Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: kde (Page 16 of 28)

KDE 4.11.5 for Slackware 14.1

January 7, 2014 / / 5 Comments

Last month I made packages available for KDE 4.12, for those of you who are adventurous and are running Slackware-current. But the older 4.11 series is also getting updated still. Today we are at release 4.11.5. If you are really curious, you can examine the list of changes and fixes in this release. This will not be the last update, either. The maintenance cycle ends with 4.11.9, to appear somewhere in April 2014. However the Workspaces (package name: kde-workspace) will get long-term support, until August 2015. This package is also used in KDE 4.12.x which does not have a versioned kde-workspace package itself (yes, I will update KDE 4.12 soon with a kde-workspace-4.11.5 package).

This is how it goes during the next couple of months: I will keep building packages for newer versions of KDE 4.12, and they will target Slackware-current. I will probably be building all the KDE 4.11 releases as well, but targeting Slackware 14.1 with these. I want to be a bit more conservative with KDE packages for the stable Slackware release.

With KDE 4.11 and 4.12 releases alternating, it may be possible that I do not have the time to build all the 4.11 updates, but I definitely will do the final 4.11.9.

There is a third track in KDE’s evolution and that is Plasma Workspaces. Just before Christmas, the KDE community revealed the first Technology Preview of Plasma2. Since this will not be available in any kind of stable form for a long time, I do not have any intention of building packages for it and will stick with the stable releases (I don’t do Betas either usually). If you really feel up to it, try compiling Plasma2 and share your experiences. I promise you a bumpy ride.

How to upgrade to KDE 4.11.5 ?

Note: you have to be running Slackware 14.1 (or current)! These packages are not suited for Slackware 14.0.

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!

Note that you can also use slackpkg+ (the 3rd-party repository extension to slackpkg) for these upgrades if you want, it makes the process a bit easier for the less seasoned Slacker.

Where to find packages for KDE 4.11.5 ?

Download locations are listed below (you will find the sources in ./source/4.11.5/ and packages in /14.1/4.11.5/ 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!

Have fun! Eric

LibreOffice 4.1.4 for Slackware 14.0 and newer

December 19, 2013 / / 13 Comments

Quite by accident I noticed that LibreOffice 4.1.4 was released yesterday, even before the DocumentFoundation’s blog post was up. The official stance for 4.1.4 is that it is “the first also suggested for corporate deployments“. Well that is good news! So I quickly cleaned up the KDE 4.12 virtual machines and started with compiling some packages.

What I also did was read this page, suggested to me by my pal Heinz: http://dilfridge.blogspot.nl/2013/12/libreoffice-kde-integration.html . This post mentions the exact issues that were also reported by Slackware users of my earlier LO packages on KDE: slowness in the “File” dialogs for opening and saving; and crashes in LO Sheets when selectiong some cells and then moving them (this would actually freeze the complete KDE desktop, not just LO). I checked out the Gentoo bug reports which are mentioned by Andreas Hüttel and extracted the patches he backported from LibreOffice 4.2. It seems (and I asked some friends to check) that these patches do indeed fix the issues on KDE.

Another change in the SlackBuild is that I switched it to use a private version of poppler, this should hopefully fix the broken PDF import in Slackware 14.1 and -current, because of a change in libpoppler library version since Slackware 14.

The LibreOffice 4.1.4 packages for Slackware are available in my 14.0 package repository – I just uploaded them. Remember, they will work on Slackware 14.1 and current just as well. Note that I ship my LibreOffice 4.1 packages with additional “libreoffice-dict-<language>” packages, containing dictionary and spellchecker support!

If you are still running Slackware 13.37 you should stick with LibreOffice 3.6.7 for which I also have packages.

At this point, I used to request that you select one of the mirrors as your preferred download location, in order to spare the master site at slackware.com. However with the launch of SLackware 14.1 the server has been placed behind the Akamai cache infrastructure, so that downloading from slackware.com will no longer hurt us;

You can subscribe to the repository’s RSS feed if you want to be the first to know when new packages are uploaded.

Cheers, Eric

KDE 4.12 is available

December 18, 2013 / / 23 Comments

The new release cycle of KDE has commenced today with the revealing of KDE SC 4.12.0!

KDE Software Compilation 4.12.0 will be mainly about improving and polishing KDE Applications. The Plasma Workspace has been feature-frozen at the end of the 4.11 cycle. There is no new source tarball labeled “4.12” for kde-worlspace anymore, the KDE folk have stuck to the 4.11 tarball for inexplicable reasons… you may recall that the basis on which all of KDE is built, the KDE Platform, has been feature-frozen since 4.9 already. New features in the Platform are being implemented for the future KDE Frameworks 5.0 but nevertheless, a 4.12 tarball has been made available. I guess they are too smart for me, I do not understand this difference in versioning choice.

