My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

KDE Software Compilation 4.6.5

The last of the 4.6 series has arrived, and I thought it would be good to compile it for Slackware-current so that Pat Volkerding can concentrate on Slackware’s core:

Please check the official announcement of the KDE Software Compilation 4.6.5 – and then proceed to download my packages for Slackware.

I had hopes that version 4.6.5 of the KDE SC would be added to Slackware but Pat is busy, and I did not want to wait. No problem! Remember, you have to be running Slackware 13.37 (32bit or 64bit) or (preferably) slackware-current in order to use these packages. They were built on slackware-current. Note that between 13.37 and -current, there was an incompatible perl upgrade which may cause some of the KDE 4.6.5 “language bindings” to fail on Slackware 13.37 (causing for instance plasmoids to break if those were programmed in perl).

Please read the accompanying README file for installation and upgrade instructions!

This is the fifth incremental release in the 4.6 series, meaning it’s mostly bugfixes and translation enhancements.

Some of the highlights of my new set of KDE packages:

  • Packages for the stable release 4.6.1 of kdepim and kdepim-runtime are included.
  • No updated dependencies since KDE 4.6.4 if you have that installed already.
  • Updated dependencies with regard to the stable Slackware 13.37 are: PyQt, QScintilla, akonadi, attica, ebook-tools, hunspell, libdbusmenu-qt,sip, soprano, system-config-printer, virtuoso-ose.
  • Not part of Slackware 13.37 at all (yet): grantlee, libatasmart, libbluedevil, libssh, sg3_utils, udisks.
  • And bluedevil was added – not a dependency as such, but rather additional functionality for your KDE desktop. Bluedevil is the new KDE bluetooth stack, based on the BlueZ libraries already present in Slackware. I added its package to the “kde” directory. It integrates a lot better into KDE than the GTK application “blueman” which is now primarily meant to be used with the non-KDE desktop environments.

The KDE 4.6.5 packages for Slackware 13.37 & current should be available for download from my “ktown” repository by now (the Indonesian mirror may need a bit of time to sync up):

Have fun! Eric

29 Comments

  1. Willy Sudiarto Raharjo

    Thanks
    Start mirroring it now 🙂

  2. otho

    Great job with these packages.

    Are any (known..) issues created by upgrading the perl in 13.37 to the version found in -current?

  3. otho

    Besides the packages compiled normally against perl of course..

  4. escaflown

    Thanks Eric!

  5. zbreaker

    Many thanks Eric…KDE looking sweet as ever…hope the back is coming along!

  6. Lawrence

    Thanks again Eric
    Have a wonderful weekend

    Lawrence

  7. manciuleas

    Hi Eric,

    Thank you for the packages!
    I had issues with kcalc not accepting numbers. I applied the patch from https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=277020 and now it’s fine. I also applied the patches from http://websvn.kde.org/?view=revision&revision=1240128 for bug http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=276568.
    Maybe you can update the kdeutils package with these fixes.

  8. Ismael

    Awesome! Thanks Eric.

    BTW, I was having problems mounting NTFS devices with KDE since the udisks change, I had the kernel-provided ntfs module not compiled and apparently udisks is using that to try to mount, so obviously it was failing.

    1st solution was to mount from command line: “udisks –mount /dev/sdXY –mount-fstype ntfs-3g”

    2nd solution (what Ubuntu is doing, I think) is to “ln -s /sbin/mount.ntfs-3g /sbin/mount.ntfs”

    Happy hacking!

  9. Mike Langdon (mlangdn)

    Thanks, Eric – I finally found some time to download and upgrade tonight. Looks and acts great!

  10. Thomas Løcke

    Thanks Eric. I just upgraded three machines to 4.6.5 and they all hum along nicely. Great work, and very much appreciated.

  11. firekage

    manciuleas@ can you tell me how to apply fix to kcalc? I don’t know how to fix it. Thanks.

  12. manciuleas

    @firekage, the patches have to be applied to the kdeutils package. You can add the following commands to kdeutils.Slackware:
    cat $CWD/knumber.cpp-276568.patch | patch -p4 –verbose || exit 1
    cat $CWD/knumber_priv.cpp-276568.patch | patch -p4 –verbose || exit 1
    cat $CWD/kcalc.ui-277020.patch | patch -p4 –verbose || exit 1
    or apply each of them one by one from the command prompt. I renamed the patches based on the bug number.

  13. dlee99

    Thanks Eric
    One thing : The dutch localisation package seems to be empty?

  14. Carlos Corbacho

    The icons in KNode appear to be missing from your packages – I just get oversized question mark icons.

  15. Slamp

    will these break upgradability to next version of slackware? or will these be the official kde packages?

    thank you btw! i just started using slackware again on my laptop. i have been a fan and running slackware on servers.

