Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: kde (Page 2 of 28)

Ktown becomes Vtown

November 5, 2020 / / 59 Comments

So it is finally happening.
On US Election Day 2020, Pat Volkerding added “vtown” into the ‘testing’ directory of Slackware-current.

The “vtown” in Slackware is essentially my ‘ktown’ repository containing KDE Plasma5 plus its dependencies, with a few exceptions, a number of my packages removed, some caveats and a couple of renamed packages.

A lot of useful information from early adopters can already be found on linuxquestions.org in the dedicated thread about vtown.

One of the benefits of this testing version of Plasma5 in Slackware is the merging of several Slackware and ktown packages.
Mostly because I needed to provide Qt5-supporting versions of existing Slackware packages, I needed different names for the ‘ktown’ versions that I was going to provide. I could not risk that people would end up with old Slackware Qt4 based packages which would break Plasma5.
So to avoid clashing with packages like “plasma-nm”, “attica”, “baloo”, “kscreen” etc… I had to use alternative package names like “plasma5-nm”, “attica-framework”, “baloo5”, “kscreen2” and several (actually, many) more.
Here is the full list of my packages that got merged back into packages with the original Slackware names:

attica-framework -> attica
baloo5 -> baloo
baloo5-widgets -> baloo-widgets
grantlee-qt4 -> grantlee
kactivities-framework -> kactivities
kfilemetadata5 -> kfilemetadata
kscreen2 -> kscreen
libdbusmenu-gtk -> libdbusmenu (dropping Qt4 support)
libdbusmenu-qt5 -> libdbusmenu-qt
libkscreen2 -> libkscreen
phonon-qt4 -> phonon (dropping Qt4 support)
plasma5-nm -> plasma-nm
polkit-kde-framework -> polkit-kde-agent-1
polkit-qt5-1 -> polkit-qt-1

There’s also some packages that are new, but given a different name than I did for ‘ktown’: my “qtav” becomes “QtAV’, “phonon-gstreamer” becomes phonon-backend-gstreamer” and “sddm-qt5” becomes “sddm”.

Here’s a list of the packages that did not make it into ‘vtown’ at all:

ddcutil (nothing uses it anymore)
drumstick (only used by vmpk now, and that is not part of Slackware)
freecell-solver (needed by kpat)
kaudiocreator (obsoleted, use k3b or soundkonverter instead)
kblog (no longer included in Applications)
kdelibs (KDE4 - no longer relevant)
klettres (future maintenance will be in ktown, no external deps)
kpat (needs freecell-solver, maybe rename to kpatience if I keep maintaining it)
ktuberling (future maintenance will be in ktown, no external deps)
kwebkitpart (lost its relevance)
labplot (future maintenance will be in ktown, no external deps)
md4c (no longer needed, was a past dep for building qt5)
perl-path-tiny (dep for freecell-solver)
perl-template-toolkit (dep for freecell-solver)
phonon-qt4-gstreamer (obsoleted)
phonon-vlc (needs VLC and I will keep maintaining this in ktown)
python3-random2 (dep for freecell-solver)
sni-qt (nice to have for Qt4 apps with systray icon? Needs libdbusmenu-qt4 which will no longer be in Slackware)
user-manager (deprecated)

Now the big question: how to upgrade?

Assuming you use slackpkg to manage Slackware updates, first edit “/etc/slackpkg/slackpkg.conf and ensure that the line:

PRIORITY=( patches %PKGMAIN extra pasture testing )

is changed to:

PRIORITY=( testing patches %PKGMAIN extra pasture )

This gives higher priority to those new ‘vtown’ packages. Then run:

slackpkg update

The next steps depend on what you currently have installed.

