My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Ktown becomes Vtown

So it is finally happening.
On US Election Day 2020, Pat Volkerding added “vtown” into the ‘testing’ directory of Slackware-current.

The “vtown” in Slackware is essentially my ‘ktown’ repository containing KDE Plasma5 plus its dependencies, with a few exceptions, a number of my packages removed, some caveats and a couple of renamed packages.

A lot of useful information from early adopters can already be found on linuxquestions.org in the dedicated thread about vtown.

One of the benefits of this testing version of Plasma5 in Slackware is the merging of several Slackware and ktown packages.
Mostly because I needed to provide Qt5-supporting versions of existing Slackware packages, I needed different names for the ‘ktown’ versions that I was going to provide. I could not risk that people would end up with old Slackware Qt4 based packages which would break Plasma5.
So to avoid clashing with packages like “plasma-nm”, “attica”, “baloo”, “kscreen” etc… I had to use alternative package names like “plasma5-nm”, “attica-framework”, “baloo5”, “kscreen2” and several (actually, many) more.
Here is the full list of my packages that got merged back into packages with the original Slackware names:

attica-framework -> attica
baloo5 -> baloo
baloo5-widgets -> baloo-widgets
grantlee-qt4 -> grantlee
kactivities-framework -> kactivities
kfilemetadata5 -> kfilemetadata
kscreen2 -> kscreen
libdbusmenu-gtk -> libdbusmenu (dropping Qt4 support)
libdbusmenu-qt5 -> libdbusmenu-qt
libkscreen2 -> libkscreen
phonon-qt4 -> phonon (dropping Qt4 support)
plasma5-nm -> plasma-nm
polkit-kde-framework -> polkit-kde-agent-1
polkit-qt5-1 -> polkit-qt-1

There’s also some packages that are new, but given a different name than I did for ‘ktown’: my “qtav” becomes “QtAV’, “phonon-gstreamer” becomes phonon-backend-gstreamer” and “sddm-qt5” becomes “sddm”.

Here’s a list of the packages that did not make it into ‘vtown’ at all:

ddcutil (nothing uses it anymore)
drumstick (only used by vmpk now, and that is not part of Slackware)
freecell-solver (needed by kpat)
kaudiocreator (obsoleted, use k3b or soundkonverter instead)
kblog (no longer included in Applications)
kdelibs (KDE4 - no longer relevant)
klettres (future maintenance will be in ktown, no external deps)
kpat (needs freecell-solver, maybe rename to kpatience if I keep maintaining it)
ktuberling (future maintenance will be in ktown, no external deps)
kwebkitpart (lost its relevance)
labplot (future maintenance will be in ktown, no external deps)
md4c (no longer needed, was a past dep for building qt5)
perl-path-tiny (dep for freecell-solver)
perl-template-toolkit (dep for freecell-solver)
phonon-qt4-gstreamer (obsoleted)
phonon-vlc (needs VLC and I will keep maintaining this in ktown)
python3-random2 (dep for freecell-solver)
sni-qt (nice to have for Qt4 apps with systray icon? Needs libdbusmenu-qt4 which will no longer be in Slackware)
user-manager (deprecated)

Now the big question: how to upgrade?

Assuming you use slackpkg to manage Slackware updates, first edit “/etc/slackpkg/slackpkg.conf and ensure that the line:

PRIORITY=( patches %PKGMAIN extra pasture testing )

is changed to:

PRIORITY=( testing patches %PKGMAIN extra pasture )

This gives higher priority to those new ‘vtown’ packages. Then run:

slackpkg update

The next steps depend on what you currently have installed.

Upgrade from Slackware’s KDE4 to the ‘vtown’ Plasma5 in Slackware’s testing:

That should be easy. If you still have KDE4 installed, run

slackpkg remove kde
slackpkg remove ConsoleKit2
slackpkg install vtown
slackpkg upgrade vtown

I have not tested those “slackpkg install vtown; slackpkg upgrade vtown” commands so if that does nothing, then instead, you need to download the whole testing/packages/vtown directory from an internet mirror and then run:

upgradepkg --install-new --reinstall testing/packages/vtown/deps/*.t?z
upgradepkg --install-new --reinstall testing/packages/vtown/kde/*.t?z

Upgrade safely from my ‘ktown’ to the ‘vtown’ in Slackware’s testing:

That is a good question! I am still running ‘ktown’ because due a medical emergency in the family I do not have enough free time to test this properly. People asked for a blog post so that’s about all I can manage and it has eaten most of today’s free time already unfortunately. Share your experiences in the comments section below and I will update the main article with better info as it becomes available.

