Well, as most have noticed this week, there are some changes in the slackware-current tree. The most notable of this of course is the change of packet format from the standard TGZ “tarballs” to the TXZ format. XZ is an algorithm based on LZMA.

The most effective way of updating your -current tree (if you haven’t done so already), is running my tgz2txz script before running rsync(1). Basically the script unzips the Tarball and repackages it again with the XZ utils.

However this does require you to have the XZ tools installed. The most simple way is just downloading the source and SlackBuild file from a mirror (slackware-current/source/a/xz/*) and run the SlackBuild.

The script is originally based of rpm2tgz, written for Slackware, by Patrick Volkerding, but thanks a lot to Robby Workman for making many improvements to the script.

You can get the most recent copy from my Git repository:
$ git clone git://github.com/michielvw/tgz2txz.git

or download the script  from here:
http://buhkit.net/~michiel/slackware/tgz2txz/

Anyway, hope this little bit helps.

I finally got around to updating my little howto on how to install Openoffice on Slackware 12.2

I have also moved it from just being a blogpost to the howto pages sections so it’s a lot more easier to find.

I have now written a more extensive howto on this subject, what to install and how. You can read it all on this page.

A while ago, I wrote that I wanted to be able to write tweets from my favourite irc client (aka irssi). Back then I actually had a bit of a look around and trying to find something that could remotely work (and preferably also worked with perl [1])

Tonight, while being my usual insomniac self I decided to have another look on the net: And a good thing too, as this time around after applying some google-fu, I discovered “Twirssi“

After downloading the script and installing it, the fun really started and I started to have a honest amount of geeking about having to hunt down and write a bunch of SlackBuild scripts for the various perl-modules.

dependency-tree for twirssi.pl [*]

• Net::Twitter
• Test::Exception
  • Sub::Uplevel
• WWW::Shorten::TinyURL
• LWP::UserAgent
  • HTML::Entities
• JSON::Any
  • JSON
    • JSON::XS
  • JSON::DWID
  • JSON::Syck

So what is left to do. Due to time constraints (a.k.a head dunking on keyboard syndrome seems to be creeping up on me, and I already start to do stuff double).

I still need to write the SlackBuild for WWW::Shorten::TinyURL and go through my build scripts and make sure that for all the scripts the CFLAGS and SLKCFLAGS are correctly set in the script. Then find a place to actually publish these things [2]. Either they will go up on SlackBuilds.org or I’ll host them on buhkit.

Here you can see a screen shot of twirssi in action. (Running on irssi / screen on a Slackware 12.2 box).

First impressions that twirssi seems to be working well and could actually be rather useful. According to the webpage there should be some sort of integration / automation possible with bitlbee. :)

[1] – Especially since all irssi plugins are written in Perl.
[2] – IF you are interested in twirssi on Slackware, and want the build scripts, give me a shout and I’ll post them.

[*] – Builds highlighted in blue are available from SlackBuilds.org.

Reposted from the official announcement on Slackware.com

Yes folks, ’tis the season to announce a new release of Slackware. With a shiny new kernel, many package updates, and the newly added ability to install from a Samba share, we bring to you the latest in the stable Slackware 12.x series. Slackware 12.2 ships with the 2.6.27.7 Linux kernel, the Xorg 1.4.2 X server (with many driver, library, and application updates), Xfce 4.4.3, KDE 3.5.10, simplified wired and wireless networking with wicd in /extra, package upgrade management with slackpkg moved into the main tree, support for non-usb-storage digital cameras through libgphoto2, pm-utils (tools to support suspend and hibernate through HAL), and much, much more. This release brings the system up-to-date without compromising stability or compatibility with the 12.x series.

More details may be found in the official announcement.

If you like Slackware, please consider supporting the project by picking up a copy of Slackware 12.2 from the Slackware Store. The discs are off to replication now and pre-orders are being accepted for the official 6 CD or 1 DVD set. Also by popular demand, we now have black T-shirts with the original Slackware logo for sale. Check ‘em out!

Thanks are due to the Slackware crew, the developers of slackbuilds.org, the fine folks on linuxquestions.org, IRC, and everyone else who pitched in to help make this another great Slackware release. We couldn’t have done it without your help.

As always — have fun!

