My first post to SlackDocs
It’s a HOWTO about PulseAudio in Slackware Linux. I already had the article almost ready on my blog, so when I finally got accepted to SlackDocs project, I just edited the formatting and posted the entire thing.
PulseAudio in Slackware
This is a work in progress that I later plan to post on http://docs.slackware.com/. Look in the comments section for changelog.
Today, 2015-05-12, while I was forced to work as a secretary during a slow season, I had nothing to do, so I remembered this post on LQ and decided to write some sort of a HOWTO for PulseAudio. I do not possess extensive knowledge about PulseAudio, nor do I even use it on a regular basis, but I do have some experience with it and want to provide at least a base that can be later extended by other members of Slackware community. This article was written by memory (plus some googling), so I’ll need to improve it later.
Slackware universal install USB
Last Sunday, after upgrading my old netbook (ASUS Eee PC 900) from Debian Wheezy to Jessie, I decided to try Debian Jessie Live on my laptop. Unfortunately, the provided image couldn’t boot in UEFI environment, so I had to switch booting mode from UEFI to legacy. After playing with the distro for a while (it had problems with my wireless card’s drivers), I changed the booting mode back to UEFI and rebooted. To my surprise, there wasn’t Slackware option in the boot menu anymore. It looks like changing the booting mode changes something in UEFI settings. Anyway, I needed my Slackware, so I booted my rescue USB with Parted Magic. It was a bit dated (version from June, 2014), maybe that’s why efibootmgr (v0.5.3) refused to work with my laptop’s UEFI firmware. At least I confirmed that my ELILO files were intact in EFI partition, so all I needed was efibootmgr to add an option to the boot menu. Somehow I didn’t think about booting into Windows 8.1, which I also have on my laptop, to add a boot option to UEFI, but if I did that it wouldn’t be so interesting, would it?
Mirror mirror on the wall...
I finally set up a mirror for Slackware 14.1 and -current (both i686 and x86_64) as well as multilib for 14.1. Here are the links:
http://mirror.t-rg.ws/slackware/
ftp://mirror.t-rg.ws/slackware/
rsync://mirror.t-rg.ws/slackware/
Mirrors are updated every 2 hours. Be warned, however, that FTP access is VERY limited: only 4 clients at a time with no more than 2 connections per IP.
I may add other not too big repos in the future.
I'm in the Slackware's changelog!
Oh. My. Money.Gods. I can’t believe I somehow actually contributed not just to the Slackware’s community, but to my favorite distro itself. Thank you, Pat! I am so flattered. Well, it happened at the October 5th, but I noticed only today. I had some troubles with elilo back then, so I opened a thread at LQ which helped me find a solution, which was to recompile elilo, and for that I had to slightly change the official SlackBuild written by Patrick Volkerding.
Opera SlackBuild update
I reworked my Opera SlackBuild, now it can be used to make packages for all three Opera flavors: Stable (not yet released), Beta and Developer. I also included an option to build local ffmpeg libraries for the browser to support H.264 video and MP3 audio in HTML5 players. BTW, thanks to ml4711 from LQ for the solution to my problem with dynamic library linking! See README file for details about possible options.
How to make "good old" Skype 4.2 work
Today, while browsing bash.im (Russian QDB’s analog), I stumbled upon an interesing quote in the abyss: 03.09.14 13:25 #4403487 xxx: Сцуко.. skype 2.2 более не работает.. пришлось поставить Linux ABI для cos6, запихать skype 4.2.0.13 и пропатчить бинарь, чтобы он думал, что он 4.3.0.37… It says that this person patched Skype 4.2.0.13 binary to make it think its version is 4.3.0.37. I thought, why not give it a try? And I did.
SlackBuilds batch
I’ve been a bit busy with script writing, as you can see. But let me tell you everything in the right order. Mintstick As I said in my post on Google+, there’s a shortage on tools for USB sticks formatting. The one I chose in the end was mintstick. It’s simple enough for the average PC user and doesn’t have many dependencies. I was also considering Gnome Disk Util, which is for some reason like alpha and omega of easy to use formatting tools, but it requires gnome-common at very least, so I decided to go with mintstick, which I really liked.
Opera SlackBuild
Not Presto, but the new, Blink one, that is based on Chromium. Shitty or not, this is new Opera, and this is their first release for Linux. It’s been only a year… Anywho, I wrote a SlackBuild for it. It also makes use of alienBOB’s Chromium PepperFlash package, so now you can have the latest Adobe Flash in two browsers (which are basically the same thing though). Be warned that:
Popcorn Time SlackBuild
Yesterday I discovered Popcorn Time. No, I’ve heard about it for a while, but I only tried to watch something with it yesterday. (If you’re interested, it was Madagascar trilogy after I watched this video.) It’s very convenient: just fire up the app, choose your movie and hope you have enough popcorn. You may say something about piracy. Yes, the app is very controversial. But I have two reasons to use it.
