Alien Pastures

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Tag: vlc (Page 6 of 9)

Package updates in the past days

September 11, 2011 / / 24 Comments

I have been updating some of my Slackware packages in the past few days and at least some of them are important enough to write a bit about it.

virtuoso

Along with my packages for KDE 4.7.x I added an updated version of virtuoso “data management server” which powers a lot of the functionality in today’s KDE: However there was a regression in this version 6.1.3 which messed up the display of path names containing non-ascii (i..e Unicide) characters. See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=271664 for more details about this issue. I applied a fix to my virtuoso-ose package which solves this.

Package available here in the 4.7.1 section: http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/ as well as all the usual mirrors.

kde-workspace

Martin Graesslin wrote an email to the KDE packagers mailing list with the plea to apply a patch to all binary packages of kde-workspace after he discovered a bug in KWin’s handling of desktop effects which apparently has been present in all versions since 4.0. The bug would cause a performance degradation which becomes worse when more windows are open on the desktop. Martin’s blog article describes how he discovered the bug during his performance analysis of KDE 4.8 code. I have applied the patch he provided in his email to my KDE 4.7.1 kde-workspace package and I will wait for a backport to KDE 4.6.x before attempting to apply the fix to the kdebase-workspace package in there.

Package available here in the 4.7.1 section: http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/ as well as all the usual mirrors.

vlcgit

This is not a package update per sé. I have been compiling the development version of the VLC media player for a long time (I think I started re-writing the vlc.SlackBuild script for the development snapshots in January 2011). I had varying success with the package, as my build script would “break” from time to time. When someone in the #videolan IRC channel wondered if the development code would work better for high-bandwidth H.264 movies (VLC 1.1.11 drops too many frames) and a VLC developer suggested that the development code has a lot of optimizations in this regard, I decided to release a package based on my SlackBuild script. I called the package directory “vlcgit” and the build script “vlcgit.SlackBuild” but the actual package is named “vlc” so that you can easily update from 1.1.11 to this development snapshot. The vlc program will identity itself as “1.2.0-git” when it starts. I think it is worth your while to try it out because there have been lots of enhancements and additional features in the past year.

VLC 1.2.0 is expected to be released before the end of 2011.

Packages here: http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/vlcgit/ (which is a US server so these packages do not contain the mp3 and aac encoders because of patent disputes) and at http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlcgit/ (for the version that includes mp3 and aac audio ENcoding capability). Also available on all the other mirrors of course.

flashplayer-plugin

The Adobe people are finally putting good effort into their Linux flash player plugin. One month after the “beta 2” release we now have the “release candidate 1” of the upcoming Flash Player 11. It looks like the releases for Linux and Windows platforms go hand in hand now, which is a reassuring sign that we Linux users are taken seriously.

Package available at http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/flashplayer-plugin/

calibre

The calibre download page states that you should “not use your distribution provided calibre package, as those are often buggy/outdated. Instead use the Binary install described below“. Of course you are free to follow that advice, but if you prefer to know how your packages get built, like me, you can still grab the packages that I provide. There is a new release of Calibre every friday and I have been following that release cycle for the past months, releasing updated packages the same day. I use Calibre every day and am happy with my builds.

Get the package here: http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/calibre/

sigil

If you are seriously into writing or converting e-books, then Calibre is the perfect management and conversion software for the task. But Calibre does not offer an actual epub editor. Epub is an open specification for electronic books and widely used all over the world except for the US apparently where Amazon dominates with the mobi format used for its Kindle. Both mobi and epub formats are quite similar, basically it is HTML text plus a book’s metadata, bundled together in a ZIP archive. Whether you are writing an ebook yourself, or need to clean up an ebook provided by someone else, there is one application which is best suited for this task: Sigil. Sigil is designed to edit epub format only. It contains an embedded HTML tidy which cleans up the book’s HTML code autimatically and an embedded Flightcrew, which assists you in validating your book to the EPUB specification.

The Sigil homepage offers pre-built binaries, but these are quite big. Since they have to work everywhere the binaries include a lot of libraries which we already have in Slackware. The new Sigil maintainer seems to be very responsive so I asked him if he could put up a page with distro-specific packages and add a link to my Slackware package there. He did that right away, and more distros have been added there since.

Get the package fir Sigil here: http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/sigil/ .

 

Good fun with all of this! Eric

Update Sun Sep 11 15:43:06 UTC 2011:

libbluedevil

Willy Sudiarto Raharjo pointed out that there was another package update and I failed to mention it. The 32bit package “libbluedevil” was not tagged with my “alien” tag initially, and I fixed that by renaming the affected files in the repository.