What I think will work is this (assuming you are also using slackpkg+ to manage your 3rd party repositories) and thanks to akimmet who posted these instructions in another blog post after having gone through the upgrade himself:

slackpkg update
slackpkg upgrade-all
slackpkg remove ktown kde kdei ConsoleKit2

Now, edit “/etc/slackpkg/slackpkgplus.conf” to remove (or de-activate) all definitions of “ktown”, and instead add “testing:vtown” to your PKGS_PRIORITY list. Then run:

slackpkg update
slackpkg install vtown
slackpkg upgrade vtown
slackpkg install LibRaw autoconf-archive exiv2 poppler

The last line will re-install the few packages that were in my ‘ktown’ but also part of Slackware core. They were upgraded by Pat in Slackware core instead of in ‘vtown’ and thus the “slackpkg remove ktown” removed those permanently.

Remember: perform this upgrade from a console in runlevel 3!
Tell me how it went! Remember, this stuff is now in Slackware ‘testing’ not because the Plasma5 software sucks and crashes but because this means a big and intrusive update to Slackware and it is best to give way to the early adopters to find the remaining kinks in the new packages.

Eric

 

57 Comments

  1. Marcelo Souza

    ItΒ΄s getting time… I can feel Slackware 15 right around the corner. It will be here soon enough!

  2. Jen

    I installed it on the laptop today, when I had some headspace. I’m installing it on the desktop, too. Looks good so far. Very smooth, although I haven’t used KDE in awhile. πŸ™‚

    • Jen

      And I upgraded like you suggested from kde4, but I didn’t remove consolekit. (Should I have? The changelog didn’t suggest it was strictly necessary?) Everything seems to work fine with it. Plasma’s nifty, although it’s a switch from xfce.

    • Jen

      Really, really not important or ground-breaking bug, but supercollider’s icon disappeared. That seems to be the only oddity from upgrading so far.

  3. Peter Christy

    I started out by upgrading an old “expendable” laptop, which only had a very basic install of slackware64-current and your Plasma 5 . That all appeared to go smoothly, so then I went on to my workshop desktop. Again, that went fairly smoothly, but I have found a couple of “gotchas”!

    Firstly, moving “testing” to the front of that line in slackpkg.conf will also atempt to upgrade gcc to gcc-10 – something you may not want to do! Either greylist gcc, or deselect it in the upgrade window if you don’t want gcc-10 just yet!

    I keep a local copy of ktown on a NAS disk to make it easier to keep my machines up to date. I found the simply using “slackpkg remove kde5” left a lot of stuff behind, for some reason. I found it easier to “removepkg /var/log/packages/*alien*”, and then reinstall the packages that got removed in the process (LibreOffice, vlc, etc) than trying to work out what had been left behind.

    Other than that, and a hiccup with openvpn-2.5 that has nothing to do with kde5, everything is now running smoothly. I’m writing this from vtown on my workshop machine.

    Just my 2p worth, and feel free to tell my I’ve done something wrong! πŸ™‚


    Pete

  4. LoneStar

    I really needed this list of which packages are renamed and which packages are dropped with the reason for the drop.
    Thanks a lot.
    And best wishes for the emergency.

  5. Regnad Kcin

    Maybe someone might benefit from my findings on this transition. I did a simple slackpkg install-new and slackpkg upgrade-all on top of my existing up-to-date ktown. (I already had “testing ” in the priority spot in the .conf) I don’t presently use slackpkg+. My simple method “worked” but it left behind some “dead” packages that are listed in the blog post such as some obsoleted ones and some renamed ones. slackpkg clean-system finds those. It also finds a lot of other 3rd party stuff that is not carefully blacklisted. I intend to leave it there for the time being and clean it up at a later date.

  6. Regnad Kcin

    kpat seems to be readily restored by installing it from the old ktown repository along with the libkdegames-20.04.3-x86_64-1alien it depends upon.

  7. Radical Dreamer

    Eric, thank you for providing ktown! It was a pleasure to use! I’m glad Pat finally added it to Slackware Current.

    One thing I would add is for people to use “slackpkg search testing” to make sure they got everything related to vtown installed.

