Sometimes, stuff just works without getting into kinks. That’s how I would like to describe the June release of Plasma5 for Slackware, KDE-5_19.06.
I built new Plasma5 packages in less than two days. I did not run into build issues, there was no need for a bug hunt. The Ryzen compiled and compiled, and then the power went out in the building today… but still, moments ago I uploaded KDE-5_19.06 to 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 this June 2019 release
This month’s KDE Plasma5 for Slackware contains the KDE Frameworks 5.59.0, Plasma 5.16.0 and Applications 19.04.2. All this on top of Qt 5.12.3.
Deps:
I needed to add one new package here, ‘quazip’, which was required by the latest version of Krita.
Frameworks:
Frameworks 5.59.0 is an incremental stability release, see: https://www.kde.org/announcements/kde-frameworks-5.59.0.php
Plasma:
Plasma 5.16.0 is the start of a new development cycle for the Desktop part of KDE. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.16.0.php. In creating the 5.16 release, the focus has been to make Plasma smoother, as well as more intuitive and consistent to use.
A few highlights: the Networks widget is now faster and more reliable to refresh Wi-Fi networks; the Desktop notification system has been completely rewritten; and there’s initial support for using Wayland with proprietary Nvidia drivers.
Once I upgrade the Qt5 package to 5.13 (not released yet) I want to create a new ‘testing’ repository focusing on Wayland support.
Applications;
Applications 19.04.2 is a stability and bugfix update for the 19.04 cycle. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-applications-19.04.2.php.
Applications-extra:
I upgraded ‘krita’ and ‘kstars’ to their latest releases.
Where to get it
Download the KDE-5_19.06 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.
A new ISO of the Slackware Live Plasma5 Edition should be available in a couple of hours (all the ISOs there are based on liveslak-1.3.2.2 and slackware-current dated “Wed Jun 12 02:51:04 UTC 2019“).
You will find the ISO at https://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/
Have fun! Eric
Awesome! Your packages always work flawlessly. I can’t wait for Slackware 15. 😉
Thanks Eric! Flawless upgrade!
Any insider news on inclusion of Qt5 and other deps in Slack 15?
How super awesome is this? Very early after the release!
Thank you!
Thanks, Eric, It just keeps getting better and better. Flawless upgrade here too. What a pleasure.
I usually wait till weekends to upgrade, to do it in a more relaxed state and after backups.
But I was eagerly awaiting Plasma 5.16, and who needs to sleep anyway? 🙂
Upgrading right now, thank you so much!
I deleted my efat-utils and fuse-exfat SlackBuild packages. I used to have to mount.exfat my Kingston memory chip on the USB bus. Now there are three mounts that weren’t there before:
fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections,
gvfsd-fuse on /tmp/xdg-runtime-/gvfs, and
/dev/sdb1 on /run/media/… type fuseblk
I don’t know if this is a feature of the new kernel or Plasma, but I like it!
Looking forward to Wayland. No hurry, I know how long it takes to build Qt from source.
I was somewhat premature in omitting the fuse-exfat package. The card reader does require it. The difference in the current framework is that I no longer have to manually invoke mount.exfat, dolphin now mounts the exfat partition automatically upon selection of its Removable Devices entry.. This is indeed a new feature. Thank you, Buildmaster Hameleers!
Hi Eric, thanks for the updates. Everything works smoothly on the desktop.
While upgrading the tools for a scanned PDF OCR script, I encountered an issue with installing RMagick, which seems to be traced to one of your packages. The command ‘gem install rmagick’ gave this error:
Can’t install RMagick 3.1.0. Can’t find ImageMagick with pkg-config.
Looking at the file RMagick/extconf.rb shows that it parses the output of ‘pkg-config –list-all’; however, this output of this command was empty on my system. I found a hint somewhere to use ‘pkg-config –list-all –print-errors’, which gave the result:
Package ‘Qt5WebKit’ has no Description: field.
I added the line ‘Description: Qt5WebKit’ to /usr/lib64/pkgconfig/Qt5WebKit.pc. Running ‘pkg-config –list-all –print-errors’ again pointed to a similar fix for /usr/lib64/pkgconfig/Qt5WebKitWidgets.pc. Finally, ‘pkg-config –list-all’ gives a list of modules and ‘gem install rmagick’ completes without an error. Both of these .pc files are in the qt5-webkit-5.212.0_alpha2-x86_64-4alien package. I don’t know what the correct fix is, just thought I would bring it up here.
