My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Plasma 5_17.01 for Slackware

My previous post concerned itself with the question: what do I spend my time on? Keeping Plasma 5 working on Slackware 14.2 and -current, and for 32bit as well as 64bit architectures, is simply too time-consuming for a monthly release. I asked for your opinion and I was glad for all the feedback I have received. Predominantly, people are using 64bit Slackware and I saw both the stable 14.2 and the -current development tree mentioned. It looks like a small minority of people is running Plasma 5 on 32bit Slackware – not my target of choice but everyone has his or her own reasons and I am not here to doubt those.

So, here is the first 2017 release of the ‘ktown’ packages – KDE 5_17.01. I have updated the main package sets to their latest releases: KDE Frameworks 5.30.0, Plasma 5.8.5 and Applications 16.12.1. I have also updated the Qt  package to 5.7.1.
What can you expect of this and the future releases? You can still use this latest KDE 5 on Slackware 14.2 (only 64bit) but I will be focusing more on -current. After all, the ‘ktown’ development is all about getting the latest and greatest KDE software included in Slackware-current. This is how I think I am going to handle the releases:

I am going to do my releases first for Slackware64 14.2 and -current. During the days that follow, will compile the 32bit packages for Slackware-current. I will stop releasing Plasma 5 packages for 32bit Slackware 14.2.

What’s new in KDE 5_17.01?

  • Frameworks 5.30.0 is an enhancement release and contains one new framework compared to my previous release: prison. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/kde-frameworks-5.30.0.php
  • Plasma 5.8.5 is an incremental bug fix release for the 5.8 series. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.8.5.php and if you want to know more about the long term support (LTS) for Plasma 5.8, go read: https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.8.0.php
  • Applications 16.12.1 contains many changes. In these 16.12.x releases, some of the big packages have been split into many smaller ones: ‘kde-baseapps’, ‘kdepim’ and ‘kdewebdev’ (and these three packages are gone now).
    Two other packages have been removed: ‘gpgmepp’ (whose functionality has been integrated into ‘gpgme’), and ‘kuser’ (for which there is no replacement and therefore I have kept it as part of applications-extra).
    Formerly part of ‘kdepim‘, the ‘kdgantt2′ program has been removed and it is replaced by a new package ‘kdiagram‘. Another new package ‘kwave‘ was added in 16.12.0 (which I never built). See https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-applications-16.12.1.php .
  • I have removed ‘kactivities‘, ‘nepomuk‘ and ‘nepomuk-widgets‘ from the kde4 package subset. These kdelibs4-based packages are no longer used by other packages.
    I also added a package there: ‘libcddb4‘ is the old kdelibs4 based version and it is needed to keep ‘k3b‘ running. The latest libkcddb is Frameworks5 based and incompatible with k3b.
    Unfortunately ‘kdepimlibs4‘ is still required by ‘kopete‘ and ‘klinkstatus‘. I had to recompile ‘kdepimlibs4‘ to remove gpgme++ files that are now part of the ‘gpgme‘ package. If you want to repeat this at home, make sure you only have ‘akonadi4‘ installed, not the newer ‘akonadi‘ from Applications.
  • In applications-extra, I upgraded ‘calligra‘ to the recently released Frameworks5 based version; a recompilation would have been needed anyway in order to ditch ‘kactivities‘. The new ‘calligra‘ has shed some of its code and no longer contains ‘krita‘ or ‘kexi‘, they are developed independently now. ‘Flow‘ and ‘Stage‘ have also been removed from the code but here the reason is that their code is un-maintained. Therefore I have added ‘krita‘ as a new package. If anyone needs ‘kexi‘ as well, let me know so I can add it (and its dependencies) next time. Also, ‘partitionmanager‘ (along with its dependency ‘kpmcore‘)  was upgraded and is now Frameworks5 based. Note: ‘partitionmanager‘ has issues using kdesu to gain root access to the disks even though it will ask for the root password. If all actions are greyed out, start it from the commandline with “sudo -s partitionmanager”.
  • The ‘kdeconnect-framework‘ package in plasma-extra was upgraded.
  • The ‘deps’ section has two new packages (three in the Slackware 14.2 repo as you can read below): ‘libdmtx‘ and ‘qrencode‘, both of which are requirements for the new ‘kdiagram‘ package. The ‘libinput‘ package was upgraded to the same version as was recently added to slackware-current (and compiled against the new package ‘libwacom‘ just like in slackware-current). Note that libinput and libwacom are not part of the ‘deps’ for Slackware-current since these are already covered by your Slackware install.
  • The ‘qt5‘ package was upgraded to 5.7.1, and accompanying upgrades were done for ‘qt5-webkit‘, ‘sip‘ and ‘PyQt5‘. Note that qt5’s dependencies have increased again: it now requires libinput, libwacom, libxkbcommon. I did not upgrade qt5 to 5.8.0 – it is too new and currently seems to have issues with KWin.

