STUpidity and other STUff
Stuff about Linux: mostly Slackware and Ubuntu
I upgraded to Firefox Developer Edition 89.0b15 and found that it worked very well. The next day, I did the check for updates and was told “Updates Available at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/beta.” This confused me because I had checked earlier on a Windows 10 VM finding no update. When I clicked on the link, I found that … Read more
The Director of Cybersecurity where I work told me about MailSpring, an email client for Linux (Mac, and Windows) that works with Office 365 without using IMAP or POP. I discovered there is a .SlackBuild for MailSpring. Being the nerd I am, I check the MailSpring site and found a newer version (1.9.1) than the … Read more
Earlier this week, and update to libcap-ng broke mounting my SaMBa server shares on startup. I received the error message: Unable to apply new capability set. Barcoboy on https://www.linuxquestions.org/ was quick to point out that the issue was libcap-ng and could be mitigated by downloading the previous version from https://slackware.uk/cumulative/slackware64-current/ This morning (26-Nov-2020), dr.s pointed … Read more
After updating to PHP 7.4.10, I’m getting the dreaded “pear.php.net is using a unsupported protocol – This should never happen. upgrade failed.” error message when running pecl upgrade. After a bit of searching, I found a post that suggests the command pear update would help. When I tried this, I got, “pear/pear dependency package “pear/Archive_Tar” … Read more
When I saw that Stellarium 0.20.2 was available, I downloaded the source from https://github.com/Stellarium/stellarium/releases/download/v0.20.2/stellarium-0.20.2.tar.gz and used the .Slackbuild from http://slackbuilds.org/ tried to build it with: VERSION=0.20.2 ./stellarium.SlackBuild‘ During the config process, the build failed with the error: cmake: error while loading shared libraries: liblz4.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory After … Read more
Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, I’ve been working from home. This caused me, for reasons that are unimportant, to learn how to burn a CD-RW from the command line in Slackware Linux. The first step was to erase the media in the drive. (While DVD-RW media can be overwritten, I’ve always had to erase CD-RW … Read more
On servers using PHP 5.6.38, PHP 7.2.11, and PHP 7.3.0RC2, when I run pecl upgrade, I get the error message: pear.php.net is using a unsupported protocol – This should never happen. upgrade failed I looked at my previous blog post and found that, back then (2014), the solution was to run: pear upgrade –force xml_util. … Read more
I recently installed Slackware64 current on my home workstation. After installing VLC Media Player from Alien Bob’s restricted Slackbuilds,, I discovered that VLC would not start. After poking around, I found that VLC was giving the error: cannot instantiate dialogs provider. Some searching around, revealed the answer on linuxquestions.org and in the file http://slackware.uk/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/pkg64/current/vlc-3.0.3-x86_64-1alien.dep That … Read more
This morning, I tried to run VirtualBox on my workstation–running Slackware64 Current–at work and found that the kernel modules were not installed. Knowing that I had upgraded the kernel (to 4.14.24) this morning, I tried to build the modules: cd /usr/src/vboxhost-5.2.8 make and got a horrible message (and feeling -): /opt/VirtualBox/src/vboxhost/vboxdrv/Makefile.include.header:141: *** Error: unable to … Read more
Along with the excellence of Slackware current comes a broken version of KRDC (KDE Remote Desktop Client) that doesn’t work for RDP connections. It fails with a dialog saying: Could not start “xfreerdp”; make sure xfreerdp is properly installed. After poking around the source code, I got rather frustrated as I found the KDE source … Read more