KDE 4.8.1 – the best DE you can get

March 7, 2012 / alienbob / 49 Comments

Today saw the announcement of a new chapter in the KDE 4.8 series. I was already very pleased with the point release 4.8.0 – it is amazing how the developers managed to keep their desktop environment stable when transitioning from 4.7 to 4.8. And the first maintenance release 4.8.1 brings us bug fixes and more.

Thanks to the fact that the KDE team makes the sources available to packagers ahead of the public announcement, I am again able to provide you with Slackware KDE 4.8.1 packages on time, and they are up for the taking!

It appears that I finally raised Patrick’s interest in the current generation of KDE. He has built his own set of packages and I received excited reports from him. That is a good sign! Perhaps there will be a nice update to slackware-current in a not-too-distant future.

Please note that my own KDE packages have been compiled on Slackware-current. There has been an incompatible update to slackware-current recently (the glibc package) which will cause run-time errors if you attempt to start these KDE programs in Slackware 13.37. If you consider using KDE 4.8.1 on one of Slackware’s earlier (stable) releases, then you have no other option than to compile packages yourself. I have written down the guidelines in another blog post..

Read the accompanying README file for installation and upgrade instructions!

You will find a lot of additional information about what the new KDE offers in comparison to the old version in Slackware, in my announcement post for KDE 4.8.0 Worth checking out if you had not read it before.

Highlight of this new set of Slackware packages:

I have added Calligra 2.4_rc1. Calligra is the continuation or “fork” if you wish of the old KOffice. Near the end of 2010 there was a fall-out between the developers of the various KOffice components, and the majority (everyone except the KWord developer) walked off to start the Calligra fork. The Calligra office suite is fianlly entering Release Candidate stage, and it is stable enough to use it on a daily basis. Don’t forget to “removepkg koffice”! Calligra’s technology is already being used on tablets: the MeeGo Office suite has Calligra at its core. There is already support for Plasma Active as well, you will find the “Active” applications in your KDE menu.

The KDE 4.8.1 packages for Slackware-current are available for download from my “ktown” repository and several mirrors (taper is in sync when I post this, the other mirrors will catch up soon):

http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.8.1/ (the master repository), rsync URI: rsync://alien.slackbook.org/alien/ktown/4.8.1/
http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.8.1/ (my fast mirror), rsync URI: rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.8.1/
http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.8.1/ (willysr’s Indonesian mirror), rsync URI: rsync://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.8.1/
http://scw.net.br/alien-ktown/4.8.1/ (a mirror maintained by Herbert Alexander Faleiros), rsync URI: rsync://rsync.scw.net.br/alien-ktown/4.8.1/

Have fun! Eric

Software

kde kde48 Slackware

44 Comments

Nille
March 7, 2012 at 16:36

Thanks Eric, saw it early this morning and upgraded.
So far no problems and the bugs that trubbled me in 4.8.0 are all gone.

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StreamThreader
March 7, 2012 at 17:31

Thanks!

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James
March 7, 2012 at 18:11

Thanks

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Buumi
March 7, 2012 at 18:23

Thanks again! I just upgraded to current yesterday so these packages came at good time for me.

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Caribe
March 7, 2012 at 23:14

Great!

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David
March 7, 2012 at 23:22

Thanks Eric, great work!

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Mike Langdon (mlangdn)
March 8, 2012 at 01:02

Thanks Eric! Just finished downloading and about to do the upgrade! Much appreciated!!

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escaflown
March 8, 2012 at 01:42

Thanks Eric!

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escaflown
March 8, 2012 at 05:18

@Eric: after installing Calligra, I can’t find Kexi anymore.

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amigib
March 8, 2012 at 16:09

Thanks Eric, new KDE works great.

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alienbob (Post author)
March 8, 2012 at 16:36

@escaflown

Bah, kexi now depends on icu4c. I am not sure if Patrick will be happy with yet another dependency if the package is 7 MB in size…
But, you can install my icu4c package (http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/icu4c/) and then recompile calligra from source:

# ./KDE.SlackBuild extragear:calligra

Eric

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Slacker
March 8, 2012 at 17:20

I see your oxygen-icons package is named with “i486” or “x86_64” arch, even though it doesn’t contain any binaries. Shouldn’t this be “noarch” instead? And why aren’t there any scalable SWFs inside?

Anyways, thanks for your great work!

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Slacker
March 8, 2012 at 17:53

@alienbob:

Icu4c allows trimming down its data sets to needs. Couldn’t you just build a small, thoroughly castrated version to make kexi happy?

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Janis
March 8, 2012 at 18:50

while granularity is fine, i’d suggest to somehow sort or label the packages for those who are not installing everything. With KDE4.8.0 i spent some time to relocate to separate directories edu, utils etc packages, just to have the core without bells and whistles.

