My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

September Edition of Plasma5 for Slackware

After a summer hiatus during which I only released new packages for KDE Frameworks because they addressed a serious security hole, I am now back in business and just released KDE-5_19.09 for Slackware-current.

The packages for KDE-5_19.09 are available for download from my ‘ktown‘ repository. 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. On my laptop with slackware64-current, this new release of Plasma5 runs smooth.

What’s new in the September 2019 release

This month’s KDE Plasma5 for Slackware contains the KDE Frameworks 5.62.0, Plasma 5.16.5 and Applications 19.08.1. All this on top of Qt 5.13.1.

Deps:
The ‘qt5’ and ‘qt5-speech’ packages have been updated to 5.13.1, ‘PyQt5’ was updated to 5.13.0 and there’s a new official ‘polkit-qt5-1’ version too: 0.113.0.
The ‘cryfs’ package was updated to 0.10.2 (the previous version stopped working anyway, after Slackware’s boost upgrade).
The updates to the phonon layer are accompanied by a removal of Qt4 support – phonon is now Qt5-only. Package updates are ‘phonon’ 4.11.0, ‘phonon-gstreamer’ 4.10.0, ‘phonon-vlc’ 0.11.0.
The telepathy deps have two updates: ‘libsignon-glib’ and ‘telepathy-acccounts-signon’. Tell me if you actually use KDE Telepathy! I think it is a heroic but doomed effort to create a voice & video capable IM framework for KDE – it does not work for me and never worked properly for me. I am thinking of completely removing it from my ‘ktown’ package set. Share your thoughts.

Frameworks:
Frameworks 5.62.0 is a regular update release. See: https://www.kde.org/announcements/kde-frameworks-5.62.0.php

Plasma:
Plasma 5.16.5 is the last bug-fix release in the 5.16 cycle, meant to increase the stability of the Desktop part of KDE. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.16.5.php.
Note that the ‘breeze’ and ‘oxygen’ themes in this release of Plasma have removed their support for Qt4 (finally) which means if you still use Qt4/kdelibs based applications, they could start looking weird now. Let me know if I should add a compatibility package containing older breeze/oxygen theme libraries.

Plasma-extra;
I updated ‘kdeconnect-framework’, ‘latte-dock’ and ‘wacomtablet’.

Applications;
Applications 19.08.1 is a stability and bug-fix update for the 19.08 cycle.
Note that due to the summer holidays, I never released the .0 release of this new 19.08 series. For more information, see https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-applications-19.08.1.php and in particular the release notes for 19.08.0 are full of relevant info.

Applications-extra:
I upgraded ‘krita’, ‘krusader’ and ‘kstars’ to their latest releases.

Where to get it

Download the KDE-5_19.09 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.

Development of Plasma5 is tracked in git: https://git.slackware.nl/ktown/ .
A new Plasma5 Live ISO has been uploaded and you will find it at https://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/ (rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/latest/)

Have fun! Eric

91 Comments

  1. Gavin

    Unable to download the ISO file due to a certificate error on Windows 10: “curl: (77) schannel: next InitializeSecurityContext failed: SEC_E_UNTRUSTED_ROOT (0x80090325) – The certificate chain was issued by an authority that is not trusted.”

    • alienbob

      Gavin, you have to install the CACert root certificate as mentioned on the front page of my server https://slackware.nl/ if you want to get rid of those errors.

  2. Francisco

    Hi Eric.
    Thanks for this update… I updated my liveslak using slackpkg… It took lot of time, but it seems some files could not be downloaded. Finally I did not find where slackpkg LOG file is… I restarted my laptop and KDE booted ok. I repeated slackpkg upgrade-all hoping It completes upgrade process but it seems it did not found packages to upgrade.

    Is there any way to check slackpkg “long update” log file result? How to make sure all upgrade process ended ok?.

    Finally, running kde akregator, I got: “akregator: error while loading shared libraries: libqrencode.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory”

    Any hint? that file is not installed on disk.

