qt-kde-620x350I am trying to keep up with a monthly release of KDE 5 (Plasma5) packages for Slackware-current. So far, so good, and every month I have been able to make a significant difference. Today the KDE developers released an update to Plasma 5 while earlier this month you could have noticed updates for Frameworks and Applications. Time for some new packages for Slackware land!

Therefore, you can now download my May release of KDE 5_15.05. Components are Frameworks 5.10.0, Plasma 5.3.1 and Applications 15.04.1 which includes the latest updates of the KDE 4 Long Term Support (LTS) packages kdelibs, kdepimlibs, kdepim, kdepim-runtime and kde-workplace.

What’s new in KDE 5_15.05?

The highlights of 5_15.05 (May release) are:

  • KDE Frameworks have been updated to 5.10.0 (maintenance release, no new frameworks)
  • KDE Plasma has been updated to 5.3.1 (also a maintenance release)
  • KDE Applications have been updated to 15.04.1 (yet another maintenance release)
  • KDE Extragear is still empty (this started with my KDE 5_15.04 release): you must grab the extragear packages (calligra, k3b, kdev-python, kdevelop, kdevelop-php, kdevelop-php-docs, kdevplatform, kio-mtp, kwebkitpart, oxygen-gtk2, oxygen-gtk3, partitionmanager, skanlite) from regular slackware-current itself.
  • No new or udated “deps” packages this time, but one has been removed. I got rid of the “qt-gstreamer0” package because I believe there is nothing that uses it. Also, the package content was conflicting with the “qt-gstreamer” package. So after you have removed qt-gstreamer0 be sure to reinstall qt-gstreamer.
  • I have added several policy files to the “powerdevil” package which bring back the Shutdown/Reboot and Suspend/Hibernate options in Plasma 5. Thanks to luis (suspend/hibernate) and manciuleas (restart/shutdown) who came up with the solution in a discussion following an older post.

Installing or upgrading Frameworks 5, Plasma 5 and Applications

As always, the accompanying README file contains full installation & upgrade instructions. Note that the packages are available in several subdirectories below “kde”, instead of directly in “kde”. This makes it easier for me to do partial updates of packages. The subdirectories are “kde4”, “kde4-extragear” (currently empty), “frameworks” “plasma”, “plasma-extra” and “applications”.

Upgrading to this KDE 5 is not difficult this time, especially if you already are running KDE 5_15.04. You will have to remove old KDE packages manually. If you do not have KDE installed at all, you will have to install some of Slackware’s own KDE 4 packages manually.

Note:

If you are using slackpkg+, have already moved to KDE 5_15.01 or newer and are adventurous, you can try upgrading using the following set of commands. This should work but feel free to send me improved instructions if needed (assuming in this example that you tagged my KDE 5 repository “ktown_testing”):
# slackpkg update
# slackpkg install ktown_testing (to get the newly added packages from my repo)
# slackpkg install-new (to get the new official Slackware packages that were part of my deps previously)
# slackpkg upgrade ktown_testing (upgrade all existing packages to their latest versions)
# slackpkg upgrade-all (upgrade the remaining dependencies that were part of my repo previously)
# removepkg sddm-theme-breeze (gone after KDE 5_15.01)
# removepkg libmm-qt5 (gone after KDE 5_15.03)
# removepkg qt-gstreamer0 (gone after KDE 5_15.04)
# slackpkg reinstall qt-gstreamer (ensure that none of the overlapping files of qt-gstreamer0 are left)

And doublecheck that you have not inadvertently blacklisted my packages in “/etc/slackpkg/blacklist“! Check for the existence of a line in that blacklist file that looks like “[0-9]+alien” and remove it if you find it!

My observations after upgrading

Again, some peculiarities I ran across when starting the freshly upgraded desktop that I want to share with you (there are some more observations in my previous KDE post):

  • At first the desktop would not even start and all kinds of Frameworks related programs were crashing. Re-installing all packages solved that. Something got corrupted the first time? No way to find out.
  •  I switched from wmsystemtray to trayer-srg as the solution for supporting old-style Xembed tray icons like Dropbox with the commandline “trayer –edge bottom –widthtype request –align right –distance 30 &” which places it lower right, directly above the Plasma taskbar. However – and I don’t recall what I did – on all subsequent logins, trayer would start before the rest of the desktop. As a result of that, trayer would cover the full task bar area. The task bar, including the KDE menu, were made inaccessible and invisible. At first I thought “yet another crash of plasmashell” and restarting plasmashell would indeed fix the issue. It was only later that I found out that they were all running, but trayer was in the way of the task bar. So I created a “trayer.desktop” file in ~/.config/autostart where Plasma5 looks for applications it has to start automatically when you login – and it will start these applications after the full desktop environment has loaded. That fixed it. By the way, the file has to end with “.desktop” or else it will be ignored. Inside it should look something like this:
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=trayer --edge bottom --widthtype request --align right --distance 30
Terminal=false
Hidden=false
NoDisplay=false
Name=Trayer

Where to get the new packages for Plasma 5

Download locations are listed below (you will find the sources in ./source/5/ and packages in /current/5/ subdirectories). If you are interested in the development of KDE 5 for Slackware, you can peek at my git repository too.

Using a mirror is preferred because you get more bandwidth from a mirror and it’s friendlier to the owners of the master server!

Have fun! Eric