  8. Eduardo

    Eric, thanks for providing ktown all these years!
    Hope everything is well with the medical emergency.

  9. Deny Dias

    Eric, I wish all the best to your family and that the outcome of this medical emergency could be nothing but healthy and happy people surrounding you.

    Yesterday, before you publish this post, I did “upgrade safely from my β€˜ktown’ to the β€˜vtown’” using slackpkg+. That was smooth sailing. No issues at all, although I paid attention to the /etc/sddm.conf and /etc/pam.d/sddm* misses as posted by LQ fellows. Those issues are now solved as Pat has already released an updated package for the purpose.

    Thank you a bunch for the effort on this looong journey from ktown to vtown. Enjoy your free time!

  10. gegechris99

    I wish your family member a speedy recovery.
    Your list of renamed and removed packages is valuable to someone like me who hasn’t done a full install of ktown (essentially, I don’t need all of those games, Calligra and KDEPIM).
    I initially made a quick check of Current changelog with a focus on polkit packages and polkit-qt5 wasn’t there. This lead to my finding out it was renamed into polkit-qt. So I set out to check if other packages had been renamed. My workflow to move from ktown to vtown was:
    – Manually identify renamed packages (I got it almost right the first time, I missed libdbusmenu-gtk)
    – slackpkg update
    – slackpkg install
    – slackpkg remove
    – slackpkg upgrade-all
    – manually identify ktown packages still installed (they didn’t make it to vktown)
    – slackpkg remove
    Granted the manual identification work was time consuming but I got a better understanding of what changed.
    I had to manually remove old ktown packages and didn’t use “slackpkg clean-system” because I kept ktown in slackpkgplus.conf.

  11. gegechris99

    in my previous post, I used characters “lesser than” and “greater than” to quote something and the text was cut. So my workflow is not clear. Here’s my workflow:
    – Manually identify renamed packages (I got it almost right the first time, I missed libdbusmenu-gtk)
    – slackpkg update
    – slackpkg install “renamed packages”
    – slackpkg remove “ktown packages that were renamed”
    – slackpkg upgrade-all
    – manually identify ktown packages still installed (they didn’t make it to vktown)
    – slackpkg remove “ktown packages that are not in vtown”

  12. Dariusz Brzezinski

    Hi Eric,

    I have just upgraded ktown to testing:vtown. I just followed your instruction and as always it finished with success. No problems at all.

    Thanks you for your hard work with ktown since the beginning of kde5 story, and I hope you and your family stay healthy during this hard pandemic time.

  13. chrisretusn

    Thanks for the blog post! Confirmed what I checked regarding package changes, removals. Thanks for your work on ktown. I’ve been using it since you made it available.

  14. Helios

    After replacing ktown with vtown, I built kpat-20.08.2 with no problem, using ktown’s freecell-solver-5.0.0. But I could not build the new freecell-solver-6.0.2.
    freecell-solver seems to be the only required dependency for kpat-20.08.2

    • alienbob

      We’ll see what happens after ‘vtown’ moves into the regular Slackware package tree and replaces KDE4.
      At that point in time I will clean out my ‘ktown’ repository and keep only those packages that did not make it into Slackware (exception for kaudiocreator and such which have been deprecated anyway).

  15. lockywolf@gmail.com

    ddcutil is a nice thing to have. I’m surprised it is not in the stock slackware.

  16. logrus

    I just did the ktown-vtown upgrade and it went without complaining. However, after an upgrade (which included kernel 5.4.75) and reboot, my sddm does not log me in. I keep getting back to the login screen. For now I resorted to runlevel 3 and running startx.

    • Dave

      It’s because of missing files (sddm, sddm-autologin, sddm-greeter) in /etc/pam.d/
      The latest sddm package in testing fixes it (currently sddm-0.18.1-x86_64-1_vtown_3).

      • logrus

        Thanks, I’ll have a look at that.

  17. alienbob

    My original instructions for upgrading from ktown to vtown would result in the removal of exiv2, poppler and more, so I added a couple explicit commands like “slackpkg install poppler” at the end.

  18. TheTKS

    I’ve installed Slackware64 -current (via Eric’s’s slackware64-current-install-dvd.iso updated yesterday) in a test partition alongside Slackware64 14.2 to give vtown a try.

    It seems to have installed correctly. I’ve tried only a few applications, but what I’ve tried is working well.

    This is really nice. Big thanks for this, Eric, and to Pat, too!

