KDE time!
Here is your monthly refresh for the best Desktop Environment you will find for Linux. I just uploaded “KDE-5_19.01” to the ‘ktown‘ repository. As always, these packages are meant to be installed on a Slackware-current which has had its KDE4 removed first. These packages will not work on Slackware 14.2.
It looks like Slackware is not going to be blessed with Plasma5 any time soon, so I will no longer put an artificial limitation on the dependencies I think are required for a solid Plasma5 desktop experience. If Pat ever decides that Plasma5 has a place in the Slackware distro, he will have to make a judgement call on what KDE functionality can stay and what needs to go.
What’s new for January 2019
This new January 2019 release of KDE Plasma5 for Slackware contains the KDE Frameworks 5.54.0, Plasma 5.14.5 and Applications 18.12.1. All this on top of Qt 5.11.3.
Deps:
There’s a new dependency to ‘OpenAL’: ‘SDL_sound’. And I finally decided to add ‘freecell-solver’ in order to be able to compile the KDE ‘kpat’ package. The ‘freecell-solver’ package needs ‘python3-random2’, ‘perl-path-tiny’ and ‘perl-template-toolkit’ to compile, so these were also added as packages.
I added ‘drumstick’ so that I could compile the KDE ‘minuet’ package.
And finally, I upgraded ‘phonon’ and ‘phonon-vlc’ and rebuilt ‘phonon-gstreamer’.
Frameworks:
Frameworks 5.54.0 is an incremental stability release, see: https://www.kde.org/announcements/kde-frameworks-5.54.0.php
Plasma:
Plasma 5.14.5 is an incremental upgrade in the Plasma Desktop 5.14 release cycle, bringing stability and performance fixes. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.14.5.php . You may want to read about all the new features in Plasma 5.14 here: https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.14.0.php
Plasma-extra:
In plasma-extra I have upgraded ‘wacomtablet’.
Applications;
Applications 18.12.1 is the first stability and bugfix update for the 18.12 release cycle. I did not package 18.12.0 so this is actually the first opportunity to test the latest KDE Applications on Slackware. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-applications-18.12.1.php and if you want more detail about the 18.12 cycle you should also read https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-applications-18.12.0.php .
And since I added the required dependencies, there are two new packages in Applications: ‘kpat’ (a suite of Patience card games) and ‘minuet’ (music education using MIDI).
Applications-extra:
In applications-extra I have upgraded ‘kdevelop’, ‘kdev-php’, ‘kdev-python’, ‘kstars’ and ‘okteta’.
Go get it
Download the KDE-5_19.01 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.
I will upload a new Plasma5 Live ISO soon. You will find it in https://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/
Have fun! Eric
Will it work on 14.2?
If you followed my blog you’d have known the answer, so I guess you are new to Slackware? The Plasma5 packages I maintain are exclusively for Slackware-current. There’s an old (end of 2017) release of my Plasma5 packages in the same repository which will work with Slackware 14.2 but those packages are almost as old as Slackware 14.2 itself so I don’t think they will bring much joy.
I will update the main article and mention slackware-current explicitly.
Thanks for everything ! Slackware is my favorite distribution. Thanks for making it closer.
It only remains for me to run two programs, Megasync and Shotwell, I can not make them work.
Awesome! Thank you Eric! Downloading now…
It’s sad 14.2 unsupported. Thanks anyway.
Thanks Eric! Upgrade went smooth as always.
Do you have any insight on what’s holding Pat back? KDE4 has been dead since 2015. It shouldn’t have been part of Slackware 14.2 and it certainly shouldn’t be part of -current. Without KDE5 in -current yet and no plan to do so it’s going to be a looong way till Slackware 15.0. Meanwhile Slackware 14.2 is showing its age, refusing to run X or even boot on machines less than about two years old.
If it weren’t for the constant flow in -current I’d be very much worried about the future of Slackware. With no new release in sight, the store gone, and no visible sign from Pat to set up a new store or subscription model, I’m still a bit worried.
Thank you Eric! Wow, Minuet is a remarkable piece of ear training software.
Eric, I can confirm that the latest update runs smoothly so far. Thanks again!
Is that a semi-official confirmation that 15.0 won’t have Plasma 5?