Upgrade from Slackware’s KDE4 to the ‘vtown’ Plasma5 in Slackware’s testing:

That should be easy. If you still have KDE4 installed, run

slackpkg remove kde
slackpkg remove ConsoleKit2
slackpkg install vtown
slackpkg upgrade vtown

I have not tested those “slackpkg install vtown; slackpkg upgrade vtown” commands so if that does nothing, then instead, you need to download the whole testing/packages/vtown directory from an internet mirror and then run:

upgradepkg --install-new --reinstall testing/packages/vtown/deps/*.t?z
upgradepkg --install-new --reinstall testing/packages/vtown/kde/*.t?z

Upgrade safely from my ‘ktown’ to the ‘vtown’ in Slackware’s testing:

That is a good question! I am still running ‘ktown’ because due a medical emergency in the family I do not have enough free time to test this properly. People asked for a blog post so that’s about all I can manage and it has eaten most of today’s free time already unfortunately. Share your experiences in the comments section below and I will update the main article with better info as it becomes available.

What I think will work is this (assuming you are also using slackpkg+ to manage your 3rd party repositories) and thanks to akimmet who posted these instructions in another blog post after having gone through the upgrade himself:

slackpkg update
slackpkg upgrade-all
slackpkg remove ktown kde kdei ConsoleKit2

Now, edit “/etc/slackpkg/slackpkgplus.conf” to remove (or de-activate) all definitions of “ktown”, and instead add “testing:vtown” to your PKGS_PRIORITY list. Then run:

slackpkg update
slackpkg install vtown
slackpkg upgrade vtown
slackpkg install LibRaw autoconf-archive exiv2 poppler

The last line will re-install the few packages that were in my ‘ktown’ but also part of Slackware core. They were upgraded by Pat in Slackware core instead of in ‘vtown’ and thus the “slackpkg remove ktown” removed those permanently.

Remember: perform this upgrade from a console in runlevel 3!
Tell me how it went! Remember, this stuff is now in Slackware ‘testing’ not because the Plasma5 software sucks and crashes but because this means a big and intrusive update to Slackware and it is best to give way to the early adopters to find the remaining kinks in the new packages.

Eric

 

KDE Plasma 5 August 2020 release for Slackware

August 1, 2020 / / 87 Comments

New Plasma5 packages for Slackware-current are ready for download & installation. I skipped July (holiday season) and so here is KDE-5_20.08 aka my August 2020 release. Be sure to read the upgrade instructions very carefully to prevent  breakage, because starting with my June batch the goal is to remove Slackware’s ConsoleKit2 and replace it with elogind!.

It would not harm if you (re-)read my previous blog article about Plasma5, “Replacing ConsoleKit2 with elogind – first steps“. It has a lot more detail about the reasons for this move as well as guidance on using the Wayland Window Manager (as a test) instead of regular X.Org. Note that Wayland sessions still need a lot of maturing and X.Org will remain Slackware’s default choice.

A repeat from that article: with elogind as the session/seat manager instead of ConsoleKit2, you’ll see some new behaviour. A quite obvious change: if you run ‘startx’ or ‘startkwayland’ at the console, you won’t see a VT (virtual terminal) switch. In the past, your console TTY would usually be tty1 but your graphical session would start on tty7 and you would automatically be switched from tty1 to tty7. This is no longer true – the graphical session will re-use your console TTY.
SDDM is still starting on tty7 but only because I make it do so via its configuration file.

What news is there to tell about KDE-5_20.08?

This August ktown release contains the KDE Frameworks 5.72.0, Plasma 5.19.4 and Applications 20.04.3. All this on top of the Qt 5.15.0 in Slackware-current.

Deps:
The ‘deps’ section got a bit smaller again this month:

  • pcaudiolib, espeak-ng, hack-fonts-ttf, noto-fonts-ttf, and noto-cjk-fonts-ttf were moved into the actual Slackware distro. Things are progressing nicely in that regard.
  • flite has been removed since Pat decided we will go with just espeak-ng.
  • a new package ‘pipewire’ was added as a dependency for krfb and xdg-desktop-portal-kde.
  • The elogind-aware dbus package was upgraded to match the Slackware version.
  • Finally, qca-qt5 was upgraded and I recompiled mlt (to fix the broken kdenlive) and speech-dispatcher.

