My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

KDE 4.12 is available

The new release cycle of KDE has commenced today with the revealing of KDE SC 4.12.0!

KDE Software Compilation 4.12.0 will be mainly about improving and polishing KDE Applications. The Plasma Workspace has been feature-frozen at the end of the 4.11 cycle. There is no new source tarball labeled “4.12” for kde-worlspace anymore, the KDE folk have stuck to the 4.11 tarball for inexplicable reasons… you may recall that the basis on which all of KDE is built, the KDE Platform, has been feature-frozen since 4.9 already. New features in the Platform are being implemented for the future KDE Frameworks 5.0 but nevertheless, a 4.12 tarball has been made available. I guess they are too smart for me, I do not understand this difference in versioning choice.

Anyway, KDE SC 4.12 (with kde-workplace 4.11) runs smoothly here.  I sure hope that KDE 4.12 will soon be added to Slackware-current (Slackware skipped 4.11 entirely). In the meantime, I built packages for you, on Slackware-current. I have not tested them on Slackware 14.1 and although they will probably just work, my focus for new KDE releases will be slackware-current as usual. If you want to be on the bleeding edge of KDE, you’ll have to follow Slackware’s bleeding edge as well.

What’s new in KDE 4.12?

KDE keeps an up-to-date feature plan page for the 4.12 release, as they do for every release past and future. Since the Workspace and Platform have been frozen, much activity is showing in the KDE Applications. Looking at that overview page, I want to check out Okular and Dolphin in any case. The graphical text editor Kate has been improved in areas of code completion and python support, which could make it an interesting choice for code developers. Especially so, since these Kate improvements trickle through in KDevelop which uses the Kate engine. I did not add kdevelop-4.6.0, anyone interested in case Slackware-current does not move soon?

And reading about Kwebkit, I guess I will have to renew the kwebkitpart package sometime soon because I seem to have missed a release.

The PIM suite had a lot of improvements (in speed and functionality) but to be honest I do not use KDE’s PIM software. Interesting to know in any case: According to a mailing list post by Vishesh Handa: there is a chance that Nepomuk will be replaced by Baloo, which performs better and avoids the data duplication currently seen in KDE (copies of the same data, think of emails, get replicated between nepomuk, akonadi and virtuoso leading to large homedirectory storage needs).

How to upgrade to KDE 4.12 ?

You will find all the installation/upgrade instructions that you need in the accompanying README file. That README also contains basic information for KDE recompilation using the provided SlackBuild script.

You are strongly advised to read and follow these installation/upgrade instructions!

Where to find packages for KDE 4.12 ?

Download locations are listed below (you will find the sources in ./source/4.12.0/ and packages in /current/4.12.0/ subdirectories). 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

23 Comments

  1. cwizardone

    Workspace. I’m in the 4.12-current-x64 directory right now and the kde-workspace file is the 4.11.4 version.
    Other than that 🙂
    Thanks for all your hard work. Greatly appreciated!
    Merry Christmas to You and Yours!

  2. cwizardone

    I guess this is the answer?

    “This release does not include a new Plasma Workspaces since it was
    feature-frozen in 4.11. so 4.12 will be mainly about improving and polishing
    KDE Applications.”

  3. alienbob

    Exactly. There will not be a kde-workspace-4.12.x.

    The reason why there _is_ a kdelibs-4.12.0 even though that has been feature-frozen for ages was given by ponce: the version of kdelibs determines the version of KDE as determined by “kde4-config –kde-version”.

    Eric

  4. Helios

    Thank you very much for this new version.

    I saw libkomparediff2-4.12.0-x86_64-1alien.txz, but no txt, lst, meta asc md5.

  5. alienbob

    Hi Helios

    I forgot to add a slack-desc file for libkomparediff2 (new package in KDE 4.12). That is why my repository script skipped it.
    I will update the package and re-run the scripts.
    Thanks for spotting,

    Eric

  6. lems

    Hi,

    thanks for these packages, running fine here. I had to rebuilt digikam, though (to get the kipi plugins in gwenview).

    lems

  7. Eduardo

    Thank you Eric!

  8. ahmed

    Anyone tried this on 14.1?

  9. alienbob

    I was emailed by someone who told me it works on Slackware 14.1. I expected as much, just do not have a 14.1 computer to test it on.

    Eric

  10. Michelino

    Hi Eric,
    first of all thanks for the (I guess really) hard work.
    I experienced a bad behavior by kwallet.
    In system settings I’m not able to disable kwallet subsystem nor perform any change at all, due the security policy.
    According to this bug report it seems not a wide error:
    https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=326126
    I don’t know how to change this behavior, any tips?
    Thanks.
    Michelino

  11. Michelino

    P.S.: kwallet isn’t also able to perform to store password using gpg. Once I try to do it using the new GnuPG backend for the KDE Wallet, it exit with “Bad passphrase” pop up.
    Thanks again.
    Michelino

  12. alienbob

    Hi Michelino

    I have fixed the kwallet package so that you can disable the ‘kwallet subsystem’ properly and without error.
    Wait a bit for the new package to appear in my repository, I am regenerating the files at the moment.
    Thanks for catching this.