Ben – no. Plasma5 will land into Slackware eventually, but I am fed up with waiting for it. All this time I have been holding back with adding new packages to enable functionality in KDE Plasma, thinking that Pat should be able to “lift and shift” my source repository. But, it’s been years now and I want to show all of what Plasma5 is capable of. That requires the addition of extra packages in the “deps” area.
The consequence may be that Pat eventually decides not to adopt all of the packages in my repository. We’ll see.
Thomas I wonder how many people still use Slackware 14.2 on desktop computers… most likely none of them are using KDE4 today. However, Slackware 14.2 is still a strong contender for a server machine. I have all my servers on 14.2 and latest patches applied. That works most excellently.
I won’t speak for Pat. He will have his reasons for leading the Slackware development this way. My blog has since long been an alternative outlet to gain more knowledge about Slackware and its development, but you will always get my opinion here, not Pat’s. We can only hope that there will be a 15.0 in 2019… and that it will contain Plasma5. If not, then KDE4 should be removed anyway. It’s dead in the water.
I still use 14.2 on my desktop with KDE4 (although it does double as a basic media and web server). It isn’t out of a lack of desire to move to something newer, but I know I won’t keep up with -current development. I just don’t have that type of time, so I’ve decided to tweak 14.2 as needed for my machine (relatively recent Ryzen 7 setup). I’ve taken the source from -current a few times to build newer versions of packages as needed.
I’ve wanted to try out Plasma5, but I’m not willing to move to -current for it. If 15.0 comes without Plasma5, I will probably install the latest ktown version you’ll provide for that stable release since I know KDE4 is pretty much dead.
Hi bassmadrigal, welcome!
Since I am not Pat I can not be 100% certain, but it sure looks like Plasma5 is going to be part of Slackware 15.0. At least, it has not been vetoed. I expect Plasma5 to go in at the latest possible moment, i.e. after Pat has tweaked and updated the -current version with everything he has on his roadmap. But as always with Slackware, ‘it’s ready when it’s ready’. And one of my goals with Plasma5 and Slackware Live Edition is to convince those people that are looking for a systemd-free distro, that Slackware is worth considering. That is why I lifted the lid and started adding dependencies to enable more KDE features.
I use 14.2 on my desktop machine with your “old” Plasma 5 packages and it works pretty well; my laptop is about two years old but I am very happy with this configuration.
Thank you for the new packages, I’ve been using plasma 5 at work on Slackware current however it still show some bugs (it requires a recent graphics card for effects, I have issues with windows focus, kmail freezes, sddm not supporting multiple monitor with different resolution properly) and is missing some KDE4 small features that I personally like because they make my work easy :D, for example kcolorchooser is missing themes, klipper has been replace by clipboard widget, AMOR was not ported to KDE5 XD for the rest I think KDE 5 is really nice.
My KDE5 is using oxygen theme and it really looks like KDE4, personally I think that besides kdenlive (that I love) I find KDE5 very similar to KDE4 from a non technical point of view. 😀
On my laptop I still use KDE4 for every day tasks.
We are still waiting when Slackware 15 will be ready for the 1st beta version or RC release. With the release of Slackware 14.2 a lot of time has passed…
For those who wants Slackware 14.2 with the latest KDE Plasma, I suggest them to move to VoidLinux for a while and when Plasma be included in the new stable version of Slackware come back again. I did that and I think it worthwhile.
Daniel; I don’t think you really understand why people need a stable release like Slackware 14.2 with its security patches, instead of a rolling release like Void Linux which requires regular updates to many packages. In that respect, Void is much like slackware-current.
That’s why, I would rather advise people to switch to -current than to abandon Slackware for Void. You will really not get anything better by going to Void.
Many thanks for the extensive update!.
Although my initial impressions of Plasma are very positive coming from XFCE for adoption in Slackware the initial indexing that the baloo indexer is doing by default might be a problem. Although I do really like the idea of a rapid search I see load-averages up to 10 at the moment during the initial indexing, with occasional stalls of 10 to 30 seconds of the whole interface. This problem disappears completely if I switch the file indexing off.