Frameworks:
Frameworks 5.72.0 is an incremental stability release, see: https://kde.org/announcements/kde-frameworks-5.72.0. A new ‘kdav’ source tarball got added but that is actually the same package you’ll find in KDEPIM. Next batch, the actual kdav package will be built from Frameworks sources.

Plasma:
Plasma 5.19.4 is a further increment of the 5.19 cycle (5.19.5 will be the last, in September). See https://kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.19.4 and if you want to read more about the goals for 5.19 you should check out https://kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.19.0 .

Plasma-extra;
In plasma-extra In plasma-extra I rebuilt sddm-qt5 to install man pages correctly, and upgraded plasma-wayland-protocols and wacomtablet.

Applications;
Applications 20.04.3 is an incremental bug fix release, see also https://kde.org/announcements/releases/2020-07-apps-update/

Applications-extra:
For applications-extra, I updated digikam, krita, libktorrent and ktorrent, and skanlite.
Note that the size of the digikam source tarball ‘blew up’ due to the addition of new neural network facial recognition data files, but the actual package ‘only’ grew from 97 to 108 MB.

Telepathy:
KDE Telepathy is no longer part of my ‘ktown’ distribution of KDE Plasma5.

KDE Sources:
Not so visible but important nevertheless is this month’s contribution of Patrick Volkerding who validated all the KDE slack-desc files and enhanced/polished a lot of them. He also cleaned out the ‘patches’ directory and removed all the obsolete patches that are not being applied anymore. As you also will have noticed, Pat is slowly picking packages out of my ‘deps’ and adding them to Slackware. Even espeak-ng which I had not expected to happen.

Where to get KDE Plasma5 for Slackware

It should be obvious, but these packages will not work on Slackware 14.2. The old (KDE 5_17.11) Plasma5 packages that were still in my ‘ktown’ repository for Slackware 14.2 were removed in May 2020 because they were un-maintained and had security issues.

Download the KDE-5_20.08 for Slackware-current from the usual location at https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/ or one of its mirrors like http://slackware.uk/people/alien-kde/current/ .

Check out the README file in the root of the repository for detailed installation or upgrade instructions.

BIG FAT WARNING: Read these README instructions carefully if you do not yet have elogind installed (i.e. if you did not install the ktown June 2020 release previously)!
In short:

  1. UPGRADE TO THE LATEST slackware-current first.
  2. Then, REMOVE the ConsoleKit2 package if you had not installed my June ktown batch before.
  3. Next, install or upgrade the KDE5 package set.
  4. Change to directory /usr/share/sddm/scripts/ and move the Xession.new & Xsetup.new files into place (remove the .new extension) after carefully checking that you are not overwriting your own customizations in the Xsession & Xsetup scripts. Note: because “slackpkg new-config” only looks inside the /etc/ directory it will miss the two scripts in /usr/share/sddm/scripts/.
    You’ll still have to manually check /etc/ for some critical *.new files that need to be put into place if you are not using slackpkg (which does this *.new check at the end of its run).
  5. Finally, REBOOT.

Development of Plasma5 is tracked in git: https://git.slackware.nl/ktown/ and this month’s development took place in the ‘elogind‘ branch. I will fold these elogind developments back into the master branch soon.

A new Plasma5 Live ISO will be available soon at https://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/ (rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/latest/) with user/pass being “live/live” as always.

Have fun! Eric

Replacing ConsoleKit2 with elogind – first steps

June 19, 2020 / / 104 Comments

Well 🙂 This was a short reprieve.
I created a new batch of Plasma5 packages for Slackware-current as KDE-5_20.06. Be sure to read the upgrade instructions very carefully to prevent a total breakage, because this month’s batch is non-standard. More detail about the upgrade steps (like: remove ConsoleKit2 first!) to follow is in the bottom section of this post.

Why a new ‘ktown‘ release so soon after lamenting in my previous post that there would not be a new release for a while?

