Pat V. emailed a group of Slackware collaborators in Brazil and tasked them with keeping official package updates while he is working on getting better. The updates are currently only available via HTTP, and a few attempts to mirror with wget get a bunch of html junk files, as usual.

The slacksec.org team and the GUS team are, currently, talking about working together, and I will follow this closely, so that the package mirror will, hopefully, contain what is going to be considered “official” updates.

Warm Regards,
Michael

In Patrick Volkerding’s absence, due to his health, a number of Slackware users started slacksec.org to keep up with security concerns. I set up a local mirror of the slacksec packages and they are available via http and ftp:

http://ftp.pbandjelly.org/pub/slacksec/

ftp://ftp.pbandjelly.org/pub/slacksec/

(links removed – no longer available)

Recently, I upgraded my Slackware-9.1 workstation with a fresh install of Slackware-10.0. A couple of the applications that I use heavily are Mozilla’s Firefox and Thunderbird, so these got fresh installs, as well. A quick copy of my old bookmarks file is all I need to restore Firefox, and I use IMAP for email, so all messages are kept on the servers, and all I need to do is set up the accounts.

Unlike the full Mozilla suite (browser/email together) Firefox and Thunderbird are standalone applications that are not aware of one another, so the frustrating tasks of copying email addresses from a bowser to the email client, and copying URL’s from emails to a browser are things that I just lived with. Some desktops, like Gnome have some global configuration’s for filetypes that can make setting default applications pretty easy, but I am a Fluxbox user – fast and no fluff – so there are no global application settings.

After reading through reams of forum posts and scripts, I found a pair of simple scripts, and created user.js configs for each application to call the other appropriately. Read on for the details and scripts!
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