Gee wizz! I was happily editing the new SlackDocs Wiki (article submissions are very welcome btw) while at the same time the KDE team released KDE SC 4.9.1 !! I had read on the “kde-packager” mailing list that the public announcement would be on Wednesday, so I was not paying all that much attention to the KDE site. And then all of a sudden there was the announcement on kde.org!

Luckily, I was prepared. I had already built the packages for Slackware-current (or better call that Slackware 14 RC4) and uploaded them to my two mirror servers. Get your KDE 4.9.1 packages .

This release is a bug fix release. Still, there is at least one glaring bug which was only uncovered after the public release (a message about the bug was posted to “kde-packager” which alerted me to the fact that the sources were already public). This is the message:

A nasty regression (was introduced) while fixing a bug inKWin for 4.9.1. With the “wrong” settings and the wrong set of open windows distributed over multiple desktops this can result in a freeze. A freeze in KWin means that the compositor stops, that is the user has no chance to recover from this state unless he knows how to switch to a tty.

A fix should be ready soon, which means a new kde-workspace package. It is a bug which should not affect a lot of people (I have been running KDE 4.9.1 for a few days here without ill effects), so I decided to push out my packages anyway.

The upgrade from Slackware’s KDE 4.8.5 to my KDE 4.9.1 should be safe and fairly trivial, As always, follow the guidelines in the README and you’ll be OK.

Highlights for the new set of Slackware packages:

  • You will find four updated dependencies compared to Slackware’s own KDE 4.8.5: akonadi, shared-desktop-ontologies, soprano, virtuoso-ose.
  • Compared to KDE 4.8.5, there were two package removals:
    • kdemultimedia has been split up into several smaller individual packages.
    • ksecrets has been removed completely in the 4.9.x series.
  • A noteworthy feature in KDE 4.9 has been added to Okular, the document viewer in KDE. Many people will cheer: Okular is now able to save the annotations you make to PDF files.

These KDE 4.9.1 packages are available for download from my “ktown” repository and several mirrors:

Parrot speak: this is a bit of text which I wrote at the time of release of KDE 4.9 release candidate 1 but I will repeat it one last time. After today, you should remember:

As you may have noticed when inspecting the above URLs, I have re-arranged my “ktown” repository. People were confused about what version would work with Slackware -current and what would work for 13.37. Also, some people have asked for sources of older releases for which I no longer host the packages.

I moved all the sources out of the package trees, you will now find a “source” directory right at the top level of the repository. Below that will be the sources of all package sets which I currently have in my repository (KDE 4.6.5, 4.7.4, 4.8.4 and 4.9.1, including all the dependencies you may want for compiling it on Slackware 13.37). The packages will be available below a toplevel directory equal to the Slackware version they were compiled for (at the moment those are “13.37” and “current“). Below that you will find the actual KDE versions and further down, the 32-bit and 64-bit packages.

Have fun! Eric