It’s that time again! Nicely following the KDE release schedule, a series of tarballs was uploaded to the KDE ftp server, containing the first release candidate of what will become KDE Software Compilation 4.6.

The Slackware packages I created and had silently uploaded to my server, have already been noticed… but anyway, better late than never, so here is my official announcement:

Your gift for Christmas: grab Slackware packages for KDE 4.6.RC1 (4.5.90 is the official version) here: http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.5.90/ or on any of my mirrors (http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.5.90/ or http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.5.90/). These packages are not fit for Slackware 13.1. You have to be running an up-to-date Slackware-current! This is still beta software, use at your own risk, yada yada.

Follow the instructions in the accompanying README for installing these packages, or upgrading from an earlier release.

Lots of bugs will certainly have been squashed, although I have not experienced all that many. You can read my previous article on KDE 4.6 beta here: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/starting-with-kde-4-6. KDE no longer needs HAL, but if you disable it, the k3b CD-writing software will complain about not being able to find an optical drive. Still some work to be done for these guys. If you don’t care for k3b I invite you to disable HAL (chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.hald) like I did, and see how that works out.

What’s important to know is the announcement by the PIM team (read the story) that the 4.6 version of kdepim which should accompany the official release of KDE 4.6 has been delayed. At the time when KDE 4.6 is released, there will be an update to the PIM 4.4.x series which is compatible with KDE 4.6 (look out for kdepim 4.4.9, sources are already available I think, and I will certainly package them along with the final KDE 4.6).

In the meantime, I ship packages for the third beta of kdepim 4.6 along with KDE 4.5.90. Please share your thoughts on requiring PIM version 4.6beta3 or  4.4.9 with KDE 4.6. One of the two will have to go into some sort of “testing” directory.

Have fun, Eric

PS: rsync is available as always:

  • rsync://alien.slackbook.org/alien-kde/
  • rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/
  • rsync://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/