Slackware Cloud Server Series, Episode 11: Jukebox Audio Streaming
I am an avid music lover. My tastes are eclectic; I enjoy electronic, industrial, punk, new wave, reggae and dub but also baroque and classical music. I used to tape my own music cassettes when I was young, sharing my mixes with friends. I have hundreds of vinyl albums and at many more compact discs. […]

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DAW question for Slackware 15.1: Pipewire or JACK Audio?
I bought a new laptop to do some more serious work on, and while I was setting up the audio, installing JACK Audio Server and friends, I wondered what would be the proper path forward for a Slackware DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) when Slackware 15.1 is released with all the improvements over the 15.0 stable […]

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Multiple Chromium updates in rapid succession
You may have noticed that after my release of the Slackware package for Chromium (and its Un-Googled sibling) version 146.0.7680.71 there was a really short interval until I released an update in the form of the 146.0.7680.75 version. Chromium 146.0.7680.71 is the latest major version upgrade and it addressed a crazy amount of CVE’s. I […]

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KDE 6_26.03 for Slackware-current
Yesterday evening, KDE released their Frameworks 6.24.0 and taking advantage of the moment and even before morning coffee, I uploaded the Slackware packages for these new Frameworks. Alongside with these Frameworks, I built a package for the third Beta of Krita 6.0.0 – the KDE drawing tool will finally be available as a Qt6 based […]

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KDE 6_26.02 for Slackware-current
Today I released a fresh batch of KDE Plasma6 packages for 32bit and 64bit Slackware-current to my ‘ktown‘ repository. You will find these packages at the origin location: https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/testing/ together with an expansive README which will help you remove KDE Plasma5 from your Slackware-current computer and install the ‘ktown‘ version of KDE Plasma6 instead. My intention […]

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OpenJDK updates (Slackware packages)
Last weekend I uploaded updates for OpenJDK based Java versions 8, 11 and 17, and added a new version 21 to the repository. Update 16-feb-2026: I also added OpenJDK 25 packages. Specifically, my repository now offers: openjdk (version 8): updated to 8u482_b08 for Slackware 15.0 and newer, using the icedtea 3.38.0 framework. Note: for OpenJDK 8, […]

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Put your application inside a VPN jail
The premise Note; political rant with European bias follows. If you don’t want to be exposed to my political views but still want to read the technical content of this article, simply skip the “Premise” and scroll down to “My data under my control”. Looking at the rapidly deteriorating situation in the United States of […]

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Ktown updates: KDE Frameworks and Gear (PIM & Applications)
Today KDE Frameworks 6.22.0 were released, and yesterday we already saw new KDE Gear 25.12.1 tarballs. Note – in ‘ktown’ you will find that KDE Gear packages are split over ‘kdepim’ and ‘applications’. I built new packages for those new sources and now you can get the packages for 32bit and 64bit Slackware from the […]

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KDE Plasma 6_25.12 for Slackware-current
A couple of days ago, I promised to use my holiday to come up with packages for KDE Plasma6. Today I finished compiling packages for 32bit and 64bit Slackware-current and uploaded a fresh package repository to my ‘ktown‘. The name seems to stick with people, even when it has not seen activity for two years, […]

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Enjoy the holidays!
We’re at that unique time of the year that I can work on something that is not trivial and requires long-term focus to succeed. The festive season is upon us all, which means (not counting family diners and birthday parties) that I have two weeks to revisit all those ideas and plans I cooked up […]

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Building Chromium for Slackware (contd.)
It’s been ‘fun’ compiling the newest Cheomium 143 sources… as usual when Google updates the major version number. Again, it is momentarily not possible to compile the Chromium sources using Slackware’s own compilers. I get a Rust error “error: extern blocks must be unsafe” in compiling ‘liballoc_error_handler_impl_ffi.rlib‘. which I have been unable to fix – […]

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Building Chromium for Slackware
I thought it would be helpful, and in any case insightful, to describe how I build the Chromium (also -ungoogled) packages for Slackware. It is not a trivial task but a necessary one I believe. Slackware users should have a choice of browsers – some prefer Mozilla Firefox, others Google Chrome, and then there’s LibreWolf […]

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No Kings! Power belongs to the people
To my friends and their friends and family in the USA: stand up against blatant corruption, greed and power grabs. Fight the corrosion of your democracy and the rise of authoritarianism and fascism in the “land of the free”. I stand with you.

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Anubis is now guarding the git server
I have had it with the onslaught of AI and indexing bots that keep my web servers in a constant state of near-crashes. In particular git.slackware.nl is not handling the load well. It’s powered by cgit, and with tens of thousands of requests per hour to serve the details of git commits, cgit experiences a […]

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New URL: blog.slackware.nl
Hi all. It was time to migrate my blog to a new server. The URL ‘alien.slackbook.org/blog/’ has changed to ‘blog.slackware.nl’. For years, my hosting server has been https://harrier.slackbuilds.org/ – ever since I had to move away from the original host, the slackware.com server (Pat does not trust PHP code). I am eternally grateful to the […]

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Heads-up: I am migrating slackware.nl to a different host on 14-aug
Before the summer holiday ends and people start hammering my download servers again, I am going to that which I announced a while ago. In order to deal with increasing load on my main server I have been planning a re-distribution of its services to multiple new hosts. The most important one – docs.slackware.com – […]

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Levi
Animals enrich our life. Caring for pets makes you a better person. Letting your kids grow up together with animals in/around the house helps them learn the value of care and compassion. We’ve had cats for almost 30 years now. The original sisterhood – two Holy Birman sisters – passed away ten and twelve years […]

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RFC: How to build my Wine package
I have a question for you – hence the “Request For Comment” in this post’s title. I have been compiling a Slackware package for the Wine emulator for a long time now. The 64bit wine package contains both the 64bit and the 32bit Wine binaries and libraries.  It therefore also requires that you made your […]

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Migrating my infrastructure
Roughly the last 12 months have been really hard on my server infrastructure – the servers that I rent and which host sites like slackware.nl, docs.slackware.com, download.liveslak.org, git.slackware.nl and several more. An un-ending DDoS attack mostly by IP addresses from Chinese origin that keep requesting to download Slackware ISO files, many per second, effectively saturating […]

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LibreWolf is now in my Slackware repository
Resulting from a request in one of my other blog pages, I have added a Slackware (15.0 and -current, 32bit as well as 64bit) package for LibreWolf. The LibreWolf version number “137.0.2–1” is a combination of the version of Firefox on which the release is based, and the release iteration of the LibreWolf developer community. […]

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