I have uploaded a 5 GB ISO file containing a new KTOWN variant of Slackware Live. This is the KDE Plasma6 Alpha release. Play around with it and perhaps you will be able to contribute to an improved Beta by finding and reporting the bugs you encounter.
Get the ISO from my NL or my US server (US ISO still uploading at the moment). There’s also an MD5 checksum and a GPG signature file in those same locations if you want to validate the download.
A lot of packages did not compile yet for various reasons. I am not too concerned about that, next update hopefully will be more complete. A lot of work still needs to be done however (by the KDE developers) to port the remainder of KDE Gear (formerly called Applications or Software Collection) to Qt6.
Not ported to Qt6 as of yet are: artikulate cantor cervisia juk kamoso kde-dev-utils kdenlive kdesdk-thumbnailers kdev-php kdev-python kdevelop kget kgpg kig kio-gdrive kipi-plugins kiten kmix konversation kqtquickcharts krfb ktorrent ktouch kwave libkipi lokalize marble okular parley poxml rocs umbrello.
Still, I was impressed with the fully working and stable Plasma6 Wayland session when I tested an unreleased KTOWN Live ISO a week ago. Of course, as things go, I seem to have broken the Wayland session in this public release of the KTOWN Live.
The version of SDDM graphical session manager should also be Wayland-capable but I will test that in a future ISO.
Let me know in the comments section below what you think of this Alpha release.
News about my chromium package (also its ungoogled sibling).
I was finally able to get the HEVC video and AC3 audio codec support working. There’s a patch set on github, maintained by StaZhu but I did not like the complexity and I am not really interested in GPU hardware-only support. The browser’s internal ffmpeg libraries playback HEVC just fine, taxing your CPU a bit more than in the case of a supported GPU.
Now, the Thorium Browser is also Chromium based and its developer Alex313031 used StaZhu’s patches and wrote some of his own to add not just HEVC video but also AC3 playback support.
Again, I did not like the complexity of his solution (documented on github) but could not get around using some of the patches provided by both. I simplified some of the others into a bunch of ‘sed’ commands. And that made it work for me.
The browser will now playback HEVC and AC3 media formats, as long as the container file is a MP4. I have not found how I can convince Chromium to also support MKV containers.
The chromium-119.0.6045.123 package is already available in my repository, and chromium-ungoogled is still compiling (the ungoogled patch kit only became available earlier today).
You can test the new HEVC playback capability here: https://test-videos.co.uk/ if you select any MP4/HEVC sample (none of those have sound) or Thorium browser test page: https://thorium.rocks/misc/h265-tester.html (those have AC3 audio).
Have fun!
Dear Bob,
thanks for your effort to slackware project.
I have one question: Is the pxe server working?
This is an important feature to distribute slackware every. Since original 15.0 it is not working, and i stop to setup slackware.
Good life for you
Kalaha
Hi Kalaha,
If you run into a bug, the best thing you can do is report it.
I have not heard any complaint about the PXE server in years. That does not mean it’s not broken, it’s just that I am not aware.
I have actually worked on the PXE server in liveslak earlier this year as a spin-off to the UEFI boot failure of the Live ISO if it was burnt to a DVD disk. I have tested the liveslak PXE server after making these changes and it works (for me at least).
I expect that the Slackware PXE server is still broken. Those scripts in Slackware (which I contributed long ago) were the basis for PXE support in liveslak. And some of the bits which I fixed in liveslak’s scripts, are still present in the Slackware scripts.
Dear Eric,
I somehow have no luck locating the image, may you be so kind and throw a link here?
I have one question – does the VNCserver work under this? My previous experience with Wayland showed that it does not (seems) have a concept of virtual desktop in the way VNC provides it.
Hi Janis, look for the text “Get the ISO from my NL or my US server” in the main artcle. Both ‘NL’ and ‘US’ are direct links to the ISO image file.
I have not tried VNCServer.
Hopefully later today I will upload a refresh of the ISO with some more packages compiled and a working Wayland session.
I did not turn attention to the different colors of NL and US 🙁 Thank you!
Hi Eric.
The news above make me extremely happy and grateful to you and your effort in making the best Linux distro even better.
As you know, Chromium (Slackware web browsers) HEVC support was my long time the first on the wishing list.
Thanks again and all the best in a future.
Hi Eric.
Thanks for this release and for keeping Slackware in the bleeding edge.
Tested some time booted in a Proxmox VE. Thanks again.
Francisco.
Hi Francisco,
Did you create the Slackware image for Proxmox yourself?
Thank you.
Hi i want to request an enhacement for the noload parameter.
Actually the noload= only works for optional and addons directories.
I want noload= work for /system directory.
With this you can download plasma iso … and put in optional the xfce series
And then play with noload=kde load=xfce and have 2 desktops in 1 iso.
the load is okey to work with optional things , but noload no sense cause optional is never charged if no pass load=
Hope i explain right and thanks for your scripts.
Hi USUARIONUEVO,
As explained in the documentation, the ‘noload’ parameter is relevant for modules in the ‘addons’ subdirectory, and ‘load’ parameter is used for modules in ‘optional’. There is a philosophy behind this, and it is is not going to change, i.e. the scope of those two parameters is not going to be broadened to include modules in the ‘system’ directory.
Thanks for the chromium-ungoogled 119.0.6045.159 update!
🙂
I got P6 running on a partition of my machine
Actually every thing seems to be ok, except that I have to use the Power button to reboot…
The good news of course is that this whole porting effort (Qt5 -> Qt6) is largely invisible to the KDE Plasma user. I think the developers did a great job.
A lot of the applications have not been ported however, and I have no idea how many of them will be ready at the time of release of Plasma 6 stable. Which means, Frameworks 5 and parts of Plasma 5 will not go away soon.
It seems that the biggest single issue is Wayland, its incompatibilities, and its tendency to fail.
Still, Wayland will be the default desktop in KDE Plasma6 since they fixed all of their showstoppers.
I am going to go along with that choice when I release packages for Plasma6 final and hopefully that will help find, report and fix any bugs.
I had what I thought was fairly modern hardware i7-12700 based nvidia 2050 graphics but I just upgraded to an i7-14700 and new z790 mb and using the onboard graphics I can get multimonitors and startkwayland is very snappy.
Thanks for the chromium-ungoogled 119.0.6045.199 update.
Note that this update fixed a 0-day exploit which is actively abused: https://thehackernews.com/2023/11/zero-day-alert-google-chrome-under.html
That is why I updated also the 32bit packages.
Thanks for the chromium-ungoogled 120.0.6099.109 update!