My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: ktown (Page 1 of 3)

Ktown becomes Vtown

So it is finally happening.
On US Election Day 2020, Pat Volkerding added “vtown” into the ‘testing’ directory of Slackware-current.

The “vtown” in Slackware is essentially my ‘ktown’ repository containing KDE Plasma5 plus its dependencies, with a few exceptions, a number of my packages removed, some caveats and a couple of renamed packages.

A lot of useful information from early adopters can already be found on linuxquestions.org in the dedicated thread about vtown.

One of the benefits of this testing version of Plasma5 in Slackware is the merging of several Slackware and ktown packages.
Mostly because I needed to provide Qt5-supporting versions of existing Slackware packages, I needed different names for the ‘ktown’ versions that I was going to provide. I could not risk that people would end up with old Slackware Qt4 based packages which would break Plasma5.
So to avoid clashing with packages like “plasma-nm”, “attica”, “baloo”, “kscreen” etc… I had to use alternative package names like “plasma5-nm”, “attica-framework”, “baloo5”, “kscreen2” and several (actually, many) more.
Here is the full list of my packages that got merged back into packages with the original Slackware names:

attica-framework -> attica
baloo5 -> baloo
baloo5-widgets -> baloo-widgets
grantlee-qt4 -> grantlee
kactivities-framework -> kactivities
kfilemetadata5 -> kfilemetadata
kscreen2 -> kscreen
libdbusmenu-gtk -> libdbusmenu (dropping Qt4 support)
libdbusmenu-qt5 -> libdbusmenu-qt
libkscreen2 -> libkscreen
phonon-qt4 -> phonon (dropping Qt4 support)
plasma5-nm -> plasma-nm
polkit-kde-framework -> polkit-kde-agent-1
polkit-qt5-1 -> polkit-qt-1

There’s also some packages that are new, but given a different name than I did for ‘ktown’: my “qtav” becomes “QtAV’, “phonon-gstreamer” becomes phonon-backend-gstreamer” and “sddm-qt5” becomes “sddm”.

Here’s a list of the packages that did not make it into ‘vtown’ at all:

ddcutil (nothing uses it anymore)
drumstick (only used by vmpk now, and that is not part of Slackware)
freecell-solver (needed by kpat)
kaudiocreator (obsoleted, use k3b or soundkonverter instead)
kblog (no longer included in Applications)
kdelibs (KDE4 - no longer relevant)
klettres (future maintenance will be in ktown, no external deps)
kpat (needs freecell-solver, maybe rename to kpatience if I keep maintaining it)
ktuberling (future maintenance will be in ktown, no external deps)
kwebkitpart (lost its relevance)
labplot (future maintenance will be in ktown, no external deps)
md4c (no longer needed, was a past dep for building qt5)
perl-path-tiny (dep for freecell-solver)
perl-template-toolkit (dep for freecell-solver)
phonon-qt4-gstreamer (obsoleted)
phonon-vlc (needs VLC and I will keep maintaining this in ktown)
python3-random2 (dep for freecell-solver)
sni-qt (nice to have for Qt4 apps with systray icon? Needs libdbusmenu-qt4 which will no longer be in Slackware)
user-manager (deprecated)

Now the big question: how to upgrade?

Assuming you use slackpkg to manage Slackware updates, first edit “/etc/slackpkg/slackpkg.conf and ensure that the line:

PRIORITY=( patches %PKGMAIN extra pasture testing )

is changed to:

PRIORITY=( testing patches %PKGMAIN extra pasture )

This gives higher priority to those new ‘vtown’ packages. Then run:

slackpkg update

The next steps depend on what you currently have installed.

Upgrade from Slackware’s KDE4 to the ‘vtown’ Plasma5 in Slackware’s testing:

That should be easy. If you still have KDE4 installed, run

slackpkg remove kde
slackpkg remove ConsoleKit2
slackpkg install vtown
slackpkg upgrade vtown

I have not tested those “slackpkg install vtown; slackpkg upgrade vtown” commands so if that does nothing, then instead, you need to download the whole testing/packages/vtown directory from an internet mirror and then run:

upgradepkg --install-new --reinstall testing/packages/vtown/deps/*.t?z
upgradepkg --install-new --reinstall testing/packages/vtown/kde/*.t?z

Upgrade safely from my ‘ktown’ to the ‘vtown’ in Slackware’s testing:

That is a good question! I am still running ‘ktown’ because due a medical emergency in the family I do not have enough free time to test this properly. People asked for a blog post so that’s about all I can manage and it has eaten most of today’s free time already unfortunately. Share your experiences in the comments section below and I will update the main article with better info as it becomes available.

What I think will work is this (assuming you are also using slackpkg+ to manage your 3rd party repositories) and thanks to akimmet who posted these instructions in another blog post after having gone through the upgrade himself:

slackpkg update
slackpkg upgrade-all
slackpkg remove ktown kde kdei ConsoleKit2

Now, edit “/etc/slackpkg/slackpkgplus.conf” to remove (or de-activate) all definitions of “ktown”, and instead add “testing:vtown” to your PKGS_PRIORITY list. Then run:

slackpkg update
slackpkg install vtown
slackpkg upgrade vtown
slackpkg install LibRaw autoconf-archive exiv2 poppler

The last line will re-install the few packages that were in my ‘ktown’ but also part of Slackware core. They were upgraded by Pat in Slackware core instead of in ‘vtown’ and thus the “slackpkg remove ktown” removed those permanently.

Remember: perform this upgrade from a console in runlevel 3!
Tell me how it went! Remember, this stuff is now in Slackware ‘testing’ not because the Plasma5 software sucks and crashes but because this means a big and intrusive update to Slackware and it is best to give way to the early adopters to find the remaining kinks in the new packages.

