Tag Archives: live

KDE Plasma 5 – Slackware October release

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I had already finished compiling KDE-5_19.10 and was waiting for the Plasma 5.17 public release announcement, when Pat upgraded libdvdread in slackware-current. That could mean trouble because of the dreaded ‘Shared library .so-version bump‘ message.
But he added the older libdvdread.so.4 library to aaa_elflibs so that the k3b program in Plasma5 does not break, and hopefully it remains in there until after I recompile k3b (which ultimately happens for the Plasma5 November release).

Unfortunately the earlier update of the ‘icu4c’ package broke some other stuff in Plasma5 as well. Be sure to install my ‘icu4c-compat‘ package, which contains the libraries from several older icu4c packages. Read my older article on ‘shared library .so version bumps‘ if you have not already done so, to understand the causes for this breakage.

The packages for KDE-5_19.10 are available for download from my ‘ktown‘ repository. As always, these packages are meant to be installed on a full installation of Slackware-current which has had its KDE4 removed first. These packages will not work on Slackware 14.2.

What’s new in the October 2019 release

This month’s KDE Plasma5 for Slackware contains the KDE Frameworks 5.63.0, Plasma 5.17.0 and Applications 19.08.2. All this on top of Qt 5.13.1.

Deps:
The ‘cracklib’ package got a version bump, and the latest ‘phonon’ and ‘phonon-vlc’ releases have been packaged.
The telepathy dependencies have been removed completely. Indeed, the feedback on my question in the README for last month’s ‘ktown’ release made clear that no one uses KDE Telepathy. For me it never worked anyway, so this month we say good-bye to KDE Telepathy and its dependencies.
Note that ‘qt5’ and ‘qt5-webkit’ should really be recompiled to fix the icu4c broken dependency, but I do not have the time right now, and the icu4c-compat package will take care of this anyway. Soon, though.

Frameworks:
Frameworks 5.63.0 is a regular update release. See: https://www.kde.org/announcements/kde-frameworks-5.63.0.php, but there is something worth mentioning still: the packages ‘kcalcore’ and ‘kcontacts’ which were part of KDE Applications and which you would find in the kde/kdepim section of my ‘ktown’ repository, have moved to the KDE Frameworks. As part of this move, ‘kcalcore’ was also renamed to ‘kcalendarcore’.

Plasma:
Plasma 5.17.0 is the start of a new release cycle of the Desktop part of KDE. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17.0.php. Some take-aways from the release notes: the Plasma startup script (/usr/bin/startkde) which was traditionally a bash script has been replaced with a C++ program which is faster than the interpreted shell script code, and also starts the various services in parallel. The devs claim that Plasma5 desktop starts up a lot faster as a result. Do you feel the same?
Chrome/Chromium should blend in more with the Breeze theme and GTK applications should have the KDE color scheme applied. There’s more to read, just follow the above link.

Plasma-extra;
I updated ‘latte-dock’ which is my default application launcher here on the laptop for a couple of months now.
Note that ‘sddm-qt5’ should really be recompiled against the new icu4c in slackware-current, but like with qt5, my ‘icu4c-compat’ package will fix the breakage for now. This one is on my TODO list for next week.

Applications;
Applications 19.08.2 is a stability and bug-fix update for the 19.08 cycle. For more information, see https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-applications-19.08.2.php and you may still want to visit the original release notes for 19.08.0 as well.

Applications-extra:
I upgraded ‘digikam’, ‘libktorrent’, ‘ktorrent’, ‘alkimia’, ‘kmymoney’, ‘kpmcore’, ‘krita’, ‘okteta’, and the development suite ‘kdevelop’, ‘kdev-php’ and and ‘kdev-python’ to their latest releases.

Telepathy:
KDE Telepathy is no longer part of my ‘ktown’ distribution of KDE Plasma5.

Where to get it

Download the KDE-5_19.10 from the usual location at https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/latest/ . Check out the README file in the root of the repository for detailed installation or upgrade instructions.

Development of Plasma5 is tracked in git: https://git.slackware.nl/ktown/ .
A new Plasma5 Live ISO has been uploaded and you will find it at https://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/ (rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/latest/)

Have fun! Eric

September Edition of Plasma5 for Slackware

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After a summer hiatus during which I only released new packages for KDE Frameworks because they addressed a serious security hole, I am now back in business and just released KDE-5_19.09 for Slackware-current.

The packages for KDE-5_19.09 are available for download from my ‘ktown‘ repository. As always, these packages are meant to be installed on a full installation of Slackware-current which has had its KDE4 removed first. These packages will not work on Slackware 14.2. On my laptop with slackware64-current, this new release of Plasma5 runs smooth.

