My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Slackware-current adopts KDE SC 4.10

It happened faster than I had thought, considering the slow pace at which slackware-current has been evolving these past months. But there is a massive flurry of activity and Patrick Volkerding has pushed lots of updates to the development branch of Slackware lately. Quite interesting was the addition of the elilo and gnu-efi packages of course, which indicate future support in Slackware for UEFI-based hardware (UEFI being the sucessor to the good old BIOS). Slackware already supported GPT partition tables (successor of the good old MBR) so this looks promising for buyers of “Secure Boot” computers. Don’t forget to wipe that awful Windows 8 first! It would not make any sense to keep it on a computer if you can install Slackware on it in its place.

But anyway, that was a side-step. I actually wanted to talk about the update of KDE Software Compilation. Slackware-current has now KDE SC 4.10, essentially the same packages that I am offering on my ktown repository, with the same patches and using the same KDE.SlackBuild framework, but then built on Slackware-current as opposed to my Slackware 14 based build. Hooray!

I guess some of you who are running slackware-current, have been wondering how you can most elegantly upgrade from the “alien” packages to the official Slackware KDE packages plus dependencies. Well, here is how I did it today, using slackpkg:

  1. Edit your “/etc/slackpkg/blacklist” and comment the line out that says “[0-9]+alien“. This will allow slackpkg to touch my packages (those that have the “alien” build tag) Note that this should still keep your multilib packages blacklisted, because those have a build tag that ends on “compat32” and for which you have the line “[0-9]+compat32” in the blacklist. Note that the exceptions are the multilib gcc and glibc packages!
  2. Run “slackpkg update” to refresh slackpkg’s knowledge of the Slackware version you are running
  3. Run “slackpkg install-new” to install any new packages like elilo and gnu-efi which were recently added
  4. Run “slackpkg upgrade-all”, and carefully check the list of package upgrades which slackpkg proposes. This step will upgrade KDE and iots dependencies, making the switch from my packages to the official Slackware versions. Make sure that you DE-select the gcc and glibc packages if you are running a multilib 64-bit Slackware-current!
  5. Edit “/etc/slackpkg/blacklist” again, and remove the comment in front of the line “[0-9]+alien“.
  6. Now run “slackpkg clean-system” and carefully inspect the list of packages which slackpkg offers to remove from your computer. Only leave packages selected which you want to get rid of! De-select all other packages (usually those would be 3rd-party packages you want to keep)
  7. Do a final check for remaining KDE packages you may have missed. Run the following two commands to check for left-over Slackware original KDE 4.8.5 packages and my own KDE 4.10 packages – and remove packages which you see listed: “ls /var/log/packages/*4.8.5*” and “ls /var/log/packages/*4.10.0*alien

That’s it! Reboot the computer and enjoy KDE 4.10!

Remember, if you just upgraded to KDE 4.10 and experience weird problems in the Plasma workspace, this can be related to KDE caches of an older release. Log out of KDE, and run the following commands to get rid of old cache data – don’t worry, these directories will be automatically re-created and re-populated (The “$USER” environment variable is actually your login username):

$ rm -r /tmp/kde-$USER/
$ rm -r /tmp/ksocket-$USER/
$ rm -r /var/tmp/kdecache-$USER/

Cheers, Eric

13 Comments

  1. Helios

    It seems that the qt-4.8.4 package is much smaller now…

  2. Marcelo

    Good news this business of UEFI.
    What would be the Slackers were it not Eric Hameleers?
    My English sucks. [google translate]
    take care =)

  3. Jeff H

    Question Alien, how long will you be building KDE for Slack 14.0? I normally do not sync with current until about a year after a Slackware stable release.

    Thanks

  4. alienbob

    Hi Jeff

    I will keep building KDE for Slackware 14.0 only if these two conditions are met:
    1) KDE in -current is not getting updated when a new KDE source release is available
    2) The packages built on Slackware 14.0 will work on -current without errors.

    Especially (2) will mean that eventually I will start compiling KDE on slackware-current again. I myself only install my own KDE packages on machines running slackware-current.

    Eric

  5. Juan Pablo

    How can I rebuild kate with the patch submited here https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=314530?

  6. alienbob

    Hi Juan Pablo

    Check out http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/kde-bugfixes-and-how-to-use-my-modular-kde-slackbuild/ for more information about patching and building individual KDE packages.

    Eric

  7. toudi

    after the upgrade to 4.10 my laptop brightness percentage step changed to 20% (it was 10% earlier) does anyone have similar problem? :s

  8. tony

    i am currently getting this error and I can not establish a wifi connection;

    Error checking authorization: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1 was not provided by any .service files

    Any idea to solve this problem?

  9. alienbob

    tony

    Did you upgrade from a previous Slackware version or did you do a fresh install? What version are you running now? What program are you using to manage your network? Are you using KDE 4.10.0? Do you have these packages installed: polkit, polkit-qt-1, polkit-kde-agent-1, polkit-kde-kcmodules-1 ?

    Many questions because your complaint is too vague.

    Eric

  10. tony

    Eric:

    I was able to solve this issue. I had an issue with Chrome and polkit-1. I deleted Chrome and my laptop was able to detect my wifi.

    Thank you for your quick response.

  11. Ron

    Hi Eric,

    Upgraded a couple of day ago from current to kde 4.10 and KDE Daemon crashes on every kde start. The KDE Daemon Crash Handler box says “The generated crash information is probably not useful”… Also there is a big list with libraries, but haven’t been able to fine any help with it.

    Both issues happen with root as well. This is a Slackware 14.0 x64 install with the latest kde packages and related in current installed.

    Also when I try and trouble shoot this, in system setting -> Startup and Shutdwon -> Service Manager I get an error message saying “Unable to contact KDED.” and everything is greyed out.

    Can’t find anywhere on the web a hint on how to solve this.

    Any help is extremely appreciated.

    Thanks!

  12. alienbob

    Ron,

    Did you try removing KDE cache information like I showed at the end of the above article?

    Also, try if disabling the automatic startup of KMix daemon helps. Disabling it resolved my KdeD crash problems:

    In “System Settings > Startup and Shutdown > Service Manager > Startup Services” you must de-select “KMixD (KMixD Mixer Service)”, apply the change and then reboot.

    Disabling KMixD will not make *any* difference to your system, I have no idea what it even does (except crashing KDeD…).

    Eric

  13. Ron

    Thanks Eric,

    I had a big reply here, but for some reason it’s not showing. Maybe the error message was too big.

    But I solved it anyway. Read carefully through the error message again today. Worked on it last night until the wee hours so missed it…

    It was kscreen. Uninstalled it and everything is fine. Crash message is gone and my Startup Services is not grayed out anymore.

    I’m having lots of DBus error messages though. Oh well, one thing at a time… 😉

    Thanks again and cheers,
    Ron

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