This upgrade should be relatively straightforward if you already have Plasma 5 installed. See below for install/upgrade instructions. For users who are running slackware-current, the most crucial part is making sure that you end up with Slackware’s packages for ‘libinput‘ and ‘libwacom‘. Failing to do so, may render your input devices (mouse and keyboard) inoperative in X.Org.

You may want to check out the new Plasma 5 before installing. For this purpose, I have generated a new Live ISO for the PLASMA5 variant. Look for that ISO on http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/latest/ . The timestamp of the “slackware64-live-plasma5-current.iso” file should be Jan 27, 2017.

Installing or upgrading Frameworks 5, Plasma 5 and Applications

You can skip the remainder of the article if you already have my Plasma 5 installed and are familiar with the upgrade process. Otherwise, stay with me and read the rest.

As always, the accompanying README file contains full installation & upgrade instructions. Note that the packages are available in several subdirectories below “kde”, instead of directly in “kde”. This makes it easier for me to do partial updates of packages. The subdirectories are “kde4“, “kde4-extragear“, “frameworks“, “kdepim“, “plasma“, “plasma-extra“, “applications“, “applications-extra” and “telepathy“.

Upgrading to this KDE 5 is not difficult, especially if you already are running KDE 5_16.12. You will have to remove old KDE 4 packages manually. If you do not have KDE 4 installed at all, you will have to install some of Slackware’s own KDE 4 packages manually.

What I usually do is: download all the ‘ktown’ packages for the new release to a local disk. Then run “upgrade –install-new” on all these packages. Then I check the status of my Slackware-current, upgrading the stock packages where needed. The slackpkg tool is invaluable during this process of syncing the package installation status to the releases.

Note:

If you are using slackpkg+, have already moved to KDE 5_16.12 and are adventurous, you can try upgrading using the following set of commands. This should “mostly” work but you still need to check the package lists displayed by slackpkg to verify that you are upgrading all the right packages. Feel free to send me improved instructions if needed. In below example I am assuming that you tagged my KDE 5 repository with the name “ktown” in the configuration file “/etc/slackpkg/slackpkgplus.conf“):
# slackpkg update
# slackpkg install ktown (to get the newly added packages from my repo)
# slackpkg install-new (to get the new official Slackware packages that were part of my deps previously)
# slackpkg upgrade ktown (upgrade all existing packages to their latest versions)
# slackpkg upgrade-all (upgrade the remaining dependencies that were part of my repo previously)

And doublecheck that you have not inadvertently blacklisted my packages in “/etc/slackpkg/blacklist“! Check for the existence of a line in that blacklist file that looks like “[0-9]+alien” and remove it if you find it!

Recommended reading material

There have been several posts now about KDE 5 for Slackware-current. All of them contain useful information, tips and gotchas. If you want to read them, here they are: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/tag/kde5/

A note on Frameworks

The KDE Frameworks are extensions on top of Qt 5.x and their usability is not limited to the KDE Software Collection. There are other projects such as LXQT which rely (in part) on the KDE Frameworks, and if you are looking for a proper Frameworks repository which is compatible with Slackware package managers such as slackpkg+, then you can use these URL’s to assure yourself of the latest Frameworks packages for Slackware-current (indeed, this is a sub-tree of my KDE 5 repository):

The same goes for Frameworks for Slackware 14.2 (change ‘current’ to ‘14.2’ in the above URLs).

Where to get the new packages for Plasma 5

Download locations are listed below (you will find the sources in ./source/5/ and packages in /current/5/ and  /14.2/5/ subdirectories). If you are interested in the development of KDE 5 for Slackware, you can peek at my git repository too.

Using a mirror is preferred because you get more bandwidth from a mirror and it’s friendlier to the owners of the master server!

Have fun! Eric

52 Comments

  1. Eduardo

    Thank you Eric! Big changes indeed. Installed here and so far it’s running OK. Thank you again!!

