There is an update available for people running Slackware-current. No, not Pat’s updates, although he is quite busy lately too, and I am glad of that. Today, there is a fresh push of packages into my ‘ktown‘ repository: following on the announcement of KDE SC 4.13.1!
I had added three new “dependency” packages for KDE 4.13 (xapian-core, qt-gstreamer and eigen3), and now for 4.13.1 I have refreshed one of the other ‘dependencies’ to match the version of the same package in the KDE 4.12.5 set (for Slackware 14.1). LibRaw got updated to the latest version. I am seriously pondering the update of libssh when KDE 4.13.2 becomes available in four weeks, so that the “sfp” kioslave will be built again (the libssh in Slackware is too old). In fact, the libssh sources are already in the “source/deps” directory but I have not used them for now.
As already stated, I built these new KDE packages on Slackware-current. I have not tested them on Slackware 14.1 and will not guarantee that they are even useable on Slackware 14.1. Now that Slackware-current development seems to have picked up a serious pace, it will of course bring you fun and excitement to switch to the development version and join in the bug hunt 🙂
What’s new in KDE 4.13.1 ?
In KDE 4.13, the semantic search program Nepomuk has been replaced by Baloo, which performs better and avoids the data duplication currently seen in KDE (copies of the same data, think of emails, get replicated between nepomuk,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). The best news for everyone who complained about Baloo, is that it is now possible to disable desktop search using a checkbox in the System Settings… the developer originally thought that nobody would want to not use his software… a bit naïve considering the upheavals caused by the semantic search feature in KDE in earlier days. I will leave the nepomuk package in the distribution as long as the developers will ship its sources along with the rest of the Software Compilation. I expect that that means, all remaining iterations of KDE 4.13. You can read more about what’s new in my previous blog post about KDE 4.13.
There were some more updates: I have added the same KDEvelop packages as were already added to the KDE 4.12.5 package set. I have updated oxygen-gtk2 to 1.4.5 and libkscreen to 1.0.4, both these releases fix crashes in applications.
How to upgrade to KDE 4.13.1 ?
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 4.13 ?
Download locations are listed below (you will find the sources in ./source/4.13.1/ and packages in /current/4.13.1/ 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!
- http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/ (the master repository), rsync URI: rsync://alien.slackbook.org/alien/ktown/
- http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/ (my fast US mirror), rsync URI: rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/
- http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/ (willysr’s Indonesian mirror), rsync URI: rsync://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/
- http://slackware.org.uk/people/alien-kde/ (fast UK based mirror, run by Darren Austin), rsync URI: rsync://slackware.org.uk/people/alien-kde/
Have fun! Eric
Thanks Eric! I really enjoy kde.
I was one of those desktop search haters, avoiding Nepomuk and friends all these years. After upgrading to KDE 4.13 I got slightly annoyed when I couldn’t find how to disable Baloo, but after reading a bit about its supposedly better architecture and performance I decided to leave it running and see what will happen. And you know what? I can’t even tell if it’s running unless I check the process list or open up Dolphin and try to search for anything. Admittedly, there’s some disk activity for less than a minute after starting KDE, but it doesn’t have any noticeable impact on my system. This is on a year old laptop (Intel Ivy Bridge, no SSD).
Hi Audrius
Good to hear a positive story about desktop search 😉
Eric
Hello,
thanks for the 4.13.1 packages. I installed them on two 14.1 systems. So far, I’ve not encountered any problems. I noticed that the README is missing, or maybe I’m blind? I did not find it.
lems
Hi lems,
I forgot to copy the README… it’s fixed now.
Eric
All went absolutely fine here. kdepim-runtime compiled great against LibKGAPI 2.1.1. The pre-compiled packages for both are in my repo:
https://github.com/denydias/slackbuilds/tree/master/pkg64
Thank you very much, Eric.
Deny.
PS: I’m so glad that Pat is now back to the kernel upgrades with 3.14 series on current! Yesterday he gave us 3.14.4.
Hey Eric,
Was wondering if you have any plans on making the Plasma Next / Frameworks 5 stuff available for testing? I promise to send you some cookies if you do.*
*subject to availability. Some restrictions apply.
