Latest Infinality SlackBuilds

There was a new Infinality release a few days back:

This is a release to update to the latest Freetype 2.4.11. The subpixel patch is now a part of Freetype, so this update includes only the infinality enhancement patch.

Yep… The big-ass subpixel patch is now upstream code. One step closer to human-readable fonts on Linux. You can grab the latest SlackBuilds/packages from my dropbox account or ftp server (a bit slower). These are for Slackware 13.37/14.0.

If upgrading from a previous Infinality installation, you can manage new configuration files with:

slackpkg new-config

Happy Slacking, as always :)

Humble Slack Bundle 7

There’s a new Humble Indie (this time around) Bundle. Looks like a decent collection of games, some of which come with DLC (downloadable content). I’ve uploaded some SlackBuilds, but not all of the games are trouble-free. You can have a look at the games by visiting www.humblebundle.com. Additional info about the uploaded SlackBuilds can be found in this forum post.

Cheers :)

Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition: one step closer to Tux

Oh, I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. Baldur’s Gate is maybe the most influential AD&D role playing game and certainly one of my favorites. And although it was released in 1998, which in PC years is like 50 years back, I can perfectly see myself playing it again. The Enhanced Edition (decent screen resolutions support etc.) is one step closer to be ported to Linux.

On a side note, it’s pretty funny how much game-porting progress we’ve seen in the last couple of years, after 20 years of desert. Maybe 2013 will be the Year of Linux Gaming :-)

Humble Bundle for Android 4 SlackBuilds

Super quick post. SlackBuilds for the new “Humble Bundle for Android 4” are uploaded to my ftp server. In the next few days I will also release scripts for ten more games from older bundles (Voxatron debut, Introversion), so the collection will be more complete. Have fun, and happy slacking everybody!

Changes in Humble Bundle SlackBuilds

I’ve been testing all my humble SlackBuilds on Slackware 14.0 for the last few days. The number has grown big (54 scripts), and my /opt was becoming annoyingly cluttered with lots of  games and other “exotic” packages that shared the same directory. So now games are installed in /opt/hib/<game> instead of /opt/<game>. “hib” stands for Humble Indie Bundle. I also enclosed a README file for each one of the games, with additional game-specific installation info. Another significant change is that from now on, the only system that I make sure these scripts work, is Slackware 14.0. If a game doesn’t work on a previous Slackware version, you are free to use/modify older versions of the scripts (which can be found at ftp://someslack.myftp.org/humble_bundle), and of course, drop me an e-mail if you need any help.

Happy Slacking, happy gaming :)

Infinality packages for Slackware 13.37/14.0

After dealing with an interesting bug that infested my freetype SlackBuild, I have rebuilt and uploaded packages for 13.37 and the spanking new 14.0. You can find links to them in the tutorial. The new “compat32″ package names are longer now because they have two tags glued together: smsl + compat32 = smslcompat32. This is due to a change made by Alien Bob to the convertpkg32 script:

The reason for adding a “compat32” build tag to all converted packages is to make system upgrades of a multilib Slackware easier. Up to now, if you were using slackpkg for the upgrades, you had to manually deselect all compat32 packages in the list which is produced by the command “slackpkg clean-system”. With the new scripts, you are able to blacklist all my multilib packages by just adding one line to the file “/etc/slackpkg/blacklist”:

[0-9]+compat32

Sounds reasonable to me, and [0-9]+smsl will still work as expected, so no problem.

P.S.: After some trial and error, I made some small changes to the tutorial, regarding which links under /etc/fonts/conf.d  “get in the way” i.e. override Infinality’s fontconfig ruleset.

Annoying Heisenbug…

I’m a philologist, not a computer scientist for god’s sake… Lately I’ve been struggling with an annoying bug that prevented KDE 4.8 from starting up on Slackware64 14.0 (release candidate) when my Infinality-patched freetype was installed. After a few evenings spent on reading KDE bug reports, Distro bug reports, forum posts about hack solutions, glibc patches, articles about dynamic linking and whatnot, the problem (see link above) was resolved by changing a few lines in my freetype.SlackBuild, which btw was identical to the stock one, minus the Infinality patches:

CFLAGS="$SLKCFLAGS" make setup CFG="--prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib${LIBDIRSUFFIX} --build=$ARCH-slackware-linux"

was changed to:

CFLAGS="$SLKCFLAGS" \
./configure \
  --prefix=/usr \
  --libdir=/usr/lib$LIBDIRSUFFIX \
  --disable-static \
  --build=$ARCH-slackware-linux

Problem solved. How? I don’t know and I don’t care. One of the many bug reports (all of them described the same symptoms but had nothing to do with freetype or Infinality) mentioned the word Heisenbug, which I had never heard before :-)

So, I edited the SlackBuild and now everything is peachy again. I have also taken down all my pre-compiled packages for the moment. Until I rebuild them you can use the build scripts for Slackware 13.37/14.0.

Cheers.