    Thanks for your hard work with liveslak/slackware. I really appreciate your big effort.

    Regards, Francisco.

    • alienbob

      You do seem to have an incomplete update on your hands. The “ibqrencode.so.4” error is caused by an outdated qrencode package. I updated that one and a lot of others early august.

      If your slackpkg found a lot of packages missing, then you may have forgotten to run “slackpkg update” before starting “slackpkg upgrade-all”.
      There is no log file for slackpkg’s activities so your best option at this moment is to re-install all packages on top of your existing installation, and do not forget recently added packages as well (in Slackware terms: “upgradepkg –install-new –reinstall”).

      • Francisco

        Hi Eric, thanks for your response.
        This is what I have done:
        1. upgradepkg –install-new –reinstall seems to find everything ok (no messages).
        2. Regarding qrencode, the offending file: ibqrencode.so.4 belongs to qrencode version 4.x. according to http://www.slakfinder.org, your repo seems to have only 3.x versions.
        3. I uninstalled current 3.x version and installed manually (compiling and then installing from /tmp) qrencode (4.0.2) from slackbuilds repository.
        4. Running akregator, blames about “Unable to load storage backend plugin “metakit””.
        5. googling about this I found in slackbuils repository:
        Mk4tcl – Tcl binding for Metakit embedded database library, so I compiled it and installed it from /tmp.
        6. Running akgregator from console I get:
        “Cannot mix incompatible Qt library (version 0x50d01) with this library (version 0x50d00)
        KCrash: crashing… crashRecursionCounter = 2”

        I am learning and trying to fix this issues as a result of an upgrade.

        Thanks in advance for your hints, help and guidance.

        Francisco

        • Ricardo

          Francisco:

          1- This (upgradepkg –install-new –reinstall) will only work if you download the packages locally and run that command on them (e.g. ‘upgradepkg –install-new –reinstall $(find /var/cache/packages/ -name *.t?z)’ if you still have packages in there).

          2- qrencode 4.0.2 is in ktown repo: https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/5/x86_64/deps/

          • Francisco

            Thanks Ricardo for your help.

            1. /var/cache/packages does not have packages on it. cause?
            2. I assume I can download again official packages from official/eric repos to that dir? and then reinstall?

            Please advice. Thanks again.

          • Ricardo

            Hi Francisco,

            1. I believed slackpkg did not by default delete the packages from /var/cache/packages, maybe I was mistaken :/

            2. Yes, you can download the packages to /var/cache/packages (or any other location you prefer) and reinstall as instructed by Eric.

  3. Helios

    Thank you very much.
    I see a problem with the new phonon-4.11.0, which does not contain anymore libphonon.so.4, which seems to be needed, for example in /usr/lib64/libkhtml.so.5.14.38 from kdelibs-4.14.38.

    • alienbob

      The new phonon version dropped the Qt4 support. That used to be provided by libphonon.so.4.
      Do you have any application which still uses the Qt4-based kdelibs and for which a Qt5 -based version is not available?

      • Helios

        After such a big update, I “ldd” everything to see if there is any “not found” library, to see what I need to recompile.
        I think that I don’t need Qt4-based kdelibs. I removed kdelibs-4.14.38 and found no problems. It seems that the package “flashplayer” has a kde4 section, but it seems to work without kdelibs-4.14.38.
        But I found also a “libgsl.so.23 => not found” in /usr/lib64/qt5/plugins/calligrasheets/extensions/sheetssolver.so

        • Ricardo

          Helios, I got several “libgsl.so.23 => not found” in my system but I haven’t upgraded yet. I do have libgsl.so.25 so I’ll check back after to see if I get less matches for .23.

          I also got several “libakonadiprotocolinternals.so.1 => not found” from libraries in kdepimlibs-4.14.10, I don’t know why I hadn’t remove it already…

      • Ricardo

        I do have at least a couple of Qt4/kdelibs based apps on my machine that I use daily:

        – yakuake-2.9.9 from SBo (because I can’t make konsole work correctly on my system, there must be some old config giving me issues)
        – basket-2.11b from SBo (there’s an oldish beta fo KF5 but otherwise development seems to have stopped)

        I’ll make a backup of phonon-4.10.2 before upgrading, just in case.

