Planet Slackware Indonesia

If you are concerned about security vulnerabilities affecting your CPU like Spectre, ZenBleed, etc, you might want to add microcode provided by your CPU vendors, like Intel or AMD and also make sure to get the latest kernel that provided the support to mitigate the vulnerabilities.

Installing microcode alone is not enough as we still need to load it early during boot so it needs to be added into your loader, whether you use LILO, ELILO, or GRUB2. Since i'm using GRUB2, this is how you add them. I'm using Intel CPU so i need to install intel-microcode package from SlackBuilds first.

To generate the microcode cpio archive, use this following command:

iucode_tool -S --write-earlyfw=/boot/early_ucode.cpio /lib/firmware/intel-ucode/*

This command will try to seach for the correct signature based on your CPU. In my system, this will results in:

iucode_tool: system has processor(s) with signature 0x000806e9
iucode_tool: Writing selected microcodes to: /boot/early_ucode.cpio

GRUB_EARLY_INITRD_LINUX_CUSTOM="ucode.cpio"

Regenerate grub.cfg by running grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

You will notice that the newly cpio archive is included as well:

Found initrd image: /boot/early_ucode.cpio /boot/initrd.gz

It's been a while since i posted on this blog and last post was about Cinnamon 5.6.0 and now, it's time to jump to Cinnamon 5.8.0 packages for Slackware-Current. It's fresh from the oven and i believe there will be more minor releases to fix bugs that are found after the .0 release, but all the scripts are now pushed to github/gitlab repository and the binary packages have been uploaded to slackware.uk repository (Credit to Tadgy).

Looking at the changelog, i'm interested to add support for multi-touch gesture project called touchegg and Touché. It's not a mandatory requirements, but cinnamon-settings does have this support when the package is available. I will probably try to push it to SBo first before i add them into my CSB repository.

Three months since i posted Cinnamon 5.4 and here we are with Cinnamon 5.6 release for Slackware-Current. As usual, there is no release notes yet as this post is written, but based on the commit message per components, it seems that this release doesn't have major features compared to previous releases. Most of the changes are refinement to what 5.4 had offered and they want to polish the desktop even further.

I have pushed the changes for building Cinnamon 5.6 to master branch in github/gitlab repository and pushed the binaries into Slackware.UK repository (Thanks to Tadgy). As usual, i tested them using Slackware-Current as base, so i can't guarantee that it will work on Slackware 15.0. There will be more updates to the Cinnamon projects over few weeks before they are finalized.

Please give it a test and feedback on the build script.

I have been playing with Cinnamon 5.4 packages for some time and i think it's now ready since it has reached 5.4.10 and LinuxMint 21 has been released, meaning they have been finalized. One of the reason why i didn't publish it sooner is because i was experiencing crashes on my VBox tests, rapid changes in -Current, and lack of spare time to deal with this project due to my workload at the office.

There are 2 new packages introduced in this new major version: gsound and xdotools. I was trying to remove caribou, cogl, clutter, and clutter-gtk from this version, but it seems that some components still looking for them, so i added them back even though upstream have declared the project no longer maintained.

The new Cinnamon 5.4 comes with a new icon sets and also faster loading time to the desktop (if you are using runlevel 3). Remember that you need proper 3D acceleration in order to use Cinnamon. I tested it under VirtualBox and it worked smoothly. One small issue i found is missing the control center icon on the favorite.

Binaries have been pushed to the usual repository, thanks to Tadgy for providing this repository and the sources have been merged into master branch. Enjoy Cinnamon 5.4 packages on top of Slackware Current.

Some people have been asking about how to send patches to SBo when submission is still closed (usually during development cycle for next SBo repository or for a while after new repo is released). There are a few ways to do it:

1. Use a pull request on GitHub or merge request on GitLab
2. Send a patch using git format-patch to the mailing list

The first option has its own documentation, so please go look on the specific platform that you prefer. For  the second option, here's how to do it.

1. Make sure you clone the latest changes from master branch or if you haven't done it, use this command: 
   git clone git://git.slackbuilds.org/slackbuilds.git && cd slackbuilds
   
2. Make a new branch (eg. yourname)
   git checkout -B willysr
   
3. Make changes to your scripts and commit using this command:
   git commit -asm "category/script: Updated for version X.Y.Z"
   NOTE: 1 commit for each script!
   
4. Make a patch using git format-patch and save it to home directory (assuming it's willysr)
   git format-patch master.. > /home/willysr
   NOTE: double dot means from master to latest changes in your branch
   it will give you output like this: 0001-libraries-antlr4-Update-DEP.patch
   
5. Send those patches to the SBo mailing list or maintainer to be tested and merged

After more than 6 years of development and so many big changes happened during the development cycle, Patrick Volkerding finally released Slackware 15.0 into another stable release. It is the longest development cycle of Slackware so far, but i think it's worth the wait as big changes are integrated smoothly into this release.

Here are the highlight of this release:

• Kernel 5.15.19 (LTS release)
• KDE Plasma 5.23.x 
• XFCE 4.16
• PAM, Pipewire, and Wayland support
• ConsoleKit2 replaced with elogind
• Python 3.9.10
• Perl 5.34.0
• Qt5-5.15.3
• Tetex replaced by Texlive
• sendmail replaced with postfix
• net-tool replaced with iproute2 for networking
• Removal of .la files
• Wireguard support
• GTK4-4.4.1
  

If you appreciate Patrick's work, please consider donating to support the project via PayPal or Patreon.

We are still working on getting SBo repository ready for 15.0, but we are not there yet. Hopefully soon.

After 18 months, MATE 1.26 is officially released by the developer. The main goal of this release is to add new functionality while maintaining the look and feel and also to fix bugs, modernizing code base, and optimizing performance.

I have built MATE 1.26 packages since last week and publish them on the usual repository (Thanks to Tadgy) and the SlackBuilds to the GitHub and GitLab. There are 3 new packages introduced compared to 1.24 release and 5 packages were dropped since it's now included in the Slackware packages. See MATE-1.26-CHANGES.TXT for more information.

These packages are intended to be built on top of Slackware-Current, not for 14.2 since they require newer library version of what we have in 14.2.

 I noticed that Cinnamon 5 is now available from their github project page, so last night i started to work on it and it seems that it's a trivial update to the build scripts. There's no hackish or extra effort to update the build script to build the latest Cinnamon 5.x on top of Slackware-Current. Since it was late at night, i finished bumping and i left to sleep while the build machine test the script while i was asleep.

This morning, i can confirm that the build is working fine, thus i uploaded all the binaries to the usual place (thanks again Tadgy for providing this access). All the changes to the build script has been pushed to github as well if anyone is interested to build from scratch.