  2. Gérard Monpontet

    Work here, Eric, thanks 😉

    just new sip package break hplip (hp-toolbox):

    error: /usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/sip.so: undefined symbol: PyUnicodeUCS2_DecodeLatin1

    old sip.4.18.1 package work.

  3. Gérard Monpontet

    just omit, poppler need update 0.50.0 in current now.

    ‘ninja’ you have 1.6.0 version in kde dep, and 1.7.2 version

    in your slacbuild. ;;)

  4. Gérard Monpontet

    poppler-0.50 need probably rebuild ‘kfilemetadata and okular’ 😉

  5. Fabick

    Hi Eric, I would to report what I think is a bug: after this update, Dolphin don’t start anymore without these packages :
    baloo-4.14.3-x86_64-2
    baloo-widgets-4.14.3-x86_64-2

    and now i don’t have anymore preview (thumbnails) of video. Another problem is with the launch of some files, like PDF or all the videos (mpeg, avi, etc.). Double click seems to start the associated application, but after nothing appear. For other kind of files the launcher work perfectly (documents, images, text). The corrisponding software (okular and smplayer in my case) works well if i launch from terminal. What’s happened?

  6. alienbob

    There’s a few packages that need a recompile on Slackware-current, looks like I did not catch them all:

    deps/PyQt
    deps/poppler
    deps/sip
    kde4/korundum
    kde4/pykde4
    kde4/qtruby
    frameworks/kfilemetadata5
    frameworks/sonnet

    Not sure yet about okular, we’ll see.

    Fabick, it sounds like you may not have installed the *new* packages. There’s a lot of those in applications/

  7. Gérard Monpontet

    Confirm that okular need rebuild, because it can no open the .pdf

  8. Gérard Monpontet

    confirme that PyQt4 need probably update to 4.12, version because the old slackware version doesn’t compil with new sip

  9. chrisretusn

    Upgrade to this version of ktown, checked dolphin, it acted as described by Fabick. I upgraded using slackpkg+, normally this works fine. If fact this is the first time it hasn’t.

    Since I used slackpkg+ I fell back to the README install. Dolphin now works. Not sure what was skipped with slackpkg+. I tee’d the output and everything was reinstalled, no new installs noted in the log.

    Also okular works okay here on the couple of PDF files I checked.

  10. Deny Dias

    I did the upgrade on Thursday, just after your RSS told me there was ktown activity. Besides the missing CHECKSUMS.md5 at that moment (fixed now), it was a pretty smooth deal for the ones following your readme.

    Here, Okular (okular-16.12.1-x86_64-1alien) does open any PDF and Dolphin (dolphin-16.12.1-x86_64-1alien + dolphin-plugins-16.12.1-x86_64-1alien) is strong and steady. I’ve seen no glitches at all.

    Thank you for this one, again!

  11. Gérard Monpontet

    chrisretusn

    okular not work with poppler-0.50.0 slack-current package it work with Eric package 😉

  12. Deny Dias

    Oh, one thing have changed here: the image quality on the the FullHD external monitor is significantly lower than before.

    Pixels look quite burned (very high contrast) and I had to change the external monitor scan settings because 1920×1080 was over scan. This happens only on external monitor with HDMI and FullHD. Lower resolutions aren’t affected, nor built-in notebook display.

    Looks like Martin Gräßlin is having some fun with dual heads.

  13. Fabick

    Eric, after your comment, I’ve downloaded all the Plasma5 branch with your sync command, and then I’ve reinstalled/upgraded all the packages. Removed the baloo packages from kde4 branch. Now Dolphin, okular and smplayer works like a breeze! I don’t know why, but the updating process with slackpkg+ don’t work well. Probably skip some packages.Now It’s all ok!

  14. Justin Case

    Krusader has stopped working:
    bash-4.3$ krusader
    krusader: error while loading shared libraries: libkonq.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
    bash-4.3$

  15. Gérard Monpontet

    It’s normal libkonq.so.5 is part of old konqueror kde4 version.

    konqueror is ported on kf5 now.

    probably your package krusader need update to 2.5.0 version

  16. alienbob

    I have uploaded a set of recompiled packages this morning (64bit, i.e. slackware64-current) and also uploaded the 32bit packages to be installed on slackware-current as promised.

    Let me know if there are any other packages that need attention on slackware64-current.

  17. Gérard Monpontet

    Ok, good Eric, now okular hplip etc….. work, thanks 😉

  18. Robby

    Hi Eric

    Thanks for the packages – 2 odd issues this side:

    1. ALL my file associations have disappeared ( in Dolphin )

    2. GIMP ( and I assume other GTK apps ) has lost all window framing eg. dialog boxes, in the UI, etc.

    FYI …

    I’ve not yet updated the packages as per today yet.

