My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Reverse birthday present: KDE-5_19.05

After a three-month hiatus, I have new Plasma5 packages for you. I just uploaded “KDE-5_19.05” to the ‘ktown‘ repository. It’s filled to the brim with new stuff.
Hopefully not many of you will be disappointed by the fact that this is a 64bit-only release. I have a severely limited capacity unfortunately due to health issues. But, today is my birthday and I wanted to get this out as a ‘reverse present’ to all of you 🙂 The 32bit packages will eventually follow, but I am afraid I will no longer be able to manage a monthly update cycle.

As always, these packages are meant to be installed on a full installation of Slackware-current which has had its KDE4 removed first. These packages will not work on Slackware 14.2.

What’s new for this May 2019 release

My May 2019 release of KDE Plasma5 for Slackware contains the KDE Frameworks 5.58.0, Plasma 5.15.5 and Applications 19.04.1. All this on top of Qt 5.12.3.

Deps:
Because of the three-month hiatus between releases, there are quite some updates to be reported. The ‘qt5’ package went up to 5.12.3 and with it come the latest versions of ‘libxkbcommon’, ‘qt5-speech’, ‘qca-qt5′, gpgme’, ‘sip’ and ‘PyQt5’. The ‘qt5-webkit’ package was recompiled against the new ‘qt5’.

The ‘cryfs’ package and its dependency ‘cryptopp’ were updated to their most recent releases.
To support the latest version of kdenlive, a new package ‘rttr’ was added and the ‘mlt’ package was updated.

Frameworks:
Frameworks 5.58.0 is an incremental stability release, see: https://www.kde.org/announcements/kde-frameworks-5.58.0.php

Plasma:
Plasma 5.15.5 is the final iteration before we move on to 5.16. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.15.5.php

Plasma-extra:
I updated to the latest release of ‘kdeconnect-framework’. If you use a smartphone then this is a must-have application to integrate phone and laptop into one seamless experience.

Applications;
Applications 19.04.1 is a stability and bugfix update for the 19.04 cycle, but since I never packaged the .0 release, this is actually the first ‘ktown for Slackware‘ release with the new Applications in which we find a KDEnlive with 60% of its code re-written from scratch. Other main applications like Okular, Dolphin, Kate have been enhanced significantly. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-applications-19.04.1.php and if you want more detail about the 19.04 cycle you should also read https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-applications-19.04.0.php .

Applications-extra:
Many upgrades here: ‘alkimia’, ‘digikam’, ‘falkon’, ‘kdevelop’, ‘kdev-php’, ‘kdev-python’, ‘kmymoney’, ‘kpmcore’, ‘krita’, ‘kstars’, ‘okteta’ and ‘partitionmanager’.

Where to get it

Download the KDE-5_19.05 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 am not yet able to generate a new ISO of the Slackware Live Plasma5 Edition, because I am in the midst of an update to the liveslak scripts. When I find time to finish or revert that update, the ISO will follow soon after. When I upload a new Plasma5 Live ISO you will find it in https://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/

And let me know – in the comments section below – whether you are actually using my 32bit Plasma5 packages!

Have fun! Eric

86 Comments

  1. Ben

    Take it easy Alien and happy birthday!

  2. cwizardone

    Happy Birthday!
    Thirty-nine again this year?
    🙂

  3. alienbob

    cwizardone… 19 additional. Grew old fast apparently 😉

  4. Oleg

    Happy Birthday!
    Thanks a lot!

  5. alienbob

    Found the first DOA… cryfs expects a shared lib that apparently got built but not installed into the package.

  6. Michael Langdon

    Happy Birthday!
    and thanks!

  7. Séb

    Happy birthday !
    Thank you for all your work ; take care of yourself !

  8. Ponce

    best wishes, Eric!

  9. Deny Dias

    All the best to you, Eric! I wish you bright days ahead with the health matters.

  10. alienbob

    New ‘cryfs’ package coming soon.
    Note: on opening your Plasma Vaults for the first time with the new cryfs installed, this will trigger a popup message where you’ll have to agree to (irreversibly) updating your Vaults. Afterwards, your Vaults can no longer be opened using cryfs < 0.10. Just so you know.

  11. Olga Zhurbyn

    Happy birthday! Get well soon.

  12. alienbob

    Thanks again Olga.
    Do you think your musical preferences are still compatible with mine by the way? New styles and genres were added but the good old ones are still here.
    This is what I listen to right now: https://bear.alienbase.nl/playlist/

  13. Gerardo Zamudio

    Happy birthday, Eric! I hope you get well soon and thank you for your hard work.