I don't have any detail about changes implemented in Cinnamon 5, but some of the new features can be seen in the LinuxMint newsletter back in April. The official announcement usually follows after it has been considered stable enough.

Open source community has faced another drama when Freenode is now being taken over and staffs were resigning and they decided to make a new service based on previous Freenode service called Libera Chat. The service is now up and running and many open source projects and communities are migrating from Freenode to Libera and more will follow soon.

I have registered the same nickname and channels i used (#msb, #sbopkg) in Libera network and so did other projects, like #slackware-help and #slackbuilds. Soon, we will leave Freenode, so if you join our channel in Freenode, it's time to look back on your IRC configuration and set to Libera network :

• Server: irc.libera.chat
• Port: 6697

If you have any difficulties connecting to Libera network, please see this guideline. Please note that at this point (May, 26 2021), Libera is still working on providing access via Tor. Hopefully they will enable this service as soon as possible.

Few years ago, i was quite lucky to get 3 free games from Ubisoft Holiday Bundle, Assasin Creed IV: Black Flag, World in Conflict: Complete Edition, and Watch Dogs. I played Assasin Creed IV for a while under Windows in my spare time, but later on, i rarely login to my Windows machine (it's only available on my laptop, not in my other machines), so it's kinda abandoned.

The arrival of Steam under Linux does give some  inspiration, but it also comes with it's own problems. In order to install/use Steam you need to have 32 bit libraries installed. This can be achieved in Slackware by using multilib provided by Eric Hameleers, but you must be really careful when using Slackware-Current since changes in -current can break your multilib. It's not officially supported by Slackware, so you must rely on community to help your issues if you encountered them. Many people have been using this approach and it worked just fine for them. I didn't install multilib on my machines because i'm not really a hard core gamers. I just play games on my spare time and it's not my highest priority.

Few days ago i saw this thread on LQ about running unprivileged containers  and i think it's an interesting topic to try on weekend, so i directly downloaded Conty on my desktop at home (running pure Slackware64-Current) and try to use it and it worked. I'm able to install Ubisoft Connect, the ecosystem of players services for Ubisoft games across all platforms which later can be used to download/install/play all Ubisoft-based games. It's like Steam but coming from Ubisoft. I copied the files from my Windows machine in order to avoid downloading a massive 41 GB source and now i can play my games again.

Conty is a non-root container compressed into squashfs and packed into a single executable based on ArchLinux. You can use this container to run any applications, including games that requires Vulkan or OpenGL. In the project's repository on github, you can also see many other information regarding this project.

So, here's what i did in order to play games on my Slackware-Linux without using multilib:

1. Download the conty releases (i choose to the conty.sh at the beginning, but later on i switch to conty_lite.sh for lighter version). From the release page: "The lite version (conty_lite.sh) includes everything from the regular version (conty.sh), except for: gcc, mingw-w64-gcc, firefox, meson, cmake and jre8-openjdk." If you only planning to use Conty to play games, i would suggest you to pick the lite version.
   
2. Make sure you have Vulkan packages and either NVidia/AMD GPU drivers. This is quite challenging because each release will have it's own spesific version depending on ArchLinux update. Release 1.8 will work with NVidia 465.24.02 while 1.8.1 will work with NVidia 465.27.
3. You need to set some parameters documented in this page. I use the the second option, which is modifying the /etc/security/limits.conf file and add this following line: <username> hard nofile 524288. Please note that this method only works when you are logged in using runlevel 3. I tried to use runlevel 4 and lightdm and found out that this method do not work. I think because i haven't configure lightdm correctly, but i will leave this out for you to solve. Make sure to reboot after editing this file as the changes will take effect after a reboot.
   
4. Run this command: ./conty_lite.sh steam or ./conty_lite.sh lutris to start the installation of steam or lutris.
5. Once steam or lutris installed, you can start download and play your games directly.

I hope this short article can help for those who wanted to switch to Slackware Linux but afraid of losing their capabilities to play Windows games available on  Steam.

 Update:

Conty 1.10 works with NVidia driver 465.31

It's a few days late, but Patrick has announced Slackware 15.0 Beta in the Changelog per April 12. It's another milestone after declaring Alpha in February. We are coming closer to final release of Slackware 15.0 after almost five years of development since the release of 14.2 back in 2016. Many things have changes since then and as far as i can see, all the major toolchain is now fixed in Slackware development tree and we are likely focusing to fix the remaining issue reported by many users who have been testing -current for a long time.

SBo is following up by entering the development cycle for 15.0 repository as per this week and submissions is now closed. No new scripts can be submitted unless it's a new dependency for newer version of the scripts available in the repository and it can only be added by admins. Thanks to Ponce's work on tracking -current, his repository has contained a lot of commits fixing scripts to be buildable on current. That will be a good starting point and we will work on fixing the rest afterwards. This process might take some time as some of the scripts are outdated and some are abandoned by the maintainer or upstream.

We welcome any help at this point and we do hope that we can release 15.0 repository the same day as Slackware 15.0 gets released like what we did last time.

It's been a long wait but Patrick has just called the current branch as Alpha 1 as the mass rebuilt due to glibc 2.33 has been done in the weekend. In this massive update, more than 1500 packages were rebuilt against latest glibc 2.33 to make sure it doesn't have any regressions. Please note that the new glibc was just released in February 2021, so it's very new. Good news is that based on most users who have just upgraded, the rebuilt works just fine as expected. I personally have upgraded to the latest version on both my desktop and laptop and it worked just fine. It just takes time to complete the upgrade and remove the .new or merge it with your existing configurations.

So what's next? Well it's definitely working towards more bug fixing and making sure there are no regressions on the default installation of Slackware 15.0. You can help by downloading the latest ISO here and install it on your machine, either via VM or in bare metal and report it to the LQ where Patrick and most of the dev team are there to monitor.

There are still some scheduled upgrades in the future, but they will have to wait until the mass rebuilt is done today and give time for users to test this snapshots. If you are curious, just try to install and use slackware-current now. In my opinion, it's very stable even on daily usage. 

 I never used XFCE before, but i'm curious about this lightweight desktop environment since it's included in Slackware and has just released it's latest release 4.16. The new version drop GTK+2 support and fully migrated to the newer GTK+3. The announcement of XFCE 4.16 showed that this is a major upgrade both in the backend and also in the front-end (UI/visual). They now have the cool icons, many new APIs, support for fractional scaling, and many more.

So i tested to run the new XFCE 4.16 from my desktop at home and here's the default desktop i got

It runs very fast and it's very minimalistic, which i love since i don't need the fancy things on my desktop or any of my machine (i still like KDE/Plasma 5 even though it's full of fancy things).