It is simple and complex at the same time, really.
I was fed up with monthly releases, they felt like a chore I could not get rid of. But the addition of PAM presented opportunities and since I had already declared that no public release should be expected for a while, I suddenly had time to research privately into a nagging problem that was always on the backburner: Wayland sessions in KDE Plasma5 for Slackware. I had this running somewhat, a couple of years ago but it is totally broken for Slackware today.
The Wayland implementation in KDE Plasma5 depends on a session API called “login1” which was originally defined and implemented by systemd and is for the most part (read: the relevant part) implemented in ConsoleKit2 as well. In the current state of software development, unfortunately ConsoleKit2 is blocking a successful Wayland implementation in Slackware; fixing this demands another core change in Slackware (next to PAM).
As if adding PAM was not ‘bad’ enough, we also need the spawn of systemd. Yes, I looked into elogind as a replacement for ConsoleKit2. The elogind sofware – exactly like eudev which we already have in Slackware – is a component of the systemd codebase, which has been isolated, sanitized, with changes away from the name ‘systemd’ and the code has been made fully independent of systemd.
I talked to Patrick about whether he would consider getting rid of ConsoleKit2. For me this was the only motive to continue dabbling with the ‘ktown’ scripts anyway. And he agreed, so I coded some scripting updates, and tested, and failed and failed. That did bad things to my mood, so I checked all my work-in-progress into a git branch and decided to leave it there for a while, simply because I did not have the time anymore, personal life demanded priority.
Some people noticed the new ‘elogind’ git branch, cloned it and continued the experiment. The resulting debugging effort resolved the dead-end I had been facing. And voila, a new package set was the result, with elogind added and thanking ConsoleKit2 for services rendered.
At the same time (thanks Patrick!) Pat Volkerding modified ‘/etc/rc.d/rc.M’ inside the sysvinit-scripts package, and ‘/etc/pam.d/login’ inside the util-linux package of Slackware-current so that they are now compatible with both ConsoleKit2 and elogind:

Thu Jun 18 22:01:29 UTC 2020
a/sysvinit-scripts-2.1-noarch-33.txz: Rebuilt.
  rc.M: add support for elogind. Thanks to alienBOB.
a/util-linux-2.35.2-x86_64-3.txz: Rebuilt.
  /etc/pam.d/login: support pam_elogind.so. Thanks to alienBOB.

followed one day later by the omitted fix to the ‘startx‘ script and a safeguard for those of you who can not read instructions and failed to remove the ConsoleKit2 package:

Fri Jun 19 19:59:04 UTC 2020
a/sysvinit-scripts-2.1-noarch-34.txz: Rebuilt.
  rc.M: check for elogind first so that we can ignore a stale CK2 package.
x/xinit-1.4.1-x86_64-2.txz: Rebuilt.
  When using elogind, start the session on the current console.
  Thanks to alienBOB.

This eased my job considerably. Consider the new ‘ktown’ release as a prep test for inclusion into Slackware.

Elogind and Wayland

Yes, Plasma5 Wayland sessions work now, thanks to the earlier PAM inclusion and now the elogind addition. You can start a Plasma Wayland session via SDDM (runlevel 4) by selecting it in the session drop-down menu.
And you can start a Plasma Wayland session at the console (runlevel 3) by executing the “startkwayland” command.

Note that with elogind as the session/seat manager instead of ConsoleKit2, you’ll see some new behaviour.
A quite obvious change: if you run ‘startx’ or ‘startkwayland’ at the console, you won’t see a VT (virtual terminal) switch. In the past, your console TTY would usually be tty1 but your graphical session would start on tty7 and you would automatically be switched from tty1 to tty7. This is no longer true – the graphical session will re-use your console TTY.
SDDM is still starting on tty7 but only because I make it do so via its configuration file.

Elogind adds a couple of commands which allow you to inspect the nature and status of the logged-in users and their sessions & seats. Check out “man loginctl”. To understand more about the elogind configuration options, read “man logind.conf”.

Running a Wayland session using the proprietary NVIDIA driver is possible – who’d have thought. For a long while, there was an unsurmountable incompatibility between Wayland protocol implementations and the proprietary drivers of Nvidia which historically support only X.Org. But Nvidia added EGLStreams support to their driver a few years back which opened a lot of possibilities.

