The release schedule is accurate as always. Today, the release of KDE SC 4.9 was announced on kde.org!

I could get the sources in time and therefore I am able to present you the Slackware KDE 4.9 packages – for Slackware-current of course (more precise, for Slackware 14 Beta1).

I assume that some of you have already downloaded and installed my earlier betas and release candidate of this new KDE series, and compared with the release candidate I previoiusly had, not much new shows up (well, bug fixes of course).

You can safely upgrade from Slackware’s KDE 4.8.4, the differences with that release are not overtly visible either, the real changes are in the “engine room”. KDE 4.9.x is an intermediate release series to prepare for the KDE Frameworks 5. The announcement page shows further changes in the development process: more attention has been going to the beta testing phase. You already noticed at the time of the first 4.9 beta, when KDE opened a “call for beta testing” page and encouraged packagers not to wait until the release candidates or the final release.

What can be told about the new set of Slackware packages?

  • There are three updated dependencies compared to Slackware’s own KDE 4.8.4: akonadi, shared-desktop-ontologies and soprano.
  • Compared to KDE 4.8.4, there were two package removals:
    • kdemultimedia has been split up into several smaller individual packages.
    • ksecrets has been removed completely in the 4.9.x series.
  • A noteworthy feature in KDE 4.9 has been added to Okular, the document viewer in KDE. Many people will cheer: Okular is now able to save the annotations you make to PDF files.

The KDE 4.9.0 packages for Slackware 14 beta1 and newer are available for download from my “ktown” repository and several mirrors (taper will probably be in sync when I post this, the other mirrors will have to catch up):

The accompanying README file contains detailed installation/upgrade instructions.

Also, I will repeat this bit of text which I wrote at the time of release of KDE 4.9 release candidate 1:

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 4.9.0, 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