There has been a bit of a hiatus in my Slackware related activities and a relative silence on this blog, It’s mostly related to my new job which proved to be a bit more time-consuming than I anticipated. I also have to fulfill my old job role until that vacancy is filled. Actually, February 1st is when the successor for my old job will start in my new team. A little less than two months to go, meaning that the hard work continues. But, I get to visit the US of A in January, just booked the flights and hotels today. Wilton and San Diego will be my ‘targets’ but a sunday stroll in New York will certainly be an option, unless there’s a meter of snow of course.

Here is some Slackware related news for you.

I just uploaded a whole new batch of packages containing KDE Plasma5 for Slackware. The previous batch, KDE 5_18.10 is already two months old and has some library compatibility issues. The new KDE 5_18.12 for Slackware consists of KDE Frameworks 5.53.0, Plasma 5.14.4 and Applications 18.08.3. All this on top of Qt 5.11.3.
Compiled on the latest Slackware -current, it’s running smoothly here on my laptop.
I decided against upgrading to QT 5.12.0. This is a new LTS release, but I will wait for the other distros to find bugs in this new software. Next week, KDE will release KDE Applications 18.12.0 and that too is something I want to check a bit before releasing Slackware packages. Therefore it’s likely that a new batch of packages containing Qt 5.12 and KDE Applications 18.12 will see the light shortly after the New Year.

I updated some of the other packages in the periphery of the KDE software collection. In plasma-extra there’s new versions of kdeconnect-framework and wacomtablet. And in applications-extra I updated kdevelop, kdev-php, kdev-python and kmymoney to their latest versions.

There’s also a package removal. The kde-wallpapers package in plasma-extra originates in the old KDE4 era, and the new Plasma5 has its own wallpapers in the package plasma-workspace-wallpapers.

As always, the ‘ktown’ repository https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/ (rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/) is the master for the KDE Plasma5 packages for Slackware-current. A fast mirror is http://slackware.uk/people/alien-kde/ (rsync://slackware.uk/people/alien-kde/).
The source code history for the ‘ktown’ package build framework can be found in git: https://git.slackware.nl/ktown/ . I will create a new “5_18.12” tag there today.

A fresh Plasma5 variant of the Slackware Live Edition based on liveslak is in the making and will be uploaded to https://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/ once it is ready and I have tested it properly. Check the ISO timestamp somewhere later this week.

Have fun! Eric