Remember why tagging your packages is useful? If you use slackpkg to keep your Slackware up to date, then you can blacklist all my packages (since I apply the “alien” tag to all my packages) so that slackpkg does not “see” them anymore. Add this single line to the file “/etc/slackpkg/blacklist“:

[0-9]+alien

🙂

Back from holiday

July 25, 2011 / / 8 Comments

I enjoyed two weeks of camping with my family, in Brittany (France).

If you want to know what the view looked like…

From Photostream

Of course there was a lot more to see. We hunt old ruins with our camera! Brittany is full of chapels, monasteries, and the boulders everyone knows from places like Carnac.

When I got back home, the first packages I needed to push out were VLC because 1.1.11 plugs two vulnerabilities, and the new beta of flashplayer 11 because finally Adobe seems to have merged the development of the 64-bit version with the “mainline” 32-bit plugin. They are both essentially the same version now, 11 beta 1 (build date 071311?). The plugin itself reports that it has version 11.0.1.60.

Get the packages for vlc and flashplayer-plugin at the usual location: http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/ (the version of vlc without the patent restrictions that can encode mp3 and aac (instead of just being able to decode these formats) to be found as usual at http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/)

More packages to come, but that needs more preparation before I can start. I need to build a patched KDE 4.6.5 package for kdeutils, and all of the KDEI source tarballs seem to have been re-generated by the KDE release team while I was on holiday.

Have fun! Eric

VideoLAN update: vlc-1.1.10

June 6, 2011 / / 10 Comments

It’s that busy time for developers again… are they all preparing for holidays and cleaning the house?

Yesterday saw an update of my favourite multimedia player, and I had missed it…

VLC player is now at stable release 1.1.10 – apart from bugfixes and codec updates, this is also a security update (no known CVE number yet) so everybody is enccouraged to upgrade his installed version.

Get Slackware packages from my repository or one of its mirrors. And remember, if you need to encode mp3 or aac audio (there is no functional difference in decoding audio between all my packages) you need to grab the package which is inside the “restricted_slackbuilds” directory. Patent trolls prevent me from hosting those packages in the US on slackware.com.

MP3/AAC patent restricted:

Enjoy! Eric

What’s cooking?

June 3, 2011 / / 71 Comments

Hi Folks

You surely noticed a bit of silence on this blog. Well, there was not much to say – I am not the twittering kind of guy who updates his readers where he’ll go out every night… I think I can lift the lid a little anyway.

I have been working on several larger packaging projects during the past weeks. LibreOffice is the one that took most of my time unfortunately. The new release 3.4.0 has been announced today, and that means I can finally test my revised SlackBuild script when building Slackware packages for you. My old way of compiling LibreOffice no longer works! It has been “deprecated” by the developers, which is a shame because it forces me to do a lot more work. Anyway, expect packages for Slackware 13.37 sometime this weekend.

I will probably not create Slackware 13.1 packages for this new LibreOffice release. What I do consider is to build the upcoming maintenance release for LibreOffice 3.3 (which will be 3.3.3) for Slackware 13.1.

KDE. How to begin? There are some stirrings in the KDE camp.

We are nearing the end of the KDE 4.6 series. Two more updates will see the light: 4.6.4 should be available in a few days and 4.6.5 is the final update, expected in early july. But considering the fact that the previous 4.6.3 experienced delays, it may take a little longer before I can start on packaging 4.6.4.

The new series 4.7.x proves to be a bigger challenge for Slackware. We saw that the 4.6. series moved away from HAL and instead requires udisks/upower (which was the reason for sticking with 4.5.5 in Slackware 13.37). The KDE developers have now finalized their move from CVS to GIT as the source control and version management system. The result is less than optimally arranged for packagers. The old “monolithic” source tarballs are now being split into many additional tarballs for individual applications. This means we have rewrite our scripts and possibly add a lot of packages. While this may be advantageous for some other distros with dedicated packaging teams, for us Slackware people it is a time for decisions.

After talking to Pat Volkerding, I announced on the KDE packager mailing list that we are considering the same solution as was chosen for GNOME in the past: remove KDE from Slackware if it proves to become a maintenance burden. I can not yet say anything final about this. For the time being, I have decided not to create Slackware packages for the KDE Software Compilation 4.7.x.

