My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

KDE5 August release for Slackware with Applications 18.08

A repetition of events… just like in July, an update in Slackware-current broke lots of 3rd party stuff. This time it was the boost package that got updated and, oh man. The most visible victims are my LibreOffice and Qbittorrent packages, but also some of the software in Plasma5 stopped working due to the library ABI update in libboost. A new LibreOffice package is coming (64bit package is ready) and Qbittorrent will be next, but first: back to the topic for this article.

Here is my monthly update of my ‘ktown’ repository, containing latest sources from the KDE download server and built on the latest Slackware-current.

What’s new

The highlight of this August release is the new Applications 18.08.0, a new quarterly update. The Plasma was updated to 5.13.4 with several important usability and stability improvements. Frameworks has been updated to 5.49.0.

Updates in the ‘extras’ section for Applications: I rebuilt ‘calligra’, ‘digikam’ and ‘krita’ because of the new boost package, and you will find new versions for ‘kstars’ and ‘okteta’.

Go get it

Download the KDE-5_18.08 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 generate a new Plasma Live ISO when I have working LibreOffice and QBittorrent packages again. Don’t hold your breath… compiling takes time.

23 Comments

  1. Geremia

    Excellent! thanks

  2. Eduardo

    Thank you Eric!

  3. Helios

    Thank you very much !
    I think that cryfs needs also to be recompiled

  4. LoneStar

    awesome, Eric. Thanks!
    I haven’t updated the boost package until now 😉

  5. alienbob

    Helios, you are correct. I have uploaded a recompiled cryfs package, thank you.

  6. Eduardo

    Eric, just wanted to confirm that I upgraded and everything runs smoothly so far. Thanks again!

  7. Marcus_777

    18.08 works flawlessly, good work as always. But I want to ask. Last week I installed slackware64-live-plasma5-current(2018-07-29) to several pc using a script setup2hd.sh. The installation was fine, but it took very long time. About 90 minutes. Why does it take so long?

  8. alienbob

    Marcus_777 – installing from the Live ISO is much different than using a regular install DVD ISO. The regular installation uses installpkg to install every package one by one. The Live ISO installer is a rsync process which does not allow you to pick individual packages. The decompression of files from a series of overlay-mounted squashfs filesystems and pushing those through rsync is heavier on the CPU and as a result the data copy takes a lot longer.

    Once you have installed the Live OS on your harddisk using setup2hd, it will behave like any other regular installation and you can use the Slackware package tools to upgrade or install any package.

  9. Regnad Kcin

    The SCIM problem of the lacunae (empty boxes, missing characters) in Noto-CJK persists. It is readily remedied by deleting the SC (simplified Chinese) font series. The Traditional Chinese (complex character forms used in Taiwan and HK) font series persists. SCIM and Chinese character display work fine without NotoCJK fonts. Google says “Noto is Google’s answer to tofu”. [???wtf? maybe it really is …] It is easy enough for me deleting NotoCJK [I do so with great glee] but might be a stumbling block for someone else who had not tracked down the problem.
    Libreoffice .pptx –> .odp, .docx –> .odt is working better (ok with new plasma and new LO 6.1.x.x) but still can’t directly open some microsoft files sent to me from thailand although my own files work fine now. This remaining problem seems to be a Microsoft vs. LO thing and not a big deal to me now.

  10. alienbob

    Regnad you could also blacklist the “noto-cjk-font-ttf” package in “/etc/slackpkg/blacklist” .
    So far you are the only one mentioning an issue with this package, so I will wait and see for now. Thanks for reporting your issue though! It will certainly help people with the same questions who arrive here after an Internet search.

  11. Marcus_777

    Thanks for explanation Eric. I started to find out what could be a reason for slow installation, except the general principle . Rsync is not a problem. The problem is slow uncompression. I did a series of tests with different block size and compression method. Absolutely the worst is xz. Compression takes up to 5 times longer. Uncompress up 8 times! Compared to lzo and gzip.(on the other hand, xz generates a little smaller files). Another speedup could bring multi decompressor. Especially for users with more cpu core. something like unsquashfs -p option.

  12. Regnad Kcin

    blacklist the fonts is a great idea. i will Delete and blacklist the entire Noto series as it is large and slow to unpack and i really have enough fonts of my own. it is interesting that noto creates the problem it supposed to fix (lacunae aka tofu).

  13. rvdboom

    Hi, Eric,
    thanks for the packages, works fine for me here.
    For the record, the libxkbcommon-0.8.0-x86_64-1alien package in deps seem to still contain /usr/lib64/libxkbcommon-x11.la and other .la files. My vlc build (I compile it from git) fails because of that. Not a big deal but I thought you might want to know.

  14. chrisretusn

    A little late to the party. Working fine on all of my installs. Always appreciate your work.

    I don’t know if it’s related but the touchpad on my Acer laptop works perfectly now. Could have been something else but I noticed it today. That’s all that counts.

  15. Ricardo J. Barberis

    Smooth upgrade, thanks Eric!

  16. bam

    Hi Eric, for the case you haven’t seen this thread yet:
    “Can’t adjust date and time in Plasma 5”
    https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?p=5894182
    , I ask here:
    Could you share us your vision there – if the problem with adjusting date and time in Plasma5 can be solved without PAM, or we just have to hope and wait PAM inclusion anyway?

  17. alienbob

    Despite the error, the settings you change will be applied anyway. Just go back into the applet and see for yourself.
    At least, that’s how it is on my installation of Plasma5, same for the Live ISO. I use the root password.

  18. bam

    Actually, it seems just become in a wrong state – putting tick in the date setting changes nothing (due the error I suppose)

  19. acidtripper

    Hi eric! great work! testing it. pretty stable nothing to say about it! think we are near for the current release!!! thank you!

  20. alienbob

    I updated poppler today so that its version again matches that of Slackware-current. I also recompiled the packages that depend on poppler (kfilemetadata5, kdepim-addons, okular, calligra, kile, krita).

  21. acidtripper

    Hi eric thanks, any idea how to solve ttys dim and turn off screen while running kde5? thats the only issue im experiencing. i start kde then go to ttys with f2 for example and working on tty2 kde dim my screen. thanks!

  22. Eduardo

    Hi Eric. Thanks for the updates!

  23. David Melik

    I love that you’re calling it KDE 5, which is not an official name–rather than names for all the parts, which confuses people–so who cares…

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