I have uploaded my November ’17 set of Plasma 5 packages for Slackware 14.2 and -current. KDE 5_17.11 contains: KDE Frameworks 5.40.0, Plasma 5.11.3 and Applications 17.08.3. All based on Qt 5.9.2 for Slackware-current and Qt 5.7.1 for Slackware 14.2.
For Slackware -current there’s again a choice of ‘latest‘ and ‘testing‘ where the ‘testing’ repository contains 17 recompiled packages that provide a Wayland compositor stack. This means you have a working Plasma5 Wayland session if you use ‘testing‘ as opposed to ‘latest‘.
The ‘testing‘ repository is for… testing. Do not use those packages on a production environment unless you are familiar with Slackware, debugging graphical sessions and know your way around slackpkg/slackpkg+.
NOTE: I will no longer be releasing Plasma 5 packages for 32bit Slackware 14.2.

The Applications 17.08.3 release which is part of this November package set, will be the last that contains software based on the old kdelibs (aka KDE4). Any application which has not been ported to KDE Frameworks 5 (KF5) yet will be removed from the Applications collection. Starting with Applications 17.12.0 we should have a legacy-free Plasma5 desktop. If anything, this would be a nice moment to add Plasma5 to Slackware-current and say goodbye to KDE4. We’ll have to wait and see what Patrick thinks of this. Looking at recent updates in -current (the ‘etc‘ ‘network-scripts‘ and ‘pkgtools‘ package versions were changed from “14.2” to “15.0”) I would hazard a guess that we are past the mid-point of the current development cycle 😉
I am really looking forward to getting Plasma5 into Slackware proper. It will allow me to cut loose from the monthly time-consuming update cycles and concentrate on creating an add-on repository for Slackware’s Plasma5 – containing speech synthesis, Wayland of course, and all the esoteric stuff I added to Plasma5 over time which will be scrapped by Patrick (I am thinking of Digikam for instance).

What’s new in the November release

Nothing world-shaking this month. All KDE sofware updates are meant to improve stability and usability. I did add two packages to ‘kde/applications-extra‘ however: both kaudiocreator and kwebkitpart have KF5 ports that are about ready for production, so I thought it would be good to give them a spin on Slackware. Now there are only two packages left from Slackware’s old KDE4 that you may want to install: Amarok (for which a KF5 port is also in the works) and KPlayer (which seems dead in the water, but instead you can try QMLPlayer from the ‘qtav‘ package in my ‘ktown‘ repository).
I also updated PyQt5 in the ‘deps ‘ directory and it has picked up Python3 support (in the slackware-current package at least).

Installing or upgrading Frameworks 5, Plasma 5 and Applications

As always, the accompanying README file contains full installation & upgrade instructions. I have some further reading material in case you are interested in the Wayland functionality of the ‘testing’ repository: README.testing.

Recommended reading material

There have been several posts now about KDE 5 for Slackware-current. All of them contain useful information, tips and gotchas. If you want to read them, here they are: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/tag/kde5/

Where to get the new packages for Plasma 5

Package download locations are listed below (you will find the sources in ./source/latest/ and packages in /current/latest/ ,  /14.2/latest/ and /current/testing/ subdirectories). Only “bear” has the packages for now, the mirrors should follow within 24 hours. If you are interested in the development of KDE 5 for Slackware, you can peek at my git repository too.

Live ISO of PLASMA5

A new Plasma5 Live ISO image will be uploaded to http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/latest/ later this week, in case you want to try the new Plasma5 desktop out first in a non-destructive way.

Have fun! Eric