Random thoughts, tips & tricks about Slackware-Linux, Lego and Star Wars

Archive for the 'Slackware' Category

March 22nd, 2010 by Niels Horn in , , |

A new version of FBReader, an e-book reader with functions to download books from some popular sites, has been released.
Version 0.12.7 is mainly a bug-fix release, but it also add some extra support for ePub files.
The new SlackBuild script is in the pending queue on SlackBuilds.org and pre-built packages for Slackware 32-bits, 64-bits and ARMedslack [...]

March 13th, 2010 by Niels Horn in , |

In a previous post I wrote about this little program I found called statifier.
This program can create a "statified" version of an executable program, that will be portable (so that it won't need the locally installed libraries). This also serves in many cases to make 32-bits programs executable on a 64-bits installation.
A new version was [...]

March 13th, 2010 by Niels Horn in , , , |

A new version of sdltrs, the TRS-80 emulator (originally based on xtrs) was released recently.
It adds the new "turbo mode", that can be switched on and off with the F11 key and reorganizes the disk numbering.
I submitted the new SlackBuild script to SlackBuilds.org and pre-built packages (Slackware 32 & 64-bits + ARMedslack) are available from [...]

March 11th, 2010 by Niels Horn in , , |

Today version 3.07 of Hercules, the System/370, ESA/390, and z/Architecture Emulator for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX, was released.
Since I use Hercules on an almost daily basis, I quickly downloaded the latest sources and prepared the new Slackware packages and SlackBuild script. The script is already in the "pending" queue, and the packages are being [...]

March 6th, 2010 by Niels Horn in , , |

Already a few weeks ago the Geeqie team released the first stable version of this image viewer, a fork from gqview, included in many Linux distributions.
The original gqview program had some bugs, but development had stalled some time ago. But lucky for us, some guys picked up this project and created a new program that [...]

February 15th, 2010 by Niels Horn in , , , , ,

Since I was doing some tests with Slackware running on different platforms (Slack/390, Slack/390x, ArmedSlack on Qemu, etc.) I wanted to compare the performance of the different setups.
I used a (quite old) utility called nbench that was originally written in 1995 but still is a simple way to compare how processors perform, emulated or real. [...]

February 15th, 2010 by Niels Horn in , ,

In preparation for a future project, I built Hercules on ArmedSlack, running in Qemu. The idea was to test the concept of running the mainframe emulator on the Arm processor.
The result was quite usable, at least for the older mainframe operating systems like MVS.
Here are some screenshots:
Starting Hercules on ArmedSlack:

The 3270 terminal connecting to the [...]

February 14th, 2010 by Niels Horn in , , , |

Today Carnival started her in Brazil. Well, I'm Dutch so I don't care too much about all the festivities (it is a nice party though).
So what better to do than finally test the 64-bits version of Slack/390?
I wrote an 11-part post about installing Slack/390 on Hercules more than a year ago, and it [...]

February 6th, 2010 by Niels Horn in , ,

Wireshark is a very nice network protocol analyzer / sniffer, that is very complete and totally free and open source. It is the standard for examining network packets, used by many professionals and home users. I've been using wireshark since the days when it was still called Ethereal, some years ago.
The last few days I [...]

January 29th, 2010 by Niels Horn in , |

Some days ago I read some messages on the SlackBuilds mailing list about problems with building FBReader on 64-bits Slackware and the right location of the libraries. At first, I had no clue what FBReader was, I was just interested in the technical problem and how it was solved.
I decided to build the program and [...]