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escaflown
March 9, 2012 at 01:32

Thanks for the tip Eric. I have icu4c installed anyway (dependency for your Calibre package). So i will just recompile Calligra.

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repo
March 9, 2012 at 15:37

Thank you, upgraded today, as always no problem.

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James
March 9, 2012 at 22:16

I ran across a small problem. With the packaged version of Calligra, krita isn’t working right for me. It loads, then crashes complaining that the lcms plugin isn’t installed.

I have lcms2 installed (from SBo) alongside slackware’s lcms 1.x. When I build Calligra from the git sources and install it krita finds the lcms plugin and runs fine.

Are others able to run krita from this Calligra package, or is this just some wierdness on my machine?

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tomtomjkw
March 10, 2012 at 17:51

Thank you, Eric! If only powerdevil developer had not lost he’s mind, I would hava called it perfect 🙂

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fakhry
March 10, 2012 at 18:13

Hello Eric. I’ve got error message when open Krita: “The Calligra LittleCMS color management plugin is not installed. Krita will quit now.”
And this is my lcms package in my system:
lcms-1.19-x86_64-1
lcms-compat32-1.19-x86_64-1
lcms2-2.2-x86_64-1_SBo.

How can I fix this?

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Nille
March 10, 2012 at 18:30

fakhry i got the same error and looks like it needs koffice-plugins.
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/19621?opened=1536

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escaflown
March 10, 2012 at 21:31

Same Krita crash here: “The Calligra LittleCMS color management plugin is not installed. Krita will quit now.”
32-bit system with lcms-1.19-i486-1

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Arvent
March 11, 2012 at 03:28

Thank You!

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escaflown
March 11, 2012 at 08:51

I’m really enjoying 4.8.1: for the first time phonon is playing well with pulseaudio for me.

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alienbob (Post author)
March 11, 2012 at 11:13

It seems that calligra compiles fine but then the krita program crashes if lcms2 was not present during compilation. I talked to Patrick about this, and he answered that he planned to look into lcms2 anyway. I will see if I can add it to my ktown repository and rebuild calligra.

Eric

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alienbob (Post author)
March 11, 2012 at 13:53

I added a “lcms2” package to the “deps” section and rebuilt calligra. Krito now works here.

The packages have been uploaded to my repository (and the “taper” mirror has them too). Mirrors will follow when they perform their daily re-sync.

Eric

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escaflown
March 11, 2012 at 16:05

Thanks as usual Eric!

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fakhry
March 11, 2012 at 20:26

thanks Eric. I’ll try then 🙂

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fgcl2k
March 12, 2012 at 14:10

I have updated the sources with rsync, compiled and installed lcms2 from deps and tried to rebuild calligra but I get the following error:
/tmp/kde-build/extragear/calligra-2.3.91/kexi/kexidb/drivers/sqlite/dump/shell.c:2864:18: error: ‘SQLITE_CONFIG_URI’ undeclared (first use in this function)

Apparently SQLITE_CONFIG_URI is not defined in /usr/include/sqlite3.h

Before updating I was able to successfully build calligra but I think that it didn’t include the sqlite3 backend.

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fgcl2k
March 12, 2012 at 14:18

I forgot: I am building on 13.37 64 bit

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fgcl2k
March 12, 2012 at 15:30

Solved: on 13.37 an upgrade from sqlite-3.7.5 to sqlite-3.7.10 is needed (only for calligra.)

Thanks for your work: I’ve used 4.8.1 only for a couple of days but it looks very promising.

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zux
March 19, 2012 at 14:04

is anyone else having a problem after upgrade tu 4.8.1, the system tray only shows KDE’s icons, things like xchat or skype just don’t show up.

ps. i had 4.8.0 working great, I did a “slackpkg clean-system” then “slackpkg upgrade-all” and then installed multilib and kde4.8.1

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Kristian
March 20, 2012 at 16:09

Hi Eric,

Many thanks for sharing these packages. I am building them a 13.37 install, and am getting the following when the slackbuild for libkorrent runs:

CMake Warning (dev) in CMakeLists.txt:
No cmake_minimum_required command is present. A line of code such as

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.8)

should be added at the top of the file. The version specified may be lower
if you wish to support older CMake versions for this project. For more
information run “cmake –help-policy CMP0000”.
This warning is for project developers. Use -Wno-dev to suppress it.

— Configuring incomplete, errors occurred!
make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop.
make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop.

Is this expected on a 13.37 system? I’m not quite sure how to resolve it.

All the best,

Kristian

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Kristian
March 20, 2012 at 16:11

OK, this might explain things:

bash-4.1# cmake –help-policy CMP0000
cmake version 2.8.4
CMP0000
A minimum required CMake version must be specified.

