The KDE team has officially announced the second beta of KDE Software Compilation 4.9. A more technical overview of the changes with regard to the previous beta can be found on this community page. After an API and feature freeze, it is just bug hunting (and fixing) until we see the arrival of KDE 4.9 in early august.

As usual, the packages for this second beta have been compiled on Slackware-current. The upgrade from Slackware’s KDE 4.8.2 to the 4.9-beta2 release (the version number is 4.8.90) should be trivial. There are two updated dependencies (soprano and shared-desktop-ontologies, the latter was added for beta2). Like with the previous beta, I did not bother with anything from “extragear” – although I was tempted to try Calligra. Please report the bugs you find! It will make the next KDE release even better

Get my packages in any of the following locations (the master repository at slackbook.org is severely restricted in bandwidth so using a mirror is always advised):

The accompanying README file contains detailed installation/upgrade instructions.

As you may have noticed when inspecting the above URLs, I have re-arranged my “ktown” repository. People were confused about what version would work with Slackware -current and what would work for 13.37. Also, some people have asked for sources of older releases for which I no longer host the packages.

I moved all the sources out of the package trees, you will now find a “sources” directory right at the top level of the repository. Below that will be the sources of all package sets which I currently have in my repository (KDE 4.6.5, 4.8.4 and 4.8.90) and soon I will also add sources for KDE 4.7.4 (including all the dependencies you may want for compiling it on Slackware 13.37). The packages will be available below a toplevel directory equal to the Slackware version they were compiled for (at the moment those are “13.37” and “current”). Below that you will find the actual KDE versions and further down, the 32-bit and 64-bit packages.

Have fun! Eric