    Eric

  13. alienbob

    Hi Michelino

    With regard to the gpg question – you will get that error when you chose an entry in your GPG keychain for which you do not have a secret key.

    I tested this by creating two new wallets, for one I selected my GPG identity for which I have a secret key and for the second I selected an identity for which I only have a public key in my keyring. I then waited for the wallets to close and tried to re-open them. The one associated with the secret key opened just fine, the other gave a bad passphrase error.

    Eric

  14. Michelino

    Thanks vary much Eric, for the quick answers, considering also that is Christmas….to this end:

    Marry Christmas and Happy new Year to you and your family!!!!

  15. Mike Langdon (mlangdn)

    I had forgotten about this until just now. Downloading as I type. Thanks, Eric!

  16. Stephan

    Hi Eric,
    I wonder if the there is a problem with the KDE partitionmanager and gparted as well. I am having similar installs on both my laptops (Slackware current). On one system I am running your latest KDE on the other I have the official Slackware KDE. The machine with the official Slackware KDE has no issues with partitionmanager and gparted. The machine with your KDE packages does not run partitionmanager and gparted properly. Partitionmanager does only show me one partition out of several and gparted only shows me all partitions on sda after a kernel message saying that the kernel could not be updated about changes in sda3 (which is an extended partition). Strange behavior. However, everything was fine a few weeks ago and I have tried quite a a lot to resolve this issue. Any idea from your side?

  17. alienbob

    Hi Stephan

    Indeed it looks like Slackware’s partitionmanager is no longer working in KDE 4.12. I do not have gparted so I can not comment on that.
    I checked out the latest SVN snapshot (20130809) and rebuilt the package using these latest sources, but its behavior was unchanged. On my computer I can reproduce exactly what you see.

    Since this is not solved with a recompilation, I had no idea what was wrong initially. Then I thought to check the compilation options and noticed that there is an option which is disabled by default. Turns out, we need that to be “ON”.
    Here is the patch to partitionmanager.SlackBuild that I applied to build a fully functional partitionmanager:

    # ——8< ----------------------------------------------------------------------- --- partitionmanager.SlackBuild.orig 2013-03-28 06:59:43.000000000 +0100 +++ partitionmanager.SlackBuild 2013-12-30 23:59:58.695223162 +0100 @@ -20,7 +20,7 @@ # OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF # ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE. -VERSION=1.0.3_20130328svn +VERSION=1.0.3_20130809svn BUILD=${BUILD:-1} # Automatically determine the architecture we're building on: @@ -82,6 +82,7 @@ -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS:STRING="$SLKCFLAGS" \ -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr \ -DLIB_SUFFIX=${LIBDIRSUFFIX} \ + -DENABLE_UDISKS2=ON \ .. make $NUMJOBS || make || exit 1 make install DESTDIR=$PKG || exit 1 # ------8<-----------------------------------------------------------------------

    I have updated the ktown tree so that partitionmanager will be built as part of extragear now. You can still use the above patch with the new source to create your own working package, of course. I will add a package to my ktown repository pretty soon.
    Thanks for reporting!

    Eric

  18. Stephan

    Hello all,

    please see in the “Freedom of Choice 2013” thread – it is the one right before this thread – for my response and Eric’s swift and sound solution for this issue.

    Cheers and a nice New Years Eve and New Years Day

    Steph

  19. alienbob

    Hmmm does anyone else have issues with Klipper in KDE 4.12? Klipper is part of kde-workspace which remained at version 4.11.4 (KDE developers froze it at that version and did not release a 4.12).

    Whenever I select a piece of text with the mouse, klipper will freeze for several seconds, and as long as it is unresponsive I can not paste the selected text.
    Sometimes the freeze of klipper is accompanied by the error text “QClipboard::setData: Cannot set X11 selection owner for PRIMARY” – as seen when you start klipper in an X terminal.

    When I exit klipper completely, all my copy/paste actions finally work unhindered, but then I lose klipper’s “clipboard history” feature of course.

    Eric

  20. Stephan

    Hi Eric,

    Klipper 0.9-7 on Slackware current (completely up to date) together with your latest KDE 4.12 packages and with your multilib libraries works fine for me. I can copy paste with the mouse without any freezing and when I exit Klipper completely the history does not vanish. It seems to be fine at least on my machine.

    Cheers

    Steph

  21. Willy Sudiarto Raharjo

    works fine here

  22. Michelino

    Hi Eric,
    just to point you out that I wasn’t able to solve the problem with kwallet and gnupg, also trying the way you suggested.
    The identity used have a secret key in keychain, but it either doesn’t work.

  23. Aravind

    @Michelio, did you manage to fix the kwallet – gpg problem. I am having the same issue.

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