Slackware Blog

Lots of entries in the slackware-current changelog for July 30th. The 2.4.32 kernel got patched to fix X11 direct rendering with X.Org 6.9.0 and newer. MySQL was reverted from 5.0.23 back to 5.0.22. Why you ask? MySQL 5.0.23 was never officially released due to bugs. Somehow the 5.0.23 release made it to a few mirror sites.

Sun Jul 30 19:16:38 CDT 2006
n/samba-3.0.23a-i486-2.tgz: Fixed bad symlink to “using_samba” in the docs.
Thanks to Valentin Avram and William Hunt for reporting this.
ap/jed-0.99_18-i486-2.tgz: Reverted to isearch.sl from jed-0.99_16.
The version shipped in 0.99_18 seems to have problems unless jed is linked
with slang-2, which we’re putting off for a little while due to the major
version bump and to let code that uses slang have a little time to catch up.
Thanks to Luigi Genoni for the bug report and fix.
Thanks as well to Petri Kaukasoina who also reported the problem.
ap/mysql-5.0.22-i486-2.tgz: Reverted to MySQL-5.0.22. Evidently MySQL-5.0.23
was never officially released due to bugs, but made it to the mirror sites
anyway. Beat Vontobel’s web site has some additional information about this:
http://www.futhark.ch/mysql/148.html
Thanks very much to Jakub Jankowski telling me the deal about 5.0.23.
ap/vim-7.0.042-i486-2.tgz: Upgraded to ctags-5.6.
Thanks to Michael Iatrou for pointing out the new ctags.
Fixed a bug in the build script’s patchlevel determination if $CWD contains
a dot. Thanks to Christophe Legras for the bug report and fix.
xap/vim-gvim-7.0.042-i486-2.tgz: Rebuilt. Fixed a bug in the build script’s
patchlevel determination. Thanks to Christophe Legras.
Fixed an undefined variable in the vim-gvim build script.
Thanks to Bryan Germann.

There’s lots more changes, so go checkout the changelog for the full list.

Dreamhost is having some problems:

There has apparently been another power outage at the datacenter. One of the generators caught fire and they were taken offline. We’re waiting for more information and we’ll post here as soon as we hear anything.

Neat. Sounds like it could be a pretty bad outage. Hopefully my personal site will be back up soon.

UPDATE: Well, Dreamhost is on it’s way back up, although my personal site is still down. This datacenter touts itself as one of the most reliable. Granted, accidents happen, but two outages in one week from L.A.?

Lots of customers are pissed off, as they probably should be. Those links are to customers comments on the most recent post at the DreamHost Blog. I’m lucky enough that the only sites I have there are personal and don’t really matter. I feel for the people trying to run a business with Dreamhost. I had problems at work with Bluehost, but nothing like this.

Technorati Tags: dreamhost, dreamhost+outage

Closer to a Slackware 11 Beta. Pat made a pretty huge update to the -current ChangeLog today. Libpng was upgraded to 1.2.12. Upgraded Lilo to version 22.7.2.1. Mutt was upgraded to fix a buffer overflow. Samba was upgraded to version 3.0.23a, a symlink was also removed from the package. The symlink was causing problems when shutting down.

There’s also new packages for KDE. They had to be re-compiled to make use of the new libpng. I’m not gonna post the actual content of this changelog entry because it’s so massive. Just go see the ChangeLog for yourself if you’re interested.

Literally hours after I made this post, Patrick updated the slackware-current changelog:

Fri Jul 14 18:31:20 CDT 2006
We *are* getting closer to 11.0, friends.
I’m hoping for a larger changeset soon, but this should be fun to play with
for now as I work on the TODO list; merging, compiling, and initial testing.
n/samba-3.0.23-i486-1.tgz: Upgraded to samba-3.0.23.
This fixes a minor memory exhaustion DoS in smbd.
The CVE entry for this issue may be found here:
http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2006-3403
(* Security fix *)
kernels/huge26.s/*: Upgraded huge26.s kernel to 2.6.16.24.
The name of the big kernel with many built-in options has been changed from
test26.s to huge26.s to reflect that Slackware 11.0 will consider the
2.6.16.x kernel series to be a supported kernel series. However, I’m
probably going to leave the bare.i 2.4.32 kernel as the default kernel (or
perhaps sata.i?) as it has very good performance and probably better security
due to the simpler and longer-tested design. I might apply or at least make
available in the kernel-source package for 2.4.32 a patch to fix direct
rendering with 2.4.x kernels and X.Org 6.9.0 or newer. Since anyone using
Slackware for server use isn’t likely to be loading the DRI modules, it’s
untouched code on those machines and won’t affect server stability (well,
depending on what, if anything, outside of the module is changed in the
kernel). It is probably a safe enough patch to apply. I’d rather ship 100%
vanilla kernels (and might, with the patch “on the side”), but DRI does not
work without the patch past X.Org 6.8.2. Is this enough text here?
Perhaps I should rename this my “ChangeBlog”.
Thanks to Andrea Volkerding for compiling these kernel packages:
extra/linux-2.6.16.24/alsa-driver-1.0.11_2.6.16.24-i486-1.tgz:
Upgraded to alsa-driver-1.0.11 compiled for Linux 2.6.16.24.
extra/linux-2.6.16.24/kernel-generic-2.6.16.24-i486-1.tgz:
Upgraded to Linux 2.6.16.24 generic kernel.
extra/linux-2.6.16.24/kernel-headers-2.6.16.24-i386-1.tgz:
Upgraded to Linux 2.6.16.24 kernel headers.
extra/linux-2.6.16.24/kernel-modules-2.6.16.24-i486-1.tgz
Upgraded to Linux 2.6.16.24 kernel modules.
extra/linux-2.6.16.24/kernel-source-2.6.16.24-noarch-1.tgz
Upgraded to Linux 2.6.16.24 kernel source.
testing/packages/linux-2.6.17.4/kernel-generic-2.6.17.4-i486-1.tgz:
Upgraded to Linux 2.6.17.4 generic kernel.
testing/packages/linux-2.6.17.4/kernel-headers-2.6.17.4-i386-1.tgz:
Upgraded to Linux 2.6.17.4 kernel headers.
testing/packages/linux-2.6.17.4/kernel-modules-2.6.17.4-i486-1.tgz
Upgraded to Linux 2.6.17.4 kernel modules.
testing/packages/linux-2.6.17.4/kernel-source-2.6.17.4-noarch-1.tgz
Upgraded to Linux 2.6.17.4 kernel source.

Patrick insists we’re getting closer to Slackware 11. I think he’s putting his wife to work too, take note of that bold line above in the changelog. He’s got Andrea Volkerding compiling the 2.6 kernel for /extra. He must be too busy with other neat things for Slackware 11. Pat is also wondering if he should just rename the ChangeLog to ChangeBlog, since he’s been writing so much text in there lately. Sounds like a good idea to me…

Look at what this guy has done to his Powerbook (via Real Tech News). I’d get a bunch of pr0n etched on mine. Forget Web 2.0. If I was gonna destory a Powerbook I’d do it right. heh.

Chances are though, this laser etching was done to show the clarity and precision possible. Some nice hardcore pr0n would demonstrate this much better though.

I feel a Slackware 11 Beta release coming on in the next few days. Why? We haven’t seen any updates to the slackware-current changelog in 15 days. I’m hoping Pat has been busy building some final packs and building some beta ISO’s for us.

The last round of updates in the changelog were fairly minor:

Thu Jun 29 02:03:45 CDT 2006
n/ppp-2.4.4-i486-1.tgz: Upgraded to ppp-2.4.4.
n/rp-pppoe-3.8-i486-2.tgz: Recompiled with –enable-plugin.
Thanks to Frédéric L. W. Meunier for the suggestion.
extra/k3b/k3b-0.12.16-i486-1.tgz: Upgraded to k3b-0.12.16.
Thanks to Matthew Johnson for pointing out the new release.
extra/k3b/k3b-i18n-0.12.16-noarch-1.tgz: Upgraded to k3b-i18n-0.12.16.

Hopefully we’ll see Slackware 11.0 Beta 1 before the month is over.