  14. Mark Foley

    Happy Birthday! Thanks for all your hard work.

  15. LoneStar

    Thank you a lot Eric, and happy birthday!
    wishing you all the best and more!

  16. Mike Booth

    Thanks for all your efforts Eric and get well soon

    I hope I’m not the only one but I still use you 32 bit PLASMA5 packages

    Best from down under

    Mike

  17. Eduardo

    Thank you Eric and happy birthday! Many blessings, long live and prosperity to you; but most of all, happiness! Thanks for this “reverse present”. I’ll download and test it as soon as possible.

  18. Ricardo

    Happy Birthday!
    Thank you for this lovely present, I’ll probably open it tomorrow night 🙂

    And get well soon!

    Best wishes,
    Ricardo

  19. Geremia

    I upgraded Okular to see if I’ll run libicui issues again, and, yes, it seems Okular still links to libicui 63 instead of 64.2. Why is this?

  20. Regnad Kcin

    Works well. No glitches observed after a few hours. I don’t use 32-bit at all anymore and have abandoned the -multilib system also since it is another maintenance item and I so seldom need it. I do no gaming and all the stuff I do is 64-bit compatible. The last 32-bit thing I used was Adobe Acrobat, which I dont need. Thanks much.

  21. Janis

    Happy birthday and let God saves you!

  22. Gustavo Schenkel

    Happy Birthday Eric!
    I was wandering how would you do about that compile error in Kwin, I hope I could thought what you did, because in fact I found the problem about isystem but didn’t knew where to apply it, than I removed the plugin from the build. Was a very nice experience and like I said to a friend, “only when you involve yourself in a project you can understand how important and tough is the work from others”. Again, happy birthday, and I wish you a healthy recovery!

  23. Regnad Kcin

    I used kde4 a little while a few days ago. KDE5 is indeed functionally better and good enough to use every day and is superior to KDE4. The goofy transparency problem with KDE5 menus is fixed. Everything seems to work. I do miss the theming that KDE4 had but that is not enough to attract me back to KDE4. Plasma5 is my daily use desktop.

  24. Radical Dreamer

    Thank you! Happy Birthday Eric! 😀

  25. Helios

    Thank you very much for this new version.

    I found that in the package rttr-0.9.6-x86_64 the library is in the directory “/=lib64” instead of “/lib64”

  26. Pete Christy

    Happy Birthday, and many thanks for all your hard work! It is much appreciated!

    All 64-bit here, but kdenlive is failing to open with an “error while loading shared libraries: librttr_core.so.0.9.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory”

    Is this because my mirror hasn’t completely caught up yet, or have I missed something?

    Cheers,


    Pete

  27. Pete Christy

    Oops! Just spotted Helios post on the same subject!

  28. alienbob

    Geremia, something must be wrong on your computer. Because here, okular links to the correct libraries:
    $ ldd /usr/bin/okular |grep icu
    libicui18n.so.64 => /usr/lib64/libicui18n.so.64 (0x00007f1fa5bcd000)
    libicuuc.so.64 => /usr/lib64/libicuuc.so.64 (0x00007f1fa59e7000)
    libicudata.so.64 => /usr/lib64/libicudata.so.64 (0x00007f1fa3fa3000)

  29. alienbob

    Pete, Helios, indeed something went wrong there. I wlll look into that rttr package and fix the library location.

  30. alienbob

    Gustavo, in case you had not yet found it, this is how I made kwin compile. Nasty hack because I could not solve it elegantly:
    https://git.slackware.nl/ktown/commit/?id=243d25be765ad51f732b28c0d8283005ae08ccb9

  31. Joonas

    Happy birthday!

  32. Gérard Monpontet

    Happy birthday and thanks, Eric 😉

  33. Agur

    Best wishes && thanks

  34. toodr

    Cheers Eric ! Relax. All this is not DEAD important.
    Happy birthday !
    Family and health are the really important things in life.
    I’m greatfull for what you do !

  35. Eduardo

    Hi Eric, this is just to report that your “reverse birthday present” works as intended so far, without any problem. Thank you!

  36. Jen

    Happy 28th birthday! 😉

  37. Geremia

    alienbob, Having now done the full ktown upgrade, why does Okular now link to libicu 64? Regardless, it works. thanks

  38. Geremia

    This upgrade sped things up! Login is quicker, too.
    thanks again

  39. alienbob

    Geremia, yes i observed a faster login as well.
    As to why your Okular now correctly links to icu4c 64.2, I can only guess that you had some old version of a library still on your system which is being used by Okular and which caused it to display an indirect dependency on icu4c 63… glad it got resolved after you fixed your packages.