EGLStreams is one of the two APIs through which a Wayland compositor can talk to a GPU driver. The other API is GBM and this is the API used by all of the Linux kernel’s GPU drivers. All Wayland compositors support GBM, but support for Nvidia’s EGLStreams is limited (momentarily) to the Wayland compositors in KDE and Gnome.

Taken from https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland/Nvidia you should prepare as follows.

  • Qt5 >= 5.15 is a requirement, luckily we already have that in Slackware.
  • X.Org release >= 1.20 is needed for EGLStreams support in XWayland, which means that all X Window clients which are started in your Wayland session will also have accelerated graphics rendering. Again, Slackware’s version of xorg-server is sufficiently new.
  • You need to enable modesetting in the kernel for the Nvidia driver. You can easily check (as root) whether kernel modesetting is enabled by running “cat /sys/module/nvidia_drm/parameters/modeset”. The command’s output should be “Y”.
    If you get a “N”, then you need to add the string “nvidia-drm.modeset=1” to the kernel’s boot commandline e.g. via the ‘append’ parameter in (e)lilo.conf or syslinux.cfg.
    For grub you can add that append-string to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT definition in the file “/etc/default/grub”, so that when you run “grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg” it will be added in every declaration block (thanks to willysr).
  • KWin needs to use EGLStreams for accelerated graphics support, as explained above, or else it will default to GBM and you won’t be happy with the  1 FPS refresh rate on your monitor!
    You need to set the environment variable KWIN_DRM_USE_EGL_STREAMS to the value of “1“.
    One way to do this is to create a profile script (e.g. “/etc/profile.d/kwin.sh”). Add the single line:

    export KWIN_DRM_USE_EGL_STREAMS=1

    and make that script executable. Or define this environment variable through any other means that you prefer, for instance if you are not using a bash-compatible shell.

After having played for a bit in a Plasma Wayland session on my desktop computer with a Nvidia card and using their proprietary driver, I can say that there are still some graphical quirks & glitches but I saw no showstoppers.

What else can you expect in KDE-5_20.06?

This June ktown release contains the KDE Frameworks 5.71.0, Plasma 5.19.1 and Applications 20.04.2. All this on top of the Qt 5.15.0 which recently got updated in Slackware-current.

Deps:
I added the package autoconf-archive which was needed to recompile dbus. I added elogind (make sure to ‘removepkg ConsoleKit2’ first!) , and added two recompiled Slackware packages picking up elogind support: dbus and polkit.
I recompiled accountsservice to pick up elogind support as well, and recompiled polkit-qt5, libdbusmenu-qt5, qca-qt5 against the new Qt5 which was upgraded in Slackware since last month’s ‘ktown’ release.
And I recompiled grantlee-qt4 because I had forgotten to do so after the 2018 mass rebuild in Slackware… no-one noticed.

Frameworks:
Frameworks 5.71.0 is an incremental stability release, see: https://kde.org/announcements/kde-frameworks-5.71.0. The Frameworks package which picks up elogind support is: solid.

Plasma:
Plasma 5.19.1 is the second increment of the 5.19 cycle, which means that I skipped the .0 release. See https://kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.19.1 and if you want to read more about the goals for 5.19 you should check out https://kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.19.0 .
There is a new package in Plasma: kwayland-server. The packages which pick up elogind support are: plasma-workspace, powerdevil, kscreenlocker.

Plasma-extra;
In plasma-extra I rebuilt sddm-qt5 to pick up elogind support and added plasma-wayland-protocols as dependency for the new kwayland-server in Plasma.

Applications;
Applications 20.04.2 is an incremental bug fix release, see also https://kde.org/announcements/releases/2020-06-apps-update/

Applications-extra:
For applications-extra, I tried (and failed) to update krita (I got boost related errors) but I did update kmymoney.

Telepathy:
KDE Telepathy is no longer part of my ‘ktown’ distribution of KDE Plasma5.

Where to get KDE Plasma5 for Slackware

NOTE: I will delay the release for a couple of hours to allow everybody to read this post and avoid updating blindly which would break graphical login sessions!