        • alienbob

          Ricardo, I have pushed two new packages into the ‘ktown’ repository that should fix this:
          These are ‘phonon-qt4’ and ‘phonon-qt4-gstreamer’. They should re-enable sound for older kdelibs/qt4 based applications.

          By the way, why don’t you use the Qt5/KF5 based new version of yakuake? My kde.SlackBuild script already has the support for it. All you need to do is drop the source tarball somewhere below kde/src/ and run:
          # ./kde.SlackBuild applications-extra:yakuake
          … to get the package built in /tmp/kde_build/

          • Ricardo

            Thanks Eric, I just upgraded and saw your phonon-qt4 packages (I always do an install-newjust in case), working fine so far.

            About yakuake, I actually compiled 3.0.4 several months ago with a slackbuild based on the SBo one. I’ll check yours to see if ithere’s any difference.

            My main problem is that, AFAIU, yakuake uses konsole/konsolepart underneath, and for me konsole from KDE5 doesn’t work the same as konsole from KDE4.

            For example, in the new konsole I can’t paste from X clipboard with Ctrl+Shift+KB_0 (unless I “unlock” the numeric keypad). My muscle memory alternates between Ctrl+Shift+KB_0 and Ctrl+Shift+Insert, it’s annoying when one of those doesn’t work 🙂

            Another thing that didn’t work (but I just checked and now does, yay!) was Ctrl+PgUp/Ctrl+PgDown inside mcedit to go resp, to the start/end of the screen (not the whole document).

            Sorry for the rant, I’ll make sure to give the new yakuake another chance 🙂

          • ArTourter

            Hi Eric, Thanks for all the hard work.

            Just a question, is there any reason why you haven’t included a yakuake package in your release? It is now part of the Applications bundle (no longer an extra).

          • Ricardo

            Hi again Eric,

            Well, yur script is too complicated for me to understand in a hurry and I didn’t want to download everything via rsync just to compile one tiny package 🙂

            So instead I hunted down yakuake’s source tarball and dusted of my old slackbuild.

            I had to tweak it pretty heavily, as the new version didn’t import my old shortcuts (I use Alt+1..0 to quickly switch between yakuake’s tabs and disable the shortcut to close tabs, as I sometimes accidentally close them) and some other settings also got lost, but so far I’m liking it.

            There’s still a couple of things I miss fomr the Qt4-based yakuake but I guess I’ll get used to no having them 🙂

            And maybe this weekend with more time in my hands, I’ll try your build scripts just for kicks.

            Cheers!

          • alienbob

            Indeed yakuake is now part of Applications… like with kipi-plugins I had missed that this was added to Applications 19.08.

          • alienbob

            I have added a yakuake package to the ‘ktown’ repository in the meantime.

          • ArTourter

            Thanks Eric,
            Much appreciated.

      • Ricardo

        Oh, and I don’t use telepathy so I won’t miss it if you stop providing it 🙂

  4. Regnad Kcin

    I dont find any problems at all so far.
    I have never tried the telepathy program.
    Thanks for the wacom tablet support. It continues to improve.
    Kdeconnect is quite useful.

    • Regnad Kcin

      Re: the notes above about yakuake. I had never heard of this drop-down terminal before. Actually it is very useful for someone like me who uses the command line quite a bit but likes the ease that the GUI brings. It installs easily and runs fine.

      • Ricardo

        Whenever I install a new desktop/laptop the first thing I do is install yakuake and mc 🙂

  5. serloz

    Hi Eric, as always thanks a lot for your hard work!

    I just want to notify you that I have the same issue found with Akregator here too:

    bash-5.0$ akregator
    akregator: error while loading shared libraries: libqrencode.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
    bash-5.0$

    I’ve never used KDE Telepathy., so… Everything else is OK!