Thanks
Hi Troy
I had been thinking about that. There is the issue of co-existence of the old KDE4 and the Frameworks 5, which I am kind of scared by.
Usually I start trying new software milestones for the likes of KDE, LibreOffice etc when the RC status has been reached, and the new Frameworks are only in beta yet.
Let me think some more about it.
Depending on where you are we can setup a cookie degustation session somewhere in the middle 😉
Eric
Hi Eric,
I’m wondering if you can set a softlink to the latest KDE source on your ktown repository just like you have done in all ktown’s pre-compiled packages.
This little improvement will help a lot the task of keeping the latest KDE sources you provide in the bleeding edge version.
So I can get the latest sources automatically without the softlink, I did this to my mirror script:
rsync –list-only rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/source/|grep drwxr|cut -d ‘ ‘ -f 14|tail -n +2|sort -nr -t “.” -k 1,1n -k 2,2n -k 3,2n|tail -1
That’s not pretty nor reliable, but works for me. 🙂
Pay attention that the cut field can change from one rsync version to another.
Deny.
Hi Deny
No problem.
Eric
Thank you very much, Eric!
Deny.
Hello again,
thanks for uploading the README, Eric.
Actually, I have now noticed a problem. On my Thinkpad T60, I use Wi-Fi and NetworkManager. Neither in 4.12.5, nor 4.13.0 or 4.13.1 am I able to scroll through the available networks in the new network management applet/widget (there is no scrollbar, and I think using the mouse wheel had no effect). I also tried a new user (clean profile): same result. Any idea?
lems
I just re-checked: I *can* use the scroll wheel. Sorry for providing wrong information. A scrollbar would be nice, too, though. (Especially since support for the IBM ScrollPoint is not in Slackware; I’ve been using a patched xf86-input-evdev-2.8.2-i486-1 package for some time now. Support for this is in xf86-input-evdev 2.8.99.1 and 2.9.0.)
lems
Hi Eric,
I want to report that Ksysguard system load is not working. I get this under messages log :
“ksysguardd[2639]: segfault at 7fab28e2c289 ip 00007fabbbb21d89 sp 00007fffc6754d60 error 4 in libc-2.19.so[7fabbbaa1000+1b9000]”.
It was the same at version 4.13.0.
Also I notice that the Temperature Desktop widget is not working, so I tried in a new empty user session and it is not on the list; maybe it was removed in this version of kde? I checked sensors of lm_sensors and it show the temperature properly.
Thank you very much for your support.
Have a great weekend.
Hi Isaac
I can not reproduce this, ksysguardd works as well as ksysguard.
About the temperature monitor widget, there is a “hardware temperature” widget, does that not work for you?
Eric
Thanks for your answer Eric,
I already check on another PC and there is no issues, so I will make a clean on my laptop maybe I have a mess with libc.
Thanks for your support Sir!
Good day Eric,
I found the reason why ksysguardd was crashing and any measure app in KDE was not working (temperature widgets, network traffic in NetworkManager, Ksysguard). I use Slackware64-current without multilib in a Toshiba laptop, model Satellite L845, with an Intel Core i5-3230M CPU @ 3.2GHz, so to avoid CPU cache corruption and various freezes I disable the threads 1 and 3 because it is just 2 real cores but 4 threads, I disable them like this:
# echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/online
# echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu3/online
When they are disabled nothing mentioned above is working; however, when I don’t disable the threads everything is working properly but I’m getting the PC freeze suddenly for short moments of time. I found out that ksysguard crashes when the core 1 is offline, but not when only the 3 is offline, maybe it expects the threads to be in order but I only use 0 and 2.
I am wondering if this is a ksysguard issue (the backend for the widgets and ksysguard) since any other non-KDE applications works properly or maybe should I find another way to offline the cores but the BIOS does not have and option to disable Intel Hyper-Threading Technology.
Any suggestion will be appreciated. Thanks for your support.
Hi ISaac
May I suggest opening a KDE bug report for this? Clearly ksysguardd should not crash on a CPU with disabled cores.
Eric