slackmatic Newswelcome new "hex" repo!2009.11.04We are pleased to announce a new slackmatic repository offered by Martin Curran, the hex repo. This fine repo currently contains over 40 well-crafted ports, including several essentials for high-performance graphics and audio applications. The ports have been produced and tested on the latest release of Slackware 13.0. Thanks for the great work on this repo, Martin! new slackmatic release, 0.912007.06.12We have posted a new slackmatic release, 0.91. This version has just a couple changes from the previous:
The first fixes an annoyance for users who want to run slackmat-build without /sbin in their path. (Thanks Giorgio Moscardi!) The second is to help provide workarounds for special downloading problems, such as files served with funny urls by php robots. (Thanks Andreas Liebe!) This release also introduces a minor change in the waybill file format specification. Until all the repos and users are synced up to this release, this change may cause you to get waybill errors with slackmat-build. I regret the annoyance. In the meantime, if you do get waybill errors, just run slackmat-build with the -W option. In other news: we're baaack!2007.04.23Hi everyone! After many months of packing, shipping, moving and adjusting, we are now back online and coming to you live and in color from our new home in Togo, West Africa. To celebrate our relocation, please find a major update to slackmatic with a big bump in release to slackmatic-0.90. New features include:
We also have a new "startkit" that makes it even easier to get started with slackmatic. See the quick start guide for more info. fakeroot2006.11.30We have recently added a port of fakeroot to the slackmatic repository. The purpose of fakeroot is to allow package builds by non-root users. This should reduce the risk (and annoyance) of splattering your filesystem with unwanted files in cases of BUILD.rc specification errors. Usage is simple:
That's it! The magic of fakeroot gives you a tgz package archive with file permissions as if generated by root, even though built as a non-root user. Then you simply install/maintain the resulting package as usual (as root) with the standard Slackware package utilities. If you have any problems using slackmatic with fakeroot, please let us know. slack on slice2006.11.30Some site new: earlier this month we moved hosting of slackmatic to a Xen virtual "slice" at slicehost. Although Slackware was not offered as a distro option, we managed to build up a mostly stock Slamd64 11.0 installation under /slack without too much difficulty. Then, with a little fancy footwork in the Slice Console Access, we moved the /slack tree into / and hard rebooted. Voila, slack on slice! The system seems to be running well. We made a tiny tweak to slackmat-build for Slamd64-compatible CFLAGS, and all of our slackmatic builds to date -- including dietlibc -- have built, installed, and run without issue. Thanks very much to the Slamd64 project http://www.slamd64.com/ for their fine port of Slackware! goodbye to "clear"2006.10.10Charles Lear has notified us that he will be taking his "clear" port repository off-line. Charles has been one of the most prolific slackmatic port developers. At the time of his departure he was publishing a total of 65 ports. Many of his ports were targeted specifically at enhancing a Gnome desktop, especially for users of the Freerock Gnome distribution. We will miss Charles and wish him the best of luck in the future. In the meantime, we will continue to publish his repo from our own servers. Please see the clear repository to pick up the latest clear.httpup file. By the way, anyone who wants to pick up these ports for their own repo is most welcome! slackware 11.0 released2006.10.05After extensive development and testing by Patrick Volkerding, Slackware 11.0 has now been released. See the official release announcement here. This release culminates over a year of bugfixes, refinements, and software upgrades since the last Slackware release, 10.2, in September 2005. Now maybe you need extra software for your fresh Slackware 11.0 installation? The slackmatic project has been ready to support this release for months. With over 200 ports now available from developers worldwide, you may find the extra software you need, all ready to build, right here in our repositories. But what if you are still hanging back with an older Slackware release? Hey, no problem! Most slackmatic ports will build and install just fine on any Slackware and Slackware-compatible system you are maintaining, giving you maximum backport flexibility. works with zenwalk2006.07.25Prolific port contributor Andreas Liebe (ahl repository) reports that slackmatic works fine with Zenwalk. So well, in fact, he recently decided to migrate all of his systems, and now offers his collection of binary packages built on and for Zenwalk platforms. Zenwalk is one of the most active of the Slackware-compatible Linux distributions. Formerly known as "minislack", the project is self-described as "modern, fast, rational, and evolutionary". Most of the developers of ZW are based in Europe, and the distribution has a decided feeling of European