My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

KDE 4.6.0 is here

We have explosive!

Targeted with deadly precision, we witness the emergence of a new major KDE release.

Have fun with these KDE Software Compilation 4.6.0 packages for Slackware-current (32-bit as well as 64-bit versions available). Slackware itself will stick with the 4.5.5 version, which is rock stable and well-tested.

Highlight of this version is that it no longer relies on HAL. This is the same approach as taken by the X.Org and XFCE developers. While X.Org relies purely on udev, there are a few additional requirements for KDE (and XFCE) which is why you won’t see these new versions of both Desktop Environments yet. The Slackware Team does not want to be confronted with a potential de-stabilization of the desktop at the end of a release cycle.

If you want to replace Slackware’s own KDE 4.5.5 with the new release, several stock slackware packages need to be updated. There are even some entirely new packages (grantlee, libatasmart, libssh, sg3-utils, udisks, upower) which are required in order to run this new version of KDE4.

You can find all of these packages in the “deps” directory for your architecture.

Accompanying this KDE release are updated packages for k3b, kaudiocreator, kdevplatform and kdevelop because the versions that are contained in Slackware will not work with KDE 4.6.ย  New companions for KDE 4.6 are kwebkitpart (which allows you to use webkit instead of khtml as the rendering engine in Konqueror), polkit-kde-kcmodules-1 and polkit-kde-agent-1. The two “polkit” packages replace the Slackwareย  “polkit-kde-1” package which does not work with KDE 4.6.

The kdepim & kdepim-runtime

There has been quite a bit of discussion about the development of the Personal Information Manager (PIM) software like kontact, kmail etc. The PIM developers were not able to release a stable version of their product in time for KDE 4.6, so you now have two choices. I’ll accompany those choices with a word of caution:

  • you can either keep the version 4.4.9 of kdepim and kdepim-runtime (these are already included in slackware-current), which is stable, and compatible with KDE 4.6,
  • OR you can upgrade to the new version 4.6beta4 which I have included together with my KDE 4.6.0 packages… and with “new” I mean “new“! The PIM software has been largely re-written from scratch and does not only integrate fully with the Akonadi storage framework but also looks quite different. Also, this is very much Beta software and may not be stable enough for production use.

See the README file for detailed installation instructions! They are especially important because of the Slackware packages you have to upgrade or remove.

Feedback welcome of course. I have been running all intermediate betas and release candidates and see many improvements over 4.5.x releases, but there are some quirks (application crashes) that I think should be ironed out in a .1 or .2 release before this should be added to Slackware itself.

Get your Slackware packages for KDE 4.6.0 here: http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.6.0/ or on any of my mirrors (http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.6.0/ or http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.6.0/). These packages are not fit for Slackware 13.1.

And rsync access is available as always:

  • rsync://alien.slackbook.org/alien-kde/
  • rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/
  • rsync://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/

Cheers, Eric

30 Comments

  1. dolphin77

    Thank you, Eric. You are as fast as usual! Very much appreciated.

  2. Tsiolkovsky

    Thank you very much for all the work of bringing the latest and greatest KDE software to Slackware.

  3. Willy Sudiarto Raharjo

    Thanks…
    mirroring it now….

  4. dr_alex

    Sorry for my English! What about hal package? Can it be removed after installing KDE 4.6.0 SC?

  5. asmegir

    First off.. great job getting these packages up so quickly. I appreciate the hard work here. Everything is great with the exception of one small nuisance..

    My digital clock widget no longer works. It just says “Could not find requested component: digital-clock”

    I tried deleting and re-adding with no luck. Deleting .kde didn’t help either. Anyone else see this issue? Or have any suggestions?

  6. alienbob

    @dr_alex –

    You can first try disabling HAL by removing the executable bit from the rc-script: “chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.hald”, and then reboot.
    Then, you can see if every program you use still works as expected (XFCE for instance will probably not like it when HAL is unavailable).
    I would not remove the hal package just yet.

    Eric

  7. LoneStar

    great Eric! ๐Ÿ™‚
    With this release I no longer have the Strigi error, I guess it’s because of the new beta of kdepim stuff.
    \o/

  8. amigib

    Thanks for your work

  9. toto

    It works well for me, except for this message

    KGlobal::locale::Warning your global KLocale is being recreated with a valid main component instead of a fake component, this usually means you tried to call i18n related functions before your main component was created. You should not do that since it most likely will not work

    which appears when I run (from konsole) programs that were compiled before I installed 4.6.0, like krusader.
    Does this mean that I have to recompile them ?