  40. Regnad Kcin

    partitionmanager fails to collect any disk information. gparted works just fine. I submitted a bug report. Bug 407414 – Partition Manager shows no disk information

  41. alienbob

    For those who want to go there directly, Regnad’s bug report is here: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=407414
    I see the same behaviour here.

  42. alienbob

    It is a packaging bug indeed.
    The three files mentioned by the developer:
    /etc/dbus-1/system.d/org.kde.kpmcore.applicationinterface.conf
    /etc/dbus-1/system.d/org.kde.kpmcore.externalcommand.conf
    /etc/dbus-1/system.d/org.kde.kpmcore.helperinterface.conf
    …were actually installed to /etc/kde/dbus-1/system.d/ instead.

    After I moved the files manually to the correct location /etc/dbus-1/system.d/ and ran:
    # /etc/rc.d/rc/udev reload ; /etc/rc.d/rc.messagebus reload
    … then it works. When you start partitionmanager it will popup an admin credentials window and after entering the sudo password for root, the application will scan devices and correctly show them.
    I will fix that package.
    Thanks Regnad for checking this , and for reporting it to KDE, because that is how I could get the relevant feedback on where to look.

  43. alienbob

    The ‘ktown’ repository has been updated with a working kpmcore package.

  44. Regnad Kcin

    Indeed fixes partition manager and reveals a nice tool that usefully displays all of the devices together in a menu block. Thanks.

  45. TheTKS

    Happy birthday, Eric! Get well soon, and thanks for all you do. TKS

  46. Brad Reed

    Happy belated Birthday, and I hope your health improves quickly! Get well soon!

  47. Helios

    It seems that the package kdevelop-pg-qt-2.1.0-x86_64 lies in kde/ instead of kde/kde/applications-extra/

  48. alienbob

    Helios… my bad. I will move it to the proper location.

  49. Alex

    Hi Eric,
    first of all, though a bit late: HAPPY BIRTHDAY and all the best for your health. Get well soon!
    Second, of course: Thanks a lot for this effort, again, despite the difficult situation that you are in.
    Take good care of yourself!

  50. Deny Dias

    I was messing with partitionmanager but it complains about a missing lvm2, although I have lvm2-2.02.177-x86_64-1 package installed. Can someone with a lvm partitioned storage confirm this issue? Is it upstream or slackware specific?

  51. alienbob

    My laptop has LUKS encrypted disk and inside I have several LVM logical volumes. Partition Manager works here and correctly shows the LUKS partitions and the LV’s inside.
    I also have lvm2-2.02.177-x86_64-1 installed (latest slackware-current).

  52. Ricardo

    My laptop also has a LUKS encrypted disk with 3 LVM logical volumes and partitionmanager shows them correctly.

  53. Dick Burggraaff

    In January last you indicated qt5-webkit as a dependency for vlc. I ldd’ed the vlc on your last plasma ISO and found no reference to qt5-webkit. Actually I ldd’ed (almost) the whole ISO and found no reference at all.
    I then removepkg’ed the qt5-webkit package and tested vlc: OK.
    Regards, Dick
    😀

  54. samw41l

    Happy Birthday!

    Thanks for the kde plasma 5 update. Just a request, how about adding latte-dock to plasma-extra?

  55. alienbob

    Hi Widya

    That looks like a nice docking application. I’ll have to think about this.

  56. acidtripper

    Hi Eric,

    Late happy birthday!, Makes me happy to know you have 25 years 😉 hehe.

    As always thanks for your serious work! always on top making slackware a 21st Century distro!.
    Testing it, working great in my setup. Still waiting for it’s inclusion on -current branch!. let’s hope it will happen in the near future.

    Best wishes from Argentina.

  57. samw41l

    Thank you for adding latte-dock.

    I’ve been using it for several month with additional widgets: applet-window-appmenu, applet-window-buttons, and window-title. I can get almost fullscreen view of app window with it’s menu, window title and window buttons (min,max,close) in the latte panel on top, and nice app dock at the bottom of the screen.

  58. LoneStar

    I have been using latte-dock for a while now, it’s nice indeed

  59. Hugo Carvalho

    Congratulations happy Birthday Eric(sorry to be late) and get well soon !! We need you AlienBOB 😉
    I do not know if you like football or if you cheer for Ajax but too bad Ajax did not make it to the champion league final…

    Take care and thanks for all your work

  60. Deny Dias

    current/latest/kde/plasma-extra/latte-dock: Added.

