My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

For your Slackware-current: KDE 5_17.03 with lots of goodies

Those of you who follow my repository RSS feeds have already noticed, but many people rely on the announcements I make on this blog (plus, I can give a lot more detail here).
I uploaded the packages for the March 2017 release of my ‘ktown’ repository: KDE 5_17.03. Actually, there is a lot of interesting stuff going on in this release, because I decided to do some things that were on my TODO for a long while. Read more about that below in the “NEWS” section.
What you get in this new release is: KDE Frameworks 5.32.0, Plasma 5.9.3 and Applications 16.12.3. All of this is still built on top of Qt 5.7.1.
This Plasma 5 release targets only Slackware-current for the moment, because of the PLASMA5 Live that I release in parallel. But packages for Slackware 14.2 (only 64bit) are already being compiled at the moment, so updates will be visible in my 14.2 repository in a couple of days at most.
NOTE: I will no longer be releasing Plasma 5 packages for 32bit Slackware 14.2.

What’s new in KDE 5_17.03?

  • Let’s start with the ‘deps’ section this time as there are some interesting updates to be checked out. You will find two upgraded packages: phonon-vlc and qca-qt5. Also six entirely new ones to support digikam and kdenlive: lensfun, opencv, frei0r-plugins, vid.stab, dvdauthor and mlt. You may already have one or more of these installed from SBo, so make sure to upgrade to my ‘ktown‘ versions to prevent breakage in digikam and kdenlive. Notably, the SBo version of my ‘frei0r-plugins‘ package is called ‘frei0r‘.
    The two packages that required the addition of these new dependencies: ‘digikam‘ (in kde/applications-extra) and ‘kdenlive‘ (in kde/applications) were on my TODO for a long time, but they depended on ffmpeg (amongst others) and although I have been adding many dependency packages to ‘ktown’, a ffmpeg package was one bridge too far. Now that Slackware (in the -current development tree) finally has its own ‘ffmpeg’ package, I decided to go ahead and investigate what else was required to finally add digikam/kdenlive.
  • Frameworks 5.32.0 is an enhancement release. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/kde-frameworks-5.32.0.php
  • Plasma 5.9.3 is the third iteration of the 5.9 series with small fixes only. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.9.3.php . I am not sticking with the long term support (LTS) releases of Plasma 5.8, as I think LTS should be targeting stable Slackware. If you want to know more about the long term support plans, go read: https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.8.0.php .
    My observations about Plasma 5.9:

    • Along with Plasma 5.9 a new network configurator was added to System Settings. The NetworkManager-openvpn plugin package I added to my regular repository and which I also added to the PLASMA5 Live Edition, allows you to define new OpenVPN connections in this Plasma network configurator. Unfortunately, when choosing “import existing vpn configuration” the editor always crashes the very moment I click on a openvpn configuration file. I can however create the desired VPN configuration using the GTK based “nm-connection-editor” instead. Afterwards, this new VPN definition is visible and usable in the Plasma 5. But I really would like the Plasma editor to work too. A bug report which I opened could not be confirmed  by the developer because he can not reproduce it – apparently the cause is something in Slackware, or in my packages.
  • Applications 16.12.3 is an incremental fix-release in the 16.12 series. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-applications-16.12.3.php . I was finally able to compile the ‘libkface‘ and ‘kdenlive‘ packages now that their dependencies have been fulfilled. Kdenlive is a (free and powerful) non-linear video editor and having this in Slackware’s Plasma 5 is an exciting enhancement.
  • Applications-extra contains two new packages: ‘digikam‘ and ‘krusader‘. Krusader is a KF5-based advanced twin panel (commander style) file manager with lots of data manipulation tools. I added this one on request of one of my readers. And Digikam is the well-known photo management suite for KDE. Its KF5 port needed some dependencies which I finally fulfilled so I could add it to my repository. And glad about that, too. Years ago I ranted about how the digikam developers made it impossible for packagers to fulfill the program’s dependencies on a stable platform like Slackware and at that time I made the decision to stop making packages for it out of sheer frustration at the lack of answers.
    I have also added a beta release of k3b (now finally a KF5 port) which will see its first new official release as part of Applications 17.04 next month. Lastly I upgraded the kdevelop related packages.
  • In plasma-extra I rebuilt the sddm-qt5 package, enabling the dutch translation and making sure that SDDM picks up your $LANG settings.
  • Also worth mentioning: with every release of Plasma and Applications, the Qt4 legacy becomes smaller. Only a limited amount of qt4/kdelibs4 packages remains. And KF5 ports of k3b, calligra, krita, ktorrent, partitionmanager, skanlite and the KDE Development Suite can be found in the “kde/applications-extra” subdirectory.