    TKS

  19. Lioh

    Dear Eric,

    if you do it this way you should not need to reinstall any packages:

    Replace ktown PKGS_PRIORITY in /etc/slackpkg/slackpkgplus.conf with testing:vtown

    slackpkg update
    slackpkg upgrade-all
    slackpkg remove ktown kde kdei ConsoleKit2

    slackpkg update
    slackpkg install vtown

  20. gp.d

    Today I made the move from “ktown” to “vtown” by following the given instruction!
    Everything works fine like before, all settings are fine, and even the “vallpaper” plugin
    works like before πŸ™‚ , the upgrade process runs without any problem…
    This is really great work, thanks a lot!

    gp.d

  21. Fellype

    —quote—
    Remember, this stuff is now in Slackware β€˜testing’ not because the Plasma5 software sucks and crashes…
    —end quote—
    Well… Not all the software that comes with Plasma5 suck and crash, but Konqueror is disappointing me when I use it as a file manager – some crashes and freezes in simple actions.
    The other things are working well. Some things surprised me positively, like the addition of Kdenlive to -current.
    And I believe that the best is yet to come πŸ™‚
    Thank you Eric, for your efforts that allowed KDE5 land on -current.

    Regards

  22. Francisco

    Hi Eric.

    Sucessfull upgrade to vtown here.

    Long live for ktown and thanks for its contribution.

    Next steps for LiveSlack? How is it impacted?

    Thanks Eric!.

    Francisco

    • alienbob

      Liveslak works as usual, nothing changes there. I do not put the stuff of Slackware’s testing area in my liveslak variants.
      As soon as Plasma5 moves from testing into the kde/ series and KDE4 is gone, the SLACKWARE liveslak variant will be Plasma5 based and there will no longer be a need for a specific new PLASMA5 variant (at least not until I start working on new ktown releases, which seems only a matter of time, considering the glacial pace of the Slackware developments the past four years).

  23. Ricardo

    Hello everyone.

    Eric, thank you for all of your hard work on ktown all of these years, you’ve spoiled us enormously πŸ™‚

    Last weekend I finally got the time to upgrade to vtown and also recompile all of my python3-dependent packages and thought of running ldd on every file under /usr/{bin,sbin,lib64,libexec} to see if something broke with the transition so here are a couple of findings:

    – From boost-compat-1.74-x86_64-1alien (I guess you could remove support for boost 1.69):
    + /usr/lib64/libboost_*.so.1.69.0
    libicudata.so.63 => not found
    libicui18n.so.63 => not found
    libicuuc.so.63 => not found

    – From flashplayer-plugin-32.0.0.403-x86_64-1alien
    + /usr/lib64/kde4/kcm_adobe_flash_player.so
    libkdeui.so.5 => not found
    libkdecore.so.5 => not found

    – From gst-plugins-bad0-0.10.23-x86_64-2alien
    + /usr/lib64/gstreamer-0.10/libgstvp8.so
    libvpx.so.1 => not found
    + /usr/lib64/gstreamer-0.10/libgstjp2k.so
    libjasper.so.1 => not found
    + /usr/lib64/gstreamer-0.10/libresindvd.so
    libdvdread.so.4 => not found

    – From gst-plugins-ugly0-0.10.19-x86_64-2alien
    + /usr/lib64/gstreamer-0.10/libgstdvdread.so
    libdvdread.so.4 => not found
    + /usr/lib64/gstreamer-0.10/libgstcdio.so
    libcdio.so.16 => not found

    From p7zip-16.02-x86_64-1alien
    + /usr/lib64/p7zip/7zFM and /usr/lib64/p7zip/7zG
    libwx_gtk2u_richtext-2.8.so.0 => not found
    libwx_gtk2u_aui-2.8.so.0 => not found
    libwx_gtk2u_xrc-2.8.so.0 => not found
    libwx_gtk2u_qa-2.8.so.0 => not found
    libwx_gtk2u_html-2.8.so.0 => not found
    libwx_gtk2u_adv-2.8.so.0 => not found
    libwx_gtk2u_core-2.8.so.0 => not found
    libwx_baseu_xml-2.8.so.0 => not found
    libwx_baseu_net-2.8.so.0 => not found
    libwx_baseu-2.8.so.0 => not found

    The following are not your packages but at least I wanted to mention them:

