.9.

There is a third track in KDE’s evolution and that is Plasma Workspaces. Just before Christmas, the KDE community revealed the first Technology Preview of Plasma2. Since this will not be available in any kind of stable form for a long time, I do not have any intention of building packages for it and will stick with the stable releases (I don’t do Betas either usually). If you really feel up to it, try compiling Plasma2 and share your experiences. I promise you a bumpy ride.

How to upgrade to KDE 4.11.5 ?

Note: you have to be running Slackware 14.1 (or current)! These packages are not suited for Slackware 14.0.

You will find all the installation/upgrade instructions that you need in the accompanying README file. That README also contains basic information for KDE recompilation using the provided SlackBuild script You are strongly advised to read and follow these installation/upgrade instructions!

Note that you can also use slackpkg+ (the 3rd-party repository extension to slackpkg) for these upgrades if you want, it makes the process a bit easier for the less seasoned Slacker.

Where to find packages for KDE 4.11.5 ?

Download locations are listed below (you will find the sources in ./source/4.11.5/ and packages in /14.1/4.11.5/ subdirectories). Using a mirror is preferred because you get more bandwidth from a mirror and it’s friendlier to the owners of the master server!

Have fun! Eric

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