This upgrade should be relatively straightforward if you already have Plasma 5 installed. See below for install/upgrade instructions. For users who are running slackware-current, the most crucial part is making sure that you end up with Slackware’s packages for ‘libinput‘ and ‘libwacom‘. I had those two packages in the ‘current’ section of my repository for a while (they are still part of the ‘14.2’ section) but Slackware added them to the core OS. Failing to install the correct (i.e. Slackware) packages, may render your input devices (mouse and keyboard) inoperative in X.Org.

You may want to check out the new Plasma 5 before installing. For this purpose, I have generated a new Live ISO for the PLASMA5 variant. Look for that ISO on http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/latest/ .

Non-ktown packages you probably want anyway

There are a couple of *runtime* dependencies that I did not add to the ‘ktown’ repository, but you may want to consider installing them yourself because they enable functionality in Plasma 5 that you would otherwise miss:

  • vlc – will give phonon another backend to select from.
  • python-twisted – required by kajongg to start & run.
  • freerdp: access RDP servers through krdc.

All of the above can be found in my regular package repository.

In order for kdenlive to reach its full potential, you might want to consider replacing Slackware’s ‘ffmpeg‘ package by my version with extended functionality: more supported codecs including AAC, MP3 and H.264 encoders.

Multilib considerations

If you install a 32bit program on a 64bit Slackware computer with multilib and that program needs legacy system tray support (think of Skype for instance), you will have to grab the 32-bit version of Slackware’s ‘libdbusmenu-qt’ and my ktown-deps package ‘sni-qt’, and run the ‘convertpkg-compat32 -i‘ command on them to create ‘compat32’ versions of these packages. Then install both ‘libdbusmenu-qt-compat32‘ and ‘sni-qt-compat32‘.
Those two are mandatory addons for displaying system tray icons of 32bit binaries in 64bit multilib Plasma5.

Installing or upgrading Frameworks 5, Plasma 5 and Applications

You can skip the remainder of the article if you already have my Plasma 5 installed and are familiar with the upgrade process. Otherwise, stay with me and read the rest.

As always, the accompanying README file contains full installation & upgrade instructions. Note that the packages are available in several subdirectories below “kde”, instead of directly in “kde”. This makes it easier for me to do partial updates of packages. The subdirectories are “kde4“, “kde4-extragear“, “frameworks“, “kdepim“, “plasma“, “plasma-extra“, “applications“, “applications-extra” and “telepathy“.

Upgrading to this KDE 5 is not difficult, especially if you already are running KDE 5_17.02. You will have to remove old KDE 4 packages manually. If you do not have KDE 4 installed at all, you will have to install some of Slackware’s own KDE 4 packages manually.

What I usually do is: download all the ‘ktown’ packages for the new release to a local disk. Then run “upgrade –install-new” on all these packages. Then I check the status of my Slackware-current, upgrading the stock packages where needed. The slackpkg tool is invaluable during this process of syncing the package installation status to the releases.

Note:

If you are using slackpkg+, have already moved to KDE 5_17.02 and are adventurous, you can try upgrading using the following set of commands. This should “mostly” work but you still need to check the package lists displayed by slackpkg to verify that you are upgrading all the right packages. Feel free to send me improved instructions if needed. In below example I am assuming that you tagged my KDE 5 repository with the name “ktown” in the configuration file “/etc/slackpkg/slackpkgplus.conf“):
# slackpkg update
# slackpkg install ktown (to get the newly added packages from my repo)
# slackpkg install-new (to get the new official Slackware packages that were part of my deps previously)
# slackpkg upgrade ktown (upgrade all existing packages to their latest versions)
# slackpkg upgrade-all (upgrade the remaining dependencies that were part of my repo previously)

And doublecheck that you have not inadvertently blacklisted my packages in “/etc/slackpkg/blacklist“! Check for the existence of a line in that blacklist file that looks like “[0-9]+alien” and remove it if you find it!