Hi Jeff
That does indeed seem to be a bug in qt5-webkit. I will have to fix the pkgconfig files in the SlackBuild script.
Thank you Eric! I installed your Plasma packages and so far it’s smooth sailing.
Hi Eric,
I seem to have a sound problem with KDE and Thunderbird. There is no notifications setting for a login or logout event sound. Thunderbird does not play a sound. Movies and Music play just fine with Dragon or VLC. I haven’t changed any settings and I just noticed this today.
I downloaded again and reinstalled – installed-new and no such luck. Not sure where to look or what I may be missing.
I found that the device was muted in System Settings. I had not been into System Settings, so I have no clue as to why that happened. Now it seems I have a font problem. Didn’t have that until I turned on the sound device. Crap. Fonts are something I never mess with. I have always used the default, and I have no idea what the default font stuff is for Slackware.
I do have Slackware in a VM that I can check.
It works good.
I discovered that the frei0r-plugins are required for full function of kdenlive even though kdenlive is part of KDE.
Not a complaint. I just write it here in case someone else needs that and is puzzled.
I learned it by running kdenlive in a terminal window.
Regnad, the frei0r-plugins package is in the ktown ‘deps’ section specifically for kdenlive, and kdenlive was compiled against it of course.
In my blog post of March 2017 I wrote about adding kdenlive and digikam:
Yet another flawless update. Thanks Eric.
Yes indeed frei0r is in the “deps” and I always run the 3 “upgradepkg…” as indicated in the README. Indeed I had for sure run that because qt5 had upgraded appropriately…
somehow frei0r was failing… i added the sbo version and fixed my kdenlive issues…
i ran the “upgradepkg –reinstall –install-new x86_64/deps/*.t?z” again just now and indeed found that I had two frei0r packages, one from ktown and one from sbo (ponce). I deleted the sbo one with pkgtool and indeed kdenlive still works. But seriously kdenlive was not working properly and i think i fixed it by adding frei0r from sbo. I am indeed a newbie with kdenlive but have been on the ktown path for many moons now.
Maybe just some late night error on my part. Thanks.
I am using KDE Plasma for about month now and i am still very excited. Upgraded to 5.16: everything works great.
Live session is very polished and is a great advertisment for both Plasma and Slackware.
Just to say “thank you” for all this work (and for libreoffice, vlc).
Thanks for this upgrade, Eric!
Does somebody know where “show progress and status information in tasks buttons” option, located in task manager settings, hid after Plasma 5.16? See the screenshot bellow, from an older Plasma:
https://i.imgur.com/Uflqgnx.png
It seems not available anymore, so Akregator unread counts always shows in the task manager, which I find to be annoying and unreadable as I use very tiny icons.
Is that option not showing only to me or is this a regression from Plasma 5.16 upgrade?
The kde taskbar panel at the bottom of the screen has disappeared, the screen fonts look very pixellated, and the icons on the desktop are oddly arranged. Also items on the screen are occasionally too large.
I uninstalled NVIDIA and reinstalled KDEplasma5. Xfce seems to work sort of ok but also has bad font quality. other operating systems on the computer are ok but nothing seems to help the KDE problem. I am using current and recently upgraded. The problem seemed to start with a rebooting of the machine…
Hi Regnad Kcin,
You posted the same issue on LQ (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/display-problems-x-related-4175656971/) and from that thread it looks like you solved the problem by re-installing all the packages in the “X” series and fixing an incorrect anti-alias setting in your preferences. How this happened, no clue?
No, sir, I am rather clueless how it occurred. I am guessing that in plugging in and unplugging the wacom pad (which is another monitor) that X and NVIDIA got confused somehow but it wasn’t a hotplug situation but a reboot with wacom plugged in. This is something that i frequently do without issues. It seems that some configuration file somewhere was fouled up but I could not locate it. Reinstalling KDE5 did not help. Reinstalling NVidia or using Nouveau instead did not help. I isolated the problem to that installation of slackware and finally decided to reinstall X. There were no unusual errors returned in terminal. I am not familiar with the log files for X and didnt know what to look for. enorbet made a kind suggestion but that didnt fix it and I found nothing strange in the xorg.conf other than the line i entered. I dont know how the antialiasing setting got set to a strange number or why I got the strange magnification effect or how the KDE panel got turned off. It’s working ok now and I upgraded the libreoffice also with no issues.