    • alienbob

      Hi serloz, you too seem to have skipped the updated qrencode-4.0.2 package in /deps/ . Or perhaps you have an older version of that package already installed from a non-ktown repository.

      • serloz

        Thank you, Eric!

        Although after installing the new package 4.0.2 and removing old 3.4.4:
        bash-5.0# installpkg qrencode-4.0.2-x86_64-1alien.txz

        installed: grencode-4.0.2-x86_64-lalien –> available: 3.4.4-lalien(alienbob) , 4.0.2-lalien(ktown)
        Enter
        –> I have the old package installed again from the repositories:
        qrencode-3.4.4-x86_64-1alien.txz
        There seems to be a system preference for one of the two repositories, I understand as well.
        Repeating the error with Akregator having the old package again.

        I have Installed Slackware Live Edition on the SSD and updated to date.

        • alienbob

          You are using slackpkg with the slackpkg+ extension. Please run “man slackpkgplus.conf” and read about the PKGS_PRIORITY variable. Make sure that the ktown repository has priority over my regular repository. That will fix the issues you are experiencing permanently by picking the correct packages during upgrades.

          Again, you may have used a Slackware Live ISO and installed it to your harddisk, but after installing it’s just a regular Slackware you have there. Not a trace of liveslak has been copied to your harddisk. It does not matter if you used a normal installation ISO or a Live ISO.

          • serloz

            Thanks Eric! Finally I could use the computer after a few days away and follow your instructions, excellent as always!
            Yes, I understand that I use Slackware with persistence in the computer, after the installation and first update I was already consulted to choose between the stable and current versions … It is very useful to install the Live Edition version for me, it comes very complete from start and it saves me a lot of time, I am very grateful for your hard and excellent work always!

    • Ricardo

      serloz, see my comment to Gold Orchid below.

      • serloz

        Thank you, Ricardo!!!

  6. Gold Orchid

    Hi Eric, great work as always and thank you so much. I also want to reiterate the missing libqrencode.so.3 wanted, when I start KMail. I have always kept up to date with your KTown and slackpkg update/upgrade-all so I think this dependency has slipped through the net. Many thanks 🙂

    • Ricardo

      Gold Orchid, I guess you meant libqrencode.so.4 missing?

      Make sure you have qrencode-4.0.2 from ktown and not qrencode-3.4.4 from the alienbob repo.

      Eric, colud you remove/upgrade these packages from your alienbob repo? There are newer versions in ktown and that might be confusing some users:

      qrencode-3.4.4-x86_64-1alien
      OpenAL-1.19.1-x86_64-1alien

      Thanks!

      • alienbob

        Actually Ricardo, you alerted me already about these two packages two weeks ago and I forgot to follow up on them.
        I will update my slackbuilds repository later today with correct versions of OpenAL, qt5 and qrencode to put an end to the version mismatch with the packages of the same name in my ‘ktown’ repository.
        Thanks again for alerting me.

        • Ricardo

          Thank you Eric, I didn’t want to bother you too much with those packages, it’s just a minor annoyance to me.

          But since we’re talking packages, there’s also qt5-5.13.0-x86_64-2alien in alienbob trying to upgrade qt5-5.13.0-2alien

          Cheers!

          • alienbob

            I already took care of the qt5 package in the same update as qtrencode and OpenAL.

          • Ricardo

            Cool Eric, thanks!

      • alienbob

        Also, for people using the slackpkg+ extension to manage 3rd party repositories: don’t forget that in slackpkgplus.conf you can assign a priority to repositories.
        You should give ktown a higher priority than my regular slackbuilds repository.

        • Ricardo

          I actually have:

          PKGS_PRIORITY=( slackpkgplus restricted ktown alienbob )

          But slackpkg keeps trying to “upgrade” e.g. qrencode from 4.0.2 to 3.4.4, must be a bug in slackpkg+ then?

          • Ricardo

            Reading a bit again about slackpkg+ I just realized I also have:

            TAG_PRIORITY=on

            If I set that to off I don’t see those three packages offered anymore.