Recommended reading material

There have been several posts now about KDE 5 for Slackware-current. All of them contain useful information, tips and gotchas. If you want to read them, here they are: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/tag/kde5/

A note on Frameworks

The KDE Frameworks are extensions on top of Qt 5.x and their usability is not limited to the KDE Software Collection. There are other projects such as LXQT which rely (in part) on the KDE Frameworks, and if you are looking for a proper Frameworks repository which is compatible with Slackware package managers such as slackpkg+, then you can use these URL’s to assure yourself of the latest Frameworks packages for Slackware-current (indeed, this is a sub-tree of my KDE 5 repository):

The same goes for Frameworks for Slackware 14.2 (change ‘current’ to ‘14.2’ in the above URLs).

Where to get the new packages for Plasma 5

Download locations are listed below (you will find the sources in ./source/5/ and packages in /current/5/ and  /14.2/5/ subdirectories). If you are interested in the development of KDE 5 for Slackware, you can peek at my git repository too.

Using a mirror is preferred because you get more bandwidth from a mirror and it’s friendlier to the owners of the master server!

Have fun! Eric

91 Comments

  1. Janis

    I tried it already on 14.2 (upgrade from KDE4)- my impression – it slowed down the things a hell lot, plus something did not function as expected. Had non-working ktorrent for example.

  2. Eduardo

    Hi Eric, thank you! I remember asking you to include krusader some time ago. Great!! Downloading now. I’m really thankful for the inclusion.

  3. Gabriel

    PS for people updating right now: I had speed issues with both Bear and French mirrors, UK mirror operating at full speed.

  4. alienbob

    Janis, can you please provide more detail? What kind of slowness? How does that manifest itself (startup speeds, graphical smoothness, etc). How does ktorrent not work? Do you see errors? Does it refuse to start? Etcetera. Just stating “slower, does not work” is not sufficient for me to try and improve things.

  5. Gabriel

    Everything is working.

    PS: I guess Plasma5 don’t have an option yet to change the ugly (imo) default account picture. To change it i used this command found on google: “kcmshell4 kcm_useraccount”.

  6. Algierd

    Will there ever be a livecd added with Trinity DE?

  7. alienbob

    Gabriel, yeah it’s the user-manager which allows you to modify stuff like the account picture.

    Interestingly, you can still run “kcmshell4 kcm_useraccount” which means you never removed the kde-baseapps package. That package disappeared when Applications 16.12.0 was released.
    The user-manager part moved to Plasma, but the Plasma 5 developers decided make PAM mandatory for the “user-manager” program, so I could not add that to my package set.

  8. alienbob

    Algierd I do not think the Trinity project is worth while, so I will never add a Live ISO for it.
    However, if someone is willing to maintain a repository of Trinity packages for Slackware, she can easily generate a Trinity Live variant.
    My liveslak project is quite customizable without having to modify the core scripts, as several spin-offs demonstrate (cinelerra-cv live, fluxflux for instance). A Trinity variant requires two new files in the ./pkglists directory, defining the repository location and the package set. And the rest of the needed modification goes into the “make_slackware_live.conf” file – that file is full of commented-out examples of what you need to do to define a new variant.

  9. LoneStar

    very nice, seems to be working fine.
    Digikam’s addition was unexpected and pleasurable suprise.
    Thanks for all, as usual!

  10. Richard Herbert

    Thanks very much, Eric. KDE 5_17.03 went in like butter, as usual. Two things: The beta version of K3B is looking for libburn, but the package can’t be downloaded from slackbuilds.org because the hosting site isn’t responding. Also, I got hit by this Plasma 5.9.3 bug: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=377441. Just aesthetic, but apparently fixed in Plasma 5.9.4.

  11. Eduardo

    Installed and so far it’s all smooth sailing. Thank you Eric!!

  12. Owen Greaves

    Howdy!

    I just finished a clean install of this latest work of yours on a clean install of Slackware -current. I’m having some graphic issues, for example, in Thunderbird, many buttons, radial buttons and some of the icons do not display, and there are no placeholders. I had to guess where the button was by memory : )

    I also found that menu items weren’t showing at all in Libreoffice, but if I ran the mouse overtop, some would appear.

    Any ideas, I deleted the .cache folder, but that never helped. Thanks for any input you might have.

    Owen

  13. ArTourter

    Gabriel, Eric, Regarding the user picture, the easy way to change it, is to save the picture/image you want to use for a user as ~user/.face.icon the image is then picked up by both sddm and the lock screen. I have used png or jpg but I suspect you can use pretty much anything.

  14. alienbob

    I thought Gabriel meant the default icon in general, I guess I did not think straight. Indeed, I have the habit of saving my user icon as ~/.face.icon … this also happens in the Live Edition where I add the Slackware Blue “S” as the ‘live’ user icon.

