Slackware and Plasma5… what will 2020 bring?

For starters, Pat just added Kerberos to Slackware-current! That is the first (small but significant) step towards a big change in Slackware which will unfold over the coming period. And at the end of that, I expect that Plasma5 gets folded into the distro as well. Here’s hoping!

In any case, I just released KDE-5_20.01 and the packages 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 January 2020 release

This month’s KDE Plasma5 for Slackware contains the KDE Frameworks 5.66.0, Plasma 5.17.5 and Applications 19.12.1. All this on top of Qt 5.13.2.

Deps:
This month’s updates to the ‘deps’ are: qt5 (where I patched two vulnerabilities) and noto-cjk-font-ttf where I also fixed a file permission issue which prevented the font from ever being found… and alongside the Sans fonts I added a Serif font collection as well.

Frameworks:
Frameworks 5.66.0 is an incremental stability release, see: https://www.kde.org/announcements/kde-frameworks-5.66.0.php.

Plasma:
Plasma 5.17.5 is a an incremental bug-fix release, and the last in the 5.17 cycle of the KDE desktop environment. Next release (5.18) will get Long Term Support (aka it’ll be a LTS release). See https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17.5.php

Plasma-extra;
In plasma-extra I updated sddm-qt5.

Applications;
Applications 19.12.1 is a stability and bugfix update for the 19.12 cycle. Remember that I still call this ‘Applications‘ but KDE folk prefer the new name ‘Releases‘. See https://kde.org/announcements/releases/19.12.1/

Applications-extra:
In applications-extra I updated alkimia, kmymoney, kstars and kdevelop, kdev-php, kdev-python. I also added a new package: ktimetracker, which was finally ported over to KF5.

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

Where to get it

Download the KDE-5_20.01 from the usual location at https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/latest/ or one of its mirrors like http://slackware.uk/people/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 is available at https://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/ (rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/latest/) with user/pass being “live/live” as always. Also check out the bonus material on the site: several addon squashfs modules with lots of my other packages. If you are unsure about how to handle these addons, read my recent article on Slackware Live.

Have fun! Eric