Although it seems (by looking at the changelog between 4.4.3 and 4.4.4) that there were no spectacular updates in the latest stable KDE Software Compilation, I got some feedback that 4.4.4 does feel “snappier” than the 4.4.3 which is part of Slackware 13.1.

Good news (that people actually use my packages)!

It made me think again about the upcoming KDE SC 4.5 for which the second beta was released very recently (the sources at least). I had not really planned on a Slackware build for KDE 4.5 until I had access to the stable sources, which will not happen all too soon.

But if even a small (bugfix) upgrade is received so positively, some people may find it interesting or challenging enough to get their hands dirty with the new beta release. So I decided to move ahead, locate the updated and new dependencies and start building packages.

At this moment there are no kdepim packages planned for KDE 4.5. The kdepim developers decided that the current quality of their software is not high enough to be included in KDE 4.5 – they expect kdepim to be re-integrated into KDE SC 4.5.1 and will release preview versions on their own in the meantime.

The software requirements for 4.5 are not yet written down like they are for older releases, but after reading through the mailing lists I have a feeling that I will have to upgrade Qt to 4.7 in the end. There is no such Qt release yet… so at some point I will start using source snapshots from the Qt git repository.

Not right now however, because the compilation recognized my already installed Qt 4.6.2 and did not complain about that. Tonight I will finish a 64-bit build of KDE SC 4.4.85 (aka 4.5-beta2) and install that to my laptop. If that does not break everything, I will also build a set of 32-bit packages and release the lot to my “ktown repository“.

Let me know if you are interested in tying out the beta! If there is no interest, I may leave it at just the 64-bit packages and use the time to debug my VLC package (which seems to crash on VAAPI support).

Watch this space for more news, soon (I hope).

Eric