The reason that this hits me might be that the laptop I use at the moment has lots of files on an encrypted drive. My suspicion is that although the Baloo_file_extr has a low priority the kcryptd-threads needed to decrypt the data read from disk have the highest nice value of -20 and those are consistently at the top in top. I’m not sure when exactly the stalls happen, but I get the impression that they might correlate with a write to disk by baloo (dmcrypt_write) or a kswap0 process appearing. Are there any suggestions to improve this behavior (or at least make it more bareable)?
btw) I also see segmentation faults in kdeinit5 that appear reproducable. Is there an easy way to rebuild the relevant packages with debug information? It wasn’t directly obvious to me from the source you use to build the packages how to do this.
Hi moesasji,
My Plasma5 desktop also runs on a laptop with LUKS encryption of the disk drive.
Baloo initial indexing may take its toll on the drive performance, but after that (relatively short) period, this high load will not be experienced any longer. The incremental indexing is not heavy on the system.
Slackware is not built with application debugging in mind: all debug info is stripped before packaging the compiled binaries. If you want, you can rebuild (parts of) Plasma5 with the debug information still present when you remove the call to ‘strip_binaries’ or comment-out that function’s content (https://git.slackware.nl/ktown/tree/kde/kde.SlackBuild#n104). You also might want to add debug flags (-g) to the CXXFLAGS definition (https://git.slackware.nl/ktown/tree/kde/kde.options#n19)
1) Thanks for the hints on getting the debug-info installed. I’ll have a go at that once I can find the time as that crash-popup does start to annoy me.
2) The system-load from baloo indeed drops over time; it is now ~2 after 12h uptime, which is still on the high side for this laptop. Yet even after ~18h since activating the indexing it still seems to be causing short several seconds long stalls very regularly; symptoms of not being able to type or even move the mouse cursor while baloo_file_extr is at the top with CPU use. Something is not behaving….I’ll keep an eye on this to see if it disappears. (
btw) total size of the file-system is ~120GB on a decent sata3 SSD; so I would have expected the indexing to be done by now.
fyi) Baloo has turned out to be a red hering as this appears to have been a bug relating to xorg/libinput based on the following warnings in the xorg-log that correlated with times of the stalls:
—
TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint: SYN_DROPPED event – some input events have been lost.
—
With the updated version from libinput that appeared in current today the stalls and high load are now gone and now things are running smoothly. Pfew.
@moesasji, you can check baloo status to see if it’s indexing, or suspend it to make sure it’s not the source of your issues (though it seems you faound the culprit already).
Nevertheless, balooctl has some interesting options, like disabling indexing of content (only index file names and metadata).
Here’s an example from my machine:
$ balooctl -h
Usage: balooctl [options] command status enable disable start stop restart suspend resume check index clear config monitor indexSize
Options:
-f, –format Output format .
Only applies to “balooctl status ”
-v, –version Displays version information.
-h, –help Displays this help.
Arguments:
command The command to execute
status Print the status of the indexer
enable Enable the file indexer
disable Disable the file indexer
start Start the file indexer
stop Stop the file indexer
restart Restart the file indexer
suspend Suspend the file indexer
resume Resume the file indexer
check Check for any unindexed files and index them
index Index the specified files
clear Forget the specified files
config Modify the Baloo configuration
monitor Monitor the file indexer
indexSize Display the disk space used by index
$ balooctl status
Baloo File Indexer is running
Indexer state: Idle
Indexed 78282 / 78282 files
Current size of index is 2.09 GiB
$ balooctl indexSize
Actual Size: 2.09 GiB
Expected Size: 1.32 GiB
PostingDB: 281.59 MiB 20.892 %
PositionDB: 587.29 MiB 43.573 %
DocTerms: 148.93 MiB 11.050 %
DocFilenameTerms: 7.12 MiB 0.528 %
DocXattrTerms: 0 B 0.000 %
IdTree: 1.18 MiB 0.087 %
IdFileName: 5.27 MiB 0.391 %
DocTime: 3.04 MiB 0.226 %
DocData: 5.59 MiB 0.415 %
ContentIndexingDB: 0 B 0.000 %
FailedIdsDB: 0 B 0.000 %
MTimeDB: 2.12 MiB 0.157 %
$ balooctl monitor
Press ctrl+c to stop monitoring
File indexer is running
Idle
^C
$ balooctl config
The config command can be used to manipulate the Baloo Configuration
Usage: balooctl config
Possible Commands:
add Add a value to config parameter
rm | remove Remove a value from a config parameter
list | ls | show Show the value of a config parameter
set Set the value of a config parameter
help Display this help menu
$ balooctl config ls
The following configuration options may be listed:
hidden Controls if Baloo indexes hidden files and folders
contentIndexing Controls if baloo indexes file content.