Pat and the Slackware crew

—

Well this weekend (well Thursday morning) kethry will be leaving for a long weekend away at her parents. Which means all kind of geekery time for me. Huzzah!!

Most of it started today really while I tried to figure a way to get putty on a USB stick  so keth has a way to connect buhkit.net from her mom’s laptop. Normally putty writes to the windows registry. Thanks to straterra for pointing out that I can have putty store information in files rather than windows registry. This will also deal with the fact that I don’t have to worry that kethry has to figure out how to setup putty. Now she can just plug it in, click putty.exe and connect straight away.

Things to do:

• Probably upgrading both Hades and Persephone to -current. (upgrade or reinstall)
• Upgrade Dionysus (my Toshiba Tecra PII laptop) to the latest of -current and the (sorta) latest SVN pull of XFCE 4.6 [1] (with thanks to rworkman)

• See if can convert my USB stick to ext3. [2]
• Create the USB Installer on they USB stick, so I can have some way of booting Slackware-current’s installer.
• Find a way to make more use of my 256MB (sure go ahead laugh) USB stick, than just a 25 MB Slackware boot disk. [3]

• Still ponder why this piece of shite Lite-on DVD does not want to burn DVD’s in the first place. [4]

• Drink beer, lots of it ;-)

[1] – XFCE 4.6 is really starting to look interesting. Although I am not sure that the extra clicks needed for the menu are helpful, It starts to fill in a nice gap below KDE and bare bones window managers ala openbox and fluxbox

[2] – Just for the heck of it. Considering I don’t have any Windows computers myself, so most data I transfer is between linux boxen anyway. Plus it beats using FAT16. If I really need to transfer data between a linux host and a windows host, I can always use kethry’s USB key.

[3] – Slax looks actually sorta interesting at 187 for the USB image. I wonder how much of it is really usefull. As for what I want really. Preferably a way to boot the latest slackware stable/current kernel, some minimal tooling would be nice, but the rest of the disk usable to transfer files.

[4] – Luckily, it does still write CD-RW’s. But I really would like being able if nothing else to make slackware-12.{1,2}.iso’s and slackware-current.iso’s. Just if I need to reinstall some computer without a net connection and not having accesss to my local mirrors.

I mentioned a while ago that I was still looking for a decent way to measure the amount of traffic that passes over my interface. The problem is mostly due to the fact that my ISP refuses for some reason to measure over a proper 24 hour period (hie 00:00:00 - 23:59:59), instead they have opted to measure the bandwidth, from 09:00:00 - 08:59:59. [1]

As you can imagine this gives somewhat a problem because 99% of all the programs will not adhere to that or will not allow you to change the measurement period. Now for a while I have been wanting to do something like that. It tends to give me chronic headaches when you are trying to do something and have to calculate bandwidth over three different sets of times.

Sounds like teh fun huh :) I used to use knemo for this, but all of a sudden, knemo started to flake out on me and to deliver outrageous results (something among the lines of 106GB over 24 hours and then a 49GB over 2 hours .. which somehow seems outside the norm of possibilities of bog standard 802.11.

So that was becoming rather useless. The second problem with knemo is, is that it only works from within KDE. So dropping X and working purely from CLI, makes it stop monitoring how much traffic passes the interface.

But thanks to the guys in ‘chucks, who took the output of vnstat and poured it into readable chunks, I finally managed to rewrite the above statement to something approaching normal bash_code :)

The result now, looks like this: [2]

[michiel@hades]:[~]$ vdstat
Report Generated on: Wed Sep 12 11:40:57 BST 2007
Received = 71 MB ((73440 kB)
Transmitted = 9 MB (9730 kB)
+----------------------------------+
Data usage = 81 MB (83170 kB)
Measured over a period of 3 hour(s)

So I am rather happy with that. It probably could do with some minor code cleanup in my case, as well as writing the daily results to a logfile somewhere.

But at least it is much easier for me now to keep a decent track on how much bandwidth I am actually using/spilling ;)

[1] – No I have no idea why. It seems you need a NATO clearance higher than my current one to know

[2] – Sourcecode available from here.

Well, a week after my initial post that I had some minor hardware failures and my subsequently unimpressed mood seem to have failed in that weeks offering of random goatlings and virgins to $DEITY.

Result: major hardware failure across the board.