  15. alienbob

    Hi Owen

    That sounds like an issue with your graphics driver. What video card does your computer have? What driver is it using (Slackware-provided or 3rd party binary blob, or…)?
    I can tell you that on my T460 laptop with Intel GPU, and in my QEMU VM’s, I do not see any of the behaviour you describe.
    Try creating a temporary new user account for testing this issue. if the new user account does not have the issue then it’s something in your homedirectory or in one of the cache directories that’s causing it.

  16. Gérard Monpontet

    I have ‘user-manager’ personnal package installed here,

    it seem worked correctly, but it need ‘cracklib’ ‘libpwquality’ and ‘accountsservice’, no ‘pam’, installed here.

  17. alienbob

    Hmmm, no PAM? That is good news.
    I’ll look into it for the next release. Thanks Gérard.

  18. Gérard Monpontet

    No tested other fonctions, but the avatar fonction work. 😉

  19. Gérard Monpontet

    Yes, Eric, without pam and with all latest version of cracklib (2.9.6), libpwquality (1.3.0), and accountssevice (0.6.43).

  20. Owen Greaves

    Hi Eric,

    I use the drivers that come with Slackware, always have. My computer is an old HP dv6-2140ca I bought in 2010, it has an independent video card Radeon HD 4650 with 1GB Memory. This never happened with previous versions of Plasma 5, so I thought I would ask your thoughts.

    The other thing that happened, I was working in WordPress, went to install a plugin stored on my computer, it opened the dialogue box, but didn’t show anything, no folders, no files….blank white box!

    Anyway, I’ll try a couple more things later today : ) Thanks for your help and work Eric.

    Owen

  21. pataphysician

    Reminder, people running Current also just had an update on X11 server from Patrick, so issues (like slowness) could be do to X11 changes and not KDE update. I’m having some issues with how multi session sound is being handled, but it seems to probably be how X11 session is interacting with pulseaudio.

  22. Darth Vader

    No offense, but it is still ugly like Hell…

    I bet that Stevie Wonder would do a better job as KDE’s UI/UX Designer!

  23. alienbob

    Darth Vader, everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion 🙂 I hate Stevie Wonder’s music, I guess you might like it in reverse.

  24. alienbob

    Owen, if you do not suspect the graphics driver then it might also be possible that you are either missing one or more of my ktown packages, or you have a Slackware package installed instead of my ktown package with the same name, or you have an alternative package from a 3rd party repository with the same name as one of my own ktown packages.

    Are you running 32bit or 64bit Slackware-current? What is your method of upgrading packages? Using slackpkg with or without slackpkg+, manual upgrades, or a mix?

  25. Ricardo J. Barberis

    Thank you Eric!

    I’m still on Slackware64 14.2 and experiencing some regular crashes, but I’ll wait and see if this version (when you release it for 14.2) solves them before bugging you 🙂

    Cheers!

  26. alienbob

    Hi Ricardo

    I have uploaded the packages for Slackware 14.2 (64bit) this morning. The mirrors should have it within the next 24 hours.

  27. Greg

    Hi Eric,

    Just installed the packages for 14.2, working great just https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=377441 is the only problem I can see.

    I have the Folder View widget on my desktop and it looks like I have highlighted all the items.

    Apart from that, all working great. Thanks 🙂

  28. alienbob

    Greg,

    Looks like that bug has been fixed in Plasma 5.9.4 which should be released today; or else apply https://cgit.kde.org/plasma-framework.git/commit/?id=547a34d346695295ce05499ae355203414412993 to the plasma-framework sources and recompile that package.

  29. Gérard Monpontet

    yes i confirm it’s fixed, i have compiled plasma 5.9.4 😉

  30. alienbob

    FYI, I have added I have added a ‘kde/plasma/user-manager’ package yesterday.
    I also added the following three packages as its dependencies: cracklib, libpwquality and accountsservice. Indeed there was no need for PAM.

  31. Owen Greaves

    Ok, I did a clean install of 14.2, did updates…then upgraded to -current, removed kde entirely (except 5 apps), downloaded Plasma 5 -current, reinstalled…..it’s working like it should this time. I’m not sure what fixed the graphic issues I was having before, but it’s not doing the silliness anymore : )

    Thanks again for your input & direction,

    Owen

  32. Helios

    Thank you very much !