  10. Willy Sudiarto Raharjo

    Just tried to upgrade my desktop. Everything is running fine even without HAL, but i still experienced annoying Nepomuk Indexing Disabled error message after few minutes i logged in to my KDE desktop.

    Any ideas to solve this ?

  11. toto

    I found an application not working in kde-4.60 : the game prboom . It ends with

    *** glibc detected *** prboom: free(): invalid pointer: 0x000000000089dc80 ***

  12. MoRpHeUz

    Your rock! Thanks from the KDE+slackware community ๐Ÿ™‚

  13. toto

    Since kde-4.6.0 has been installed, some lines have appeared when I run dmesg :

    EXT4-fs (sda1): re-mounted. Opts: commit=0

    (only once)

    What does this mean ?

  14. roberto 'Robyt'

    Hi, udisk dont work .
    If i start /usr/libexec/udisks-daemon the answer is

    /usr/libexec/udisks-daemon: error while loading shared libraries: libpolkit-gobject-1.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

    And don’t work k3b, automount of usb ecc ecc
    I need another package?

    thank’s

  15. Willy Sudiarto Raharjo

    @roberto:
    install l/polkit-0.99-i486-1.txz
    it’s part of Slackware’s default package

  16. roberto 'Robyt'

    @willy: Thank’s, work fine now ๐Ÿ™‚

  17. Peter G

    Hmm. The comment about 4.5.5 being rock solid strikes a chord. Just installed Slack current x86_64 (Thurs 27 Jan) and KDE 4.5.5 segfaults. xfce4 is fine though. It is a virtual machine, though – VMWare Player. But a version of Current from early December was fine.
    Cheers,
    Peter

  18. Willy Sudiarto Raharjo

    @Peter: I can confirm that 4.5.5 is rock solid. I have been using it for a while until i decided to upgrade to KDE 4.6. It’s very stable and i have never had any single crashes

  19. Peter G

    @Willy – well it certainly crashed for me. It was OK last month for me too, so something in the recent changes to Current broke it for me. I found somebody else with a similar crash on the Slackware newsgroup – alt.os.linux.slackware.
    Anyway, I upgraded to 4.6.0 and so far it works fine.
    Cheers,
    Peter

  20. Willy Sudiarto Raharjo

    @Peter: Well, good for you then ๐Ÿ™‚

  21. roberto 'Robyt'

    I’ve another little problem..
    dbus-daemon increase his memory size and fill all memory.
    root 4117 66.2 27.1 846484 843632 ? Rs 08:49 192:28 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon –fork –print-pid 5 –print-address 7 –session

    In a weekend with my pc logged on but with only ktorrent active i found that dbus-daemon use 3gbyte of memory

    How i trace this problem?

  22. ulij

    @roberto: I have the same problem

  23. roberto 'Robyt'

    @ulij:Maybe is a soprano/virtuoso problem.
    I’ve killed akonadiserver and the memory stop his run.
    I’ve renamed the dir
    :~/.kde/share/apps/nepomuk/repository/main/data/virtuosobackend, restart kde and now i’ve a dbus-daemon that use ~4 mbyte di ram.

  24. roberto \'Robyt\'

    ๐Ÿ™ i’ve rebooted and dbus reuse more memory

  25. roberto \'Robyt\'

    Ok… the problem is nepomukserver
    I kill it and the memory stop to increase his size

  26. tekknogenius

    Installed kde 4.6 now my nvidia hdmi video out does not sync correctly with my television any longer. Under 4.5… it worked fine. Any clues or help?
    Thank you.

  27. Widya Walesa

    Slackware{64} current has been updated the exiv2 to version 0.21 and gwenview (and maybe kdegraphics) needs to be rebuilt against this new libs. Your latest gwenview of kdegraphics is using libexiv2.so.5 which is part of exiv2-0.18.2.

    Thanks for the kde 4.6 packs ๐Ÿ™‚ .

  28. adam

    kcminit seg fault every time I try to log in .. guess I’ll have to wait a bit for kde 4.6

  29. Mike

    so, if kde 4.6 doesn’t need hal anymore, can i take it out of the daemons on startup? or would i need it if i decide to use other DE later? i think that’s most likely…

  30. alienbob

    @Mike –

    I have not been running HAL for months on this computer. You can run the command “chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.hald” which is the easiest and cleanest way to disable hal without having to remove it.

    If you want then to switch back to XFCE or any other desktop manager that needs HAL, then “chmod +x /etc.rc.d/rc.hald” followed by a reboot is all that’s needed for HAL to be started on boot again.

    Eric

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