Right after the announcement of the KDE Software Compilation 4.7.1 – I present you with KDE 4.7.1 packages for Slackware.

It’s my second batch of modularized KDE. Read my previous post about KDE 4.7.0 if you want to know more about the reasons for splitting KDE for Slackware into many more (and smaller) packages.

Whereas my KDE 4.7.0 packages should still be applicable to a Slackware 13.37 system, my strong advice for these new 4.7.1 packages is to install them onto Slackware-current (32-bit or 64-bit). I can not guarantee that they will run without issues on Slackware 13.37 – I did not try myself. If you should decide to give it a go on Slackware 13.37 and it works fine for you, please tell me so that I can update this warning.

Read the accompanying README file for installation and upgrade instructions!

Some of the highlights of these KDE packages:

  • There are several updated dependencies compared to Slackware’s own KDE 4.5.5:  PyQt, QScintilla, akonadi, attica, clucene, ebook-tools, hunspell, libdbusmenu-qt, phonon, polkit-qt-1, qt, raptor2, rascal, redland, shared-desktop-ontologies, sip, soprano, system-config-printer and  virtuoso-ose.
  •  In comparison with my previous 4.7.0 there are several updated dependencies too (this list is a bit smaller): PyQt, akonadi, clucene, libbluedevil, polkit-qt-1, qt, raptor2, rascal, redland, sip and soprano. The upgrade of Qt to 4.7.4 makes this desktop a whole lot more stable, and it deals with the false SSL certificates issued after the CA authority DigiNotar got hacked.
  • KDE dpendencies that are not part of Slackware 13.37 at all (yet): grantlee, herqq, libatasmart, libbluedevil, libssh, phonon-gstreamer, phonon-xine, sg3_utils and udisks. Note that I added phonon-gstreamer and phonon-xine only after I had already released KDE 4.7.0 packages because people reported that they no longer had sound. These two packages solve that issue.
  • You will find three useful new applications, compared to Slackware’s own version of KDE: I already added bluedevil to my 4.6.5 package-set. Bluedevil is the new KDE bluetooth stack with a nice GUI, based on the BlueZ libraries already present in Slackware. And with KDE 4.7.0, I included kplayer, a KDE front-end to MPlayer. This time, I added Quanta Plus, which disappeared from KDE4 because that migrated from Qt3 to Qt4. It is now being worked on again, but no longer as a standalone application – instead it is available as a plugin to the Kdevelop Platform. My previous blog post has more information about my reasons for adding quanta.
  • I also added oxygen-gtk, which is not really an application, but a theme engine. It (optionally) makes GTK applications visually blend in with KDE’s own Oxygen theme. There is a README in its documentation directory which explains how to enable it.

The KDE 4.7.1 packages for Slackware-current are available for download from my “ktown” repository and several mirrors. The Indonesian mirror may need a bit of time to sync up but Willy is usually very fast with that:

Have fun! Eric