includeFolders The list of folders which Baloo indexes
excludeFolders The list of folders which Baloo will never index
excludeFilters The list of filters which are used to exclude files
excludeMimetypes The list of mimetypes which are used to exclude files
$ balooctl config ls contentIndexing
yes
I unfortunately I spoke to soon…something is still not working well with the trackpoint/keyboard as the errors and stalls are back. But it doesn’t seem to be Baloo….time to try if the problem is present on XFCE on this install.
@Richardo: I had found the various options from Baloo; the default settings in my case had generated a “index” that it a single file of 17GB on a 128GB drive, which is a file-size that to me appears absolutely bonkers for an option that is enabled by default.
@moesasji,did you check dmesg? I had similar stalls every few minutes, usually when Alt+Tabbing between windows, and it turned out to be a GPU (Intel integrated GPU, Core i5-4200U) driver (i915) issue.
In my case, ‘sudo dmesg -T | grep drm’ would print something about the GPU hanging and resetting itself.
This was on Slackware 14.2, I think I “solved” it by instaling -current’s kernel, now I’m on -current and never had that issue again.
A long shot but maybe woth a try.
Also, while on dmesg check for disk errors.
About baloo, I guess the database size increases with the amount of files, as you can see I have 78k files and baloo’s db is only 2GB. Maybe you could try to exclude some directories, for example I exclude directories containing git repos since those can be searched with ‘git grep’ efficiently.
@Ricardo: Yes I looked at the various logs and there is nothing in dmesg or in /var/log/messages. The only thing that stands out to me in this issue is the following error which appears in the Xorg-log during when stalls happen:
—
TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint: SYN_DROPPED event – some input events have been lost.
—
I only see this error running Plasma as I have been running XFCE for the past day without this error appearing in the logs at all. Unfortunately I don’t see what exactly triggers as under Plasma with Baloo fully disabled these stalls and errors also appear to be gone.
As a result it is difficult figure out what exactly is triggering this behaviour and unfortunately I do need to get some real work done (so I’m running XFCE again for now).
I still use Slackware64 14.2 with KDE4. I do test and sometimes use your Plasma packages on a -current laptop I have, but it’s not my daily driver. I don’t want to fiddle with -current. KDE4 and Slackware 14.2 are showing their age, though. A lot of applications I use have newer versions that will only work on -current and with newer Plasma libraries.
Hallo Eric,
are there any chances to have screen autorotation capability (e.g.: iio-input-proxy) in your ktown set?
Best reguards
Michelino,if you mean this: https://github.com/hadess/iio-sensor-proxy then no. This requires systemd.
Hi Eric,
I have been using 14.2 with KDE4 since its release, although I test -current and Plasma 5 on another machine….today I’m going to upgrade my production Laptop to -current with Plasma 5….as mentioned earlier – 14.2 is showing it’s age. I’ve had no issues with your Plasma 5 packages – all is working as it should, many thanks for your work on all these extras. Talk to you soon. I also finally started using SlackpkgPlus on the -current machine – love that tool more and more.
I have a PXE server at home where I added Slackware Plasma5 Live as a boot option (See https://docs.slackware.com/slackware:liveslak#pxe_booting_the_live_os).
And I have an old desktop computer which needed to be re-purposed with Slackware.
So what I did was: PXE-boot Plasma5 on that computer and test its performance. I found that when the Live OS modules are extracted over the network, the OS performance is almost as if it is a local install (the PXE server storage is a SSD, so fast reads).
And Plasma5 worked beautifully with the nouveau module driving the GPU. All smooth sailing.
So then I opened a konsole window in the PXE-booted Plasma5 desktop, used fdisk to partition the hard drive and ran “setup2hd”. It took 95 minutes to install Slackware this way (extracting all modules over the network and writing them to the local disk).
Did a “chroot” after the installation finished, and used the script /usr/share/mkinitrd/mkinitrd_command_generator.sh to generate an appropriate initrd for the generic kernel, then edited /etc/lilo.conf to add a stanza for the generic kernel, ran “lilo”, exited the ‘chroot’ and rebooted into the local installation.
