20230525

I haven’t checked in on GNOME in some time, but there hasn’t been a new point release yet, so I think I’m good for now. But I have been keeping up with nwg-shell which has had a ton of updates the past weeks adding support for hyprland. I’ve now updated both the x86_64 and aarch64 -current repos with all the latest nwg-shell packages except for adding hyprland. The actual integration with the configs and such just released today, and since 15.0 is limited in that it only runs an year old release of hyprland, I’ve skipped it for the moment. But yes, hyprland does build and run on -current, I just haven’t had the opportunity to see if I need to patch anything first. I’ll look at that next week for users of the bin repos, but for now I’ve tried to get both arches in sync, stay tuned for the addition of hyprland early next week.

https://slackware.lngn.net/pub/aarch64/slackwareaarch64-current/nwg-shell/

https://slackware.lngn.net/pub/x86_64/slackware64-current/nwg-shell/

20230426

Silence is golden they say. While I’ve been quiet, I haven’t been still. I’ve been slowly cleaning up scripts, packages, and doing testing for aarch64 things as well. Buried in my /staging dirs is a partially up-to-date GNOME 43 for aarch64 Slackware, once 43.6 goes officially live, I will likely put up the repo. I’ve been holding off sorting things into subdirs locally, trying to give it the feel of dependency tracking without actually having dependency tracking. Not sure if I’ve succeeded or not, or if that will transpose into the repo. gcs43- x86_64 is currently up-to-date, (except for webkit) and I’ve added “Shotwell” – the photo album organizer, which I swore was already here, but wasn’t. I’ve also added the VoIP dialer, “gnome-calls”. This is mainly for the mobile focused OS, but I figure, it should be packaged, as surely someone would find it useful.

I’ve been playing with some other distros, primarily ones with alternate init systems. Artix with OpenRC (from Gentoo), and I plan to try a Void install out as well. I had a less than successful attempt with Crux, which runs perfectly in VMs but I’m having issues getting it to go on baremetal. I really want to get into Crux a bit, as it looks really appealing to me, so hopefully I can work it out. I hate walking away defeated. Anyway, trying all these systems out, I get homesick very quickly, and always breathe a sign of relief when I boot back into Slackware, where everything is sane and perfect.

Tomorrow I’ll try and push out new GNOME 43 & 44 ISOs, I really should automate this, but I never do. Automation creates mistakes that go unnoticed, and I hate fixing things 😉

20230407

Turns out there is a script on SBo for hyprland (only it’s old and outdated) but there is none of the other software, but since it’s likely held up by Wayland updates (coming in 15.1) I’m not going to bother submitting anything for it, yet. I reached out for help with wtf to do with my jacked-up gtklock script and Urchlay came to the rescue with some sed magic that sure beats my symlinking all the libs into it’s include dir. Going to do some review of my scripts for the modules, and I hope to have gtklock and the rest uploaded next week on SBo. So that will then round out any missing software needed by nwg-shell.

Some updates coming for the x86_64 and aarch64 nwg-shell repos, likely today. New foot, updated google-go-lang and nwg-bar, off the top of my head. Felt like writing something so there’s this, I’m out!

20230405

Been a hot minute since an update from me! I’ve been doing a bit of hopping around working on other things, I’ve finally made my way back home to Slackware! I’ve pushed a few small updates to the gcs43 repo, unfortunately it seems we need a patch for another Slackware package to fix LibreOffice, I’m going to hold off on that for now hoping it will come soon. If you’re not running the LLVM 16.0 updates yet, I’d stay away until fixes get pushed from upstream.

Outside of that, I’ll be pushing some nwg-shell updates here and to SBo shortly. Recently, some support was added for hyprland on nwg-shell, but Slackware doesn’t have hyprland yet. I’ve cobbled together some WIP SlackBuilds. A few leeched from SBo and a few (for hyprland) I wrote. I’ve gotten it to run, and haven’t really touched it again. If you want bleeding edge WMs, this be the place for them! Not all scripts function last I recall, but hyprland runs, that’s all that matters, I guess.

Oh, and I updated the GNOME 44 ISO with the latest packages from @N4T3R and the latest -current changes.

20230323

I’ve uploaded a GNOME 44 liveslak which features packages from https://reddoglinux.ddns.net/, N4t3R has gone above and beyond to get GNOME 44 running on Slackware by the date of release and rather than duplicate the effort, I figure I’ll just run forward with it. This new ISO will be offered along side my GNOME 43 Slackware system. I will continue work in that area myself (and a aarch64 repo is coming, I swear) but since my time is thin, I’m not going out of my way to add more x86 things to maintain. My focus is for aarch64 and I must regain my focus in that area going forward. I will also be updating the GNOME 43 ISO today as well, so keep a look-out for that.

Since GNOME 44 is the new hotness, I’ve put up a mirror (https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1EPAmMfQuN7_uzaZXS1GzrylzqaLznbyI?usp=sharing) for the ISO on gdrive which may offer better download speeds, depending on where you are in the world.

Moving forward, I’ll look to focus on the nwg-shell I maintain on SBo and sorting things for aarch64, which hopefully before long, I can offer a nice selection of software for.

20230309

I’ve pushed another iso update today to include the OpenSSL 3.0 upgrade as well as a patch to grub which fixes grub from reading ext file systems created with the newer e2fsprogs versions I’d you use the iso as a rescue disk, you want the grub patch. Trust me.