            But now I got:

            installed: jansson-2.12-x86_64-1 –> available: 2.7-1alien(alienbob) , 2.12-1(slackware64)
            installed: ninja-1.9.0-x86_64-1 –> available: 1.7.2-1alien(alienbob) , 1.9.0-1(slackware64)
            installed: recordmydesktop-0.3.8.1-x86_64-4 –> available: 0.3.8.1-4alien(alienbob) , 0.3.8.1-4(extra)

  7. Lioh

    Hi Eric,

    thanks for the update. I would agree to completely drop telepathy. I never managed to get it work either. I still face some issues with krunner which hangs for about 5 minutes when I start it directly after login. Once it has found it’s way, it works correctly throughout the whole session. I have asked on LQ (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/ktown-current-issues-4175660766/) and other people experience this issue as well. I have tested in on different hardware and within VMs, always with the same result. Sadly there has been no reaction to my bug report on KDE side.

    • Ricardo

      Maybe some krunner plugin giving you trouble?

      I have these and experience no problems:

      https://i.imgur.com/ZMewZvR.png
      https://i.imgur.com/V6ZPDWv.png

      • Lioh

        I was able to nail it down to the Instant Messenger / Telepathy plugin. So it might be connected to the non-working Telepathy component as well. One more reason to drop it 😉

        • Lioh

          Removing all telepathy packages also speeds up the Plamsa search plugin settings dialog launch.

          • Lioh

            I have digged a bit deeper and figured out that the issue I faced was related to the inclusion of rlworkmans packages for Xfce 4.14 (maybe ConsoleKit). Without the repository active, I don’t see the issues.

  8. Cwizard

    A question about Gwenview. We may have had this conversation before, but in my old age I’m lucky if I can remember my own name. 🙂
    Loaded up your latest KDE-5 updates this morning and so far, so good.
    For a number of years the kipi-plugins were available as a separate package and once installed Gwenview had the ability to do some minor editing, so it wasn’t always necessary to open the image in The GIMP. Several years ago now, the digiKam developers decided to make the kipi-plugins only available with digiKam, that it, if you want to use the plugins, you have to install digiKam. Your collection of packages includes digiKam and it is installed, but Gwenview cannot see the plugins. Is there a way to make that happen?
    Many thanks.

    • alienbob

      I think I may have to package https://download.kde.org/stable/kipi-plugins/ – because since Digikam 6.x, they have deprecated kipi-plugins in favour of a new plugin architecture “DPlugins” and removed them from the source tarball.

      • Cwizard

        I’ve been looking around for a kipi-plugins package I could build an install and stumbled across this,
        https://github.com/KDE/kipi-plugins

        It would appear that their entire emphasis is on exporting images to various social media, something I have absolutely no interest. If image manipulation options are no longer a part of their project, please don’t waste your time. 🙂
        The GIMP will have to do.
        🙂
        Thanks for taking the time to reply.

      • Cwizard

        OK, I downloaded, built and installed the package at the link in your reply and, sadly, it confirms what I just said in my last reply. It only contains two minor plug-ins related to printing, the entire rest of the package is for importing and, mostly, exporting images to socal media.
        I’ll pass. 🙂
        Back to XnViewMP.
        Thanks for you time and consideration.

        • alienbob

          I think the image editing plugins were removed more than 3 years ago from kipi-plugins: https://cgit.kde.org/kipi-plugins.git/tree/NEWS?h=v5.0.0

          • Cwizard

            It has been longer than that since I’ve used Gwenview on a regular basis, so I missed the change. Too bad. Gwenview and the The GIMP were a good combination.
            XnViewMP is the best viewer for Linux I’ve discover so far (along this long 20 plus year journey). 🙂 Worth taking a look at if you view and do some minor editing to enhance your photos. By “enhance” I mean improve the contrast, sharpest, color, etc. all from XnView without having to open the image in The GIMP. Its only draw back is I sometimes find copies of images scattered around the hard disk in places the image(s) were never stored. Still haven’t figured out that one.
            🙂

          • Cwizard

            Many thanks for the kipi-plugin package! 🙂

  9. kyrill

    Hi Eric. Many thanks for your effort!
    I’ve been using falkon as my primary browser since I switched to KDE5, but with the last upgrade it stopped working. When started from terminal, it does nothing and exits with status 0. If I remove all of its config files, it starts exactly once and only in a fesh session (removal of config during the same session doesn’t help). May I be missing something?

