Today, the KDE team officially announced the first release candidate for KDE Software Compilation 4.9. That is less than a day after the source tarballs were posted on the private area where packagers have access. The new KDE release manager is giving “us packagers” a hard time – it was probably done as a penalty for the fact that several of the “big distros” were releasing packages long before the KDE team officially announced them. This was seen by the KDE release team as abusing a privileged position. After all, the sources are released in advance so that packages can be ready when a new release is announced… but those packages should stay under wraps as long as the release team has not given a go-ahead. The discussions on the (private) kde-packager and releaseteam mailing lists were not always friendly.

But. of course compiling the KDE packages is trivial using the modular KDE.SlackBuild script, and I have the packages ready for you – compiled for Slackware-current. The upgrade from Slackware’s KDE 4.8.4 to the 4.9-rc1 release (the version number is 4.8.95) should be trivial. There are three updated dependencies (akonadi, soprano and shared-desktop-ontologies). The new akonadi is a requiremnt for RC1. The RC1 packages also fix the incompatibilities with Slackware-current’s new attica and python packages (the previous Beta2 packages needed some tweaking to work with the latest slackware-current).

Like with the previous betas, I did not bother with anything from “extragear”. Pat Volkerding updated many of those when he added KDE 4.8.4 to Slackware-current. Speaking of 4.8.4 – that is the version which will ship with Slackware 14 unless KDE releases an unplanned bugfix 4.8.5. DO NOT expect KDE 4.9 in the next Slackware. We have a winner with 4.8.4 and we do not want to risk introducing new bugs with a 4.9 zero release when we are basically cleaning up the loose ends in slackware-current.

Enough chatter, back to reality now. While you good folk are waiting for your KDE download, I will continue my fight with VLC dependencies in another Virtual Machine… those are currently giving me headaches, and VLC 2..0.2 has been tagged so I expect an official source tarball any moment.

Get my KDE packages in any of the following locations (the master repository at alien.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 “source” 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, 4.7.4, 4.8.4 and 4.8.95, 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