20230221

I’ve slowly been going through these packages and running them through the sbo-maintainer-tools, not to prepare them for submission (-current packages cannot be added) but to help me find issues/errors in them. I am maintaining 3 branches of scripts and things tend to get lost in the shuffle. I’ve found some errors and fixed things along the way for a few packages that have been bothering me for some time now. Flatpak should now correctly place it’s shell script in /etc/profile.d (before it always kept the .new suffix), I’ve re-built xdg-desktop-portal-gnome again finally fixing regressions in the package. This package controls the xdg-portals within GNOME mostly for flatpak packages. I’ve updated Epiphany to 43.1 (along with webkit2gtk 2.38.5), and I’ve added Gradience – this application themes GTK4 apps and is becoming very popular. It has a repo of themes and soon will be able to theme gnome-shell as well, for a complete desktop feel. GNOME 43 has settled down and is a bit more stable now than at first, so I figured it’s a good time to add this one. I’ve also set the ISO to enable pipewire by default, which fixes the built-in gnome-shell screen recording functionality. You can now record video on your desktop without configuring pipewire on the ISO. This is not the default in Slackware, and is controlled by some shell scripts in /usr/bin. If you have issues with pipewire, you can disable it by running “pipewire-disable.sh” as root (it’s in your path). Note by enabling pipewire, Flashback/metacity will not operate, you must disable pipewire to use the GNOME Flashback desktop session. I don’t like shipping it in a semi-broken state, but I’ll assume most are not using the Flashback desktop (although I do quite like it), hopefully eventually Metacity will work with pipewire.

Along the way, I’ve removed a few Slackware packages,  mostly ones that interfere with GNOME in some way. easytag is one that no matter the xdg setting, would always pop-up when I wanted to open Nautilus from a notification. Removing it fixes all my woes. I’ve also removed a bunch of legacy apps from the /xap series since the GNOME desktop mostly replaces them.

I’ve also added D-Spy, a d-bus explorer application that will show you what open apps are actively using d-bus services. This is mostly useful for debugging issues with applications, but could prove useful to a slacker.

I’m still submitting packages to SBo for the nwg-shell which I’m trying to get up before the end of the week, so liveslak things will be tapering off for a while. I’m working on the GNOME 43 packages for aarch64, which I’d like to have available before long. GNOME 44 will be out eventually, so that’s coming up, and I’m going to let this simmer for a bit for a change, instead of constantly updating the iso. Enjoy.

 

20230206

Nothing much new this week (yet). I’ve updated the iso with the latest -current and kernel 6.1.9. I haven’t added anything new, but I am considering to remove some Slackware shipped X11 apps. Things like thunderbird, xmms, and other things covered by the GNOME desktop, I may remove to shrink the iso a bit, as it seems to keep growing. Maybe next revision.

I’ve been working on getting scripts for nwg-shell SBo-ready. Which means they have to build on 15.0 and comply with their guidelines. In the end, I’m going to have a way for users to build it locally, a SBo install option will exist, and I’ll have a package repo available as well. This way one can do as they wish to get the software. I know many users want a simple solution, and SBo works for that, so hopefully I’ll finish that work soon. And within the week nwg-shell should be available there as well.

Nothing else cookin’ this week. I need to do my taxes and other fun adult stuff, but I’ll keep doing this and avoid it all, like a seasoned vet 😉

20230201

Changes in the latest GNOME-liveslak ISO are plenty this time around, as I try to fill out missing pieces I’ve skipped over along the way. I’ve added the extra optional “GNOME-Flashback”, Metacity-based throwback Desktop as an option. Select “GNOME-Flashback (Metacity)” from your GDM gear menu to load the Desktop. Metacity will use the current set theme for light/dark mode, and it will pick up your icon set as well. Slackware’s adwaita-icon-theme is missing some icons, as such, I’ve added a re-pack to the repo which fixes this as it effected menus in Flashback. I don’t know if it’s Adwaita to blame or issues with Slackware’s provided package, as I’ve yet to look into it.

I’ve also added “orca” the GNOME screen reader for visually-impaired users. My logs have been cluttered for months complaining this isn’t there when I login, so this should provide a fix for that, as well as making GNOME-liveslak now usable for people with visual impairments. I happen to be visually-impaired, but I can’t say I want my computer to talk to me but I do hope it’s useful for those who need it.

Additionally I’ve added apostrophe, a WYSIWYG markdown editor which I’ve been too lazy to get building for months now. But this is an amazingly useful MD editor and since I’m still planning on moving this site to a MD-based site at some point, this will prove useful to me at least, maybe you as well!

The ISO has been updated with other package updates as well as the latest -current, now on kernel 6.1.8, Firefox 109, gstreamer 1.22 and more. As of today, Slackware has offically updated gjs,mozjs102, and polkit, and I couldn’t be more ecstatic about these changes finally getting in -current! I’m going to continue refining and doing housekeeping as I go, and we already have the 44 Alpha release in our hands so eventually the ISO will be brought to that branch. If you wish to stay on 43, the option will exist as well if you have an installation or just no longer update anything on the ISO. The 43 repo will still receive updates while we work toward 44.

Outside of all this, the nwg-shell repo has seen some updates in preparation for the ability to auto-update nwg-shell on Slackware. There are still a few kinks there, but it’s a very solid DE. I’ll soon have package sets for x86_64 15.0 and for aarch64-current in repos since it’s moved on from being a work-in-progress to a viable desktop option, so look out for those updates soon!