    Everything works well except a problem with accents in French.
    I have set LANG=fr_FR.UTF8 , but in konsole, messages appear with accents replaced with a black square (using the command “cat” for example). But accents are displayed correctly from the keyboard. A text with accents is not displayed correctly using kde applications (kate for ex.) but correctly in emacs, texstudio, geany, nedit, xedit

  33. ArTourter

    Hi Eric,
    I get a warning/error (not sure which) when starting k3b saying:
    Unable to find cdrskin executable
    K3b uses cdrskin in place of cdrecord.
    Solution: Install the libburn package which contains cdrskin

    From that message it is unclear to me if it will revert to using cdreacord or not (cdrecord and its path are in the list of program it claims it can use in the preferences, but that may be a remnant from the old days).

  34. alienbob

    ArTourter yes I was already warned that the new k3b depends on libburn instead of the old cdrecord.
    I will add a package for libburn soon. The cdrskin binary is part of that package.

  35. ArTourter

    Hi Eric,
    Yes I somehow missed the comment before I wrote my message. The package from slackbuilds.org is now working fine since the hosting site seems to have fixed whatever problem they had.

  36. alienbob

    I already uploaded a libburn package to the ‘deps’ section of my ‘ktown’ repository.

  37. Hubert Phava

    Hi Eric. As usual. thanks for your work.
    My system is a 64–current (updated today) with your multilib goodies ( all 32bit packages upgraded too) and your Kde-set.
    Trying to fire up “showfoto” i receive this message:
    ———
    dash-4.4$ showfoto
    libGL error: No matching fbConfigs or visuals found
    libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast
    Unrecognized OpenGL version
    Unrecognized OpenGL version
    ——–
    and i must give Cntrl+C to obtain the prompt.
    I have also recompiled “digikam” (with your scripts) but non luck: same message.
    Digikam seems to work well but not showfoto.

    Any hint?

    TIA
    HP

  38. Hubert Phava

    Sorry, i’ve forgot to say that i use Nvidia prop. drivers.
    *Always* before any kde/xorg/mesa update, i completely unistall nvidia-drivers, then install the above packages and finally reinstall nvidia and mesa packages ( in “init 1” mode); then reboot the system.

  39. alienbob

    Are you sure you have not (re-)installed a mesa package (32bit or 64bit) _after_ installing the Nvidia driver?

    • Hubert Phava

      Au contraire… i’m sure to have reinstalled mesa *after* nvidia. Ok…. once at home i’ll give mesa a try

  40. alienbob

    Read my words correctly: if you re-install or upgrade mesa (same goes for xorg-server) after you installed/upgraded the Nvidia drivers, then your system’s OpenGL subsystem will be broken until you re-install the Nvidia drivers on top of mesa again.
    Nvidia drivers always come last.

  41. HUbert Phava

    ThankYou Eric… did thw correctly ordered installation and now I have showfoto again
    🙂

    HP

  42. Gérard Monpontet

    new k3b package have libexec in /usr/lib64/libexec/

    need this option:
    -DKDE_INSTALL_LIBEXECDIR=/usr/libexec \

    ‘ninja’ package, 1.6.0 version in dep (plasma), ‘1.7.2’ version in your SlackBuild repositories 😉

  43. Janis

    Hi!
    Sorry, for delay – I’d say is the feeling that evrth becomes slow – the reaction time on mouse click, the way how the apps react. I have virtual machine with 14.2/KF5_17.02 on board – while for the virtual machine there is an excuse for being slow with graphically intensive GUI, on the physical machine with enough (? 16GB) RAM and SSD disk for system I expected it to be comparable to KDE4 general performance-wise.
    As I actually like the way KF5 looks, I’ll give one more try in a while.

  44. Fabick

    Hello Eric, I’m reporting the same problem of Helios.
    Even with correct setup (I think) of char coding, I’ve problems in konsole with UTF8.

    This is my locale :
    LANG=it_IT.UTF-8
    LC_CTYPE=”it_IT.UTF-8″
    LC_NUMERIC=”it_IT.UTF-8″
    LC_TIME=”it_IT.UTF-8″
    LC_COLLATE=C
    LC_MONETARY=”it_IT.UTF-8″
    LC_MESSAGES=”it_IT.UTF-8″
    LC_PAPER=”it_IT.UTF-8″
    LC_NAME=”it_IT.UTF-8″
    LC_ADDRESS=”it_IT.UTF-8″
    LC_TELEPHONE=”it_IT.UTF-8″
    LC_MEASUREMENT=”it_IT.UTF-8″
    LC_IDENTIFICATION=”it_IT.UTF-8″
    LC_ALL=

    but is almost impossible to work with accented letters in terminal !