Big thanks for Robby Workman for his work on packaging XFCE 4.16 so Patrick can smoothly include it on Slackware-Current.

Linus just announced the next LTS kernel 5.10 last week and 24 hours later, the first point release was released by Greg to revert 2 commits that caused problems, but in less than a week after, it landed straight into Slackware-Current main tree without going into /testing first. So we have a final confirmation that next Slackware release (15.0) will surely use the latest LTS kernel release which will be supported up to 5 years (which will be EOL around 2026).

Up to this point, NVidia hasn't released any update to their legacy drivers, but that didn't stop me to push the upgrades knowing that there's a patch to make the current Legacy driver works with 5.10. I have pushed the patches onto my SlackHacks repository and i have tested it before posting it here. In fact, i'm now running Slackware Linux with Kernel 5.10.1

uname -a
Linux slack64.slackie.org 5.10.1 #1 SMP Sat Dec 19 17:07:30 CST 2020 x86_64 AMD Ryzen 5 1600X Six-Core Processor AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux

One notable differences with previous patch was that it now requires me to run the nvidia-installer with --no-unified-memory parameter or else it would failed to build nvidia-uvm.ko modules. I suspect that this has to do with CUDA things and i don't have it installed on my machine. If you do have CUDA installed, you can try to remove this parameter and see if it works on your machine.

 Hopefully this patch can help users who are still stuck with legacy drivers like me :)

After the big merge (tm) event, i respun two new fresh VM based on latest update on -current and rebuilt all packages for MATE and Cinnamon to see whether there's a breakage or not and it turns out it works very well for MATE. You can use the same script to rebuilt all the packages if it's broken due to the big update.

As for Cinnamon, i'm using this good chance to push the updates for Cinnamon 4.8.x that has been pushed by upstream developers. I had prepared for this launch when vtown was introduced few weeks ago, but i'm stuck at elogind that didn't get pushed to main tree since it's one of the main dependency for Cinnamon packages besides other things. I'm really glad that it was finally pushed and i can push my changes for Cinnamon 4.8 and provide early preview for Cinnamon 4.8 for Slackware-Current users.

Binary packages has been uploaded to slackware.uk (Thanks Tadgy) as usual and master branch has been updated as well with the latest commits.

Let me know if you find any issues running the script or the binaries.

Have fun :)

This is the day!!! This is the Big Merge (tm) day of Plasma 5 and newer XFCE from /testing into main branch. This is also the day of Qt4 and ConsoleKit2 removal from Slackware since it has been replaced by Qt5 and elogind. It took time for Patrick to push all these changes but finally all is in the main tree now and it's time to polish this tree for best release ever of Slackware 15.0.

Since there are a lot of changes (new, removed, upgraded, rebuilt) entries in the changelog, pay attention in the new and removed parts since you don't want to miss them.

LQ community has done a great job of submitting suggestions, testing (and found broken packages), and sending patches to Patrick and we want more of those positive suggestions/comments to improve the stability of Slackware.

I'm looking forward for an Alpha/Beta state of Slackware 15.0 once Pat is finished with some more cleanups after this big merge. Stay tunes and stay safe!!!

It's Thanksgiving day in the US and Patrick gives a very nice gift to every Slackware users which he posted on his Patreon page. He pushed GNOME-related stacks to main tree (including UPower 0.99.x) and XFCE stack to vtown.

Please note that this update will affect those who are using MSB and CSB projects as some of the dependencies are now part of the main tree, so before upgrading, it would be good idea to remove them first.

For MATE users, here's the list of packages you need to remove:

• glade
• libwnck3
• gtksourceview3

Since UPower has been bumped, i have the chance to bump mate-power-manager to 1.24.x release as well since it requires newer UPower which was the only blocker to bump this package. With this update, all MATE packages are now in 1.24.x release.

Due to COVID-19 outbreak, many activities are switched to home activities and this affect my kinds and me personally. All schools activities and assignments were given online and  it must be done at home and submitted back on the learning management system used. One of the task given was to draw and i realize it's not that easy to draw using a mouse and keyboard for my daughter, so i was thinking of buying a new drawing tablet.

I have been looking for some brands and making sure that it should work on my Slackware desktop and finally yesterday, i bought a new Graphic Drawing Tablet Huion Inspiron H430P from local dealer in Jakarta. It's considered a nice tablet for beginners and i'm not trying to be a professional artist, so this cheap tablet should be fine for me.

Today this tablet arrived and i started to check whether it's working out of the box under Slackware. I tried to connect the device to my computer and i can see that it has been detected by latest kernel in Slackware-Current (5.4.30 at this time of writing) and xorg libinput drivers. The pen (which is battery-free) works out of the box and i can instantly draw things using Krita or GIMP.

Unfortunately the pen lack of pressure sensitivity feature if we are using the driver provided by the Linux kernel. The four buttons on the tablet itself is also not working. So i tried to make a SlackBuild script to package a newer version of driver for tablets made by Digimend from this project. The project provides newer version of drivers compared to the one available in the Linux Kernel. So i installed the package and reboot the computer or you can simply reload the modules by using this command:

modprobe -r hid-kye hid-uclogic hid-polostar hid-viewsonic



The newer driver provides better support and it enables us to add more custom configuration to the tablet by using X.Org driver or Wacom driver.

Before you proceed, make sure your tablet is detected by xinput:
xinput --list
⎡ Virtual core pointer                          id=2    [master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer                id=4    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ Microsoft Wired Keyboard 600              id=9    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ HUION Huion Tablet Pen stylus             id=10   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ HUION Huion Tablet Pad pad                id=11   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ HUION Huion Tablet Touch Ring pad         id=12   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ HUION Huion Tablet Dial                   id=13   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ Logitech USB Optical Mouse                id=14   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard                         id=3    [master keyboard (2)]
    ↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard               id=5    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Power Button                              id=6    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Power Button                              id=7    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Microsoft Wired Keyboard 600              id=8    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Microsoft Wired Keyboard 600              id=15   [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ HUION Huion Tablet Dial

Next we need to make a new X11 custom rule for this device. I created a new file /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-huion.conf:

# Huion tablets 
Section "InputClass" 
    Identifier "Huion class" 
    MatchProduct "TABLET" 
    MatchIsTablet "on" 
    MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*" 
    Driver "wacom" 
EndSection 

Section "InputClass" 
    Identifier "Huion buttons" 
    MatchProduct "TABLET" 
    MatchIsKeyboard "on" 
    MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*" 
    Driver "evdev" 
EndSection 

