My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: frameworks (Page 2 of 2)

KDE galore

qt-kde-620x350The KDE community now has multiple release tracks for their software. It used to be just the monthly incrementals to the KDE Software Compilation, but part of the transition to Qt5, QML and the new Frameworks, this monolithic release schedule has been abandoned. The Frameworks 5 (successor of kdelibs) and Plasma 5 release schedules are now pretty much disconnected. The new release schedule can be found here for Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5. This complicates things quite a bit for the planning of my Slackware packages. I do not want to get obsessed with providing these packages the day their source code is released. That will be unmanagable at a personal level.

So, during the past week I have been sitting on Slackware package sets for KDE 4.14.1, Frameworks 5.2.0 and Plasma 5.0.2. I have decided not to release these package sets one by one but instead I waited until all three of these were publicly announced to the world. Willy Sudiarto Raharjo tested these packages and he provided valuable feedback on the packages as well as my documentation – thanks again, Willy.

Today, the packages have been made available on my ‘ktown‘ repository and you can grab them!

None of the dependencies for KDE 4 and 5 had to be upgraded since the release of the previous KDE 4 and 5 package sets. The KDE 4.14.1 package set uses the sources of kactivities-4.13.3 (taken from the KDE 4.13 major release) because no new tarball is being made available. For kde-workspace, an update to 4.11.12 was provided.

What to expect from these new packages ?

The KDE 4.14.1 is the first increment of the 4.14 release cycle. It focuses on bug fixing, not feature enhancements. A list of changes is found here. Frameworks 5.2.0 is also a bug fix release. The Frameworks have been in development for a long time and are pretty stable. Plasma 5 software is much younger, and that shows. The release of Plasma 5.0.2 is an ongoing process of fixing annoying bugs. The 5.1.0 release in October will finally see some new functionality – several programs that are part of Plasma 5 have reduced functionality compared to their KDE4 predecessors.

My previous post on Plasma 5 for Slackware has a lot of additional information, tips, known issues and such. You might want to (re-)read it.

 

How to upgrade to KDE 4.14.1 ?

You will find all the installation/upgrade instructions that you need in the accompanying README file. That README also contains basic information for KDE recompilation using the provided SlackBuild script.

You are strongly advised to read and follow these installation/upgrade instructions!

How to upgrade to KDE 5 (frameworks & plasma) ?

If you want to try out KDE 5 (Frameworks & Plasma) please be warned that KDE5 is incomplete. Lots of programs still have to be ported to Qt5 and QML, and therefore your new KDE5 desktop will heavily rely on the availability of KDE4 programs. You need to have already installed my KDE 4.14.1 packages with dependencies, before you install/upgrade to the Frameworks 5 / Plasma 5 packages and their dependencies. Not the other way round please! Some dependencies for KDE5 need to overwrite stuff of the KDE4 dependencies.

I provide a README file for KDE5 as well. Read it carefully!

Once you have installed these packages you can run “xwmconfig” and select “xinitrc.plasma” (if you are in runlevel 3) before running “startx”. If you are in runlevel 4 (graphical login session manager) you should select “KDE Plasma 5” from the KDM session dropdown. You can also use SDDM, a new graphical login manager, which will have been installed as part of the KDE5 packages, but you need to do some editing of “/etc/rc.d/rc.4” to enable SDDM. See my previous post on Plasma 5 for more details.

Where to find Slackware packages for KDE ?

Download locations are listed below.

You will find the KDE 4.14.1 sources in ./source/4.14.1/ and packages in /current/4.14.1/ subdirectories, whereas KDE 5 (Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5) sources can be downloaded from ./source/5/ and packages from /current/5/ .

Note that I have symlinks in place (useful for users of a package manager and running slackware-current) so that ./current/latest/ will always point to the latest stable KDE release, and ./current/testing/ will always point to the most recent testing release (currently that’s Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5).

Perhaps you noticed the directory name for KDE5 is “5” and not “5.0.2” or “5.2.0”. I decided to treat KDE5 as a “rolling release” and in future will probably update parts of it. For instance, when a new Frameworks 5 is released, I will only update the sources in ./source/5/kde/src/frameworks/  and the packages in ./current/5/*/kde/frameworks/ . The toplevel directory name will stay at “5”.

