It was bound to happen, and while I was asleep Pat updated slackware-current with a fresh batch of packages… containing KDE 4.8.2 and all the stuff that it depends on!

The update to the ChangeLog.txt makes up almost 20% of the full ChangeLog length so far! Finally we have a beefy update to -current. It’s playtime for those who had not used my own unofficial “ktown” builds yet.

Note that Slackware’s version of Calligra (the successor to Koffice) is now at the official stable release, version 2.4. My own package was still a release candidate.

Also note that Networkmanager was added to Slackware! So, what I had kept separately in a “testing” directory because I was not sure what Pat would want to do with it, is now being used in the distribution after all. Enabling NetworkManager is done like in my own instructions: make the rc script executable (Slackware will ship NM disabled by default) using the command “chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.networkmanager”, and add the NetworkManager plasmoid (widget) to your KDE desktop in order to configure it.

The good old way of using rc.inet1 to configure your network is still available of course, this will not change! Also, you can still use WICD instead if you prefer that. Users of XFCE will want to stick with WICD anyway, since Slackware does not have a graphical configuration tool for managing NM connections, apart from the KDE widget.

Upgrade instructions:

If you are currently running “alien” packages for KDE 4.8.2 and want to upgrade to the official packages in Slackware-current, then you’ll have to be prepared for some manual labour. But it may not be that hard after all, except when you have a lot of my other packages installed as well (like multilib versions of gcc/glibc and lots of “compat32” packages).

  1. If you are using slackpkg to maintain your Slackware,  then probably you have blacklisted all of my packages.In this case, temporarily remove or comment the line in “/etc/slackpkg/blacklist” that goes “[0-9]+alien”. Then use slackpkg to upgrade to slackware-current as usual, with this condition: do not blindly accept the list of packages to be upgraded, but review every single package shown by slackpkg as a candidate for upgrading. De-select every package which you want to keep! All the “alien” packages related to KDE and its dependencies must stay in a “selected” state. Then let slackpkg do its upgrade work and you’ll end up with a proper slackware-current.
  2. If you want to upgrade using slackpkg but are not prepared to review lots of packages manually to see if they should be upgraded or left alone, then a very fast way of upgrading from my own to Slackware’s packages will be the following four commands followed by a regular upgrade using slackpkg (example paths are for 64-bit Slackware, so if you are running 32-bit Slackware then you have to ignore the “64”):
  1. upgradepkg /path/to/local-mirror-of/slackware64-current/slackware64/a/*.t?z
  2. upgradepkg /path/to/local-mirror-of/slackware64-current/slackware64/l/*.t?z
  3. upgradepkg /path/to/local-mirror-of/slackware64-current/slackware64/kde/*.t?z
  4. upgradepkg /path/to/local-mirror-of/slackware64-current/slackware64/kdei/*.t?z

Note that if you blindly ran these four commands and you are on a multilib system, you will have overwritten the multilib versions of the glibc packages with original (non-multilib) Slackware versions. You will have to download and upgrade to my multilib glibc packages again. Note that this will not break your Slackware installation… it merely disables the use of 32-bit software until you re-install my multilib glibc packages.

Have fun! Eric