My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Waiting for KDE 5 (Plasma 5)?

The KDE community released the source code to Plasma 5.2.0 today, and some of you are dying to see what it looks like.

Plasma5_locked

You just need to wait a little longer.
I have built all the packages, and I am doing a final quality check. Then I’ll have to write a proper README generate the repository files (time-consuming).

One note in advance:

The Plasma 5.2.0 desktop packages (completed with Frameworks 5.6.0 and Applications 14.12.1 accompanied by some of the “old” KDE 4.14.x libraries) are built to replace your current KDE 4.x desktop! My KDE 5 preview, posted in August 2014, was meant to be co-installed with an existing KDE 4 desktop and was built so that its configuration files would be written to different directories than your existing KDE 4 configuration. This allowed the curious among you to have a sneak peak of KDE 5 with the option of completely removing it again afterwards, with no pain. The new KDE 5 release I will be presenting tomorrow, means that you have to choose: do you want to stick with KDE 4 or migrate to KDE 5 (Plasma 5.2.0)?

If you are not willing to swap a stable KDE 4 desktop environment for an adventure with KDE 5 (stable enough, with exciting new features, but may have bugs or missing features that are deal-breakers for you), it may be better to wait a bit and let the early adopters tell their story of the upgrade before you decide to join them.

If you are using slackpkg+ to manage your 3rd party packages and have added my “testing” repository http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/current/testing/x86/ or http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/current/testing/x86_64/ , then please double-check your /etc/slackpkg/slackpkgplus.conf file and make sure that you remove one of the following:

  1. http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/current/testing/x86_64/ (or http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/current/testing/x86/)
  2. http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/current/latest/x86_64/ (or http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/current/latest/x86/)

Having the first in your slackpkg+ configuration means that your KDE 4.14.3 will be migrated to Plasma 5.2.0. Keeping the  second repository will ensure that you keep KDE 4.14.3 installed.

If you want to know when KDE 5 will be added to the Slackware core distro… my guess is that that will at least take another year. The stable Slackware release which we are working towards, will likely see its ageing KDE be refreshed with the latest KDE 4.14.3 enhanced with the LTS (Long Term Support) versions of kdelibs, kdepim* and kde-workspace, but not with KDE 5.

Also, remember that this release of KDE 5 is meant to be run on slackware-current. If you are running Slackware 14.1 or even one of the older stable releases, then KDE 5 is something you will only be reading about. By the way, I still have KDE 4.13.3 for Slackware 14.1 of course, if you think Slackware’s own KDE 4.10.5 is getting stale.

The git history of my development process towards a “stable enough for daily work” Plasma 5 desktop is here: http://taper.alienbase.nl/cgit/ktown/log/?h=5_15.01

I hope to have packages no later than tomorrow, and proper instructions in a blog article no later than thursday.

Eric

16 Comments

  1. Didier Spaier

    Thanks Eric!

    I am not a KDE user and seldom use a KDE app, so I won’t get through the hassle of installing that stuff…

    But (yes, there is a “but”), this notwithstanding I am very grateful for your hard work to provide the latest KDE, as that certainly contributes to increase the audience of Slackware, which benefits to all of us.

    Cheers, Didier

  2. alexsson

    Weehoo, cant wait!

  3. zbreaker

    Wow. fantastic news. Thanks as always for your tireless work Eric. As it is a total “one way or the other” I will err on the side of caution and perhaps wait awhile before making the jump, even though I am a -current person. But wait, there is my old friend Clonezilla, and I am an adventurous person!

  4. Michelino

    Great job man.
    Thank you!!!!!

  5. Deny Dias

    ‘let the early adopters tell their story of the upgrade before you decide to join them.’

    That’s me! Thanks for the advice on remove latest/testing from slackpkg+.

  6. Mike Langdon (mlangdn)

    Got slackpkgplus set and ready! Its almost showtime! Seems kind of silly to be be excited about software. 🙂

    Thanks!

  7. regnad kcin

    I’m building a new machine for the lab with slackware64-current installed so I’ll try kde5 on it. if kde5 bombs i can always opt for xfce until i would get a chance to remove kde5 and start over with kde4…

  8. Janis

    Hi Eric!

    It would be nice if in some spare time you could “put a lid” on 14.1 compiling KDE 4.14.3 for it.

  9. alienbob

    Hi Janis

    When Slackware-current officially gets updated to the latest KDE 4, then I will compile KDE 4.14.3 for Slackware 14.1. And perhaps I will do that earlier even, if I have the time.
    KDE 5 “applications 14.12.1” does contain some LTS versions of KDE 4.14 tarballs:
    kde-workspace-4.11.15.tar.xz
    kdelibs-4.14.4.tar.xz
    kdepim-4.14.4.tar.xz
    kdepim-runtime-4.14.4.tar.xz
    kdepimlibs-4.14.4.tar.xz
    … so these could be added to an updated KDE 4 package set in future.

  10. sberthelot

    Hi Eric !

    Sorry to post this quite late but I tested only recently your kde 4.14+ packages.

    It seems that Krdc doesn’t work for RDP anymore (I use it a lot on my workstation). Apparently the KDE team switched from rdesktop to freerdp starting with KDE4.11 (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=248896)

    Can you plan adding it as a dependency ? (sorry to add more work to what you are already doing great ! 🙂 )
    Is it the same for KDE5 network packages ?

    Thanks!

  11. alienbob

    Hi sberthelot.

    The krdc which is part of my KDE 4.14.3 packages has already been patched to support freerdp. If you install freerdp it should just work.
    I will not add freerdp as a dependency.

    I did not apply that patch to the KDE 5 version of krcd, because the new source code has that patch already applied. Therefore, should work out of the box after you install freerdp.

  12. pcninja

    I almost never use KDE or Konqueror, but I am wondering if the version of Konqueror for KDE 5 has anything new or different compared to the version in KDE 4.10.5

  13. Michelino

    Hi Eric,

    I’ve installed you set of packages, but I am no able to have plasma working, better, everything seems ok in background, but nothing is displayed on screen, except from the (working) mouse icon.

    I checked the .xsession-error, and it repeatedly shows this errors:

    Qt: Session management error: networkIdsList argument is NULL

    QXcbConnection: XCB error: 3 (BadWindow), sequence: 826, resource id: 54525954, major code: 18 (ChangeProperty), minor code: 0

    QXcbConnection: XCB error: 5 (BadAtom), sequence: 1103, resource id: 0, major code: 20 (GetProperty), minor code: 0

    I really don’t know how to fix it.

    I want to point you out that I was using your plasma 5 first prewiev till the upgrade.

    I have reinstalled the set, removed carefully old pkgs, checked deps, removed “.*5” stuff (“.config{,5}”, “.local{,5}”, “.cache{,5}”, “.kde{,5}”), recompiled NVIDIA driver, with no fortune.

    Thanks in advance.

  14. Michelino

    P.S.: I’ve also created a new user to test, same results

  15. Michelino

    Ok, just to let you know, it was due to Nvidia driver, uninstalling it (and reinstalling xorg-server-*, mesa and libdrm) solved.

  16. Ricardo J. Barberis

    Just chiming in to say thanks again for your great work, Eric (and to receive future comments on this post).

    And also an anticipated ‘thank you’ for your future updates on Slack 14.1 since I’m not ready yet to jump to Plasma 5 (but I’ll try to setup a -current install on my older laptop to try it out and see how it evolves).

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