26 March, 2009

Slackware-current updates and Nvidia driver

I recently updated a desktop running Slackware-current to the latest packages released up to 24-Mar-2009. There were a few minor issues. The first is that, if using slackpkg to upgrade, I had to upgrade the findutils package before everything else or slackpkg would no longer work properly.

# slackpkg update
# slackpkg upgrade findutils
# slackpkg upgrade-all
The second was that I couldn't install the Nvidia driver for the new 2.6.28.8 kernel package because it was failing.
ERROR: The 'cc' sanity check failed:

The C compiler 'cc' does not appear able to
create executables. Please make sure you have
your Linux distribution's gcc and libc development
packages installed.
It turns out that gcc-4.3.3 in slackware-current depends on mpfr.
# slackpkg info mpfr

PACKAGE NAME: mpfr-2.3.1-i486-1.tgz
PACKAGE LOCATION: ./slackware/l
PACKAGE SIZE (compressed): 348 K
PACKAGE SIZE (uncompressed): 930 K
PACKAGE DESCRIPTION:
mpfr: mpfr (Multiple-Precision Floating-Point Reliable Library)
mpfr:
mpfr: The MPFR library is a C library for multiple-precision floating-point
mpfr: computations with exact rounding (also called correct rounding).
mpfr: It is based on the GMP multiple-precision library.
mpfr: The main goal of MPFR is to provide a library for multiple-precision
mpfr: floating-point computation which is both efficient and has
mpfr: well-defined semantics. It copies the good ideas from the
mpfr: ANSI/IEEE-754 standard for double-precision floating-point arithmetic
mpfr: (53-bit mantissa).
mpfr:

# slackpkg install mpfr
After installing mpfr, I was able to compile the Nvidia module for the running kernel.

Finally, kdeinit4 was failing with an error about loading the libstreamanalyzer.so.0 and libqimageblitz.so shared libraries. I fixed this by installing strigi and qimageblitz.
# slackpkg info strigi

PACKAGE NAME: strigi-0.6.3-i486-1.tgz
PACKAGE LOCATION: ./slackware/l
PACKAGE SIZE (compressed): 904 K
PACKAGE SIZE (uncompressed): 2570 K
PACKAGE DESCRIPTION:
strigi: strigi (fast and light desktop search engine)
strigi:
strigi: Strigi is a fast and light desktop search engine. It can handle a
strigi: large range of file formats such as emails, office documents, media
strigi: files, and file archives. It can index files that are embedded in
strigi: other files. This means email attachments and files in zip files
strigi: are searchable as if they were normal files on your harddisk.
strigi:
strigi: Homepage: http://strigi.sourceforge.net/
strigi:

# slackpkg info qimageblitz

PACKAGE NAME: qimageblitz-r900905-i486-1.tgz
PACKAGE LOCATION: ./slackware/l
PACKAGE SIZE (compressed): 82 K
PACKAGE SIZE (uncompressed): 240 K
PACKAGE DESCRIPTION:
qimageblitz: QImageBlitz (Graphical effect and filter library for KDE4)
qimageblitz:
qimageblitz: Blitz is a graphical effect and filter library for KDE4.0 that
qimageblitz: contains many improvements over KDE 3.x's kdefx library
qimageblitz: including bugfixes, memory and speed improvements, and MMX/SSE
qimageblitz: support.
qimageblitz:

# slackpkg install strigi qimageblitz
After those minor issues, I had KDE4 up and running with the latest Nvidia driver.