Dear all, today I released KDE-5_19.11 and it comes with some upgrades to official Slackware packages. Don’t worry – Pat Volkerding kindly added the shared libraries of the official Slackware packages to aaa_elflibs, so if you have been updating your Slackware-current installation properly then nothing will break when you update Slackware’s exiv2 and LibRaw packages to the newer versions contained in the November release of ‘ktown‘.
Official Slackware package updates for exiv2 and LibRaw will come sometime soon, but it will require Pat to recompile several other packages as well that depend on exiv2 and/or LibRaw. I needed the new exiv2 to compile the latest digikam, so I was pleased with Pat’s cooperation to make this a smooth ‘ktown‘ upgrade for you.

The packages for KDE-5_19.11 are available for download from my ‘ktown‘ repository. As always, these packages are meant to be installed on a full installation of Slackware-current which has had its KDE4 removed first. These packages will not work on Slackware 14.2.

What’s new in the October 2019 release

This month’s KDE Plasma5 for Slackware contains the KDE Frameworks 5.64.0, Plasma 5.17.2 and Applications 19.08.3. All this on top of Qt 5.13.2.

Deps:
This month’s updates to the ‘deps’ are: qt5 and PyQt5.
Fresh additions are: LibRaw and exiv2. These are stock Slackware packages and the two are being upgraded ahead of Slackware, so that the Plasma5 packages can pick them up. Pat added the shared libs for the older releases to ‘aaa_elflibs’ so that none of the Slackware packages will break when you install this month’s Plasma5 packages.
And I have removed qt5-speech because I overlooked that this is already part of the big qt5 package.

KDE$:
I rebuilt kdelibs in the KDE4 section, just like Pat did for Slackware. This removes hardcoded TLSv1 allowing TLSv1.1 and TLSv1.2.

Frameworks:
Frameworks 5.64.0 is an incremental stability release, see: https://www.kde.org/announcements/kde-frameworks-5.64.0.php.

Plasma:
Plasma 5.17.2 is a an incremental bug-fix release in the 5.17 cycle of the KDE desktop environment. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17.2.php

Plasma-extra;
In plasma-extra I updated latte-dock.

Applications;
Applications 19.08.3 is a stability and bugfix update for the 19.08 cycle, see https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-applications-19.08.3.php

Applications-extra:
In applications-extra I updated digikam, kile (finally 3.0 beta 3!), kstars and kdevelop-pg-qt, kdevelop, kdev-php, kdev-python. Due to the new exiv2 and LibRaw I rebuilt krename and krita.

Telepathy:
KDE Telepathy is no longer part of my ‘ktown’ distribution of KDE Plasma5.

Where to get it

Download the KDE-5_19.11 from the usual location at https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/latest/ . Check out the README file in the root of the repository for detailed installation or upgrade instructions.

Development of Plasma5 is tracked in git: https://git.slackware.nl/ktown/ .
A new Plasma5 Live ISO will arrive later this week (hopefully… I have some stuff high on my TODO list) and you will find it at https://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/ (rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/latest/)

Have fun! Eric