    Furthermore, there’s a reported bug with Kate and KDevelop that change encoding to the files, from UTF8 to ISO-8859-15, how reported to the page :
    https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=373001

    are these problems correlated?
    I don’t figure how to fix term encoding, after several attemps!

  45. alienbob

    Gérard, yes that is something I need to fix in the next batch.

  46. alienbob

    Janis, that slowness is something I have _never_ experienced in Plasma 5 on real hardware. Something else must be the issue.
    But then again, I run Plasma 5 only on Slackware64-current. Should not make that much of a difference however.

  47. alienbob

    Fabick, Helios, if you are able to figure out (the cause of) your issue and it’s something I can fix in my packages, let me know.

  48. alienbob

    Fabick, I can not reproduce the issue reported in https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=373001 on Slackware64-current with the latest Plasma package set.

  49. Alex

    Hi Eric,
    awesome job, once again, thanks a lot!
    One though regarding LTS. Although I fully get your point, why you are maintaining the non-LTS version only, at the moment, I wonder
    (1) if it wouldn’t make sense to maintain non-LTS for Slackware64-current and the LTS version for Slackware64-stable
    (2) which way Slackware64-stable 14.3/15.0 (or whatever the version number will be) will go.

    I am currently running Slackware64-stable 14.2 on my main machine, and I would rather not have to “downgrade” to LTS from something else when the next Slackware version is released. That’s why I am not (yet) running Plasma5 on that machine.

    Well, I know, there cannot be a clear answer right now, as it all depends on Pat making decisions, and while we all know that he is taking his responsibility very seriously and to the best benefit of all of us, we don’t know what he will consider the best way to go, once this decision is to be made. So I don’t expect a concrete answer, I am just sharing my thoughts on the topic.

  50. Helios

    For the localization problems I have found something on archlinux forums : delete ~/.config/plasma-locale-settings.sh and restart the session

    I have also changed ~/.config/plasma-localerc with a correct LANG but maybe this is not useful

    ~/.config/plasma-locale-settings.sh did not appear again.

    Now accents appear again correctly in kde programs as kate. But messages in konsole (for example when I run “gcc -v”) appear with weird characters instead of letters with an accent.

  51. Helios

    In fact everything works well by putting also a correct LANG in ~/.bash*** (I had changed them incorrectly to solve my problems)

    So I think the main thing is to delete ~/.config/plasma-locale-settings.sh which is probably created at the first execution of kde5

  52. alienbob

    Alex – I am not going to maintain a completely separate Plasma 5 stack for Slackware 14.2. You will not get official Plasma 5 for Slackware 14.2 anyway.
    And whatever Pat will upgrade KDE4 to when the time comes, it is not certain at all that it will be the LTS version. From a Slackware point of view it could even be more sensible to follow the development process and leave Plasma LTS for the enterprise distros. Sticking with Plasma 5.8 imposes limitations on what you can do with regard to upgrading other software on the system – newer Qt5 for instance, will probably not work with Plasma 5.8. Plus, you are stuck with tech from 2016, which would suck if Plasma 5 got added to Slackware-current in 2018.

  53. alienbob

    Helios, thanks for documenting that.
    I assume that the “~/.config/plasma-locale-settings.sh” file is being written by the localizations plugin of System Settings.

  54. USUARIONUEVO

    Hi again.

    In multilib system , when try build jack-audio-connection-kit (for32 bit package) , he wants db packages and get an error.

    he wants -ldb for 32 multilib , but packages are not in your repo , i download from 14.2 and convert it solved.

    Add db-* (3 packages) to official multilib ?

    Thanks for your work and patient.

  55. USUARIONUEVO

    Sorry for re-post , but here is another one

    libxml++ (for compile 32 multilib package) , wants

    glibmm , of the slackware oficial packages (32bits to convert multilib solve again)

  56. Owen Greaves

    Hi Eric,

    I got a new thing happening, well an old thing really. I’m getting alot of screen tearing when using OpenGL 2.0 & 3.1 but no screen tearing with OpenGL 1.2. Keep in mind this is an old NVidia Card, AGP in fact.

    OpenGL works, but it’s dog slow….is there a way to speed it up? Probably has absolutely nothing to do with Plasma 5 that you have done….just thought I would ask anyway : )

    Thanks,

    Owen

  57. Owen Greaves

    I should say NO tearing with OpenGL 1.2 – also, I’m not using NVidia Drivers, just the one that comes with Slackware 14.2 / -current.