    Nice! Thanks for this!

    Re. partitionmanager and lvm2: the message says I’m not able to modify lvm partitions, so I can see the lvm partitions in the physical drive, but I can’t modify it in any way as the context menu options are disabled. I just disabled the message for now. As for the volume groups exposed by lvm, I can see them as well as the partitions within.

  61. alienbob

    Deny, thanks for the details about your partitionmanager issue.
    Once I am behind my laptop again I will have a look at how it works here, perhaps a permissions issue.

  62. Owen Greaves

    Hi Eric,

    As you know I’ve shared that Plasma 5 runs dog slow, very sluggish on my production Laptop – still don’t know why, but I narrowed it down to my profile. I created a new account (adduser) then fired up Plasma 5 – runs really fast and snappy on that account. On the original account I deleted the .cache folder, no difference, I’m considering nuking the .kde folder, but I’m not sure if it gets rebuilt. Anyway, it is running as it should in a different user account, but not my original account – that one doesn’t get reformatted when re-installing – the /Home folder structure is on it’s own partition, I usually leave it as is when I install -current. Common denominators : ) Thanks for your work, and hopefully your health returns to it’s norm. Blessings.

    Owen

  63. alienbob

    Owen, if your session is sluggish, can you find a running process which is causing it? Or is it a graphical setting you changed and forgot about? Compare what your and the new account have configured in “System Settings > Display and Monitor > Compositor” for instance.

  64. alienbob

    Deny, in partitionmanager I have one Volume Group (cryptvg) which contains two Logical Volumes (‘root’ is formatted with ext4 and ‘swap’ is formatted as swap or course).
    Both have some menu items that are not greyed out. The ‘swap’ LV has an active menu “deactivate swap” and the context menu for the root partition shows the active menus “unmount” and “resize/move”. I can resize or move the LV because I have some un-allocated space in my VG.

  65. Owen Greaves

    Hey Eric,

    The settings are identical, if I set things to be instant, in my original account, it still hangs but not as long. On the second account I created, it runs faster and better.

    I have not checked processes yet, that’s next on the to do list : ) I’ll let you know what I find : )

    Owen

  66. Owen Greaves

    Howdy again, there is a common denominator in TOP:

    baloo_file_extractor & Chromium that are using CPU & Memory at the moment – baloo upto 58+% Memory and 8+% CPU – and growing as it sits.

    Not sure what to make of that : )

    Owen

  67. Owen Greaves

    Also, Chromium seems to be a bit of a HOG – put those two together and what do you get? Sluggish : )

    Owen

  68. Bob Funk

    I have had baloo cause problems with slowing down the system after migrating my home folder to a new install. You could try deleting baloo’s cache (~/.local/share/baloo) which will be rebuilt the next time you restart baloo. The initial indexing when baloo rebuilds may be slow at first but it should ease back if its working properly (mine’s currently sitting at 0% cpu /0.6% memory)

  69. Owen Greaves

    Bob,

    That helped for sure, but now I have two instances of baloo – one called baloo file (using 100% CPU) and baloo_file_extractor using 50% Memory – baloo file went away after I closed the snapshot tool : ) I took a pic, but can’t post it here.

  70. Bob Funk

    The baloo_file and baloorunner processes are both running on my system, although at minimal resource usage. They should throttle down after completing their indexing. You can try “balooctl status” to see if its completed the index yet. Mine is sitting at 12961/12961 files so it is completed.

    Another option is to disable baloo temporarily with “balooctl stop” and “balooctl disable”, or permanently by editing .config/baloofilerc and setting indexing-enabled=false.

  71. Deny Dias

    Eric, thanks for your attention on this.

    I have the very same layout as you, including volume labels. That’s because I followed your wonderful README_CRYPT.TXT, which I thank you. This makes it easy to debug as our setup is similar.

    That being said, my LUKS+LVM setup is:

    $ lsblk /dev/sdb
    NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
    sdb 8:16 0 238,5G 0 disk
    ??sdb1 8:17 0 100M 0 part /boot
    ??sdb2 8:18 0 238,4G 0 part
    ??lukssdb2 253:0 0 238,4G 0 crypt
    ??cryptvg-root 253:1 0 222G 0 lvm /
    ??cryptvg-swap 253:2 0 16,4G 0 lvm [SWAP]

    partitionmanager can operate at sdb (storage hardware), sdb1, sdb2 (low level partitions), cryptvg-root and cryptvg-swap (logical volumes) as they all have options like “resize/move” in their context menus. On the other hand, /dev/mapper/lukssdb2 (lvm2 physical volume) is the one mounted as cryptvg (volume group) and that has no options in the context menu.