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

First preview for Slackware of Plasma 5

qt-kde-620x350Today is my son’s 16th birthday, and I do have a gift for all of you, not just for him. I present to you a first preview for Slackware, of the KDE Frameworks 5.1.0 libraries, combined with Plasma 5.0.1, the next-generation desktop workspace from KDE.

I wrote about this in my previous post, but now you can experience it first-hand: Plasma 5.0 improves support for high-DPI displays and comes with a “converged shell”, i.e. one Plasma codebase for different target devices like desktop computers, laptops, tablet, phones etc. Plasma 5 uses a new fully hardware-accelerated OpenGL(ES) graphics stack. Plasma 5 is built using Qt 5 and Frameworks 5.

And with the Breeze themed artwork and its own Oxygen font, this desktop looks clean and modern.

If you want to start an application quickly, use the new KRunner (usually hidden behind Alt-F2) which will now be activated directly when you start typing when your desktop has the focus.

 What to expect from these Slackware packages

I think it worked out very well that I waited with my packages until after the first bugfix release of both the Frameworks libraries and the Plasma programs. The latest sources provide a much stabler desktop with more functionality. Still, we are only at the beginning of KDE 5 (or whatever the name for the software compilation will end up being). KDE 4 will be here for a while and developers are busy porting their applications away from Qt4 and kdelibs, to the new Frameworks libraries based on Qt5 and QML. Give it a year to mature and then we will be able to leave KDE 4 behind, is my guess.

These new packages are only going to be useful if installed on top of Slackware -current and my KDE 4.13 packages (plus dependencies). KDE 5 is still very much  a work in progress and needs the KDE4 applications and artwork to provide you with a fully functional desktop.

Testing Repository URL

I created a repository URL that you can use for slackpkg+ or slapt-get or whatever package manager you use.

The URL http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/current/testing/x86_64/ (for 64-bit) and http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/current/testing/x86/ (for 32-bit) will remain permanent, even when the versions of the software gets updated. Currently “testing” points to “5.0.1” in the repository because that is the current version of Plasma 5.

Enabling SDDM in runlevel 4 instead of KDM

Runlevel 4

If you want to see the new graphical session (login) manager SDDM in action, add the following lines to the Slackware file “/etc/rc.d/rc.4” right after the line: echo “Starting up X11 session manager…”

# — 8< ————————————–
if [ -x /usr/bin/sddm ]; then
exec /usr/bin/sddm
fi
# — 8< ————————————–

… and then switch to runlevel 4 by typing:

# init 4

Select “KDE Plasma 5” from the SDDM session dropdown. Alternatively, if you prefer good old runlevel 3, you can type:

$ xwmconfig

… and select “xinitrc.plasma” as your default window manager for X11. Then run:

$ startx

To enter your desktop session.

Installing or upgrading Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5

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

Note that the new Plasma5 packages do not upgrade any package from my KDE 4.13 set, although they will upgrade several Slackware original packages. Be careful when upgrading Slackware packages afterwards. Slackpkg+ will help you, if you add the above repository URL to the slackpkgplus.conf file and give these packages higher priority than the Slackware originals.

If you decide to remove the Plasma 5 packages but not KDE 4.13 (or whatever latest version of KDE I have in my ktown repository), be sure to re-install two packages at least: akonadi from my ktown repository and harfbuzz from the Slackware-current repository.

Separated configuration files

I have taken great care to ensure that the configurations for the new KDE5 are not overwriting your old configuration files for KDE4. New configurations will be written to ~/.local5 , ~/.cache5 , ~/.config5 and ~/.kde5 . That way, you should be able to go back to your stable KDE4 desktop without ill effects after having played with KDE5.

One “issue” you will notice, is that some non-KDE applications will forget their configuration and will start as if you are using them for the first time. Chrome/Chromium is such an example. If you want to use the old configuration in Plasma 5 as well, simply create a symlink, This is how I did it for my Chromium after I found out (first remove the new chromium directory that was created by starting Chromium in Plasma 5):

$ rm -r ~/.config5/chromium
$  ln -s ../.config/chromium ~/.config5/

Where to get the new packages for Plasma 5

Download locations are listed below (you will find the sources in ./source/5.0.1/ and packages in /current/5.0.1/ subdirectories). Using a mirror is preferred because you get more bandwidth from a mirror and it’s friendlier to the owners of the master server!