Eric

 

Ktown Plasma5 packages for Slackware 14.2 will go offline soon

Hi all,

As you know, my ‘ktown’ project, providing an extensive and functional Plasma5 package set for Slackware, is mostly targeting the Slackware ‘in-progress’ version called “Slackware-current”.

For a short while after an official stable Slackware release, I keep providing ‘ktown’ packages for the most recent stable Slackware version (which is 14.2 at the time of writing) but once the stable and development releases of Slackware start to diverge too much, I stop updating the Plasma5 packages for the stable release. After all, ‘ktown’ is meant to be the bleeding edge playground for a future Slackware release.

I recently noticed that people are still downloading and installing my ageing ‘ktown’ packages for Slackware 14.2. Those packages have not been touched since end of 2017, they may contain security holes, and they do not represent the state of development of the KDE software today.

Therefore I am giving you a heads-up that this weekend end of May 2020, I am going to remove all the old packages on ‘ktown’ for Slackware 14.2 (that’s https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/14.2/latest/).

If you want to run KDE Plasma5, you should migrate to Slackware-current.

Good luck! Eric

Python3 update in -current results in rebuilt Plasma5 packages in ktown

Pat decided to update the Python 3 to version 3.7.2. This update from 3.6 to 3.7 broke binary compatibility and a lot of packages needed to be rebuilt in -current. But you all saw the ChangeLog.txt entry of course.

In my ‘ktown’ repository with Plasma5 packages, the same needed to happen. I have uploaded a set of recompiled packages already, so you can safely upgrade to the latest -current as long as you also upgrade to the latest ‘ktown’. Kudos to Pat for giving me advance warning so I could already start recompiling my own stuff before he uploaded his packages.

A couple of good things came out of this effort.

  • I took a patch for the ‘sip’ package from its repository, which then allows for compiling the ‘PyQt’ 4.x package errorfree. This patch will be applied the next official sip release by Riverbank Computing, so then Slackware-current can finally also upgrade to the latest sip and PyQt versions.
  • I wrote a one-liner patch for QScintilla to make the PyQt4 part compile again. So now my QScintilla re-gained support for Qt4 next to Qt5.
  • I updated the ‘digikam’ package to DigiKam 6.0.0, a new major release after two years of development.

Have fun!

Eric

Rebuilt packages for Plasma5 (ktown)

The updates in Slackware-current this week (icu4c, poppler, libical) broke many programs in my Plasma5 ‘ktown’ repository, to the extent that the complete Plasma 5 desktop would no longer start.

That is the fun of using the bleeding edge – if something disruptive happens in slackware-current you’ll have to wait for the 3rd party repositories to catch up. And I am one of those 3rd party packagers.

I have researched the list of packages that needed a recompilation, and in some cases I performed an upgrade at the same time (qt5 went up to 5.9.3, poppler synced to the 0.62.0 in Slackware-current, qtav went up to 1.12.0). The 64bit packages have already been uploaded but if you are running 32bit Slackware-current (why are you doing that?) you’ll have to wait another day because I just started the compilation there.

What has been updated in the ‘ktown’ repository? Here is a list, mostly in order of compilation:

  deps:qt5,qt5-webkit,phonon,qtav,poppler
  kde4:kdelibs,akonadi4,kdepimlibs4
  frameworks:kfilemetadata5
  kdepim:EVERYTHING
  plasma:plasma5-nm
  applications:okular
  applications-extra:calligra,digikam,kile

Every package in kdepim? Well yeah, there were many broken packages and it was simply faster to recompile all of kdepim and be done with it.

Users of slackpkg+ will be up & running fast with these updates; the others probably just need to download the individual packages I listed above from a mirror like https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/latest/.

When the 32bit package set has been finished The 32bit packages have now been recompiled and uploaded to the repository.

I will also recompile whatever is needed in the ‘testing’ repository (that’s where the Wayland related packages are stored).

Other – not related to Plasma5 – updates/rebuilds are coming soon have finally been uploaded too. Those are LibreOffice, Pale Moon, Calibre; these programs are also affected by the updates in slackware-current but the urgency was lower than with the Plasma5 desktop.

Poll: who needs 32bit packages for latest Plasma 5?

During the past week I have been spending time on getting the latest KDE Frameworks, Plasma and Applications built. The new Applications 16.12 was quite a bit of work due to the splitting of tarballs in many smaller ones. Also, the Slackware 14.2 and -current versions have now diverged sufficiently that the packages I compile on 14.2 are no longer guaranteed to work on -current, so that introduces additional work.

This effort took much longer than I am comfortable with. I do not have as much time available as I used to have due to “real life” – meaning my new job is quite a bit more demanding than my previous one.
This made it clear to me that I have to start making decisions about my Slackware activities, with more detail than what I said in the past along the lines of “updates may come less frequent”. It is obvious that I can not keep releasing a new set of ‘ktown‘ packages every month, for both 32bit and 64bit platforms, and for both Slackware 14.2 and -current. I have a few options:

  1. stop releasing 32bit packages for Plasma 5 (ktown repository)
  2. stop releasing Plasma 5 for Slackware 14.2 and start focusing on -current exclusively

I tend to lean into option (1) and therefore wrote this blog post. Who is using my Plasma5 (ktown) packages on a 32bit Slackware OS?

If there are users running a 32bit Slackware-current OS then this could mean a stop to new Plasma5 releases for Slackware 14.2. Updates to the graphical desktop does not have priority at this time in the development cycle of Slackware-current which means I will have to keep maintaining my ‘ktown’ repository for a while to come.

Bottomline: I will have to make one of the two above choices, and I will listen to you – the users of my packages – to help me make that decision.

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