Anyway, KDE SC 4.12 (with kde-workplace 4.11) runs smoothly here.  I sure hope that KDE 4.12 will soon be added to Slackware-current (Slackware skipped 4.11 entirely). In the meantime, I built packages for you, on Slackware-current. I have not tested them on Slackware 14.1 and although they will probably just work, my focus for new KDE releases will be slackware-current as usual. If you want to be on the bleeding edge of KDE, you’ll have to follow Slackware’s bleeding edge as well.

What’s new in KDE 4.12?

KDE keeps an up-to-date feature plan page for the 4.12 release, as they do for every release past and future. Since the Workspace and Platform have been frozen, much activity is showing in the KDE Applications. Looking at that overview page, I want to check out Okular and Dolphin in any case. The graphical text editor Kate has been improved in areas of code completion and python support, which could make it an interesting choice for code developers. Especially so, since these Kate improvements trickle through in KDevelop which uses the Kate engine. I did not add kdevelop-4.6.0, anyone interested in case Slackware-current does not move soon?

And reading about Kwebkit, I guess I will have to renew the kwebkitpart package sometime soon because I seem to have missed a release.

The PIM suite had a lot of improvements (in speed and functionality) but to be honest I do not use KDE’s PIM software. Interesting to know in any case: According to a mailing list post by Vishesh Handa: there is a chance that Nepomuk will be replaced by Baloo, which performs better and avoids the data duplication currently seen in KDE (copies of the same data, think of emails, get replicated between nepomuk, akonadi and virtuoso leading to large homedirectory storage needs).

How to upgrade to KDE 4.12 ?

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!

Where to find packages for KDE 4.12 ?

Download locations are listed below (you will find the sources in ./source/4.12.0/ and packages in /current/4.12.0/ 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!

Have fun! Eric

KDE 4.11.4 for Slackware 14.1

December 4, 2013 / / 11 Comments

Even though the KDE community has already made available a Release Candidate for the upcoming KDE 4.12, they also continue with the bugfix releases for the 4.11 series. Yesterday saw the source code release of KDE Software Compilation 4.11.4, as announced on kde.org. This is again a maintenance release, containing updates for Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform. Note that the KDE 4.11 Workspaces will continue to receive updates for the next two years – from what I understood, its version will remain 4.11 while KDE SC moves on to 4.12 and onwards.

Since the release of KDE 4.11.3 last month, we were also treated to Slackware 14.1 so it made sense to build the new Slackware packages on Slackware 14.1. They will of course work just as well on slackware-current since that has not diverged all that much from the stable release.

How to upgrade to KDE 4.11.4 ?

Note: you have to be running Slackware 14.1 (or current)! These packages are not suited for Slackware 14.0.

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!

Note that you can also use slackpkg+ (the 3rd-party repository extension to slackpkg) for these upgrades if you want, it makes the process a bit easier for the less seasoned Slacker.

Where to find packages for KDE 4.11.4 ?

Download locations are listed below (you will find the sources in ./source/4.11.4/ and packages in /14.1/4.11.4/ 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!

Have fun! Eric

KDE 4.11.3 ready for install

November 5, 2013 / / 10 Comments

Here is KDE Software Compilation 4.11.3 – it was announced a little earlier today. The third incremental maintenance release for KDE 4.11 contains updates for Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform, and has eliminated over 120 bugs from the Window Manager KWin, the file manager Dolphin, the personal information management suite Kontact, the UML tool Umbrello, and others.

Packages are available for Slackware-current in the usual 32-bit and 64-bit flavours. I am running them on this very laptop and I find no flaws. I am also working on other interesting stuff, that is why it took a few hours to write the blog article. Be sure to be here when I publish the next one (hopefully tomorrow). One hint: SilverLight.

The new Plasma Network Management applet which I added to the previous KDE 4.11.2 set, has been seriously reworked by its developers, and the updated version I have as part of the new KDE 4.11.3 needs a bit of manual work if you are currently using that first version. After upgrade, you will notice that the old applet has transformed into a red cross and calls itself an “unknown applet”. Just remove it from the system tray and add the updated one (called again “Network Management v0.9.3.1”).

How to upgrade to KDE 4.11.3 ?

Note: you have to be running Slackware-current! These packages are not suited for Slackware 14.0.

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!

Where to find packages for KDE 4.11.3 ?

Download locations are listed below (you will find the sources in ./source/4.11.3/ and packages in /current/4.11.3/ 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!

Have fun! Eric

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