    – From PyQt-4.12.3-x86_64-3 (broken because phonon upgrades?):
    + /usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/PyQt4/phonon.so and /usr/lib64/python3.9/site-packages/PyQt4/phonon.so
    libphonon.so.4 => not found

    – From subversion-1.14.0-x86_64-3
    + /usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl/auto/SVN/_Core/_Core.so and several others
    libperl.so => not found

    Also, I had to remove amarok-2.9.0 as it broke with the phonon upgrades, but I really missed it so I made a slackbuild for the git version

    If anyone cares to try: https://github.com/richarson/slackbuilds/tree/master/experiments/amarok-kf5/

    Beware there is a problem currently in that it doesn’t load mysql’s plugin so it can’t read the old amarok’s music collection and ratings, nor create a new one. Haven’t had time to investigate yet.

    Cheers!

    • Ricardo

      Bah, nevermind about p7zip, apparently I stupidly removed your wxGTK, reinstalled and all is fine.

      Sorry for the noise.

    • Ricardo

      About amarok-kf5: when it builds it can’t find MySQLe (mysql embedded library) even though it exists, cmake complains with this error message:

      Could NOT find MySQLe missing: HAVE_MYSQL_OPT_EMBEDDED_CONNECTION

      So, for now at least, I exported my old amarok database from $HOME/.kde/share/apps/amarok/mysqle/amarok/, imported it into a running mariadb instance and configured amarok to use an external database.

      So far, so good πŸ™‚

      Cheers and sorry for polluting your comment section.

      • alienbob

        Nothing that has value or provides context will be able to ‘pollute’ the comments section.
        Even if I can not help, and even though I never figured out why Amarok would have any appeal πŸ˜‰

        Note that on Slackware 14.2 there is a /usr/lib64/libmysqld.so symlink that points to libmysqld.so.18, but on Slackware-current that same symlink points to libmariadbd.so.19. Perhaps the cmake script gets confused by that.

      • LoneStar

        Hello,
        Based on https://www.mail-archive.com/amarok-devel@kde.org/msg06460.html
        I patched cmake module FindMySQLe.cmake removing like 80, and the detection correctly happens.

        Later, when linking, you have an error related to not finding -ltpool.

        This is because “mysql_config –libmysqld-libs”, which is used in the cmake module, replies with a list of libraries to be linked that includes tpool.

        Actually mysql_config is a bash script and the list of libraries that it responds with is hard-coded in the script.

        Editing line 90 in the script and removing -ltpool from it, makes it all work.

        I’m not sure if the presence of tpool in this list of libraries is a mistake in the sources or what.
        For sure there is no libtpool present in Slackware, and mariadb is compiled without using it.

        Later, when launching it, it will segfault on start.
        You will have to follow this suggestion to work around it:
        https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=391362#c7

        Pheew. It took me a lot of time πŸ™‚

        • alienbob

          I understand a bit more why Amarok lost its appeal to me long ago πŸ™‚ In the past I could never get it to play my MP3 collection and now apparently it can not even compile and run properly in Slackware…

          • LoneStar

            hehe well, I mostly use Clementine and Spotify, but I wanted to see how Amarok has become in KF5. It used to be my main player in the KDE4 era. And it wasn’t much complex to compile in the past, but I think the development team has lost a lot of enthusiasm (and members, probably).

            Elisa is fine but it doesn’t scrobble to LastFM and that is a relevant issue for me.

  24. Geremia

    plasmashell doesn’t automatically start. I have to run “kstart5 plasmashell”. Systray missng, and all my applications in the KDE menu are missing; KDE menu editor shows nothing.

    • Geremia

      Also, I was getting GPG errors when install vtown. I had to set STRICTGPG=off in slackpkgplus.conf. Is that normal?
      Other than that, everything’s working fine. thanks

      • alienbob

        Sounds like you missed something in the upgrade. Did you migrate from ktown to vtown? You did not mention that.
        Getting GPG errors when installing Slackware packages (vtown packages are signed with the official Slackware key) is pointing at a configuration issue on your end.

        • Geremia

          Yes, ktown ? vtown.
          I’m not having those issues anymore, but I cannot get multilib installed. “slackpkg reinstall/install/upgrade multilib” commands return “No packages match the pattern for upgrade.”
          I have “MIRRORPLUS[‘multilib’]=https://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/multilib/current/” in slackpkgplus.conf.

