This time, the KDE release team was pretty quick with their KDE 4.7.2 source tarballs. Normally, distro packagers get a few days of headstart so that they can create packages in time for the source release, but this time I was not yet ready compiling.

Anyway, here they are, myKDE 4.7.2 packages for Slackware.

I guess all of you are used to the modularized KDE. Read my 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.

These packages were compiled on Slackware-current but there is a good chance that they will work problemfree on Slackware 13.37 too. I have received several reports from people who tried this and were happy. Still:

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, strigi, system-config-printer and virtuoso-ose.
  • In comparison with my previous 4.7.1 there are only two updated dependencies: libbluedevil and strigi. The upgrade of Qt to 4.7.4 which I did for the previous 4.7.1 package set added stability to the 4.7 series. I wish I had added an up-to-date Qt4 when I released 4.7.0 packages because I was quite unhappy with the desktop experience back then. However the new Qt4 package deals with the false SSL certificates issued after the CA authority DigiNotar got hacked which is another good thing to have.
  • 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.

Not new since I added these to KDE 4.7.1 before (but you may be new to KDE 4.7 so I will repeat myself here):

  • 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.
  • 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 4.7.2 packages for Slackware-current are available for download from my “ktown” repository and several mirrors (taper is in sync when I post this, the other mirrors still have to catch up):

Have fun! Eric