    Regards

  19. alienbob

    Robby if you upgraded using slackpkg/slackpkg+ try to instead follow the procedure shown in the README. You are missing package updates. No idea which ones, but my guess is that the file association issue might be related to a missed kservice update.

  20. Egor

    Thank you for 32-bit packages for current. Works perfect.

  21. Guest

    upgraded today (30/01) with slackpkg+

    Working fine. What i have left on slackpkg upgrade-all is: baloo / baloo-widgets / kactivities / kdepim-4 / kdewebdev / kde-baseapps nepomuk-core / nepomuk-widgets

    … which for what i understand should be safe to remove

  22. Gérard Monpontet

    Sorry, Eric but calligra need also recompil with poppler-0.50.0 😉

    ldd /tmp/tmp.bTtzcB/usr/lib64/qt5/plugins/calligra/formatfilters/calligra_filter_pdf2svg.so: libpoppler.so.62 => not found

  23. Ricardo J. Barberis

    Upgraded yesterday (Sunday) and apart from PEBKAC (forgot to ‘slackpkg install ktown’) everything went smoothly.
    This is on Slackware64 14.2 with your previous set of Plasma5 installed. upgraded through slackpgk/slackpkg+

    Thank you!

    PD: The link to yur git repo points to 5_16.01, the correct link seems to be http://bear.alienbase.nl/cgit/ktown/log/?h=5_17.01

    Cheers!

  24. Robby

    Hi Eric, you were of course correct : ) Downloading the updated packages and reinstalling everything solved both issues. Thank you.

  25. Carles

    Genially simple. Thanks Eric.

  26. alienbob

    FYI, some good information on using Plasma and enhancing your experiences with it, see the article by denydias on http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/two-months-with-plasma-5-and-some-impressions-4175598847/

  27. Karthik

    Hi eric,
    I have installed plasma 5.8.5 on slackware-current
    and it takes about 40-50secs to load.

  28. davide

    In my honest opinion the best strategy could be use plasma lts on slackware \”stable\” and use the regular plasma releases on skackware current

  29. DhabyX

    Hi Eric

    The package lokalize not works in current, this package still using previous version of hunspell.

    A simple symbolic link solves this.

  30. Owen

    Hi Eric,

    Once problem I’m having is, vi does not open documents, it opens up the first 10 lines, but the rest of a file. This only happens in KDE Plasma 5 in a Konsole window. If I drop out of X to CLI, it works just fine. Confused : ) Any ideas why this would be happening?

  31. alienbob

    Owen, I had this too, using vi (which is a symlink to elvis). The vim editor and all other programs are fine.
    I logged out, removed all KDE’s cache files it had for my user account and that solved it. No idea what particular piece of cached data caused this.

  32. Owen

    Hey Eric,

    That did not work for me, an interesting note – when I open a file in vi, it shows maybe the first couple lines, if I use the arrow key to scroll down, nothing happens, if I hit the enter key, it scrolls one line at a time, so I have to hit the Enter key for each line I want to see.

    That’s kinda odd, not sure what to make of that : )

  33. Ricardo J. Barberis

    I upgraded from Slackware’s KDE 4 to your Plasma 5 packages only recently (5_16.11) but I also saw konsole acting weird.

    Never noticed vi because I don’t use it 🙂 but it happens to me too.

    The wierdness I experience in konsole is for example I can’t paste the X selection with Ctrl+Shift+Insert (it prints 6~, middle clicking works, though), or clipboard selection with Shift+Insert (that prints 2~).
    Neither can I use Ctrl+L to clear the terminal.

    Yakuake (which is what I use most of the time) works fine, but I believe it uses konsolepart from KDE 4.

  34. Richard Herbert

    Lots of Slackware current updates today, including an upgrade to libevent-2.1.8 . I created a symlink in /ursr/lib64 from libevent-2.0.so.5 to libevent-2.1.so.6.0.2 to satisfy Kmail.