It should be obvious, but these packages will not work on Slackware 14.2. The old (KDE 5_17.11) Plasma5 packages that were still in my ‘ktown’ repository for Slackware 14.2 were removed last month because they were un-maintained and had security issues.

Download the KDE-5_20.06 for Slackware-current from the usual location at https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/ or one of its mirrors like http://slackware.uk/people/alien-kde/current/ .

Check out the README file in the root of the repository for detailed installation or upgrade instructions.

BIG FAT WARNING: Read these README instructions carefully! In short:

  1. UPGRADE TO THE LATEST slackware-current first.
  2. Then, REMOVE the ConsoleKit2 package.
  3. Next, install or upgrade the KDE5 package set.
  4. Change to directory /usr/share/sddm/scripts/ and move the Xession.new & Xsetup.new files into place (remove the .new extension) after carefully checking that you are not overwriting your own customizations in the Xsession & Xsetup scripts. Note: because “slackpkg new-config” only looks inside the /etc/ directory it will miss the two scripts in /usr/share/sddm/scripts/.
    You’ll still have to manually check /etc/ for some critical *.new files that need to be put into place if you are not using slackpkg (which does this *.new check at the end of its run).
  5. Finally, REBOOT.

Development of Plasma5 is tracked in git: https://git.slackware.nl/ktown/ and this month’s development takes place in the ‘elogind‘ branch..

A new Plasma5 Live ISO will be available soon at https://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/ (rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/latest/) with user/pass being “live/live” as always.

Have fun! Eric

Updated packages in the past weeks: Plasma5, gcc_multilib, openjdk7 and more

March 15, 2020 / / 94 Comments

I do regular updates of packages in my repository. I focus on the software that is popular, or relevant to Slackware. For the software with a high visibility I usually write a blog post to alert people to the new stuff.
During the last couple of weeks I have not been writing so much about updates due to personal circumstances, some of it has to do with the Corona outbreak.

I was also affected the death of Erik Jan Tromp (Slackware’s alphageek) early March just after I visited him for a final time in his apartment in Leeuwarden.


Anyway, here is a summary of what was refreshed during these weeks.

The new KDE-5_20.03 batch is now available for download from my ‘ktown‘ repository. As always, please remove KDE4 first (check the README for instructions if you still need those). These packages will not work on Slackware 14.2.
This March release contains the KDE Frameworks 5.68.0, Plasma 5.18.3 and Applications 19.12.3. All this on top of Qt 5.13.2.

Deps:
The most interesting event this month is of course the addition of qt5 and its dependencies to Slackware-current itself. I could remove several packages from my own ktown ‘deps’ section: OpenAL (renamed to openal-soft in Slackware), SDL_sound (integrated to Slackware’s sdl package), brotli, hyphen, libxkbcommon, socat, qt5, qt5-webkit, wayland, wayland-protocols and woff2.
I also updated the sip package so its version matches again with that in Slackware (the ktown version has Qt5 support which the Slackware version still needs to pick up). The qca-qt5 package was updated to the latest version.

Frameworks:
Frameworks 5.68.0 is an incremental stability release, see: https://www.kde.org/announcements/kde-frameworks-5.68.0.php.

Plasma:
Plasma 5.18.3 is the fourth incremental release of 5.18 LTS (Long Term Support). See https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.18.0.php for the full announcement including several video’s portraying the strong points of KDE’s desktop environment and https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.18.3.php for information on these latest updates.

Plasma-extra;
In plasma-extra I updated latte-dock.

Applications;
Applications 19.12.3 is a stability and bugfix update for the 19.12 cycle. Remember that I still call this ‘Applications‘ but KDE folk prefer the new name ‘Releases‘. See https://kde.org/announcements/releases/2020-03-apps-update/

Applications-extra:
In applications-extra I updated kstars and added a new package: labplot.

Telepathy:
KDE Telepathy is no longer part of my ‘ktown’ distribution of KDE Plasma5.