Known issues

The “known issues” section ends this article, and I will keep it updated with the feedback I receive in the comments section below, direct email, LinuxQUestions.org, Google+ etc. Be sure to visit here regularly! For the first batch, I simply used the information that Willy had already gathered on his own blog:

  •  When you switch back to KDE 4, in some cases, all the icons in the Applications tab in the KDE  Menu will change to a blue folder icon.
    • Solution: reinstall KDE 4.13.3 packages, log out and login again. That will fix it.
  • Adding a new entry to the KDE Menu using the Menu Editor sometimes does not seem to work.
    • Solution: Logout/login and the changes you made will appear. This happened to me and Willy -but only the first time we tried it. After that first time, all seems to work normally.
  • HPlip shows an error message about not finding a system tray area. The reason is because the Plasma 5 workspace does not implement the X11 “Xembed” protocol. The system tray area works differently now. Not just HPlip, but all other applications that are not part of  Plasma  5, will have this issue, but only HPlip shows an error. You will not see any icons for Dropbox, SCIM etc… as they don’t have a place to dock.
    • Solution: There is a short-term solution which is not elegant, but it gives you back your old systray ocins. Use third-party Xembed system tray implementations like stalonetray or wmsystemtray . I have stalonetray in my own repository, and both are also available at SBo.
  • There are now two SystemSettings programs. One is part of Plasma 5 and the other is the one from KDE 4. The Plasma 5 version is found in the “Favorites” tab of the K-Menu, while the one from KDE 4 (which is more complete) is available in the menu as “Applications > Settings > System Settings“. The Plasma 5 version is not yet feature-complete.
  • Certain conditions may crash your Plasma Shell. E.g. typing in the  Search field in the K-Menu “Favorites” tab and then removing that text will crash plasmashell (your desktop goes black), fortunately it will restart automatically.
  • KRunner (Alt-F2) will not save your command history.
  • Public holidays are not yet shown in the System Tray clock. See this URL for more information.
  • Resource usage of this new desktop is currently rather high due to a design limitations in KWin, The cause is known and this will be fixed in future releases.
  • In some cases, if your desktop becomes unresponsive, you might want to take a look at “top”. You may find that kded5 runs at 100%, eating all CPU resources available.
    • Solution: Killing the kded5 process or logout/login will fix this.
  • The updated harfbuzz package breaks the library’s ABI. As a result, LibreOffice 4.3.0 will no longer work (error looks like “symbol lookup error: libvcllo.so: undefined symbol: hb_icu_script_to_script“).
    • Solution: Downgrading to the original Slackware harfbuzz package solves it, which is a pity because I thought I had taken care of the ABI breakage by applying a patch which re-adds that missing symbol.
  • The hardware keys for altering volume and mute do not work on a global level. They seem to work for some applications – VLC is one of them. Sound is working fine though.

Have fun! Eric

KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma Next

qt-kde-620x350The KDE4 series is still actively developed (in August we will see the release of KDE SC 4.14) but the KDE developers have been working long and hard at the next generation desktop. I wrote some generic phrases in the past about KDE Frameworks 5 (the successor to the KDE Platform aka kdelibs) and Plasma Next (the Qt5 based successor of the Plasma Workspaces of KDE4 which uses Qt4 for its graphical splendor).

But in the next few months we will actually see the first stable release of the Frameworks and the Plasma 2. There are beta sources available now and I grabbed those in order to re-write Slackware’s KDE.SlackBuild build harness. That took a lot more effort than I anticipated but I am glad I did it in an early stage (I don’t usually concern myself with KDE beta releases). My scripts are ready and it’s mostly empty slack-desk files which need some more attention.

I won’t be sharing more than screenshots at this moment. The KDE-5 desktop is just too crash-prone in this beta stage, and I want to spare Slackware the disaster of pushing an unstable desktop. Just think of how the “big distros” handled the release of KDE 4.0 which was basically a “technology preview” but got added to distros anyway, much to the chagrin and frustration of their endusers.

Some interested parties have received a link to the new packages to try them out and give me feedback. My first attempt was missing a lot of things (missing icons, menus, application entries) but thanks to the feedback, my second compilation attempt (using the sources for Frameworks 5 Beta3, to be released tomorrow, and git snapshots of  Plasma Next) looks a lot better:

kf5_startup

KDE 5 startup (Breeze theme)

kf5_menu

The KDE 5 menu – Qt5 co-esisting with Qt4

kf5_systemsettings_compositor

The OpenGL Window Compositor has become intelligent

This is just a taste of things to come in the summer, I hope!

Eric

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