Section "InputClass" 
    Identifier "Huion scroll" 
    MatchProduct "TABLET" 
    MatchIsPointer "off" 
    MatchIsKeyboard "off" 
    MatchIsTouchpad "off" 
    MatchIsTablet "off" 
    MatchIsTouchscreen "off" 
    MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*" 
    Driver "evdev" 
EndSection

Reboot the computer and check whether your tablet is visible using this command:

xsetwacom --list

HUION Huion Tablet Pen stylus           id: 10  type: STYLUS    
HUION Huion Tablet Pad pad              id: 11  type: PAD       
HUION Huion Tablet Touch Ring pad       id: 12  type: PAD

As you can see, the device is now configurable via Wacom driver. Next i want to make a new configuration for my tablet as follows:
- Set the device mapping
- Set the screensize
- Set the ration between device:screensize
- Set 4 buttons:
 * Button 1: color picker
 * Button 2: resize brush size
 * Button 3: toggle erase mode on/off
 * Button 4: undo

Next i create a new file called huion and save it under /usr/bin:
#! /bin/bash

# License: CC-0/Public-Domain license
# Author : Willy Sudiarto Raharjo
# Reference: https://www.davidrevoy.com/article331/setup-huion-giano-wh1409-tablet-on-linux-mint-18-1-ubuntu-16-04

# Tablet definition 
tabletstylus="HUION Huion Tablet Pen stylus" 
tabletpad="HUION Huion Tablet Pad pad" 

# Reset 
xsetwacom --set "$tabletstylus" ResetArea 
xsetwacom --set "$tabletstylus" RawSample 4

# Mapping 
# get maximum size geometry with: 
# xsetwacom --get "$tabletstylus" Area 
# 0 0 24384 15240 
tabletX=24384 
tabletY=15240

# screen size: 
screenX=1920 
screenY=1080

# setup ratio : 
newtabletY=$(( $screenY * $tabletX / $screenX )) 
xsetwacom --set "$tabletstylus" Area 0 0 "$tabletX" "$newtabletY"   

# Buttons 
# ======= 
# TOP LEFT
xsetwacom --set "$tabletpad" Button 1 "key Control_L" # color picker on ring

# BOTTOM LEFT
xsetwacom --set "$tabletpad" Button 2 "key Shift_L" # resize brush

# TOP RIGHT
xsetwacom --set "$tabletpad" Button 3 "key e" # toggle eraser

# BOTTOM RIGHT
xsetwacom --set "$tabletpad" Button 8 "key Control_L z" # undo

Give execute permission and run this script when you start your desktop. In MATE, you can easily do this by opening System > Preferences > Personal > Startup Applications menu. Make a new entry by clicking on Add button and set the values as follows. This will ensure that the script will be executed when you logged in to your MATE desktop.

I'm planning to submit the SlackBuild to SBo soon so it can be used by other people as well. If you upgrade your kernel, you will need to re-ran the SlackBuild script so that it will place the modules into the correct kernel version used by your machine.

 

into HUION Huion Tablet stylus (removing the "Pen") so you need to adjust the "tabletstylus".

Hey all, it's been a while since i posted here, but today there's a big update that i want to share to all Slackware users who have waited for this to happen and this is one of the remaining part of my wishlist and that is the one and only, Plasma 5!!!

Yes, Patrick has finally decided to push Plasma 5 after coming with teaser in previous updates. At this moment, the Plasma 5 packages are still in /testing directory, but i'm guessing it won't be long until it's merged into the main tree along with other updates. I have downloaded the new Plasma 5 packages at my current desktop at home, but didn't have time to upgrade it this morning so i did test the upgrade on my workstation at the office first and once i confirmed it worked well, i perform the upgrade on my laptop which i used to write this post.

Here's how i perform the upgrade

slackpkg update

slackpkg upgrade-all (to upgrade poppler and libinput first)

slackpkg remove kde (to remove all KDE 4 packages)

cd slackware64-current/testing/packages/vtown

installpkg --install-new --reinstall deps/*.txz kde/*.txz

So for your information, the Plasma 5 that were added today consists of KDE Applications 20.08.2, Framework 5.75.0, and Plasma 5.20.2. This is the latest update from KDE developers per October 2020.

So far, i don't see any major issues with the new Plasma 5, but it will require more extensive testing  to discover issues. I do wish Patrick can keep distributing digiKam. It's a nice application that probably needed by many graphic designers or people that do digital manipulations using digital cameras.

This is the current Plasma 5 screenshot taken from System Settings on my laptop

To prevent slackpkg to revert back to the original KDE 4, put this into your /etc/slackpkg/blacklist until Plasma 5 gets added into main tree: [0-9]_vtown_[0-9]

Few days ago i saw that Cinnamon 4.6.0 has been released on GitHub and as usual, developers will still release a couple more releases before they mark it stable, but i have made some changes to the SlackBuild scripts and push it to master branch for those who are eager to try the new Cinnamon 4.6.x series.

I believe this version will be used in the next Linux Mint 20 which will be released in June, but i want Slackware-Current users to try this version first :)

So as usual, go grab the latest master commit in github or grab the binary packages in slackware.uk (don't forget to support Tadgy for providing this free service to Slackware community by signing up in his Patreon page).

Any feedback for the project is very appreciated.

I have been using my old GnuPG keys since long time ago (it was created in 2003) and i think it's time to make a new one which is more secure according to best practices recommended by many parties. I'm still keeping my old keys for now, but it's recommended that you should use my new key.

It's now using the new RSA 4096 bit key instead of the old DSA 1024 bit key.

You can grab my new public key here: https://gist.github.com/willysr/b63c6567a30a07f27dd94994fb282d9f or simply by running gpg2 --receive-keys 720E73097A7E6E5577ECAB9C3F617144D7238786

I have just build the latest MATE 1.24 on top of latest Slackware-Current (per Feb 26 2020) and pushed the binaries into the usual repository provided by Darren Austin at slackware.uk. I took this chance to bump some libraries to the latest version available.

As mentioned earlier, i can't provide mate-power-manager 1.24 since it requires new upower 0.99.x which uses a new API, so i will leave it as it is for now. Once new upower gets included, i will have to make some test first before pushing mate-power-manager 1.24 to public.

Big thanks to AlienBOB who generously deleted some of his ISOs to make room for MATE variant of Slackware Live ISO. The new ISO with MATE 1.24 will be provided soon once he had time to pull the binaries and recreate the ISO again.

One of the biggest wish for many people in Slackware community has been approved by Patrick this morning (or night depending on your local time). It's Qt5!! It's one of the main dependency for next Plasma 5 and many applications that has been ported to use Qt5 instead of Qt4.