1) Whitestar .. our main and server-ish box died spectacularly. Considering this box does DHCP, NFS, local Slackware-12.0/-current mirror and much other goodness. *poof*

2) My freecycle Ubuntu box just proofed how much suckiness it really was and refused to boot up at all.

3) Kethry’s box at that time decided to fail her main harddrive.

Needless to say, there was much unhappiness not to mention I think I enriched the neighbourhood in the more colourful aspects of both the English and Dutch language.

Anyway after sitting down with kethry we had a bit of a talk about the possibilities of purchasing new hardware, which thankfully was possible due to her receiving some extra birthday money (note: must return money. need to rob some kids of their cider money ;) )

Anyway thanks to andarius who was rather (read: extremely) helpful and patient dealing with my absolute noobness on hardware building. However: after a day of debating and looking at the various options I decided to go for a “budget-build” of a new computer, but one that actually will keep me going for the next while. I think I have not done all that badly for about £ 250,- (roughly USD$ 505,- / CAD$ 531 / € 370,- / 4,724,582.69 IDR (well if I missed any other country see xe.com))

The specs are pretty much as following:

• Gigabyte GA M61PM-S2 nForce 430 AMD Socket AM2
• AMD CPU AM2 Athlon 64 Dual Core 4000
• OCZ 1GB Kit (2×512) Platinum Series DDR2 PC6400 800MHz Dual Channel Memory And Platinum Heatspreader [1]
• Liteon 20x DVDRW/RAM Beige
• 200GB Seagate Barracuda SATA2 8MB
• 2x Ultra Quiet 120mm Case Fan (x2)
• Xilence 480W Gaming PSU
• Arianet 402TK Midi Case Silver Black

Result: A nice and exceedingly fast box, that rather outpaces my previous box. For now that box is running Slackware 12.0 .. in due time I’m looking forward to give Slamd64 a run :) Even though it was pretty stressful at times, I am somewhat happy that I have done it. [2] It was all in all a pretty uhm “interesting” learning experience.

So after being a week offline[3], I need to rebuild this box and keths as well. We’ve also switched away from the Babylon5 naming scheme and gone for a more classical Greek naming scheme. Her box is now named Persephone (or perhaps rather .. her)and mine Hades.

[1] – This had to be replaced as one of the memory sticks turned to be bad. Luckily after explaining the tests I had done (ie swapping memory sticks around and kernel compiles etc), they quickly swapped it around.

[2] – Andarius – a big thank you for your patience and insights :D

[3] – Most annoyingly, the loads of emails and rss/blogs I have to catch up with.

The last couple of days are not good.  First my “9″ key on my keyboard fails completely, and at the same time catching some droplets of water , which seems luckily to do little harm.

The biggest problem was waiting until the water dried sufficiently enough to allow me to type my password without any problems what so ever. But right now the “9″ is playing up and there is an ugly hole in my keyboard. I am seriously peefed off and dep9sressed about this all. Yes it’s only a frigging keyboard but the brokenness of it seriously hampers my typing. And ofcourse this keyboard was a gift from my parents. So I am not a happy bunny at them moment.

I mean seriously, a keyboard like this should last longer than just five months.  I am highly unimpressed by that.

To further all joy and greatness, akregator (KDE rss reader), just pulled a disappearing act on me, and wiped out all but two feeds. It just cost me about 2 hours to sort out all my feeds, which was a slight positive, and get everything back in working order. I clearly need to make sure that this not happens again by backing this up.

So, all in all, the last 2 days have rather failed to impress me :|

The following article has just been brought to my attention, which all in all made quite an interesting read: The article is called “Dealing with upstream: how KDE and the distros manage to keep things together” and is written by Troy Unrau. Of course, I am quite happy see the following text about Slackware:

Only one distribution seems to be relatively immune to this process, that being Slackware. Slackware is one of the oldest distributions in existence, and may in fact be the longest running distro of all time. The reason that Slackware is successful, but never popular to the extent of other distros, is that it leaves customization alone. Wherever possible, they ship ‘virgin’ packages which can be recompiled using upstreams’ official source packages. This makes Slackware a good development platform as you can ensure that any problems you encounter are not due to distributions making changes to the source, but also makes it a less popular choice among users who prefer a more polished, integrated experience.

It’s nice to see some more mainstream media writing about Slackware in a good and positive light :)