7.4.2 - KDE brain damage fixes - ep.1 - Xscreensaver by Bill Gates

[chris_Xnest]

The last time I did a Knoppix remaster was in 2008 when I performed a full brain transplant on Knoppix 5.3.1. I called it Electronnix.
I stuffed it with pretty much everything ever crossed my mind, from 64 loop devices, iso and partition/cloop images creation with a click from konqueror (with or without encryption), iso and partition/cloop images mounting the same way from konqueror, completely rearanged KDE Start Menu (menu entries sorted logically and new cathegories added where needed), new programs installed that I needed (electronics and CAD mostly), all the way to 28 new kernels added on top of the existing 2.6.24.4, with PAE enabled so I can make full use of 4GB or more RAM, updated and multiple versions of hardware drivers selectable on boot prompt, a second Xorg server (1.6.5) besides the existing 1.4.0.90 and so on.

My point is: since 2005 I never used Microsh*t again, thanks to Mr. Knopper's excellent work providing this great Linux distro. Also since then I never had to keep a HDD inside my computer. Everything is running on USB Flash sticks.
And I used it every day for everything I ever needed to do with my computer. 100% useful.

For those who remember, it had KDE 3.5.9, which was really a work of art. Basically everything was customizable and it had a ton of features.

Since I wasted a whole lot of time remastering this, I also strategically stockpiled quite a number of motherboards from that generation (2008 or earlier) so I can make sure I will still be able to run this remaster for enough time in the future.
(Luckily there are strong signs the current future will end in about 7 years tops)

Quite recently though I started having problems with certain sites, who stopped accepting old version of web browsers I had acces to in my Electronnix.

Building new browser versions from source in this old Linux is impossible because of zillions of newer dependency requirements, so I started looking at the Knoppix releases after 5.3.1. And I was really disappointed to see the GNU world took a turn for the worst. KDE became dumb and dumber, basically every piece of software started bearing the mark of brain damage.

And let me be clear, I'm not talking here about Mr. Knopper's work which is excellent as always, but he can only do so much. He can only take a snapshot of the existing GNU software at a particular moment and put it in a new Knoppix release. He's not responsible for what Debian programmers and the rest of GNU come up with.

And lately (after 2008 ) it looks like GNU got some serious brain damage. That only proves my old theory: ever since the creation, the amount of intelligence on the planet was a constant. The population expanded exponentially though hence the visible effects... Either that or Microsh*t actually paid off most of the KDE and GNU developers so they can dumb down the software they write, on purpose. Not that Windblows 7 is any better, but anyway...

So in this episode I will try to lend a hand to those who stumbled upon the same problem as me: in Knoppix 7.4.2, right after the midnight of 2014 Dec 31, at X startup I started seeing a big splash yelling at me that Xscreensaver is too old and I had to upgrade it, and that if my distro maintainer put this version of Xscreensaver in it, they did me a great disservice. Or something like that. And of course the very intelligent author of this Xscreenloser put his copyright there along with his web site address and name so anyone can praise him. Starting 2015 Jan 01, 00:00.

Yeah right!

So if you wonder how you can get rid of this BS(c?) which landed in K7.4.2 courtesy of a New Age Superficial Intelligence, here's how I did it: (NOTE: EVERYTHING DESCRIBED BELOW IS EXECUTED IN THE ORIGINAL KNOPPIX 7.4.2 LIVE ENVIRONMENT)

Googling around I found this:

https://build.netitwork.net/package/...patch?expand=1

It's a patch for this exact problem, only not for xscreensaver-5.26-1 (which is in K7.4.2) but for 5.22.
But it was a starting point. I downloaded the sources for xscreensaver-5.26-1 from snapshot.debian.org:

xscreensaver_5.26.orig.tar.gz and xscreensaver_5.26-1.diff.gz

Then:

tar -xzf xscreensaver_5.26.orig.tar.gz
cd xscreensaver-5.26
zcat ../xscreensaver_5.26-1.diff.gz" | patch -p1   ### this gave me the same version as in K7.4.2

Then I proceeded to manually modify the files (as described by the patch mentioned above) in the "xscreensaver-5.26" source tree. This way I obtained a bugfixed (or braindamagefixed?) source tree.

Then I had to install some missing dependencies. I manually downloaded the files below from snapshot.debian.org:

libxml2-dev_2.9.1+dfsg1-4_i386.deb
gir1.2-gtk-2.0_2.24.24-1_i386.deb
libgtk2.0-dev_2.24.24-1_i386.deb
libglade2-dev_2.6.4-2_i386.deb

I also did "

apt-get clean

" and "

apt-get update

". Before this though, depending on your location you might want to go in /etc/apt/sources.list and change the ".de." to something more close to you (for instance I changed to ".us.")

Then I did this:

dpkg -i libxml2-dev_2.9.1+dfsg1-4_i386.deb
dpkg -i gir1.2-gtk-2.0_2.24.24-1_i386.deb
dpkg -i libgtk2.0-dev_2.24.24-1_i386.deb
dpkg -i libglade2-dev_2.6.4-2_i386.deb
apt-get install fortune-mod libpam0g-dev xutils-dev libjpeg-dev libgle-dev intltool libxmu-dev libxpm-dev libxss-dev quilt

and then I rebuilt the debian packages by going back in the "xscreensaver-5.26" source dir and typing:

dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc

This resulted in the xscreensaver-5.26-1 debian packages (re)generated right beside the "xscreensaver-5.26" directory:

xscreensaver_5.26-1.dsc
xscreensaver_5.26-1_i386.changes
xscreensaver_5.26-1_i386.deb
xscreensaver-data_5.26-1_i386.deb
xscreensaver-data-extra_5.26-1_i386.deb
xscreensaver-gl_5.26-1_i386.deb
xscreensaver-gl-extra_5.26-1_i386.deb
xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod_5.26-1_i386.deb
xscreensaver-screensaver-webcollage_5.26-1_i386.deb

Of all these packages you only need to install one:

dpkg -i xscreensaver_5.26-1_i386.deb

This will overwrite the existing package in K7.4.2 and get rid of the dumb advertising splash at every restart.

Of course I'm assuming you do all this in a chroot environment in the unpacked KNOPPIX filesystem, after which you repack the filesystem back in a KNOPPIX cloop file. Personally I did not get there yet since I still have to dig around a while to try and find more brain damage to fix (another one is konqueror, see next episode).

So personally I just use a knoppix.sh script placed in the KNOPPIX directory (I copied the original DVD on a flash stick) which is executed at the end of knoppix-autoconfig right before X starts. This way when X starts, xscreensaver-5.26-1 is already properly trepanated and doesn't behave stupidly anymore.

I'm attaching here the final patch I obtained (to be applied directly against xscreensaver-5.26-1). Hopefully the attachment will make it through...