          • Geremia

            Figured out the problem:
            MIRRORPLUS[‘slackpkgplus’]=https://slakfinder.org/slackpkg+/
            should have been
            MIRRORPLUS[‘slackpkgplus’]=http://slakfinder.org/slackpkg+/
            For some reason, having a mirror that gives 404 error tripped things up.

        • Geremia

          Is STRICTGPG=off not required? Your vtown repo isn’t an official Slackware repo, is it?

          • alienbob

            Look closer please. The ‘vtown’ is not mine.
            It is Pat’s and it is part of the official slackware-current tree.

  25. Richard Van Den Boom

    Hi,
    I just upgraded this week-end from ktown to vtown.
    All works fine, no visible change at this point.
    Again, thanks a lot, Eric, for the work done for all these years to keep this updated. I’ve been using ktown for all this time and enjoyed it. The transition is surely transparent now thanks to all you’ve done.

  26. Leo Rutten

    Hello Eric,

    Today I installed the vtown packages on a desktop PC which had
    already current for some time.
    Everything went well until I bumped on errors some of which I could solve.
    These were the steps:

    telinit 3
    pico slackpkg.conf
    PRIORITY=( testing … )
    slackpkg update
    slackpkg remove kde
    slackpkg ConsoleKit2
    upgradepkg –install-new –reinstall vtown/deps/*.t?z
    upgradepkg –install-new –reinstall vtown/kde/*.t?z

    Then an old Qt5 gave a dynamic linking error:

    removepkg qt5*
    removepkg *alien*
    slackpkg install-new

    Now it was possible to switch manually to graphical mode with startx.
    It is not possible to switch to the desktop after telinit 4 and login.
    The login itself works but instead of the desktop I get immediately the sddm login screen again.
    This problem is not solved. I will solve it later with a clean current installation.
    Probably there is still an old package in the installation.

    • alienbob

      Well, “old Qt5 gave a dynamic linking error” is a dead giveaway.
      If you are using slackpkg but not slackpkg+, I think you should check /etc/slackpkg/blacklist to find out whether you are blacklisting some packages that have been introduced into Slackware recently – like that qt5 package which used to be coming from my repository probably and now is part of Slackware.

      • Leo Rutten

        Everything is solved now. While installing vtown, I made the mistake of answering “keep” to keep the old scripts
        instead of the .new ones. After issuing these commands:

        cd /usr/share/sddm/scripts
        mv Xsession.new Xsession
        mv Xsetup.new Xsetup

        the desktop appears nicely.

        After 25 years (I started using Slackware in 1995) the Slackware philosophy still holds: learning how a system is built (scripts, configuration) helps
        you solving problems. Thank you.

  27. Francisco

    Hi Eric.

    I upgraded successfully to VTown from KTown. After this process I run out quickly on free space on / (20Gb)

    I am running Slackware 14.2+ after a HD install from Slackware Live (Full install including Music and Sound services). /home is in another partition.

    I applied some hints and recommendation from Slackware Documentation and LQ.

    1) Cleaned /tmp
    2) Uninstall Kernel Source.
    3) I tried to run slackpkg clean-system just to see what shows…., but it shows only some packages I manually installed (no much disk space).

    Is it safe to remove /var/cache/packages, used by slackpkg for downloaded packages? any other “cache” locations?. I am planning to resize / partition if no other options.

    Any recommendation/hint to “cleanup” my current install?. I would like to keep music and sound features.

    Final Question: In order to have current Slackware + Vtown (testing), in a new machine, do I need a clean slackware install and then follow your instructions to migrate to Vtown from KDE4?

    Best Regards and thanks in advance.

    • alienbob

      Doing a clean installation with the intent of using the ‘vtown’ Plasma5 eventually, you should skip installing KDE4, it would just be a waste of time to install it first and then de-install it again.

      As for partition sizes, welcome to the club of people who thought they could live cheap by restricting the size of the root partition… my advice would be not to attempt to prune stuff you deem unneeded, it will just grow back like a fungus – how do you think that data came to be there in the first place?
      Increase the partition size, is the only viable option.

      • Francisco

        Thanks Eric for both answers. It is clear. Thanks again.