And then VLC…I have been waiting for a 1.2 release for so long that I almost do not believe it will ever arrive. I have a SlackBuild for it, but I will likely wait a bit longer before releasing a package for ths development version of VLC media player. It appears like there is a 1.1.10 release around the corner which is what I’ll build for Slackware 13.1 as well as 13.37.

Looking ahead, I think that creating VLC versions for Android is going to be considered more important. There is a whole new audience there, and I may very well be one of its users. There is also the fact that the developer team is almost always short of smart and motivated people. This showed last year when it was almost impossible to release a MS Windows version. Jean-Baptiste Kempf feels responsible for this so he made it happen, but I doubt that it is making him very happy.

And finally, Calibre E-book Management. This piece of software is indispensible if you are in the possession of an E-reader. Calibre manages your e-book collection, converts e-books between various formats (interesting for you Kindle users out there!) and allows you to upload books to your E-reader device. Calibre usually works a lot better than the software you get with your E-reader. And  since I am buying a Sony PRS650 for my wife I needed to have a working verison of Calibre for my Slackware box.

I have a Slackware package for Calibre in my repository but I have not been able to update it for a while, because it requires python 2.7. Unfortunately, Slackware 13.37 is still at python version 2.6.6. So I spent a lot of time to find a way around this and decided to take the same approach as with VLC and FFMPEG: that is, to compile all the requirements into the package itself and not depend on Slackware. I think I have succeeded in this, and am currently testing the results. Stay tuned…

Happy hacking! Eric

New libreoffice, vlc packages for your Slackware

March 24, 2011 / / 21 Comments

Yummy food for your hungry Slackware boxen!

* VLC 1.1.8 available

Another minor release in the 1.1 series, version 1.1.8 saw the light yesterday. Bugfixes and updates for the translations are its main features, but several small enhancements were made to the codec modules.

New encoders for dirac video (now using the schroedinger implementation) and webm /vp8 were added but to be honest, I have not looked at those since I rarely encode audio or video. Feedback welcome of course!

Noteworthy is the fact that VideoLAN celebrated its 10th birthday of going open source this february – the software was initially developed as a french student project under a closed-source license. Hilarious promotional video there… typical french humour?

Get the Slackware packages here (built on Slackware 13.1, will work on later versions too):

The “US restrictions” are ludricous crap, but there you go… otherwise I would not be able to host the packages on the slackware.com server. Of course, mp3 and aac decoding is not a problem at all.

And for you KDE 4.6 users, remember having this problem with the “Media > Open” file browser dialog box taking 30 seconds to appear, that issue has been resolved. The fix was applied on the KDE side (it was gone with KDE 4.6.1) but I thought I’d mention it here regardless because it was a nuisance. See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=260719 for a nice discussion between KDE and VLC developers. Interesting to read on https://bugs.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/+bug/708527 is, that while we do not have this bug anymore in Slackware’s KDE 4.6.1 (well, my own KDE 4.6.1 for Slackware 13.37 to be precise), it appears that Kubuntu’s KDE 4.6.1 still suffers from it…

* LibreOffice 3.3.2 … wow that was fast!

The LibreOffice development really shows the power of collaboration. Little over a month after their previous “micro release” 3.3.1, here we have 3.3.2 already. It shows plainly that LibreOffice is diverging fast from its origin OpenOffice.org. How is that possible? Well, the most obvious reason is the growth in numbers of developers. What was impossible while SUN and later Oracle held the reigns, is now showing its worth: people are contributing code, and with more people starting to dig at the deeper levels of code, this momentum of development will only accelerate.

Specific highlights for the 3.3.2 release are the code cleanups: german-only comments have been replaced and no longer used code has been removed. If the schedule is not slipping we’ll see the big release 3.4.0 in May. This is supposedly the release that is going to make the large step away from OpenOffice.org.

I created some Slackware packages for you (built on Slackware 13.1, works on Slackware 13.37 too). Using the new LibreOffice menu icons instead of the old OpenOffice seagull logos, its looking prettier even! I added a dictionary to the italian language pack, but other than that I did not diverge from the way I built the previous 3.3.1 packages.

One word about the dictionaries (which I included for en-GB, en-US, es, fr, it, nl language packs): they are installed as “shared dictionaries” i.e. they will show up in your extension manager as locked and unchangeable. You can still install your own dictionary on top of that, if you find one that is more advanced or better suited to your work. This personal version will be installed into your ~/.ooo3 user directory and will have preference over the shared version.

Get packages here:

Enjoy!  And tell me if you like these packages (or if you see room for improvement).

Eric

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