What’s new in the September 2019 release

This month’s KDE Plasma5 for Slackware contains the KDE Frameworks 5.62.0, Plasma 5.16.5 and Applications 19.08.1. All this on top of Qt 5.13.1.

Deps:
The ‘qt5’ and ‘qt5-speech’ packages have been updated to 5.13.1, ‘PyQt5’ was updated to 5.13.0 and there’s a new official ‘polkit-qt5-1’ version too: 0.113.0.
The ‘cryfs’ package was updated to 0.10.2 (the previous version stopped working anyway, after Slackware’s boost upgrade).
The updates to the phonon layer are accompanied by a removal of Qt4 support – phonon is now Qt5-only. Package updates are ‘phonon’ 4.11.0, ‘phonon-gstreamer’ 4.10.0, ‘phonon-vlc’ 0.11.0.
The telepathy deps have two updates: ‘libsignon-glib’ and ‘telepathy-acccounts-signon’. Tell me if you actually use KDE Telepathy! I think it is a heroic but doomed effort to create a voice & video capable IM framework for KDE – it does not work for me and never worked properly for me. I am thinking of completely removing it from my ‘ktown’ package set. Share your thoughts.

Frameworks:
Frameworks 5.62.0 is a regular update release. See: https://www.kde.org/announcements/kde-frameworks-5.62.0.php

Plasma:
Plasma 5.16.5 is the last bug-fix release in the 5.16 cycle, meant to increase the stability of the Desktop part of KDE. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.16.5.php.
Note that the ‘breeze’ and ‘oxygen’ themes in this release of Plasma have removed their support for Qt4 (finally) which means if you still use Qt4/kdelibs based applications, they could start looking weird now. Let me know if I should add a compatibility package containing older breeze/oxygen theme libraries.

Plasma-extra;
I updated ‘kdeconnect-framework’, ‘latte-dock’ and ‘wacomtablet’.

Applications;
Applications 19.08.1 is a stability and bug-fix update for the 19.08 cycle.
Note that due to the summer holidays, I never released the .0 release of this new 19.08 series. For more information, see https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-applications-19.08.1.php and in particular the release notes for 19.08.0 are full of relevant info.

Applications-extra:
I upgraded ‘krita’, ‘krusader’ and ‘kstars’ to their latest releases.

Where to get it

Download the KDE-5_19.09 from the usual location at https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/latest/ . Check out the README file in the root of the repository for detailed installation or upgrade instructions.

Development of Plasma5 is tracked in git: https://git.slackware.nl/ktown/ .
A new Plasma5 Live ISO has been uploaded and you will find it at https://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/ (rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/latest/)

Have fun! Eric

June installment of KDE Plasma5 for Slackware, includes Plasma 5.16

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Sometimes, stuff just works without getting into kinks. That’s how I would like to describe the June release of Plasma5 for Slackware, KDE-5_19.06.

I built new Plasma5 packages in less than two days. I did not run into build issues, there was no need for a bug hunt. The Ryzen compiled and compiled, and then the power went out in the building today… but still, moments ago I uploaded KDE-5_19.06 to my ‘ktown‘ repository. As always, these packages are meant to be installed on a full installation of Slackware-current which has had its KDE4 removed first. These packages will not work on Slackware 14.2.

What’s new in this June 2019 release

This month’s KDE Plasma5 for Slackware contains the KDE Frameworks 5.59.0, Plasma 5.16.0 and Applications 19.04.2. All this on top of Qt 5.12.3.

Deps:
I needed to add one new package here,  ‘quazip’, which was required by the latest version of Krita.

Frameworks:
Frameworks 5.59.0 is an incremental stability release, see: https://www.kde.org/announcements/kde-frameworks-5.59.0.php

Plasma:
Plasma 5.16.0 is the start of a new development cycle for the Desktop part of KDE. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.16.0.php. In creating the 5.16 release, the focus has been to make Plasma smoother, as well as more intuitive and consistent to use.
A few highlights: the Networks widget is now faster and more reliable to refresh Wi-Fi networks; the Desktop notification system has been completely rewritten; and there’s initial support for using Wayland with proprietary Nvidia drivers.
Once I upgrade the Qt5 package to 5.13 (not released yet) I want to create a new ‘testing’ repository focusing on Wayland support.

Applications;
Applications 19.04.2 is a stability and bugfix update for the 19.04 cycle. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-applications-19.04.2.php.

Applications-extra:
I upgraded ‘krita’ and ‘kstars’ to their latest releases.

Where to get it

Download the KDE-5_19.06 from the usual location at https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/latest/ . Check out the README file in the root of the repository for detailed installation or upgrade instructions.