  28. wirelessmc on LQ

    I post the following on LQ this morning. Anyone else having session termination problems at run level 4? This is a brand new -current install (no KDE4 but everything else + vtown).

    vtown run level 4 session termination issue
    I have installed the latest snapshot of Slackware64-current on a brand new Desktop machine. Like one of my other development machines I will maintain two different S*64-current installs on this box. One with KDE4 and another with Plasma5. I do this because Plasma5/vtown seems to be rough around the edges still. Now to the matter at hand…

    I cannot cleanly end an X session on Plasma5 – neither with logout *nor* reboot. The session termination will spin for about 20 seconds showing the black/white Plasma5 logo and then will eventually return to X. It doesn’t matter if the session is started as X or KWayland. Same behavior for both.

    There is no such issue when running the session from run level 3 (startx). I believe this is a bug since I followed what I thought was a correct installation procedure (see below).

    Do I need other packages from ktown? Has anyone else here observed this?

    Here’s a recap of the install process on the brand new machine:
    1) install everything except for KDE4 (including XFCE4).
    2) Drop to console level.
    3) Remove the package ConsoleKit2
    4) Install vtown/deps and then vtown/kde packages. (upgradepkg –install-new –reinstall)
    5) Reboot immediately

    • alienbob

      This behaviour is not something I experienced or heard of. I’d hope this is just a matter of configuration, since the steps you describe to install Plasma5 should be OK.
      In any case I would look for any *.new files that were installed and whose existence you did not address with that immediate reboot. If there are none to be found, then you can think of next steps.

  29. agur

    fresh Slackware_current install
    after upgrade to vtown , startx dosn’t start only after the changing .xinitrc to startplasma-x11
    something like :
    ……
    # Start the window manager:
    if [ -z “$DESKTOP_SESSION” -a -x /usr/bin/ck-launch-session ]; then
    ck-launch-session startkde
    else
    #startkde
    startplasma-x11
    fi

    • alienbob

      Well that is not strange agur. Apparently you ran “xwmconfig” as your regular user which creates the ~/.xinitrc file, and since Slackware installs KDE4, that ~/.xinitrc file contains “startkde” command.
      Then you upgraded to Slackware’s ‘vtown’ version of Plasma5 and since your ~/.xinitrc file is not getting replaced automagically, it now calls a program which you just de-installed.
      The solution is to run “xwmconfig” again and select KDE Plasma5 Desktop. That will overwrite ~/.xinitrc with the correct content.

  30. Ivaylo Yordanov

    Hi
    I just upgraded from K to Vtown.
    – upgraded via test packages locally from rsync of Slack repo.

    after some small issues starting X and Wayland too
    1. when start startkwayland i have issues:
    – Desktop zoomed to 200% after set to 100 everything is very small.\
    – when use setting tools systemsettings5 and change something even small and hit Apply button Wayland crash or freeze. ( can change things on monitor settings without problem )

    2. i test slackpkg but:
    – slackpkg search vtown – i see not only KDE and DEPS packages but many other and also this will return some of them to not multilib version.
    upgrade vtown gcc-9.3.0_multilib-x86_64-3alien –> gcc-9.3.0-x86_64-3

    • alienbob

      Wayland is not stable enough to do anything but testing and reporting bugs to the KDE developers, I can not help you with any of that.
      As for using slackpkg – I assume you also use slackpkg+ and the fact that it tries to replace the multilib compilers with the Slackware originals means that you have your PKGS_PRIORITY configured wrong.

  31. Ivaylo Yordanov

    Thanks
    – Wayland – after couple of CTRL-ALT-F? disconnect Keyboard and need to be stopped remotely – will play
    – fixed slackpkg – i make mirrorplus with name vtown need to rename πŸ™‚

  32. KG Hammarlund

    Don’t know if this is related to the “Big Merge”, but:
    the Dec 8 -current upgrade forced me to rebuild dvdstyler (SBo). Building was interrupted by:

    configure: error:
    Please check that wx-config is in path, the directory
    where wxWidgets libraries are installed (returned by
    ‘wx-config –libs’ command) is in LD_LIBRARY_PATH or
    equivalent variable and wxWidgets is version 3.0 or above.

    I had your wxGTK3-3.0.5.1 package installed. Reinstalled it, same error. Rebuilt it, using your buildscript, same error. I then built wxGTK3-3.0.5 using ponce’s SBo script for -current, upgraded, and dvdstyler built without issues. I also built a wxGTK-3.0.5.1 package with the same script, and again dvdstyler built OK.
    No clue to why your package triggers the mentioned configure error, it takes someone more knowledgeable than me to figure out.

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