PAM support

My ‘ktown’ has two sub-repositories. The ‘latest‘ sub-repository is always meant to be used with the official Slackware-current packages. and the ‘testing‘ sub-repository is where I test stuff that is not yet ready to be adopted by the larger population.

Since last month, Slackware’s own ‘/testing’ area contains a set of packages that add PAM support to Slackware. My regular ktown aka ‘latest’ repository content is meant for an up-to-date Slackware-current without PAM. The ‘testing’ repository on the other hand is compiled against a pam-ified Slackware and can be used if you have added the new ‘testing’ PAM packages of Slackware-current to your system.
The packages that picked up PAM support are: kscreenlocker and plasma-workspace (in the ‘plasma’ directory),  and sddm-qt5 (in ‘plasma-extra’). A new package has been introduced as well: kwallet-pam (in the ‘plasma’ directory).

Where to get KDE Plasma5 for Slackware

Download the KDE-5_20.03 from the usual location at https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/ or one of its mirrors like http://slackware.uk/people/alien-kde/current/ .
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 is available at https://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/ (rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/latest/) with user/pass being “live/live” as always.

While I was working on new Plasma5 packages, Pat Volkerding released packages for gcc 9.3.0 for Slackware-current. When I told him I did not have the time to compile multilib versions for the new gcc because I was busy, Pat responded by updating the gcc-multilib.SlackBuild script and compiling a set of multilib gcc packages for me. So what you download from my multilib repository was actually built by Pat this time.

For those who still use the older Java7, I updated my openjdk7/openjre7 packages to 7u251_b02 with the help of IcedTea 2.6.21 release. This is a security bugfix release, as these Java releases always are I guess.
I get questions from time to time why I do not release packages for Java 11, and my answer always is: I do not see the need. I build my packages using IcedTea framework and when they add support for newer Java versions than 8, I will release packages for that too.

There were several Chromium 80 updates in rapid succession during the last month, and the most recent version you can get from my repository now is 80.0.3987.132. I realize that there’s even a slightly newer release available but there’s only so much time to work on Slackware.

The advantage of having Qt5 in Slackware nowadays, is that it becomes a lot easier to compile a Calibre package for slackware-current. Nevertheless, the calibre package for Slackware 14.2 is still big because my Calibre packages contain all the dependencies inside and the version for Slackware 14.2 includes qt5 libraries.

I am regularly updating packages that are part of my ‘Digital Audio Workstation’ collection.
During the past weeks I updated the MuseScore package (Musescore can create, playback and print music scores) and along with that I updated the Qt5 based JackQtl graphical interface to the Jack2 audio server.
For my own laptop and desktop, I am now starting qjackctl in Plasma5 on login and all my ALSA and Pulseaudio sound pipes through Jack into my speakers now, without the need to change anything to Slackware’s default ALSA and Pulseaudio configurations.

Have fun! Eric

PAM landed in Slackware today, also new Plasma5 packages available

February 12, 2020 / / 82 Comments

OK folks, so today PAM finally landed in Slackware.

What does that mean? Not much actually. Your Slackware will keep functioning as before. The new functionality offered by the Pluggable Authentication Modules is not directly visible. Let me simply copy the ChangeLog.txt announcement verbatim:

