Month: October 2022

GNOME 43.1 – LIVESLAK

EDIT: I posted this as a new page initially, reposted as a blog entry, as it should be (did I mention wordpress is my enemy?)

People are asking if the repo attached to the iso will work on a standard installation. My answer to this is yes and no. If you just install the packages on an existing Slackware install, you’ll be missing users/groups and GDM will not work, slackpkg+ won’t exist properly either. My advice if you wish to install to a HDD is to do your install from the liveslak ISO, included on the image is an installer “/usr/local/sbin/setup2hd” you can run to install locally on your HDD.

—-Original Post Follows—-

I’ve just completed testing changes for the final package-set for GNOME 43.1, and prepared a new LIVESLAK to replace the existing 43.0 one found here. The LIVESLAK contains slackware64-current as of today October, 26th 2022. Featuring the core GNOME modules, except gnome-boxes and gnome-builder. I’ve excluded them because of the large amount of extra dependencies, but I’ve included built-in system-wide flatpak installations for flathub and gnome-nightly repos. You are recommended to install them through gnome-software if you require them.

Outside of the needed libraries not included in Slackware-proper, this Live ISO contains the core GNOME modules, including the gnome-console, gnome-maps, gnome-control-center, gnome-music, gnome-photos, gnome-software, gnome-disk-utility, and much more.

Slackware is shipping with the latest 5.19.17 kernel and Firefox 106.0.1, Thunderbird 102.4.0, and GNOME includes their browser Epiphany, using the webkit2gtk4.1 rendering engine, which boasts amazing speed in my limited use so far! I’ve also included the GNOME Extension from Ubuntu, Appindicator, which you must enable within the Extensions application upon first boot.

By default at boot GDM loads up a Wayland session for your Live User (password also “live”) and sudo is configured for root access (the root password is “root”). The ISO contains a complete Slackware installation except the KDE and XFCE desktop environments. The ISO weighs in at 2.9GiB. In order to use a usbstick with persistent storage, one must run the iso2usb.sh script as root during the writing process (or use ventoy).

If there’s anything you’d like to see added, that you feel would be useful on a live system, leave a comment, and I’ll consider it. I’ll also be adding a couple add-ons which you can add to your usb stick shortly for broadcom-sta, ufw, maybe gufw… any suggestions?

See latest post for downloads::20221031 – liveslak – gnome 43.1

Many thanks to AlienBOB (for liveslak) and my fellow GNOME loving teammates – Frank (snuk) and Nathaniel (N4t3R).

epiphany added!

Thanks to the recent webkit2gtk update, we now have a working epiphany browser! There is still some bugs, some sites may flake out as of yet, but I’m adding it now, as it’s blazing fast, and everyone should try it out!

Mon Oct 24 12:23:50 UTC 2022
gcs43/epiphany-43.0-x86_64-1_gcs.txz:  Added.
gcs43/webkit2gtk4.1-2.38.1-x86_64-1_gcs.txz:  Upgraded.
+--------------------------+

Whenever GNOME 43.1 gets official release, I’ll update the liveslak ISO, for now you can download the package to use in the meantime. (Unless you’ve went ahead and installed the ISO, then bravo!)

10/23/22 GNOME Updates

I updated some packages in the gcs42 aarch64 repo as well as the x86_64 gcs43 repo today. I’ve also attempted to add some links to the right menu bar, but as since all I ever do is fight with WordPress, doing things like this is highly stressful. In the end, I may just move to a nice easy to deal with html format, like my site used to be all around. I’m already very tired of the “usability” WordPress offers the user. It’s not usable, it’s absolutely terrible to use.

aarch64 – gcs42

Sun Oct 23 11:24:40 UTC 2022
gcs42/gnome-control-center-42.4-aarch64-1_gcs.txz: Upgraded.
gcs42/gnome-remote-desktop-42.6-aarch64-1_gcs.txz: Upgraded.

x86_64 – gcs43

Sun Oct 23 11:27:08 UTC 2022
gcs43/eog-43.1-x86_64-1_gcs.txz: Upgraded.
gcs43/gnome-remote-desktop-43.1-x86_64-1_gcs.txz: Upgraded.
+————————–+
Sat Oct 22 11:50:41 UTC 2022
gcs43/gnome-software-43.1-x86_64-2_gcs.txz: Upgraded.
gcs43/evolution-data-server-3.46.1-x86_64-1_gcs.txz: Upgraded.
gcs43/gnome-maps-43.1-x86_64-1_gcs.txz: Upgraded.
gcs43/libshumate-1.0.2-x86_64-1_gcs.txz: Upgraded.

These updates are also available in the ChangeLog.txt within the respective directories, and if you’ve added them to slackpkg+.

GNOME 43 LIVESLAK!

Today I’ve uploaded a slackware64-current liveslak containing GNOME 43.0 (and a few additional bug fix packages), it contains -current as of yesterday (10/19) and should be the latest update. The ISO features a “core” GNOME 43.0 install minus two large packages which I’ve generally chosen to omit from my builds and installs, as I have no use for them. Builder and Boxes are the missing core desktop components. Why have I omitted them? Between them there is likely close to 20 extra dependencies not included in Slackware already, that I feel make installing GNOME feel like a massive mess. On the plus side of this, both packages are available as flatpaks, and I’ve included both flathub and GNOME_nightly pre-setup for the live user account. You’re free to add them if you’d like to use either of them!

Also included is a single app in flatpak form, and that’s Epiphany (web-browser), there is a rather large bug that renders WebKit unable to render pages in Epiphany 43.0 on Slackware. There are people on working it out, and hopefully fixing it soon. I’ve held back doing this ISO while they’ve worked on a solution, but it’s been close to a month now and while they are closer to the solution, it seems to be quite a lot of back and forth effort to fix. I do assume in the next revision to the ISO we’ll have a working native package to ship.

By releasing this now, I hope that we can find any bugs left in these apps, and work them out as well. You’ll notice upon first boot, there is no desktop wallpaper showing, I believe this to be an issue in GNOME’s wallpaper package, we’ll fix it up soon. For now, set the wallpaper you’d like. Anything can be your default, it’s yours afterall.

There is a package repo in place for the ISO, it’s preconfigured for you. Updates will be available soon after sources are released, and it can be updated with the usual slackpkg commands slackpkg update and slackpkg upgrade-all as the root user.

I’m also moving things around on the server, things may not be where they once were. You can find the GNOME 43.0 Liveslak here along with the previous (and much more refined) GNOME 42.5 ISO as well.