    • alienbob

      I don’t know what you are missing but Falkon browser works fine here.

    • Ricardo

      kyrill, maybe try running it under gdb?

      $ gdb falkon
      (gdb) run

      If it crashes, a backtrace might give a hint of why:

      (gdb) bt

      But this should probably be continued on KDE’s bugzilla 🙂

      ———–
      For me, starting falkon from konsole gives me this, but it still works fine:

      $ falkon
      QWebEngineUrlScheme::registerScheme: Too late to register scheme “falkon”
      QWebEngineUrlScheme::registerScheme: Too late to register scheme “extension”
      Please register the custom scheme ‘falkon’ via QWebEngineUrlScheme::registerScheme() before installing the custom scheme handler.
      Please register the custom scheme ‘extension’ via QWebEngineUrlScheme::registerScheme() before installing the custom scheme handler.
      Use of deprecated not thread-safe setter, use setUrlRequestInterceptor instead.
      Loading “/usr/lib64/qupzilla/libImageFinder.so” failed: “No se ha encontrado la biblioteca compartida.”
      Loading “/usr/lib64/qupzilla/libPIM.so” failed: “No se ha encontrado la biblioteca compartida.”
      Falkon: 0 extensions loaded

      • kyrill

        Thanks for the advice, but after the latest updates both in slackware-current and ktown falkon works again, so I didn’t have a chance to try.
        Now it gives out several warning similar to what you get, but prevously it exited cleanly (exit code 0), but did nothing at all: no warnings, no window.

  10. Michael Langdon

    Thanks Eric – everything went as expected on the upgrade. 🙂

  11. nobita

    Puto out Telepathy , thats my 2c

    Thanks fr packages !!

  12. Igor

    I also never used and even installed telepathy

  13. Helios

    The new application yakuake does not work correctly here. It is impossible to resize the window.

    • alienbob

      The yakuake settings allow for different window sizes, but the mouse can apparently not be used for resizing. Whether that is by design or a bug, I cannot say. If it troubles you, open a bug report.

      • Helios

        I think that it is by design. It is rather unusual and disturbing in the beginning, because I did not realize that it is not supposed to be always visible, but to be open quickly when needed, and hide quickly after that.

  14. Mike Booth

    aThanks for your work Eric, uograded with no problems except your rsync site is incredibly slow. Used the UK mirror.

    No telepathy here

    Mike

    • Regnad Kcin

      @Mike Booth- I am in China and most of the time the uk mirror is better for me. But sometimes it is slow and the .nl mirror is fast. So I stay prepared to use what works at the time, internet traffic being what it is. …At first I looked from west to east and I found I liked the west beast least. And then I looked from east to west and then i liked the east beast best. – Theo. Geisel

  15. Gabriel

    Thanks a lot for the build. It works very well on my computer. I see there are wayland packages included, but I’m unable to make it work. Do I need somethign special for it?

    • alienbob

      Wayland packages alone are not enough by far. Search the blog for historical articles on Wayland support, it requires recompiling several packages among which qt5 so it will take a while to complete.

      I never could get a Wayland session working however, because it also requires systemd-logind (or elogind).

      • Gabriel

        I see, thanks a lot. Rebuilding packages already on slackware is a major stopper 🙁

  16. lockywolf

    Would you consider updating netsurf (and perl-html-parser) in -alien?

    There are some important crash fixes in netsurf 3.9

    Thanks for your work!

    • alienbob

      Hi lockywolf,
      I will add those two packages to my TODO, thanks.