Voila, Plasma5 in full glory!
Having a PXE server in the house is a luxury of course, and I have it because I need to develop and test all these solutions I put out to Slackware, but it’s actually not rocket science, and I have documented its setup in my own Wiki a long time ago: https://wiki.alienbase.nl/doku.php?id=slackware:pxe
Thanks a huge bunch – interesting way of making it happen…the creativity Linux users have is simply put – amazing! Thanks again Sir AlienBob : )
Yes Eric, tuo are right, I was referring to iio-sensor-proxy, my mistake.
Anyway, afaik systemd is not hardcoded, according to gentoo folks(1)(2), but it needs some work I’m not able to do…just to let you know.
Thank you very much for your work and the time you spend for all of us.
(1) https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1082226-postdays-0-postorder-asc-start-150.html?sid=82f7af698df6ddbb4cd066bbc368a5cf)
(2)https://forums.funtoo.org/topic/1269-iio-sensor-proxy-requires-that-s-word-should-i-keep-trying-or-move-on/
Michelino, Gentoo ‘solved’ the systemd dependency by patching the sources to use elogind instead (this is the standalone extract of systemd-logind – similar to eudev).
However, Slackware does not have elogind either, so adding this iio-sensor-proxy will not be possible.
Thank you for clarifing It Eric!
all working fine.
no issues.
Thanks
Hi Eric,
Sorry to bother you with this but….I moved to -current on my Production Laptop with your Plasma 5 – it’s running, but very slowly….I’m thinking it might be Video Driver related. Also, when I try to set a default Application for E-Mail – it doesn’t populate the dialogue box and or keep it, or save it. Not sure what to think of that one. The others work fine, but not E-Mail option. This was a clean install of 14.2, then upgrade to -current, then Plasma…any thoughts?
Hi Owen, I can’t really give you a good answer with regard to the slowness of your Plasma 5 desktop. I do not know the details about your hardware, the installed software or your software upgrade path.
About the “default applications” I can reproduce what you mention (file selector for e-mail app does not have any effect on the entry field), although when I manually enter the path to an application, and click “Apply”, this program will be remembered.
It seems to be a bug, and since I do not use this feature, I do not know if it was present in earlier releases of Plasma. If it bothers you, feel free to open a bug report in the KDE bug tracker.
Hi Eric,
Thanks for your input, I appreciate the time. The hardware is somewhat old in that it was a machine purchased in 2014, AMD – A6-5200 APU, 6GB RAM, Radeon HD 8400 Video card. 1TB Hard Drive – pretty standard stuff – using EFI – Secure Boot turned off (that was a pain). I tried adding the mail client manually, but it wouldn’t show me what I typed….so I assumed it didn’t work. Plasma 5 (KDE5) runs beautifully on a really old Tower I have with 4GB RAM and a cheesy on board video card….and old hard drive – so it’s something specific to the Laptop me thinks.
I haven’t checked the drive for errors, next on the to do list, and I have not installed Catalyst / Drivers for the 8400 Radeon. That’s another rabbit hole to venture down.
I did another install, but this time I downloaded your -current ISO – KDE 4.14.3 runs snappy – I haven’t upgraded to Plasma 5 – is it safe to upgrade using Slackpkg+ – using ktown, or should I remove KDE with Pkgtool and then download and install?
Thanks so much for taking the time to assist, I know you’re busy….this isn’t urgent, just trying to figure it out : )
Blessings
Hi Owen
The perceives slowness can indeed be caused by video card driver. The hardware you describe is quite similar (except for the GPU because I always use Nvidia or Intel) to a machine I recently added to my workplace, and Plasma5 runs snappy and fast here.
If you have a slackware-current and want to install Plasma5, the README in the repository root for Plasma5 explains in great detail how you get rid of KDE4 and install Plasma5 and its dependencies. You have the manual option, or you can use slackpkg+. Just make sure you have installed or replaced (using ‘upgradepkg –install-new’) every package in my Plasma5 repository – some of the packages are replacements for stock Slackware packages.