values and sensibility: clean, solid, and practical. ZW has published 4 releases since the first of the year, and has shown a steady climb in the Distrowatch rankings, where it recently broke into the top 20. They have also made available a live CD release. If you are coming to slackmatic from Zenwalk, you are most welcome! We think you will find this project a good source for supplemental packages, and hope you feel at home here. dietlibc 0.302006.07.20The slackmatic port of dietlibc has been updated to release 0.30. The dietlibc project from Felix von Leitner provides a libc implementation optimized for small size. This alternative to the GNU libc library is very useful for creating tiny, fast-loading, statically-linked executables. The slackmatic project provides built-in support for the dietlibc library. Just set DIETOK=yes in the BUILD.rc control file for the port, and the build will automatically be configured to use it. See the guinix repository for examples of several packages that take advantage of dietlibc, including daemontools, djbdns, and qmail. Please note that the BUILD.rc control file for dietlibc has now been updated to include the OPT_NOSTRIP=1 option. We discovered that the automatic stripping of static libs introduced in recent versions of slackmat-build actually disabled the dietlibc library, causing linkage failure in those builds attempting to use it. We apologize for not finding this problem sooner, and sincerely regret any confusion and hassles to anyone else encountering the problem before. The dietlibc port may be found in the slackmatic repository. clear passes 602006.06.29Charles Lear's clear repository now contains over 60 ports. Charles moves into pole position on the port count this week, with new contributions to his already substantial repository. These include a diverse array of applications to enhance a Freerock GNOME desktop, as well as all the required libs and Perl modules. Charles has been with slackmatic since the early days of the project. His repo has undergone a lot of growth and change in that time, reflecting his own evolving interests and vision. Due to Charles' experience and helpful feedback along the way, slackmatic itself has grown and --hopefully-- improved. Now we only hope we can keep up... Go Charles! And thanks for making this a sizzling summer for slackmatic. ahl hits 502006.06.26Andreas Liebe's ahl repository has now reached 50 ports. Andreas is one of the most active slackmatic port developers, offering many packages to enhance the Slackware desktop and provide multimedia access. His repository has now achieved a significant milestone. Recently he shared with me this comment: Slackmatic is great!! Half a year ago I built every package manually, because writing slackbuild scripts is too complicated for me. I only managed to maintain six or seven packages on lp.net. Now my repo has 49 ports. It's slackmatic that made this possible! Thank you! Thank you Andreas, for sharing all this work and for helping to improve slackmatic! new slackmatic release, 0.192006.05.29A new slackmatic release is now available. This release fixes a bug introduced in release 0.17 that broke the NOSTRIP option. This release also includes support for the OPT_NOSTRIP variable that will eventually supercede usage of NOSTRIP. Both variables will continue to be supported until further notice, so existing BUILD.rc scripts using NOSTRIP should not be broken. Port maintainers are encouraged to migrate to OPT_NOSTRIP for new projects. The OPT_NOSTRIP=1 option is used to disable the automatic binary stripping performed by slackmat-build. Some ports require this feature, such as some binary codecs. In the current implementation, if OPT_NOSTRIP is undefined or empty, the value of NOSTRIP will be used to set OPT_NOSTRIP. Otherwise any value defined for OPT_NOSTRIP will have precedence over any value defined for NOSTRIP. As slackmatic continues to develop we will standardize on the use of the OPT_* prefix to denote user- and/or build-controllable option variables. Please download and install the latest release here: http://download.slackmatic.org/slackmatic-0.19-noarch-1sm.tgz. new slackmatic release, 0.182006.05.22A new slackmatic release is now available. This release fixes a bug introduced in release 0.16 that may cause unintended compression of certain files within a package. Please download and install the latest release here: http://download.slackmatic.org/slackmatic-0.18-noarch-1sm.tgz. new slackmatic release, 0.172006.05.22A new slackmatic release is now available. This release includes the option variable OPT_ROOTBIN, for users requiring backward compatibility with the root:bin binary ownership policy of Slackware releases <= 10.2. To use, set the variable OPT_ROOTBIN=1 in the slackmat-build environment or in the configuration file /etc/slackmatic/slackmat.conf. Download and install the latest release here: http://download.slackmatic.org/slackmatic-0.17-noarch-1sm.tgz. new slackmatic release, 0.162006.05.02A new slackmatic release is now available. This release anticipates the appearance of Slackware 11.0 any day now and includes the following changes:
Download and install the latest release here: http://download.slackmatic.org/slackmatic-0.16-noarch-1sm.tgz. Note: if the new -mtune options fail when using older versions of gcc, simply setup an override CFLAGS definition in the /etc/slackmatic/slackmat.conf configuration file. For example, CFLAGS='-march=i486 -mcpu=i686' will restore the default CFLAGS build for users maintaining stock Slackware 10.2 systems. rc shell2006.05.02We are now hosting a site for rc, the Unix port of the Plan 9 shell, at http://rc-shell.slackmatic.org/. For now the new site is mostly a reconstruction of Tim Goodwin's site formerly found at http://www.star.le.ac.uk/~tjg/rc/. Tim's site went dark sometime earlier this year. We like the rc shell a lot. It is small, efficient, clean and capable. Not only is it the command processor for slackmatic, but also serves as our scripting engine for daemontools services and as our personal login shell. And when compiled against Felix von Leitner's dietlibc, rc makes the perfect shell for tiny embedded Linux systems. As time permits we will be adding some of our own documentation to the site, and would welcome any other contributions and suggestions you may have. Even if you aren't using slackmatic, we suggest you give rc a try! httpup security update2006.04.05Johannes Winkelmann has issued a new release for the httpup utility to fix a security problem. slackmat-sync uses the httpup protocol to synchronize distributed port repositories. The latest release of the httpup utility is now httpup-0.40h. To get and build the update:
Note also that the downloadable slackmatic package itself has been bumped up to slackmatic-0.15-noarch-2sm.tgz to include the updated port repository for httpup. If you had any difficulty following the quick start instructions because the httpup port was missing from the slackmatic package, please try this latest release. Thanks to Andreas Liebe for the alert! latest repository2006.04.05Kite Lau has contributed the latest port repository, kite. The centerpiece of Kite's new repo is Scribus, an open source desktop publishing application. Scribus is gaining ground in both usability and user-base as a viable alternative to the well-known commercial DTP systems. This is a great addition to the packages available with slackmatic. Kite is also actively adding other new ports, so be sure to keep an eye on his repo! found tux...2006.03.24...and a happy slackmatic user. Ok, it's cheating a little (Vitaly is one of us). slackmatic "blurb"2006.03.14We have added a short promotional blurb to the online documentation page. slackmatic passes 100 port milestone!2006.02.06The slackmatic project surpassed 100 ports this weekend! Thanks to the generous productivity of Andreas Liebe ("ahl") and Charles Lear ("clear"), over 100 ports are now available to slackmatic users through contributed repositories. new slackmatic release, 0.152006.02.02A new slackmatic release is now available. This release adds a NOSTRIP option for packages that want to disable the automatic binary strip(1)-ing performed by slackmat-build. Download and install the latest release here: http://download.slackmatic.org/slackmatic-0.15-noarch-1sm.tgz. Thanks to Andreas Liebe for requesting this feature! new slackmatic release2006.01.17The slackmatic release has been bumped up to 0.14. This release fixes an error in slackmat-build that failed to automatically strip libraries. Download and install the latest release here: http://download.slackmatic.org/slackmatic-0.14-noarch-1sm.tgz. Thanks to Andreas Liebe for alerting me to the problem! a "clear" repository2006.01.09Charles Lear has contributed his port repository, clear. Charles' repo has some cool ports for both gnome and kde desktop users. These include beagle, the gnome file search utility, and keep, a backup utility for kde. Good stuff, Charles! Your endurance as an early user of slackmatic is appreciated! new repository2006.01.06Andreas Liebe is the first to contribute a repository in the New Year. See Andreas' ahl repository for some great new ports. These include libmatroska, the libraries needed to work with the matroska mulitmedia formats. Welcome, Andreas! And thanks for your help in testing slackmatic. new leap second2005.12.26A new leap second will be added to the UTC time clock on December 31, 2005, at 23:59:60. See the guinix repository for the leapsecs package to update the /etc/leapsecs.dat file installed by many djb packages. See also http://thedjbway.org/leapsecs_update.html for more information on leap seconds, UTC, and TAI. Happy New Year, by the way! -mtune in gcc2005.12.15With recent upgrades in Slackware -current to gcc-3.4.5, the "-mcpu" option is deprecated in favor of "-mtune". Note, however, that "-mtune" is not recognized by the gcc-3.3.6 shipped with Slackware 10.2. In time we will fix up slackmat to test for gcc versions to setup -mtune automatically. For now the -mcpu option still works fine, or you can modify CFLAGS in your own slackmat.conf or slackmat environment. it's a girl!2005.12.10Congratulations to Patrick and Andrea on their new baby girl! Welcome to the world, Briah! domain registered2005.12.08The slackmatic.org domain was registered today. We will be online soon! |