  17. Gérard Monpontet

    Just for info, Eric, i have compiled ‘KDE Plasma 5.16.90’ , ‘startkde’ is now replaced by ‘startplasma-x11’ in /usr/bin ‘plasma-workspace’ , this change, need modifying the script /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.plasma 😉

  18. alienbob

    Hi Gérard, good to hear from you again!
    And thanks for this heads-up. The new Plasma 5.17 is scheduled for release on 10 October which is an ideal condition to include it in my October release of Plasma5 for Slackware.

  19. Gérard Monpontet

    I’m still looking at Pat’s work and yours, Eric, I’m spending less time doing this because I’m a grandfather now, and I’ve also started an activity, manual, another passion, woodworking. 😉

  20. Steve

    Hi Eric,

    I would like very much to give Plasma/KDE-5 a test run. In fact I’ve prepared a couple partitions on my development box expressly for this purpose. However at this point with extremely limited bandwidth to slackware.nl from my location (California, US) it is impractical for me to download it (despite installing the required certificates https://alien.slackbook.org/blog/adding-cacert-root-certificates-to-your-slackware/). Any chance you can mirror it on slackware.uk? or mirrors.slackware.com/slacware ?

    In the meantime I will try to create an rsync link to the live iso.

    Thanks,
    –Steve

    • alienbob

      It’s being mirrored on http://slackware.uk/people/alien-kde/ like forever.
      Rsync is also possible through rsync://slackware.uk/people/alien-kde/ .

      • Steve

        Cool! Thanks Eric. Bookmarked!

        • Steve

          Update… So the bandwidth to your bear server seems to have improved today. I started a wget session and it completed the entire repo in 3 hours and 17 minutes+.
          A bit of a disparity to what the reported download was from wget (858M) and a ‘du -k’ (1.25G).

          FINISHED –2019-09-21 11:46:25–
          Total wall clock time: 3h 36m 44s
          Downloaded: 2394 files, 858M in 3h 17m 15s (74.2 KB/s)
          /g/wget_slk/alien-kde5_} du -sk .
          1251980 .

  21. Eduardo

    Hi Eric! Thanks for the update.
    It took me some time to download and install it since I changed my PC and I was busy setting up Slackware-current proper and recreating all other tools of my workflow. However, I downloaded your September update and so far it runs smoothly.

    Regarding telepathy: I *used* to use it, but roughly at the time you started to include it in your Plasma packages I began to abandon its use, due to the fact that today’s preferred platforms are walled gardens. I love telepathy but it is simply inapplicable in today’s world, so I would have no objection to its removal.
    Thanks again for everything!

  22. Steve

    Eric,

    Thanks so much for making the latest Plasma 5 desktop available on -current. I have updated my *64-current and have been test driving it for the better part of the week. It appears just about ready for production deployment. It’s an amazing DT. The KDE developers have created a masterpiece. Your work to ready it for Slackware should be appreciated by all Slackware users and the development team.
    file:///tmp/Screenshot_2019-09-25_13-41-32.png

  23. acidtripper

    Hey Eric!

    I Think in the same way as Steve does, feel that ktown is ready for production environment at least from beginning of 2019. Pretty stable, using it for everyday use at work. And nothing to complain believe me that i use it for prod like 10 hours-day.
    Same as QT5 it’s mature and taking into account that qt4 is dead, and lot of apps are using it at this moment, would be a good thing to adopt it on -current branch.
    About the telepathy thing… Tried several times to make it work with my google account, and no chance! recompiled some libraries, but no case at least at my side. Personally i don’t know if any other distro as debian/kubuntu could make it work, i’ll check and see if there’s any patch available.

    So again, thank you for your devote work, and still waiting the day to see this inside Slackware. In my opinion pat needs to add some peeper to the distro.

    Cheers

    • alienbob

      Let’s hope Pat makes that decision soon. Either to include Plasma5, or just to include the dependencies I have to ship in order to have a functional Plasma5.
      It’s getting a bit long in the tooth to be honest. It’s already near impossible to do monthly updates for Plasma5 because all the updates in slackware-current keep breaking stuff that I have to fix. It’s simply taking too much of my time without any meaningful change in Slackware’s direction. It feels I am wasting my time. My two cents.