Another big thing happening in -current is the new OpenSSH 8.2 release which will bring some incompatible changes, especially if you are still using ssh-rsa as the algorithm. To test whether your machine is affected, try to run this command in your shell

ssh -oHostKeyAlgorithms=-ssh-rsa user@host

If you managed to connect using the above command, it means that your OpenSSH software is fine, but if you don't, then it needs to be upgraded.

I'm still waiting for the next big update Plasma 5, PAM, and XFCE 4.14 to be merged soon. I'm not using the PAM for now as i want to test it later when it has been merged into the main tree. That saves time to remove the _pam packages later on.

It has been some time since i posted about Slackware updates and around 2.5 years since my wishlist i created in 2017. Only one item left that are still not yet approved by Patrick, but i have a hunch that it's coming soon to -Current tree. So i guess it's time to wrap some updates up to early December 2019:

• Linux LTS Kernel 5.4.x
• PHP 7.4.x
• GCC 9.2.x
• GLIBC 2.30
• Python 3.7.x
• Perl 5.30.x
• GTK+3 3.24.x
• NetworkManager 1.20.x
• vte 0.58.x
• XOrg 1.20.x
• tcl/tk 8.16.x
• Mesa 19.2.x
• Bind 9.14.x
• Rust 1.39.x
• SDL2.0.x
• Firefox 68.0-ESR
• Thunderbird 60.8.x
• MariaDB 10.4.x
• Postfix 3.4.x
• Samba 4.11.x
• OpenSSH 8.1p1

Basically, most of the list above are bleeding edge packages, so when you read a news telling that Slackware is outdated, please ask them to read the -current Changelog. You can see all the added/removed packages since Slackware 14.2 here: http://slackware.osuosl.org/slackware64-current/CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT

My (updated) wishlist are:

• Add Qt5 and Plasma 5
• Python 3.8

My two projects: MATE SlackBuilds and Cinnamon SlackBuilds are working nicely with the latest Slackware-Current. Binary packages are hosted in Tadgy's repository: http://slackware.uk/.

Eric's Plasma 5 and LiveSlack projects are also keeping up to date with Slackware development. Please follow the news on his blog: https://alien.slackbook.org/blog/

It has been requested by many people in the past, many debates have been sprung due to this discussions, and finally in 2020 Patrick is taking PAM in -current (still in /testing for now, but hopefully will be merged in the main tree in the next few days or hours). It's a long journey to get PAM  gets included and some people have been working on this as a side project, namely Vincent Batts, Robby Workman, and Ivandi. Their work is finally paid off and next Slackware release will have PAM support out-of-the-box, so people in the corporate can start working on AD (Active Directory) on top of Slackware.

I have been providing PAM support in my CSB project, but it's only needed to be present and it doesn't get linked to other packages outside CSB project. With real PAM support in core Slackware, some packages in CSB will be removed soon and Slackware should get real PAM support.

PAM is down, next one we are looking for is the new XFCE 4.14 and Plasma 5.18 LTS along with the new UPower for mate-power-manager. I'm looking forward for next big update in -current tree for the next few weeks. It's gonna make your adrenalin pumped!!!

MATE 1.24 has been officially released by the developers as scheduled. They are going to be part of some major Linux distribution coming up in April, such as Ubuntu 20.04 and Fedora 32. The highlight of MATE 1.24 release are moving from dbus-glib to GDBus, intltools to gettext, and also Python 3 migration due to EOL for Python 2. HiDPI is also one aspect the developer was focusing on for this release.

Tarballs have been uploaded to usual place and soon it will be coming to many distributions. I was ready to provide binary packages for MATE 1.24 for Slackware (-current users), but unfortunately that idea might have to be postponed a bit since mate-power-manager now requires newer upower (0.99.8+) which Slackware doesn't have (yet). It will become part of Slackware when Plasma 5 and XFCE 4.14 are introduced to -Current tree someday.

Git tree are updated to build MATE 1.24 releases in master branch (except for mate-power-manager). Feel free to pull the latest master branch and compile it on your own if you don't want to wait until new upower gets included in current.

Cinnamon 4.4 is out and while it's not officially announced as per this post is created, i have prepared the SlackBuild scripts along with the binary packages ready for Slackware-Current users. These new set of packages adds two new dependencies: pytz and libtimezonemap, but removed some of the packages that are no longer needed or have become part of Slackware Current.

Cinnamon 4.4 brings more improvements towards HiDPI especially through the icons, new XAppStatus applet, performance improvements, nemo external condition support, new scrollbar settings, and many more. Expect details on Clem announcement soon.

The SlackBuild script is now pushed to master branch of CSB Project, so feel free to pull latest update and run the build-cinnamon.sh script if you want to build it from source. Binary packages are available via http://slackware.uk/csb/current/x86_64/.

Hey all

it's been a while since posted a post here, but that's because of my work load which was way so hectic, so i didn't have time to post an update on Slackware or other things related to Slackware, but for today, i will make an exception since it's time to play with Cinnamon 4.2, the latest release of Cinnamon, which is yet to be announced, but the tarballs are already released on their github project page.

There's no news yet on their blog, but i'm guessing they will release it soon after they mark it as stable. It took several minor releases to ensure stability and compatibility in Cinnamon based on past track records. We had some minor issue dealing with cinnamon-settings-daemon for Slackware-Current since they moved to support newer UPower 0.99 API while in Slackware, we still use the old UPower 0.9.23. In the end, upstream patched a bit, but i'm not really sure the power management component works best since i haven't tried it yet on a laptop (desktop is fine).

Anyway, the changes are now merged into master branch already on our github project and binary packages are now uploaded to http://slackware.uk/csb/current/x86_64/. Please use upgradepkg --install-new --reinstall *.txz to make sure everything is reinstalled and you didn't miss a new package (tinycss) or you will have a semi broken cinnamon-control-center.

NOTE: This is intended for Slackware-Current users only. It hasn't been tested on Slackware 14.2.

When i bought my first AMD Ryzen 5 1600X last year, i was hoping for a great performance after looking at some reviews and it did give me a good impressions on the first few days both in Windows and Linux. Unfortunately few days later, i had some issues after upgrading to latest Windows 10 update and i decided to remove Windows 10 completely from my desktop at home. It turns out an issue on the BIOS, so an update was performed and suddenly the problem goes away (Thanks to idlemoor for the suggestion).