  58. alienbob

    Owen, curiously enough I have the following tidbit in the script which generates the Live ISO. It’s for the PLASMA 5 variant, and since you are posting below my Plasma 5 article it’s worth trying out the following (you’re the first user who mentions he has an old GPU):


    # Make sure that Plasma and SDDM work on older GPUs,
    # by forcing Qt5 to use software GL rendering:
    cat <<"EOGL" >> ${LIVE_ROOTDIR}/usr/share/sddm/scripts/Xsetup
    OPENGL_VERSION=$(LANG=C glxinfo |grep '^OpenGL version string: ' |head -n 1 |sed -e 's/^OpenGL version string: \([0-9]\).*$/\1/g')
    if [ "$OPENGL_VERSION" -lt 2 ]; then
    QT_XCB_FORCE_SOFTWARE_OPENGL=1
    export QT_XCB_FORCE_SOFTWARE_OPENGL
    fi
    EOGL

    It’s untested… no one ever provided feedback about it.
    The important part of course being the definition and exporting of the variable QT_XCB_FORCE_SOFTWARE_OPENGL. You get the gist.

  59. alienbob

    USUARIONUEVO, indeed the convertpkg-compat32 script is supposed to help you with any additional 32bit Slackware package you need when compiling software.
    The default set of ‘compat32’ packages that I provide is sufficient for most users. I do not want to add too many others in the default set. In particular the glibmm/cairomm/atkmm etc packages I try to avoid because of their dependency hell.

  60. Owen Greaves

    Well Eric, I just completed an install of Plasma on 14.2 – not -current. Completely removed KDE, and then did the Plasma 5 install. The problem simply went away, I didn’t have to use your script….I will however, try it on a -current inst just for fun to see what happens, stay tuned : )

  61. Owen Greaves

    One thing that has returned, the problem with Vi not showing more than 3 lines of an opened file in Konsole – Vi works properly if I’m not in X / Plasma at all….can’t remember how we fixed that before. I deleted the .cache folder, but that didn’t do anything.

  62. Fabick

    HI ! I’ve followed the Helios trick about removing “~/.config/plasma-locale-settings.sh” and now seems that kate starts to decode correctly UTF8 files. I need to test the same from KDevelop but this use kate as internal editor, then I hope that works

  63. Ricardo J. Barberis

    Owen, I think that’s a konsole bug, vim works fine in konsole, and vi works fine on yakuake for example.

  64. manciuleas

    Hi,

    Would anyone know if the latest batch of updates on current affects KDE? Pat has recompiled some of the KDE4 packages.
    Thank you

  65. alienbob

    manciuleas for me it takes longer. I do not have the fast hardware Pat uses, and I have to “dress up” virtual machines before I can start compiling. I have the 64bit Plasma 5 packages done, but the 32bit packages will take another couple of days. I only have a few hours per day left for Slackware. The build machine is old and noisy and therefore is not allowed to be on at night.
    Recompiles in the works are: opencv and qt5 in ‘deps’; kdelibs, libkdcraw, kopete, krdc, kstars, digikam in ‘applications (-extra)’; and updated versions of krita and calligra (because recompiling the now-old versions did not make sense).

  66. Richard Herbert

    manciuleas and alienbob: The latest LibRaw update in current forced me to create a symllink from libraw.so.15 to libraw.so.16 in /usr/lib64 to satisfy a library dependency in gwenview. Thanks.

  67. alienbob

    Richard – OK, I will add gwenview to the list.

  68. Eduardo

    Hi Eric: I second what Richard said. Thankfully the workaround is trivial. Thanks for everything!

  69. Richard Herbert

    Eduardo – Yes, very trivial. “Forced” was a bit too dramatic. 😉 Thanks for everything, Eric.

  70. manciuleas

    @aliebob

    I’ll wait, there’s no rush.
    Thanks for your work.

  71. Helios

    For the last slackware-current updates, I found also that the following kde5 packages are impacted:
    poppler (maybe the upgrade with slackware-current poppler will kill the qt5 versions ?)
    okular
    kfilemetadata
    dvdauthor
    kdegraphicsthumbnailers
    frei0r
    kdelibs4

  72. David

    Hi Eric,

    I installed this update on 14.2 a while back and it’s been working great for the most part

    One issue I noticed today, though, is that the Add Widgets functionality seems to be broken. Broken meaning if I click Add Widgets, nothing happens at all: no dialog, no error, etc.