    Do you have the same behavior there? The warning message contains a ‘don’t show again’ checkbox. I’ve ticked it and I see no message upon partitionmanager start anymore, yet I can’t perform any actions to the lvm2 physical volume.

  72. Owen Greaves

    Hi,

    Disabling Baloo makes my system performance much, much better….when I checked the status it was Idle, but yet in Top it shows it’s running and consuming CPU & Memory at what I consider high levels….once it’s turned off, there’s no process, and the system runs like it should in this profile I’m logged into. It has to be something in this profile that’s causing issues, as it doesn’t bog performance like this in other profiles I log into. Anyway, that’s my findings.

    Owen

  73. alienbob

    Owen, the baloo_file_extractor will run at 100% CPU and consume a lot of your RAM while it is initially indexing your file content. With “balooctl status” you will see how many files are candidate for indexing and how many of those have already been indexed. That will give you an idea of how long this initial indexing will take.
    Once the initial indexing is complete, baloo_file_extractor will stop and baloo_file will only be active when files change on your system.
    If you don’t need content indexing you can disable that in “System Settings > Search” and un-check “Also index file content”. That will stop baloo_file_extractor from being active completely.

    Upgrading from one KDE release to another will sometimes introduce incompatibilities. I have found that sometimes it is needed to delete the Baloo index (like Bob also said) and let baloo re-index from scratch. That will normalize its runtime behaviour.

  74. 3DPACTE

    … error while loading shared libraries: libGL.so.1

  75. alienbob

    Well 3DPACTE – despite the lack of detail, I can still safely say that you forgot to install the new libglvnd package which was added on May 11.

  76. Eduardo

    Hi Eric, just wanted to say thank you for Latte Dock. It’s really awesome. Hope you have a great birthday.

  77. Owen Greaves

    Eric & Bob,

    Deleting the Baloo Index did the trick, now I’m cooking with cheese.

    Thanks for your direction and input once again.

    Owen

  78. olga

    Rebuke The Pipe! Can not check your playlist suggestion, email?

  79. alienbob

    Hi Olga, you will probably be pestered by a Invalid/unknown Certificate error message in your browser when visiting any page on https://bear.alienbase.nl/ ?
    You can follow these instructions to add the missing certificate to your browser: http://wiki.cacert.org/FAQ/BrowserClients and that will fix the certificate error. It is unfortunate that Google, Mozilla and Microsoft refuse to add these CACert certificates to their browsers so you’ll have to do this manually. It is a one-time setup.
    I’ll also send you an email.

  80. alienbob

    Owen, that’s great!
    Baloo (like Akonadi) is often perceived as a resource hog and people are quick to completely disable it. But with a bit of care, it stays out of your hair and will prove to be useful once you start to see file names and content references when you start typing in the Plasma “run” dialog, in the open menu or simply when looking at the desktop background.

  81. samw41l

    Nice catch Owen. Thanks for the tips.

    I’m deleting old baloo index and now baloo finished indexing all of my files just under 5 minutes.

  82. psnarf

    KDE5 is awesome. It just works! It must have taken a heroic effort to compile and package all of the files.

    PS. Running Slackware Current on a laptop with a Ryzen 5 2500U processor. Everything just works!

    Hoping this finds you fully recuperated,
    Happy Birthday!
    and thanks!
    -Hank Pfeil
    Slackware has come a long way since my
    Slackware-1.2.0 box of floppies.

  83. Mike Booth

    Thanks a million for the 32 bit KF5.downloading now.

    Mike

  84. Henry Pfeil

    Say, you wouldn’t happen to be working on Plasma 5.16, would ya? Is there a compelling reason to ignore the mantra: if it works, don’t fix it? We don’t use discover, pretty lookee-here graphics is nice, but not compelling, the current notification system works. I’m not convinced it’s worth the time and work of building new Plasma packages when more important projects present themselves.

  85. alienbob

    Hi Henry,
    A new set of Plasma5 packages will be available shortly, and they will contain Plasma 5.16.0.

  86. Henry Pfeil

    Private, not for publication.
    I think it was Johnathan Swift who prefixed his missives with:
    “Pray! burn this as soon as it falls into your hands.”
    You may want to delete

    https://alien.slackbook.org/slackware/ktown/current/latest/x86_64/PACKAGES.TXT

    The gzipped version of the same file exists in the same folder.

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