It all went fine after few weeks ago i got another same sympthoms. When i left my computers over night, i would get a lockup in the morning. I barely have any loads, so it shouldn't be an issue. I tried several trick, but still the issue persists, until i tried the last combination by adding this kernel boot parameters: "nomodeset irqpoll rcu_nocbs=0-11 idle=nomwait". I added this parameters in /etc/default/grub and use grub-mkconfig to generate a new grub.cfg and after few days of testing, i could say this parameters are the best workaround for me. I also use this script to disable C6 state, which is suspected as one of the culprit. So far, everything is working as intended. Let's wait for a couple of days and see the results

It's been a month since the final release of MATE 1.22.0 and the developers has pushed a new update MATE 1.22.1 which fixed some issues, including security fixes in the code that still uses unsafe functions such as strcat or strcpy.

The new mate-icon-theme is also featuring a sharper icons for some MATE components as can be seen in the git log. The icons are now built using latest inkscape version so you will notice some differences  once you upgrade your MATE components and logout from your X and login again or reboot your machine.

For this new update, i had to patch the upstream source a bit to remove a dependency of inkscape in order to build mate-utils. It was introduced in this commit, but i revert some of the changes in the latest commit here. It won't have any effect at all for users as inkscape is only used as a build dependency, not as runtime dependency.

MATE developers are very open to non-systemd systems like Slackware, Gentoo, and many others distributions that didn't adopt systemd. The latest mate-session-manager works without a patch since it's now included in the 1.22.1 release. Big thanks to Victor Kareh of RedHat. This is important as more and more Linux and *BSD system uses MATE as their desktop environment. The latest project that incorporate MATE is OS18, where it was built on top of NetBSD.

Binary packages has been pushed to the slackware.uk as usual. It's built against latest update in -current per April 23 2019.

If you live in the stable environment, you will notice that Patrick has issued a new update on the kernel packages that fixed several security vulnerabilities and also some other minor issues found during kernel development and backported to earlier LTS release. Unfortunately, this new release broke some user-space application as they changed some of the API during the development, which was
get_user_pages. It's still unknown why this changes happening on -stable releases which shouldn't change any interfaces.

On my system, it broke the virtual box, both from source and also binary distribution from Oracle. It failed here with this message:

/tmp/vbox.0/r0drv/linux/memobj-r0drv-linux.c:1113:18: error: too many arguments to function 'get_user_pages'
             rc = get_user_pages(pTask,                  /* Task for fault accounting. */
                  ^
In file included from /tmp/vbox.0/r0drv/linux/the-linux-kernel.h:101:0,
                 from /tmp/vbox.0/r0drv/linux/memobj-r0drv-linux.c:31:
include/linux/mm.h:1200:6: note: declared here  

Other people spotted a breakage on NVidia driver as well, although a new beta driver is available that fixed this issue. Unfortunately, this issue is not yet fixed in VirtualBox case. There's a patch available, but at this time of writing, it hasn't landed in VirtualBox's SVN repository.

Update:
I managed to rebuilt the kernel modules under binary distribution from Oracle (Thanks to LQ). Here's how to do it:

1. Run the installer (it will fail to build the kernel modules for the first time)
2. open /usr/src/vboxhost-6.0.4/vboxdrv/r0drv/linux/memobj-r0drv-linux.c
3. Change the bold part (there are 3 places where you need to apply)



if GET_USER_PAGES_API >= KERNEL_VERSION(4, 9, 0)

                                fWrite ? FOLL_WRITE |   /* Write to memory. */

                                         FOLL_FORCE     /* force write access. */

                                       : 0,             /* Write to memory. */ 

 

into

 

if GET_USER_PAGES_API >= KERNEL_VERSION(4, 4, 168)
                                fWrite ? FOLL_WRITE |   /* Write to memory. */
                                         FOLL_FORCE     /* force write access. */
                                       : 0,             /* Write to memory. */ 

4. Run /sbin/vboxconfig

MATE Developers are still working on next major update, MATE 1.22, but in the meantime, they are still pushing updates to the latest stable release: MATE 1.20. Several packages were getting fixes while others have received translations updates and they have been pushed to public for few days. I'm a little bit behind as i'm focusing on stabilizing Cinnamon packages and it seems they are now in stable states as LinuxMint 19.1 has been released. I can now focus on my MATE project again.

So here's the (probably) last updates in 2018:

base/caja-1.20.3-x86_64-1_msb.txz: Upgraded.
base/engrampa-1.20.2-x86_64-1_msb.txz: Upgraded.
base/eom-1.20.2-x86_64-1_msb.txz: Upgraded.
base/libmateweather-1.20.2-x86_64-1_msb.txz: Upgraded.
base/marco-1.20.4-x86_64-1_msb.txz: Upgraded.
base/mate-control-center-1.20.4-x86_64-1_msb.txz: Upgraded.
base/mate-desktop-1.20.4-x86_64-1_msb.txz: Upgraded.
extra/atril-1.20.3-x86_64-1_msb.txz: Upgraded.
extra/caja-extensions-1.20.2-x86_64-1_msb.txz: Upgraded.
extra/mate-applets-1.20.3-x86_64-1_msb.txz: Upgraded.
extra/mate-calc-1.20.3-x86_64-1_msb.txz: Upgraded.

Code changes have been pushed to github and binary packages have been uploaded to slackware.uk repository.

Next major version 1.22 will be released in 2019. For upcoming changes, please see the Roadmap.

Clem hasn't announced the official release of Cinnamon 4.0, but the tarball has been around for some days and i have managed to build it on top of latest Slackware Current. Cinnamon 4.0 will give some big performance on Nemo, new panel layout, and many new features. You can check the detailed changes on every sub component of Cinnamon on their github repository.

I noticed the release just two days ago while i was sick at home and i started to work on it. It took some time to do finish it since some sub components changed their build tool to Meson and some changes in the parameters were needed to build without Wayland (Thanks Clem for the pointers). At the end, it was a successful one (at least under a virtual machine), but it won't get merged into master for now as i need to make sure few things before pushing them to master. Also, Slackware Current is still developing, so there might be a chance that some packages are added into the main tree itself.

Here is the part where you can help by trying to reproduce the build on a clean installation of Slackware-Current. Go to Cinnamon SlackBuild repository on branch cinnamon4 and start cloning it. Please use the build-cinnamon.sh script to automate all the download process and installation according to the BUILD_ORDERS.

Let me know if there's a problem with the current installation and please write a new issue so it's trackable.

PS: You will notice that the default icon in the menu turned into GNOME menu. I'm hoping to replace it with Slackware's icon in the final release of Cinnamon 4.0 for Slackware 15.0 :) (Done, thanks to Skaendo for the icon and patch).