      • Francisco

        Eric, I am new to slackware and liveslack is really competitive in linux distros world right now. I have a debian distro with an old plasma version and this distro is updated, stable and solid as I have seen. Some care when updating… but that is part of the learning curve I am having.

        Please do not give up!!! you are not wasting your time!!!. Many Thanks for your hard job. If is there any “humble” way to help you in the process, let us know…

        Regards.

  24. acidtripper

    Hey, found something. When i restart rc.networkmanager i loose the plasma-nm in KDE.

    Tried to relunch but dind’t found any binary, looking around realized that now it qtm.

    Do you know if there’s any workaround there?

    Thanks

    • alienbob

      So, lesson learnt is: don’t restart networkmanager while you’re logged into a DE?
      The rest of your sentences are not really making sense.

  25. Steve

    Side benefits of KDE/Plasma 5. I needed a method of remote control/login to one of my box’s with a Windows 10 (Home) OS. It doesn’t have support of RDP (like the Pro version) so freerdp was not an option. A Teamviewer install came up easily on the KDE/Plasma 5 version of current. This was not the case for my other *64-current installation. Not until I figured out all the other libraries needed (not posted in the Slackbuild.org docs for Teamviewer) could I bring it up on the standard current OS. I imagine the KDE/Plasma 5 install supports other applications too. BTW These TV dependencies were mostly in the “dep” branch of Plasma-current.
    Thanks again Eric!

  26. Karl

    I followed your instruction to install plasma 5 on a freshly installed slackware-current, removing kd4 first. After that, I could only start X as root. As a regular user, it would just hang. No error messages. except for: Internal error: Could not resolve keysym XF86MonBrightnessCycle, and Internal error: Could not resolve keysym XF86RotationLockToggle, a two lines more and just hung there. I even installed a brand new user to try. No error in /var/log/Xorg.0.log. Any ideas?
    It did work with kde4 before.

    • alienbob

      Did you read and follow up on this piece of text in the README?

      NOTE:
      If you had installed KDE 4 as your default desktop previously, the removal
      of KDE 4 packages will break the symbolic link ‘/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc’.
      An attempt to run ‘startx’ in a console will fail with a black screen.
      After installing Plasma 5 for the first time, you need to run ‘xwmconfig’
      and select ‘xinitrc.plasma’ as your desktop session.

      • Karl

        I must have missed that part. Thank you, I’ll try again.

  27. Richard Herbert

    Mon Oct 7 04:41:29 UTC 2019

    l/icu4c-65.1-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
    Shared library .so-version bump.

    S**t. Just when everything was going so well. I’m not installing it for the time being.

    • Richard Herbert

      Ahem. As we say in French, “Oublie ça.” I just saw Eric’s updated icu4c-compat package has been updated. Should have checked first.

    • alienbob

      A bit higher up it said:

      Mon Oct 7 04:41:29 UTC 2019
      a/aaa_elflibs-15.0-x86_64-12.txz: Rebuilt.
      Upgraded: libexpat.so.1.6.11, libglib-2.0.so.0.6200.1,
      libgmodule-2.0.so.0.6200.1, libgobject-2.0.so.0.6200.1,
      libgthread-2.0.so.0.6200.1.
      Added temporarily until third party packages have been recompiled:
      libicudata.so.64.2, libicui18n.so.64.2, libicuio.so.64.2,
      libicutest.so.64.2, libicutu.so.64.2, libicuuc.so.64.2.

      Nothing bad would have happened if you had upgraded without my icu4c-compat.

      • Richard Herbert

        Hi, Eric. I apologize for the chaff. I didn’t even notice the notes in the Slackware64-current changelog. I always read the changelog before installing Slackware64-current updates, but obviously not attentively enough this time. Thanks anyway for updating your icu4c-compat packages so quickly. Much appreciated, as always.

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