I hinted at this in my previous post; I have been building packages for the second beta of KDE SC 4.5.

I was not so sure if I should make them publicly available after I had installed them on my laptop running Slackware64 and very soon, noticed some serious issues:

  • I can not have virtual desktops with separate widget sets for instance.
  • I had some initial problems with KDM which is now configured to run as a non-existing “kdm” user – but I patched “/etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc” and reverted to the old, working, situation.
  • The drop-down menu when you click on the “cashew” in the top-right corner has many double or even triple entries, which is very annoying

However, in the meantime I received positive feedback from people who are eager and willing to test the beta packages. Good, thank you! That made me feel all warm inside!

All the joking aside, I am glad with the reponses to my blog posts. It’s what drives me to create these packages for you.

Here they are (64-bit as well as 32-bit): http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.4.85/

You’ll notice that there are a few updated dependencies and one new package, libdbusmenu-qt. Grab those too! There are no pre-compiled language packs for now (I just lacked the time), but I have added the sources and updated the build script for “KDEI” so you can easily build a single package yourself. For example, compile the “nl” language pack with this command:

# PKGLANG=nl  ./kde-l10n.SlackBuild

Good luck! Don’t forget to report the bugs you find at http://bugs.kde.org/ and feel free to discuss them in the comments section of this post.

By the time KDE4.5 sees its first Release Candidate, I will have updated the Qt4 package too. At this moment I did not want to diverge too much from Slackware 13.1.

Cheers, Eric