The KDE developers are already well underway to a 4.10 release, having published the second Beta yesterday. But as I stated before, I will stick with the 4.9 series until at least there is a stable release of 4.10. Today marks the final update in the 4.9 series. With the publication of KDE Software Compilation 4.9.4 we are at the end of the maintenance cycle. Check out the release notes if you want to know all about what happened in the past month.

I think that 4.9.4 is a perfect companion for people running Slackware 14 or current.

My Ktown packages for KDE are specifically targeting Slackware-current, since that is what they are built on. At the moment, the development of -current has not deviated much, so that the KDE 4.9.4 packages will work well on Slackware 14 as well. That is why you will find the packages in a “14.0” directory.

Whether you are upgrading from the stock KDE of Slackware, or if you are upgrading from my previous 4.9.3 packages, you will find proper installation/upgrade instructions in the accompanying README and you are strongly advised to read and follow them.

Highlights for the new set of Slackware packages:

  • You will find five updated dependencies compared to Slackware’s own KDE 4.8.5: akonadi, qt, shared-desktop-ontologies, soprano, virtuoso-ose.
  • Since qt-4.8.4 was released a few days ago, I decided to add this version to the package set. I would have had to rebuild qt anyway in order to apply fixes for crash bugs, but 4.8.4 should be better even..
  • I had upgraded some of the “extragear” of KDE in my 4.9.3 package set and they are kept for 4.9.4: you will find new versions of kdevelop and kdevplatform, as well as oxygen-gtk2.
  • I had added a new package oxygen-gtk3 to my 4.9.3 set which is also carried to this 4.9.4 set. The package should give any software which uses the GTK+3 widget set a nice integrated look and feel when you run it in KDE.
  • And to conclude, I have added an entirely new package to this KDE 4.9.4 set, “kio-mtp” which is required in order to access and manage files on devices running Android 4.0 and later. I have not tested this, and am hearing mixed reports about its usefulness. Let me know if you use this!
  • 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.

Download locations (using a mirror is preferred, both my own taper and Willy’s server are fully synchronized):

 

Have fun! Eric