Wine 4.2 Released

• Wine Announcement

  The Wine development release 4.2 is now available.

• Wine 4.2 Released With Unicode String Normalization & ECC Crypto Key Support

  The second bi-weekly development release following last month's stable debut of Wine 4.0 is now available for testing. Wine 4.2 was just release and adds Unicode string normalization support, support for ECC cryptographic keys, support for mixing 32/64-bit DLLs in the load path, futex-based implementations of more synchronization primitives, and the usual smothering of bug fixes.

GNOME Desktop: Security Internship, History of GNOME and People Who Work on librsvg

• GNOME Security Internship - Update 5

  This project started with a simple on/off switch in control center that entirely enabled or disabled the USB protection. A respectively so called always on and always off. Later on we introduced a smarter protection level that was active only when the user session was locked. While an always on protection seemed a good idea on paper it turned out that the advantages compared to the lock screen protection were very slim. When the screen is locked both protections have the same behaviour. They only differentiate when the user session is unlocked.

• Pick a clock, any clock.

  After listening to the latest episode of Emmanuel’s podcast on the History of GNOME, nostalgia got the better of me, and I decided to dig out the GNOME 1.4 usability study that we ran at Sun Microsystems in March 2001, and make it available online again.

• Who wrote librsvg?

  The shitty thing about a gradual rewrite is that a few people end up "owning" all the lines of source code. Hopefully this post is a little acknowledgment of the people that made librsvg possible. The charts are made with the incredible tool git-of-theseus — thanks to @norwin@mastodon.art for digging it up! Its README also points to a Hercules plotter with awesome graphs. You know, for if you needed something to keep your computer busy during the weekend.

Slackware Removal of Lumina Desktop and Additional New Packages/Versions

• Lumina Desktop will be removed from my -current repository

  The Lumina Desktop is part of the TrueOS project, a FreeBSD variant. I packaged version 1.4.0.p1 for Slackware and it is part of the Plasma5 variant of my Slackware Live Edition. I noticed a while ago that Lumina would no longer start but it was low on my priority list to try and fix it. Today I found the time to look into this, but a recompilation against the latest Qt5 and other libraries, altough error-free, would not make the Lumina Desktop start successfully: it will start to load, but then you’ll hear a beep and you’re dumped at the command prompt or at the graphical login screen without evidence of what happened.

• Valentine present for Slackers

  Today is Valentine’s Day. A moment to give some extra attention to people that are dear to you. In my case, that’s everyone who loves, uses, supports, advocates or develops Slackware Linux. For all of you, I uploaded “KDE-5_19.02” to the ‘ktown‘ repository. There’s some updates in there that might interest you, see below. If you do not (want to) run or install Slackware-current, I will make sure that a new ISO of the Slackware Live Plasma5 Edition will be available around the weekend. That way, you can safely try it out without having to touch your hard drive. As always, these packages are meant to be installed on a Slackware-current which has had its KDE4 removed first. These packages will not work on Slackware 14.2.