    I just tried the same in a fresh user environment to rule out some weird user-config conflict, but it didn’t work there either.

    Any ideas?

    Thanks, Dave

  73. Gérard Monpontet

    Just for info: i have compiled KDE Applications 17.04 RC, it seem ‘kajongg’ need python3 and python3-qt, the all other work correctly. 😉

  74. Gérard Monpontet

    And omited python3-twisted, minimal version-16.6.0 😉

  75. alienbob

    Yes, that is why I will stop shipping a kajongg package. I am not prepared to add python3 to my ktown dependencies.

  76. alienbob

    David, I do not run Slackware 14.2 on any machine, so I used a virtual machine snapshot of 14.2 (64bt) and installed my latest Plasma 5 for Slackware 14.2 on it.
    The “add widgets” functionality works here. I can add widgets to the desktop and also to the system tray.
    Perhaps you are missing a package? Or have performed an incomplete upgrade?

  77. HUbert Phava

    Just for feedback….
    Slack664–current here with multilib packages and Eric’s Kde stuff..
    The only problem found after Pat’s update i’ve had is witn gwenview, resolved with the above “ln -s ” workaround.
    No kate, no vim, no okular malfunction.
    Anyway, i’m recompiling all KDE stuff ( with Eric’s scripts and sources) on a spare ( but slooooooooow machine) on a fresh installed slackware64–current
    🙂

    HP

  78. David

    Thanks, Eric. It’s useful to know it works on your 14.2 VM.

    Anything’s possible. I don’t think I missed any steps during the upgrade from 5._17.02, but who knows.

  79. David

    Well, I rsync’d the whole repo and went through and did upgradepkg –install new for all the sub-directories and now it seems to work. Must have missed something during the upgrade. Thanks!

  80. Helios

    I have seen the following minor ptoblems remaining:

    For poppler it seems that the only non-kde application in slackware-current that uses it is cups.

    I think that in the README, installation from kde4, the following are missing :
    removepkg kdev-python
    removepkg kdepim

    With slackware-current kaudiocreator : libkcompactdisc.so.4 => not found

    in /usr/bin/krfb (from krfb-16.12.3-x86_64-1alien) : libvncserver.so.0 => not found

    in /usr/bin/spumux (from dvdauthor-0.7.2-x86_64-1alien) : libMagickCore-6.Q16.so.3 => not found

  81. alienbob

    Helios,

    I will address all of that when I compile the next batch of updates (new frameworks/plasma/applications).
    Well except for kaudiocreator which needs to be addressed in Slackware itself.

  82. Helios

    In fact kaudiocreator works if libkcompactdisc-4.14.3 from slackware-current is reinstalled. It does not seem to interfere with kde5

  83. Helios

    Well, there is still a problem with kaudiocreator in slackware-current, with seems to come from audiocd-kio. But I have tried sucessfully the last kaudiocreator from git. Anyway k3b does also the job well.

  84. chrisretusn

    The -current update with japer also affected digikam and kdenlive

  85. alienbob

    In my next batch of updates (which is completed for -current but I have to wait until thursday to make them public because of KDE policy), I have added “libkcompactdisc4” based on the 16.08.3 version. This is needed for kaudiocreator support. But apparently I need to do this for audiocd-kio-16.08.3 as well. Helios, what exactly is the issue here?

    Issues with digikam and kdenlive will be gone in the next batch because both package in there are recompiled.

  86. Helios

    With slackware64-current kaudiocreator (without package libkcompactdisc-4.14.3-x86_64-2) the window does not open, and I get the message

    kaudiocreator: error while loading shared libraries: libkcompactdisc.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

    If I install slackware64-current libkcompactdisc-4.14.3-x86_64-2, the window opens and the content of the CD is detected. But when I try to extract I get an error window with

    impossible to find protocol audiocd:/
    install (IOSlave) audiocd

    The last kaudiocreator seems a pure KDE5 program.

  87. Gérard Monpontet

    Just for your info Eric, i have updated ‘accountsservice’ to 0.6.45, it seem that it work better that the 0.6.43 version:

    https://www.freedesktop.org/software/accountsservice/accountsservice-0.6.45.tar.xz

  88. alienbob

    Hi Gérard.

    I had already finalized my 17.04 release but since the Applications 17.04.0 release still has not been announced, I can upgrade this single package.

  89. Gérard Monpontet

    Ok, Eric, thanks 😉

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