Tag Archives: live

New ISOs for Slackware Live (liveslak-1.3.4)

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I have uploaded a set of fresh Slackware Live Edition ISO images. They are based on the liveslak scripts version 1.3.4. The ISOs are variants of Slackware-current “Tue Dec 24 18:54:52 UTC 2019“. The PLASMA5 variant comes with my december release of ‘ktown‘ aka  KDE-5_19.12 and boots a Linux 4.5.6 kernel.

 

Download these ISO files preferably via rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/ because that allows easy resume if you cannot download the file in one go.

Liveslak sources are maintained in git. The 1.3.4 release brings some note-worthy changes to the Plasma5 ISO image.

PLease be aware of the following change in the Plasma5 Live Edition. The size of the ISO kept growing with each new release. Partly because KDE’s Plasma5 ecosystem keeps expanding, and in part because I kept adding more of my own packages that also grew bigger. I had to reduce the size of that ISO to below what fits on a DVD medium.
I achieved this by removing (almost) all of my non-Plasma5 packages from the ISO.
The packages that used to be part of the ISO (the ‘alien’ and ‘alien restricted’ packages such as vlc, libreoffice, qbittorrent, calibre etc) are now separate downloads.
You can find 0060-alien-current-x86_64.sxz and 0060-alienrest-current-x86_64.sxz in the “bonus” section of the slackware-live download area. They should now be used as “addons” to a persistent USB version of Slackware Live Edition.

Refreshing the persistent USB stick with the new Plasma5 ISO

If you – like me – have a persistent USB stick with Slackware Live Edition on it and you refresh that stick with every new ISO using “iso2usb.sh -r <more parameters>”, then with the new ISO of this month you’ll suddenly be without my add-on packages.
But if you download the two sxz modules I mentioned above, and put them in the directory “/liveslak/addons/” of your USB stick, the modules will be loaded automatically when Slackware Live Edition boots and you’ll have access to all my packages again.

What was Slackware Live Edition and liveslak again?

If you want to read about what the Slackware Live Edition can do for you, check out the official landing page for the project, https://alien.slackbook.org/blog/slackware-live-edition/ or any of the articles on this blog that were published later on.

Extensive documentation on how to use and develop Slackware Live Edition (you can achieve a significant level of customization without changing a single line of script code) can be found in the Slackware Documentation Project Wiki.

Have fun!

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!