CMake requires that projects specify the version of CMake to which
they have been written. This policy has been put in place so users
trying to build the project may be told when they need to update their
CMake. Specifying a version also helps the project build with CMake
versions newer than that specified. Use the cmake_minimum_required
command at the top of your main CMakeLists.txt file:

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION .)

where “.” is the version of CMake you want to support
(such as “2.6”). The command will ensure that at least the given
version of CMake is running and help newer versions be compatible with
the project. See documentation of cmake_minimum_required for details.

Note that the command invocation must appear in the CMakeLists.txt
file itself; a call in an included file is not sufficient. However,
the cmake_policy command may be called to set policy CMP0000 to OLD or
NEW behavior explicitly. The OLD behavior is to silently ignore the
missing invocation. The NEW behavior is to issue an error instead of
a warning. An included file may set CMP0000 explicitly to affect how
this policy is enforced for the main CMakeLists.txt file.

This policy was introduced in CMake version 2.6.0.

What would you recommend?

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Janis
March 20, 2012 at 16:18

Hi!
I have a constant problem in one instance – kde 4.8.1 constantly forgets folder view settings and after start-up i have empty desktop. Only after switching back and forth to desktop view teh folder view is restored, but – unfortunately, with totally messed up icons.

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StreamThreader
March 23, 2012 at 23:19

Hello!
I have a problem with install and compile DigiKam 2.5.0.
I recompile itself exiv2 and libkexiv2 and DigiKam sucessfully compiled!
But i found new problem
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=290496

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Hannibal
March 27, 2012 at 08:34

If you use 4.8.1 be careful with update to current from “Mon Mar 26 01:41:11 UTC 2012”. After update, I have problems with KDE startup. It segfaults in ksmserver (and kwin). I try to strace problem, but with strace there is no problem!

So instead of problem detection, I have temporary workaround. If someone have same problem, replace 346 line of /usr/bin/startkde “kwrapper4 ksmserver $KDEWM” by “kwrapper4 strace -f -e trace=fork ksmserver $KDEWM”

If someone ask, “-e trace=fork” is for silence console output. And, as I say this is only TEMPORARY solution as it generate noticeable CPU usage.

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Hannibal
March 28, 2012 at 14:29

I’ve identified my problem. It exist in nvidia proprietary openGL library. Update to latest version available, hopefully fix it.

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weput
March 30, 2012 at 16:12

I enjoy the performance boost of 4.8.0 on my asus 1005ha (small but noticeable).

i’ll have to get find the time to upgrade to 4.8.1… has anybody test it on a netbook?

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weput
March 30, 2012 at 20:04

ok.. as it is friday i took the time to download the packages and update kde on the netbook.

everything works fine as it did before… couple of dependencies where upgraded so no big deal as I was running 4.8.0

left calligra out as i’m running libreoffice… will test later.

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Janis
March 31, 2012 at 09:19

I think, ill revert back to 4.8.0 – otherwise the extremely idiotic behaviour of 4.8.1 will lead me to lowing Windows7:
that piece of s.. oft called activities ir messing up everything possible – I use only folder view regime with desktop as only folder displayed. after EACH restart I find my desktop empty, digital clock in non functioning state, only wallpaper and last open app in place. After fiddling around i found that it is somehow possible to create activity “Folder view” and then get my favorite view.
BUT. if ir delete any other trash activities leaving the only i need, after restart I have the same – welcome to the same shitty state.
So – may be there is the knowledge on stripping down “cool” components of kde 4.8.1?

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alienbob (Post author)
March 31, 2012 at 11:08

If you think you found a bug introduced with KDE 4.8.1 then the best thing to do is open a bug in KDE’s bugtracker (https://bugs.kde.org/) so that it can get fixed. Whining about going back to Windows7 is not going to give you more credibility however.

Eric

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Janis
March 31, 2012 at 14:16

I do not know whether it is a bug or not – i just want to get rid of all that marketing nonsense, that’s all, call it Minimalistic KDE. If someone need those “ujactivities”, he is welcome to debug them. I like(d) KDE, even KDE4, but if the only way to use it is to “enjoy” everything invented by KDE team, i’ll finally give up.

I almost agree with you on whining, but during two last weeks I met SO much problems with virtually stable OS software that I am starting to shake in my “faith”.

If you can advice, how to reduce “features” in kde 4.8.1, you comment on it will be very welcome.

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alienbob (Post author)
March 31, 2012 at 16:06

If yoiu could work with KDE 4.8.0 but have issues with 4.8.1 then I would call that bugs. It would help if you would describe something that can be tried (and reproduced) by other people too see if it can be solved easily.

I myself have no issues at all with KDE 4.8.1 but perhaps I use different aspects of it. I do not use “activities” for instance.

Eric

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kir
April 1, 2012 at 09:48

Comment from Hannibal
Posted: March 27, 2012 at 08:34

BIG thanx!!!

Reply