Today i decided to call for public testing for the upcoming Cinnamon 4 for Slackware Current, a development branch of Slackware which will become Slackware 15.0 in the future. I found the current version of Cinnamon and all of it's components are stable enough for public usage and Slackware already progressed much and some of the packages that are needed by Cinnamon are now included in the core packages as well.

I have merged the cinnamon4 branch into master branch in Github repository, so master branch is now following Cinnamon 4.0 exclusively. The build script is updated to reflect changes to the list of scripts to build the whole Cinnamon desktop. You can just run build-cinnamon.sh to build and install all packages according to the build order.

Binary packages are uploaded to the usual place, thanks to Darren Austin for the mirror space.

As always, please raise a ticket if you found any issue with the build script or if you have any suggestion to improve the experience with Cinnamon Desktop.

UPDATE: vala and graphviz are now removed as vala is included in -current and it was built without graphviz.

Under 24h after Linux Kernel 4.19 LTS is released by Greg, Patrick decided to bump the kernel used in -current to the latest LTS release. This new major version brings tons of new and interesting features, as written in Kernel Newbies.

I decided to try this new kernel and luckily, my VMWare is still working well, even though i used VirtualBox lately. I did have some problems with NVidia 390.87, but i found a simple patch and here's what you need to do:

1. ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-390.87 --extract-only
2. cd ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-390.87
3. Apply the patch found here
4. ./nvidia-installer

All (except 1) of my wishlist is now fulfilled. The last remaining is moving on to Qt5 and KDE 5. I'm pretty sure it will showed up soon enough as KDE 5 is getting more stable and polished. It has been tested by Eric (and some other) for some time and it's proven to be solid.

I was shocked to hear that the Slackware Store didn't work as intended and Patrick got no income from the store for the last TWO YEARS!!!  I was mad, considering that most people thought the sales would have gone to Patrick and it could helped him financially while working on Slackware Linux project. They don't really need the DVDs, but they wanted to show their respect for Patrick who have devoted his life for the project. I stopped my subscription once i saw that post by sending an email to the store.

Many people have suggested alternative options to Patrick to get the money directly to him instead of using third party and FINALLY, he officially announced his PayPal account (https://www.paypal.me/volkerdi). For now, that's the only official payment method that is confirmed by Patrick himself. Do not go other options like BitCoin address because Patrick has denied that it was his account.

Since my PayPal is blocked permanently for something i didn't do and stupid AI flagged me, i may not be able to send any donations nor receive any donations using PayPal. I will probably wait if Patrick decide to add more ways to set up a donations which goes directly to him.

Please support Patrick and his family so that he can focus on Slackware Linux and make Slackware Linux 15.0 the best release ever!!!!

It's been a month since my last post about SBo DMCA Takedown, and i wanted to share some updates in the Slackware development progress. It has been an amazing progress and most of my wishlist (from one year ago) have been realized, while two remaining.

The recent upgrade in Slackware brought GCC 8.1, the latest major release of GNU C Compiler. It brings new language features as well as better code optimizations, BUT it also comes with a stricter rules (which might affects scripts in the SBo projects). Amazingly Pat has stated that all packages have been tested for build failures against this new version of compiler.

Another progress in development areas are perl 5.28.0, rust 1.27.0, guile 2.2.4, git 2.18.0, mercurial 4.6.2, mariaDB 10.3.8, PHP 7.2.7, and meson 0.47.0. Developers will love it. It has great support of many modern languages along with the tools to support development process.

As for core packages, the kernel is still tracking latest 4.14.x LTS branch along with coreutils 8.30 and sysvinit 2.90 among many other changes. pkgtool have received many love in this cycle and it's a major work related to how package database are located. Previously it was placed under /var/log/packages, but in the latest version, the exact location have been moved under /var/lib/pkgtools/packages, while the old one are symlinked for backward compatibility.

Many updated/new packages/libraries gets into this release, including pulseaudio 12, harfbuzz 1.8, poppler 0.66, mesa 18.1, NetworkManager 1.12, texlive 2018.180630, gimp 2.10.4.

Patrick is now tracking Firefox 60-ESR and no longer continue on following latest release from Mozilla as ESR will get longer support. Next ESR release will be at Firefox 68 which is scheduled to be released on July 2019, so small chances that we need to wait until next year.

I'm still waiting for the KDE5/Qt5 integration in Slackware.

About 14h ago, 10:32 PM GMT+7 (Western Indonesian Time), me (and several other people who forked SBo's repository at GitHub) received a DMCA Takedown notice due to a company (Steinberg) filed a complaint to more than 200 open source repositories in GitHub that uses several of their header files (namely aeffect.h and aeffectx.h). We used that files in one of our scripts (jack-tools) which was changed over a year ago by the maintainer. At that time, it was OK to use their header files (although it has been unmaintained since 2013), but some time ago, Steinberg has made an announcement about dropping their support for VST 2 and focusing on VST 3 only. This drives the DMCA takedown action which affects SBo repositories in GitHub.

The admins have discussed this matter last night and we came to a solution of fixing this issue permanently by removing the related commit and all the history for this script in master and 14.2 branch. This is not a trivial action as the commits involved were 11867 since 2017-02-04. Ponce did the initial testing and David did the final touch, including pushing an unexpected public update including with the mass re-base on master and 14.2 branch (Thanks David).

How this affects you?
If you are maintainers who had push access to SBo repository or someone who cloned SBo repository locally, you must do these steps in order to get back to the right track:

git tag -d 14.2-20170204.1 (you only need to do this step once) 

git push github :refs/tags/14.2-20170204.1 (only if you have mirrored SBo repository on github)

git checkout master (do this to 14.2 branch as well)
git fetch --all
git reset --hard origin/master (do it for 14.2 as well)

or a simpler way is to re-clone our repository using git clone. That should give you a clean repository with an updated tags and commits.

If you are regular user who download the scripts or tarball containing the SlackBuild script along with the rest from our website or someone who used automatic tools, such as sbopkg, you don't need to do anything and everything will work normally just as you normally do.

At this point, all the tags are not yet signed, but it will be done soon. SBo will also set a stricter rule to avoid things like this to happen in the future.

The first idea was occured by windows driver, because in my laptop supported dolby sound. So i found the interesting article to enable surrounding sound.
Before you changed the sound, first test your sound with command:

Drop caps is use a large font like a mass media, magazine, paper etc. That will be stylish or good looking. The time will create in libreoffice.

In friday, slackware-current was provide to update package again. The package update is kernel to 4.4.16 version, libidn bug has fixed, tigervnc was recompiled with xorg-server-1.18.4 and other.

