I hinted at the upcoming packages in an earlier post. KDE release team had asked on the packagers mailing list if it would be possible for distros to make early betas available of KDE 4.9 because it needs a lot of testing. It took me a while to find out how to build everything and to discover that not all of the split-off packages (the old “kdemultimedia” has been split up) would compile on Slackware. While I was busy with that, I discovered that there was a new IcedTea release too, which meant I could compile a new OpenJDK package.

KDE 4.9-beta1

The KDE team will officially announce the sources for the first beta of KDE Software Compilation 4.9 on monday 4 june, after some delay which was caused by a missing soprano package. However, I do not have time for a blog post on monday, being too busy at work, so I will make my packages and scripts available one day earlier.

Keep in mind that the packages for this beta have been compiled on Slackware-current. The upgrade from Slackware’s KDE 4.8.2 to the 4.9-beta1 release (the version number is 4.8.80) should be trivial. There is only one updated dependency (the aforementioned soprano) and none of the “extragear” was upgraded – I focused on the KDE core. If you are interested, grab them, install them, try out as much of the desktop environment as you can, and report the bugs you find!

Get my packages here:

The accompanying README file contains detailed installation/upgrade instructions.

Note: KDE 4.8.4 packages will be hot on the heels of this package set. I am already compiling it, and will wait until the official announcement on kde.org with making them public.

OpenJDK 7u4

 The newest release 2.2 of IcedTea builds the fourth update to the Java 7 platform. Icedtea is a “build harness” – it provides an enhanced way of compiling OpenJDK sources, adding a lot of patches which are not present in the original OpenJDK sources and offering an additional Java web browser plugin, icedtea-web.

I built the OpenJDK 7u4_b21 packages for you, along with the icedtea-web plugin package. Note that Slackware (as with all other distros) is no longer allowed by the new terms of Oracle’s license to distribute the official Oracle binaries of the JDK and JRE. Therefore you have not seen an update to the Java packages in Slackware for a long time. You can update using my native (i.e. compile on Slackware) packages of OpenJDK (the open sourced version of large parts of Oracle’s Java code), or download Oracle’s official binaries yourself and use the official Slackware build script to wrap those binaries into a Slackware package. The choice is yours!

You can test the installed packages here for instance:

Upgrade to my OpenJDK package now!

Note: you will find a JRE (java runtime engine) and a JDK (java development kit) package. Only install one of those! The JRE is sufficient if you just want to run Java based applications. You need the JDK if you want to be able to compile Java code. Also, grab the icedtea-web (optional) and rhino (required) packages.

Better even: download them from one of the mirrors. Since the slackware.com web server is up and running again, we have applied a download cap to the team’s member pages which will slow down your retrievals. For instance, you could use my taper.alienbase.nl or Darren Austin’s UK mirror .

Have fun! Eric