Hi Again,
Yes, I have been using the instructions you provided everytime I installed Plasma 5 – I was curious if it mattered which way I removed KDE 4. I’ve always just used the Video Driver the Install uses, I haven’t installed proprietary drivers in the past. That’s really the logical thing to me causing the performance issue…I have one NVidia Card, but it’s running Win10 Pro – not Linux, the only Windows machine in the house I might add. Thanks again.
Hi Owen, what you have to do is to install propietary drivers for your videcard. is common to have slowness in graphics with free drivers. I hope this would help you! Best whishes
Ya, I tried to install AMD’s Graphic Drivers – they will not install with Xorg-1.20.4 in -current – it only supports upto 1.10 : ) Probably need to find a Legacy Driver.
Or Compile : )
One old trick – disable kwin’s compositing:
$ kwriteconfig5 –file kwinrc –group Compositing –key Enabled false
Don’t forget to logout and login again.
Hi Eric!
I don’t know if this is the right place to report this.
I’m using slackpkg+ with your ktown and alienbob repos, and I saw a few of your packages are already in Slackware -current, you might want to remove them from your repos:
jansson (2.12 on current, 2.7 on alienbob)
ninja (1.9.0 on current, 1.7.2 on alienbob)
recordmydesktop (0.3.8.1 on current extras, 0.3.8.1 on alienbob)
Also, on both of your repos I get two duplicates with different versions:
OpenAL (1.19.1 on ktown, 1.19.0 on alienbob)
SDL_sound (1.0.3-1 on ktown, 1.0.3-2 on alienbob)
Cheers!
Hi Ricardo,
It’s fine to report those things here. I will clean up my repository, thanks!
First off all, thanks Eric for your work!
I’ve decided to give a try to KDE5. And I’m disappointed. For me it looks worse than KDE 4, maybe more consistent but worse. And it seems to be less configurable (IMHO).
Additionally it cause some problems with migrating from KDE4. Kwallet wallet was not migrated. moreover old wallet cannot be imported directly into new (always complain about wrong password). I was forced to copy old wallet into system with KDE4 open it there, export as XML, and eventually import it in KDE5. So if you use kwallet, export it to XML before migration – it will save you time and trouble.
Next problem cause akonadi (I’m not surprised – the worse thing appeared in KDE4 – always made problems…). See bug https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=402229 . Akonadi won’t start at all for me. I need to run some db script and patch and recompile akonadi – horrible thing.
And at the end removed functionality from kmail “just because”. See:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=387931
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=393421
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=399245
Ignoring users reminds me a little Pale Moon case :/
Hi Eric,
I got the itch to try building your latest Plasma 5 on 14.2 (okay, not exactly 14.2 — I’ve gotten through the deps so far and have already had to upgrade some things to make it work). I am following your instructions at the bottom of this page:
https://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/current/latest/
I just have a couple questions about it.
1) If I run updates.SlackBuild, I believe I do not need to also cd into telepathy and run telepathy.SlackBuild, because it is already run by updates.SlackBuild. Is that correct?
2) kde.SlackBuild by default builds kde4. I can comment that out if I only want Plasma 5, right?
Thanks for your scripts. I’m not sure if this little adventure will succeed, but I definitely wouldn’t have a chance without all your build scripts and patches.
montagdude, I try to keep the updates.SlackBuild script relevant and containing all the actual packages that need to be built, but it is not meant for Slackware 14.2 so YMMV.
The kde.SlackBuild script builds whatever it finds in the source tree, and driven by the main components almost at the bottom of the script (frameworks, kdepim, etc). It builds KDE Plasma5, not KDE4, I don’t know where you got that from. The only KDE4 related thing that is built, is the old KDE4-based kdelibs, which should be sufficient to keep most old KDE4-based applications running if you have 3rd party packages installed.
Hannibal I am not going to tell you that you have to like KDE Plasma5. There’s XFCE and various other DE’s or WM’s to pick & choose from.
Things change all the time, some things go away, others are new. This holds true for software as well as life.
Eric, okay, I see now that it is only kdelibs that is built by the kde4 module. I ran into some issues the first time I tried to build that, but it sounds like I can skip it anyway if I don’t need any old KDE4 apps. Thanks.