  35. Gérard Monpontet

    yes qt5 need rebuild on the new libevent slack-current package.

    i use qt5-5.8, here without problem, i have rebuild and updated, frameworks, applications, kdepim, plasma, and recompiled all on qt5-5.8, without problem i have also
    updated all deps:

    cfitsio-3.410
    libinput-1.6.1
    libxkbcommon-0.7
    lmdb-0.9.19
    ninja-1.7.2
    OpenAL-1.17.2
    phonon-4.9.1
    wayland-1.12.0
    qt5-webkit-5.8.0

    without problem 😉

  36. Gérard Monpontet

    i have build today the new frameworks (5.9.1) with qt5-5.8

    no problem.

    for build qt5-5.8 i have used the SBO SlackBuild, because It does not require uninstall qt5.

  37. Gérard Monpontet

    Sorry it’s frameworks (5.31.0) 😉

  38. alienbob

    Gérard, I will not switch to Qt 5.8 as long as the KWin developer is having issues with it even though it is only affecting his Wayland suppot: https://plus.google.com/+MartinGr%C3%A4%C3%9Flin/posts/N3Vjvce3z5C

  39. Gérard Monpontet

    No, problem Eric, i agree, I do not think that Pat would want to integrate wayland into Slackware now, but maybe I’m wrong 😉

  40. alienbob

    No, he won’t integrate Wayland. And it looks to be a long while before he integrates Plasma 5. So I am stuck with providing you with updates. And the next updates will not be targeting Slackware 14.2 – due to the updates in -current, I will be focusing on getting back in line with the new/updated libraries.
    And perhaps I should provide a new set of xorg-server/mesa/qt5 that have been recompiled against wayland to see if we can finally get a working Wayland session in Slackware’s Plasma 5. I am going to take that newer wayland source tarball at least, and put it in the next batch.

  41. Matt

    Since I upgraded to these packages, I can no longer run/compile kymymoney. It keeps looking for /usr/lib64/libgpgme++-pthread.so That existed with the previous versions, but not this one. Is there a relatively straightforward way to fix that?

  42. Matt

    Just tried to compile kmymoney from scratch and this time cmake dies with this related error:

    Could NOT find QGpgme (missing: _QGPGME_EXTRA_LIBRARY)

  43. Gérard Monpontet

    Ok , Eric 😉

  44. Gérard Monpontet

    Matt, try this patch:

    https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/tree/trunk?h=packages/kmymoney

    ‘kmymoney-gpgme-1.7.patch’

  45. Matt

    Thanks for the idea, Gérard. Now it will make it through the cmake .. step. Unfortunately when I try to compile, it almost immediately begins throwing errors like:

    In file included from /usr/include/gpgme++/context.h:30:0,
    from /usr/src/kmymoney-4.8.0/libkgpgfile/kgpgfile.cpp:44:
    /usr/include/gpgme++/verificationresult.h:77:10: error: ‘shared_ptr’ in namespace ‘std’ does not name a template type
    std::shared_ptr d;

    And many more like it. Apparently I’m going to have to take this up with kmymoney. Worst case scenario I have to reinstall the standard 14.2 packages. I need kmymoney.

  46. Matt

    In case anyone looks for a similar answer, I had to pull alkimia and kmymoney from git. Hopefully no nasty bugs have been introduced. It works now.

  47. Karthik

    Hi Eric,
    Sorry for reposting the same problem. I have installed
    Kde plasma 5.8.5 on slackware-current and it takes more than 1min to load the desktop from startx command. My system configuration is Intel core i5 , 8Gb RAM with Intel HD graphics 5500. I can post xsession-errors if you want.

    Thank you.

  48. alienbob

    Karthik a minute is quite long. Have you tried creating a fresh user account and testing the startup time of Plasma5 using the new account? Perhaps it’s something in your user’s cache or configuration.
    If you want to share your xsession-errors please use a pastebin facility for that and share its URL, do not copy/paste into this comments section please.

  49. karthik

    Thanks for replying.
    Creating a new user account did not help so i am posting
    the pastebin URL1 http://pastebin.com/RC7WqcnF .
    And i will paste xsession-errors from startx->logout to init3 and again startx URL2 http://pastebin.com/9Sxh0tGB .
    Logging out and re-logging in is fast. But only from fresh boot it is damn slow. And I tried KDE NEON today and it is fast.

  50. Gérard Monpontet

    Try to install or reinstall the ‘kservice’ package.

  51. Gérard Monpontet

    just cosmetic, i have compiled the new ‘qca-2.1.3’

    in the Slackbuild the ‘-DMAN_INSTALL_DIR=/usr/man \’ option is probably redundant 😉

  52. Karthik

    I tried removing and reinstalling the package kservice but no change. I doubt there is some problem with ksycoca.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

© 2024 Alien Pastures

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