Wed Feb 12 05:05:50 UTC 2020
Hey folks! PAM has finally landed in /testing. Some here wanted it to go
right into the main tree immediately, and in a more normal development cycle
I'd have been inclined to agree (it is -current, after all). But it's
probably better for it to appear in /testing first, to make sure we didn't
miss any bugs and also to serve as a warning shot that we'll be shaking up
the tree pretty good over the next few weeks. I'd like to see this merged
into the main tree in a day or two, so any testing is greatly appreciated.
Switching to the PAM packages (or reverting from them) is as easy as
installing all of them with upgradepkg --install-new, and if reverting then
remove the three leftover _pam packages. After reverting, a bit of residue
will remain in /etc/pam.d/ and /etc/security/ which can either be manually
deleted or simply ignored. While there are many more features available in
PAM compared with plain shadow, out of the box about the only noticable
change is the use of cracklib and libpwquality to check the quality of a
user-supplied password. Hopefully having PAM and krb5 will get us on track
to having proper Active Directory integration as well as using code paths
that are likely better audited these days. The attack surface *might* be
bigger, but it's also a lot better scrutinized.
Thanks to Robby Workman and Vincent Batts who did most of the initial heavy
lifting on the core PAM packages as a side project for many years. Thanks
also to Phantom X whose PAM related SlackBuilds were a valuable reference.
And thanks as well to ivandi - I learned a lot from the SlackMATE build
scripts and was even occasionally thankful for the amusing ways you would
kick my ass on LQ. ;-) You're more than welcome to let us know where we've
messed up this time.
The binutils and glibc packages in /testing were removed and are off the
table for now. I'm not seeing much upside to heading down that rabbit hole
at the moment. Next we need to be looking at Xfce 4.14 and Plasma 5.18 LTS
and some other things that have been held back since KDE4 couldn't use them.
Cheers! :-)

Also today, I uploaded a fresh batch of Plasma5 packages to my ‘ktown’ repository. This time, the ‘latest‘ and ‘testing‘ versions of the repository are different!
The regular aka ‘latest’ repository content is meant for an up-to-date Slackware-current without PAM. The ‘testing’ repository on the other hand is compiled against a pam-ified Slackware and can be used if you have added the new ‘testing’ PAM packages of Slackware-current to your system.
The packages that picked up PAM support are: kscreenlocker and plasma-workspace (in the ‘plasma’ directory),  and sddm-qt5 (in ‘plasma-extra’). A new package has been introduced as well: kwallet-pam (in the ‘plasma’ directory).

I expect that Plasma5 gets folded into the distro soon after PAM moves out of testing and into the core distro.

The new KDE-5_20.02 batch is now available for download from my ‘ktown‘ repository. As always, please remove KDE4 first (check the README for instructions if you still need those). These packages will not work on Slackware 14.2.

What else is new in the February 2020 release

This month’s KDE Plasma5 for Slackware contains the KDE Frameworks 5.67.0, Plasma 5.18.0 and Applications 19.12.2. All this on top of Qt 5.13.2.

Deps:
This month no updates to the ‘deps’ section (except in ‘testing’ where I removed cracklib and libpwquality since those are now part of the Slackware PAM related packages).

Frameworks:
Frameworks 5.67.0 is an incremental stability release, see: https://www.kde.org/announcements/kde-frameworks-5.67.0.php.

Plasma:
Plasma 5.18.0 is the first release of 5.18 LTS (Long Term Support). The focus for this new release cycle has been on improving the notification system, a much improved audio-volume systray widget, streamlining the desktop settings (no more ‘cashew’ menu in the top right) and a much better integration of GTK+ based applications with the Plasma desktop theme, through the use of client-side decorations. Also, the graphical performance has been tweaked with less graphical glitches and Nvidia GPU statistics displayed in KSysGuard.  See https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.18.0.php for the full announcement including several video’s portraying the strong points of KDE’s desktop environment.

Plasma-extra;
In plasma-extra I updated latte-dock and rebuilt sddm-qt5.

Applications;
Applications 19.12.2 is a stability and bugfix update for the 19.12 cycle. Remember that I still call this ‘Applications‘ but KDE folk prefer the new name ‘Releases‘. See https://kde.org/announcements/releases/2020-02-apps-update/

Applications-extra:
In applications-extra I updated kdevelop-pg-qt, kdevelop, kdev-php, and kdev-python..

Telepathy:
KDE Telepathy is no longer part of my ‘ktown’ distribution of KDE Plasma5.

Where to get it

Download the KDE-5_20.02 from the usual location at https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/ or one of its mirrors like http://slackware.uk/people/alien-kde/current/ .
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 is going to be available soon at https://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/ (rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/latest/) with user/pass being “live/live” as always. I am still working on an improved ‘setup2hd‘ and depending on the amount of work (and setbacks) I may decide to leave the ‘old’ setup2hd script in the ISO for now.

Have fun! Eric

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