Eric, unfortunately I still like KDE best. I use kmail, konsole, okular every day. And there not how Plasma looks like troubles me at most – I will eventually used to new design. Only how applications I like are ruined. In KDE 3 kmail runs fast and with no trouble. In KDE 4 appear crappy akonadi – when you get hundreds of mails it juggle them on disk several minutes before kmail become usable – when you get tens of thousands mails you can wait literally days before they are processed. I hope it will be fixed in KDE 5 but nothings change – akonadi still sucks. And moreover kmail itself are slowly destroyed. In new konsole you cannot set permanently bold font (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=378523). All such things make me sad. I can back to KDE 4 but I cannot used it eternally – it eventually becomes to old to be usable.
I no wonder that Pat don’t want KDE5 in mainline Slackware for now – it is for me still at most in beta state.
PS. Sorry for complains on your blog, this is wrong place for doing this…
Unfortunately, my experiment (building latest Plasma 5 on 14.2) didn’t succeed. I got through all the deps, but once I got to Frameworks I ran into some things that appear to be internal compiler errors. I even tried upgrading to GCC 8.2, and no difference. Oh well, I guess I will have to wait for Slackware 15 or maybe I’ll make the switch to -current.
montagdude – if you never try you’ll never know the possibilities. It was a good effort, even if it did not yield results.
Hannibal, the only way to change things is to open a new bug on bugs.kde.org and make your point – clear, crisp, with evidence and a suggested outcome.
I did not fail to notice the comments at the end of those existing bug reports that you mentioned in an earlier post here on the blog. It appears they come from you, because the language used is quite similar to your posts here on the blog. Let me give you a piece of advice: commenting on how bad everything has become, and using exclamation marks to make your point, is not going to get your requests fulfilled. Do not rub the developer the wrong way – developers are often also emotion-driven and your comments will have the opposite effect of what you desire.
Eric, you have right. Those exclamations doesn’t help to fix the problem (or even make it worse). I usually don’t write bug reports in this way – but in case of this bug, all reasons are mentioned before by other commentators with no response – and I gone little to far with emotions.
This in definitely wrong place to discuss about that. In my first post, I just want to warn other Slackware users about problems I’ve encounter during migration, not to complain about them. In case of my attitude to developers… – Eric, keep doing your fantastic work for Slackware!!! 😉
EOT
It looks like the libvpx-1.8.0-x86_64-1 bumped instant messaging.
Marcus_777, and KMail too. Probably others.
falkon is also affected;)
(qtwebengine)
qt5, need rebuild with new libvpx-1.8.0, package 😉
Hi Gérard, long time no see 😉
Yes I am aware that libvpx upgrade caused some minor harm to Plasma5 environment.
This week, there’s little I can do about it because I don’t have time, but next week I start on a whole new set of packages (new sources for Frameworks, Plasma and Applications are available). I will also add some new features to the desktop (new ‘deps’ which should enable some new functionality I want to take to the test).
Since the last update of Plasma5 packages, I too was plagued by a baloo_file_extractor which kept on using a large part of a CPU and making my CPU fan do overtime. Using “balooctl indexSize” I saw that the actual database size was about twice as big as the ‘expected’ size so i did the following to stop/disable baloo (which deletes the database) and re-enable it (so far it is sitting idle, we’ll see what happens when I reboot/logon again tomorrow):
$ balooctl indexSize
$ balooctl stop
$ balooctl disable
$ balooctl status
Hi, Eric, take your time 😉
for other user,
ln -s libvpx.so.6 libvpx.so.5, in /usr/lib64, temporarily fix the problem.
Hi Eric, I’ve recently upgraded my ffmpeg to version 4.1, which naturally, has broken ffmpegthumbs in Plasma5. I’ve found the source code in your repository, but not being that familiar with cmake, I’m a bit stumped! The source code package seems to be intended to be part of the Plasma mega-build. Is there an “Idiot’s Guide” anywhere as to how to update individual packages, as and when needed? (Other than going back to the old-fashioned way, that is!)
Cheers!
Pete, information about how to use kde.SlackBuild to compile only a single package is written down here: https://alien.slackbook.org/blog/kde-bugfixes-and-how-to-use-my-modular-kde-slackbuild/
In essence, it’s as simple as executing:
# ./kde.SlackBuild applications:ffmpegthumbs
And then after a while retrieve the finished package in /tmp/kde_build/
Many thanks, Eric! I guessed there had to be a guide somewhere….!
—
Pete