A new ISO of the Slackware Live Plasma5 Edition should be available in a couple of hours (all the ISOs there are based on liveslak-1.3.2.2 and slackware-current dated “Wed Jun 12 02:51:04 UTC 2019“).
You will find the ISO at https://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/

Have fun! Eric

Uploading 15 GB of new Slackware Live Edition ISO images

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I finished generating ISO images for Slackware Live Edition 1.3.0.2. These ISOs are all based on Slackware-current “Thu Jan 17 04:52:06 UTC 2019” which means it will boot a Linux 4.19.16 kernel.

Available variants are:

  • Slackware (unaltered complete) in 32bit and 64bit flavors, ~3.5 GB in size
  • XFCE (minimalistic Slackware) in 32bit and 64bit flavors, ~700 MB in size
  • MATE (Slackware without KDE4 but with MATE added) is a 64bit ISO of 2.4 GB
  • PLASMA5 (Slackware without KDE4 but with KDE Plasma5 and a lot of other goodies added) comes in a 64bit flavor at 4.3 GB

The squashfs modules in the XFCE ISOs are compressed with ‘xz’ to keep them as small as possible (so they will fit on a CDROM medium). All of the other ISOs are compressed with ‘zstd’ which gives the Live OS a speed boost of ~20% at the cost of 10% increase in the ISO size.

There’s 15 GB to upload to slackware.nl so it will take a while to get there… even with 3 MB/sec upload speed. Rsync download is possible via rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/ … you just have to be a wee bit patient.

In the meantime, if you feel bored, you can look at the development history in its git repository. If you want to read about what the Slackware Live Edition can do for you, check out https://alien.slackbook.org/blog/slackware-live-edition/ or any of the articles on this blog that followed.

Extensive documentation on how to use and develop Slackware Live Edition can be found in the Slackware Documentation Project Wiki.

Have fun!

KDE Plasma5 – Jan ’19 release for Slackware

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KDE time!
Here is your monthly refresh for the best Desktop Environment you will find for Linux. I just uploaded “KDE-5_19.01” to the ‘ktown‘ repository. As always, these packages are meant to be installed on a Slackware-current which has had its KDE4 removed first. These packages will not work on Slackware 14.2.

It looks like Slackware is not going to be blessed with Plasma5 any time soon, so I will no longer put an artificial limitation on the dependencies I think are required for a solid Plasma5 desktop experience. If Pat ever decides that Plasma5 has a place in the Slackware distro, he will have to make a judgement call on what KDE functionality can stay and what needs to go.

What’s new for January 2019

This new January 2019 release of KDE Plasma5 for Slackware contains the KDE Frameworks 5.54.0, Plasma 5.14.5 and Applications 18.12.1. All this on top of Qt 5.11.3.

Deps:
There’s a new dependency to ‘OpenAL’: ‘SDL_sound’. And I finally decided to add ‘freecell-solver’ in order to be able to compile the KDE ‘kpat’ package. The ‘freecell-solver’ package needs ‘python3-random2’, ‘perl-path-tiny’ and ‘perl-template-toolkit’ to compile, so these were also added as packages.
I added ‘drumstick’ so that I could compile the KDE ‘minuet’ package.
And finally, I upgraded ‘phonon’ and ‘phonon-vlc’ and rebuilt ‘phonon-gstreamer’.

Frameworks:
Frameworks 5.54.0 is an incremental stability release, see: https://www.kde.org/announcements/kde-frameworks-5.54.0.php

Plasma:
Plasma 5.14.5 is an incremental upgrade in the Plasma Desktop 5.14 release cycle, bringing stability and performance fixes. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.14.5.php . You may want to read about all the new features in Plasma 5.14 here: https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.14.0.php

Plasma-extra:
In plasma-extra I have upgraded ‘wacomtablet’.

Applications;
Applications 18.12.1 is the first stability and bugfix update for the 18.12 release cycle. I did not package 18.12.0 so this is actually the first opportunity to test the latest KDE Applications on Slackware. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-applications-18.12.1.php and if you want more detail about the 18.12 cycle you should also read https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-applications-18.12.0.php .
And since I added the required dependencies, there are two new packages in Applications: ‘kpat’ (a suite of Patience card games) and ‘minuet’ (music education using MIDI).

Applications-extra:
In applications-extra I have upgraded ‘kdevelop’, ‘kdev-php’, ‘kdev-python’, ‘kstars’ and ‘okteta’.

Go get it

Download the KDE-5_19.01 from the usual location at https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/latest/ . Check out the README file in the root of the repository for detailed installation or upgrade instructions.

I will upload a new Plasma5 Live ISO soon. You will find it in https://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/

Have fun! Eric