  16. alienbob

    @dlee99 –

    During my vacation, the KDE team updated first the ‘nl’, and then all the other language source tarballs.
    So I guess I will have to rebuild all of them later this week.

    Eric

  17. alienbob

    @Slamp –

    These are my packages. They are not official Slackware packages. If KDE 4.6 or 4.7 finally gets added to Slackware, they will be Pat’s packages.
    That does not mean you break upgradeability of Slackware in any way if you install my KDE 4.6 packages. Slackware is quite upgrade-friendly and my packages are as compatible to the official ones as possible.

    Eric

  18. alienbob

    @Carlos –

    I do not use knode normally but I fired it up, configured it to use my default NNTP server, and subscribed to a few news groups to see how well it works.
    I must say, I do not see the issues you have with icons. Everything looks just fine.

    Did you perhaps forget to upgrade the oxygen-icons package?

    Eric

  19. alienbob

    @manciuleas –

    I will compile an updated and patched kdeutils package shortly.

    Eric

  20. dimm0k

    Any kmail users notice that if you delete a message from your Inbox that’s listed towards the top of the list that after deletion the selector jumps back to the middle of the list? This was not happening before the upgrade to 4.6.5. Proper behavior should be the selector moves to the next message below the deleted one.

  21. Niki Kovacs

    I just took a closer look at your sources for building KDE 4.6.5. Isn’t virtuoso-ose missing in the alldeps.SlackBuild?

  22. alienbob

    Hi Niki

    Yes, that one is missing from the alldeps.SlackBuild, and in the 4.7.1 directory as well. I have fixed that locally, and wih the next package update (either KDE 4.7.2 or some bugfix) they will get uploaded.

    Eric

  23. Niki Kovacs

    Until now I’ve always been using Thunderbird within KDE, given the somewhat messy state of KMail in the KDE 4.x series. Now I wonder if the version that ships with KDE 4.6.5 is in a “production” usable state, e. g. no serious bugs, no disappearing mails, etc. What are your experiences with this?

  24. alienbob

    @Niki

    I do not use kmail all that much, I use Thunderbird because that is available acros the OS-es my family and I use (Linux and Windows). But at the times I do use kmail (mainly for checking if it works at all, and for checking other people’s complaints) I have never found issues.

    Eric

  25. Niki Kovacs

    Thanks for the fast reply, Eric. I’ve been a Thunderbird user for the last years, also. Now I’m having a curious issue with it. I’m using the Lightning calendar, which only comes as a plugin. I also install it to most of my clients who need a calendar. I recently setup a LAN in a school, with roaming profiles (NFS/NIS). The thing is, we have both 32bit and 64bit clients… and when a user acceeds to his account on a 64bit machine, the Lightning plugin won’t work anymore. Unfortunately the Mozilla Foundation seems to have stopped development of the standalone Sunbird app (which seemed to be near impossible to build on 64bit anyway). So I’m seriously considering a migration to KMail and the whole Kontact/KOrganizer suite. Regarding my clients, I’m following a sort of eat-your-own-dog-food principle, and I try to use the same applications I also install for them.

  26. Niki Kovacs

    Right, here goes. I just installed KDE 4.6.5 on my main workhorse PC, and it ROCKS. Most of the little annoyances from previous versions seem to be ironed out, and I feel working on this machine will be quite pleasurable. One minor glitch though. With desktop effects activated, some windows would sometimes appear black. Switching from OpenGL to XRender corrected the problem. I vaguely suspect my video card (NVidia GeForce 6150) to be a little bit too feeble.

  27. Niki Kovacs

    Post scriptum: THANK YOU, Eric. Huge pat on the shoulder. If you ever come around here in South France, let me pay you a beer or two (or twenty-seven).

  28. Niki Kovacs

    First impressions after working with KDE 4.6.5 for the past week. 1) IT ROCKS! 2) Some minor detail affects removable devices. I deactivated HAL like suggested. Now when I insert a USB key, it gets mounted on /media/MYC4TWR0T3TH4T or some obscure directory. No big deal, but why not /media/disk anymore? And ejecting CDs doesn’t work anymore, clicking on the Eject symbol only unmounts them. No big deal neither. On the other hand, finally the rendering bug on my old NVidia card is corrected and I can have desktop effects without annoying artefacts. Yessss.

  29. alienbob

    Please note that this article was written two and a half years ago.
    Since then, the layout of the repository has changed to support multiple versions of KDE for multiple Slackware releases.

    At the root of the ktown repository there is now a “13.37” directory for Slackware 13.37, and the “4.6.5” directory has moved in there.

    Eric

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