Here list of package in slackware-current: (source from: http://www.slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=x86_64)


Thu Jul 28 19:44:25 UTC 2016
a/kernel-generic-4.4.16-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
a/kernel-huge-4.4.16-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
a/kernel-modules-4.4.16-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
d/kernel-headers-4.4.16-x86-1.txz: Upgraded.
k/kernel-source-4.4.16-noarch-1.txz: Upgraded.
l/libidn-1.33-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
       Fixed out-of-bounds read bugs. Fixed crashes on invalid UTF-8.
       Thanks to Hanno Böck.
       For more information, see:
       http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2015-8948
       http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2016-6261
       http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2016-6262
       http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2016-6263
       (* Security fix )
l/libtasn1-4.9-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
n/bluez-5.41-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
extra/tigervnc/tigervnc-1.6.0-x86_64-4.txz: Rebuilt.
       Recompiled for xorg-server-1.18.4.
isolinux/initrd.img: Rebuilt.
kernels/: Upgraded.
usb-and-pxe-installers/usbboot.img: Rebuilt.
+————————–+

This time i’ll share backup files in / Directories, i use Slackware Linux as mainly operating system. The implementation using local linux machine to a remote linux server using rsync command. This will be an interactive way to perform backup files / directory, where you need to provide remote backup server hostname or ip address and folder location.

Many tricks and tips using linux for daily activity, one of them is use linux default program i.e shell script. Persistence shell script is very easy for use furthermore for progammer’s, administrator etc.

The night will discuss about MySql again which previously was discussed Reset MySql [MariaDB] Password. If you have an important data you can create the backup using shell script and if using linux.

Today i will share about mail tools in linux default with shell script, yep this mail using command line not graphical. In Slackware Linux the mail was include 3 tools i.e Mailx,Mutt And Sharutils.

Yesterday, i finished setup mysql a.k.a MariaDB for develop a website in my machine and today i forget the mariaDB password.

Yesterday ago, i get problem again. Yeah this problem unimportant too, because this little problem. But i’ll share for those experienced the same thing …

This problem just a little problem, because the KDE default screenshot application is ksnapshot. But if you installing KDE Plasma ksnapshot was removed, and changing to spectacle.

In june 15 after update slackware package then i get notice to kde 5_16.6 available in alien repository in previously post i have told information about updating slackware system.


<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><h3></h3><h3>What’s new in KDE 5_16.6???</h3><ul><li>Frameworks 5.23.0 is an enhancement release with no new frameworks this time. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/kde-frameworks-5.23.0.php</li><li>Plasma 5.6.5 is the final bugfix release of the 5.6 series – Plasma 5.7 is going to be released in a couple of weeks. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.6.5.php .</li><li>Applications 16.04.2 is also a maintenance release. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-applications-16.04.2.php .</li><li>Qt5 and Qt5-webkit packages in the “deps” directory have both been upgraded to 5.6.1 as per request of the Plasma developers who had a lot of issues with Qt 5.6.0.</li><li>And krdc does not have to be recompiled any longer to enable RDP support. All you need to do now is add a freerdp package (not yet in my repository – does anyone need this?).</li></ul>
<ul></ul><h3>Upgrade KDE 5_16.6 using slackpkg+</h3>Upgrade KDE 5 using slackpkgplus is not difficult, you just install slackpkg+ because slackpkgplus is third party tools. After install configure your mirror, for example i using bear.alienbase.nl for mirror and then don’t forget to remove line in /etc/slackpkg/blacklist if [0-9]+alien exist.

For command update:

If you have slackpkgplus earlier you don’t need slackpkg install-new or slackpkg install ktown (if not include a new package) and you have installed kde plasma previous version (this my optionally).

Here command for update:

<pre># slackpkg update
# slackpkg install ktown_testing (to get the newly added packages from my repo)
# slackpkg install-new (to get the new official Slackware packages that were part of my deps previously)
# slackpkg upgrade ktown_testing (upgrade all existing packages to their latest versions)
# removepkg xembed-sni-proxy ktux amor kde-base-artwork kde-wallpapers kdeartwork (they don’t exist in the repo anymore)
# slackpkg upgrade-all (upgrade the remaining dependencies that were part of my repo previously)
</pre>
<h3>Where to get the new packages for Plasma 5</h3>Download locations are listed below (you will find the sources in ./source/5/ and packages in /current/5/ subdirectories). If you are interested in the development of KDE 5 for Slackware, you can peek at eric git repository too.
Using a mirror is preferred because you get more bandwidth from a mirror and it’s friendlier to the owners of the master server!
<ul><li>http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/ (the master repository, will be slow), rsync URI: rsync://alien.slackbook.org/alien/ktown/</li><li>http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/ (my own new fast mirror), rsync URI is rsync://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/.</li><li>http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/ (willysr’s Indonesian mirror), rsync URI: rsync://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/</li><li>http://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/linux/distributions/slackware/people/alien-kde/ French fast mirror thanks to Tonus.</li><li>http://slackware.uk/people/alien-kde/ (fast UK based mirror, run by Darren Austin, rsync URI: rsync://slackware.uk/people/alien-kde/ )</li></ul>
Happy using KDE 5_16.6!!!

In june 13, 14 and 15 slackware-current provide package to update was streak. In june 13 there are continuation update.

Here list a package (June 13):

<ul><li>Upgraded gettext to 0.19.8.1 version</li></ul><ul><li>Rebuilt pkgtools cause in setup.80.make-bootdisk create a first bootable active primary partition rather than using a filesystem on the unpartitioned device. Some BIOSes won’t boot it otherwise.</li></ul><ul><li>Upgraded gettext-tools to 0.19.8.1 version </li></ul>
Here list a package (June 14):

<ul><li> Rebuilt pidgin-2.10.12 Because pidgin use the much larger collection of SSL certs in /etc/ssl/certs rather than the ones that ship with Pidgin, otherwise certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt (and others) cannot be verified.</li></ul>Here list of slackware package (June 15):

<ul><li>Upgraded glibc-zoneinfo-2016</li><li>Rebuilt package-tools 14.2 cause the problem in removepkg fix package name matching so that (for example) “removepkg s” will not remove a package whose name begins and ends with “s” and added internationalized man pages.</li><li>Rebuilt slackpkg-2,82.1 and added internationalized man pages.</li><li>Upgraded vim and vim-gvim to 7.4.1938 version</li><li>Upgraded git to 2.9.0 version </li><li>Upgraded gparted to 0.26.1 version</li><li>Rebuilt aaa_elflibs 14.2</li><li>Upgrade cups package to 2.1.4 version</li></ul>
Just only one package to update or provide in slackware changelog in june 14, in june 15 along with their renewal KDE Framework 5 from alien.
So i must update kde plasma 5, and happy updating system!
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