Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: kde (Page 23 of 28)

End of may ramblings

May 31, 2012 / / 22 Comments

It has been a while since my latest blog post, so I thought it would be good to talk a bit about the goings-on.

First about the Slackware web server. I know, people, that we have been without http://www.slackware.com/ for a few weeks now, but rest assured that the site will eventually be back. Either we put the old web site code on a temporary server or we wait a little longer and publish a new site based on a new CMS. It all pretty much depends on how much time we can volunteer for this – it is mostly handled by a few people in the coreteam. Pat should focus on Slackware and make sure we get a new stable release at some point – there is a lot to do still on that front.

And then about my own packaging activities.

There was a new release of LibreOffice yesterday, and I am currently building packages for that. If there are no issues with the build then you can expect those packages tomorrow.

KDE release team is in the process of releasing the first beta of KDE SC 4.9, and I intend to make packages for that. There was a heated discussion about this beta when the new release manager announced he was going to call off the beta1 release… but all issues have been resolved yesterday and new tarballs are going to be made available ahead of time to the packagers. There are quite a few changes compared to KDE 4.8.x so it will cost me a while to work out the updates to the KDE.SlackBuild framework.

I also hope that VLC releases their version 2.0.2 soon. It has been lingering just around the corner for a while, but a recent fall-out between several of the core developers threatened the whole project’s existence when their most important Linux developer quit the team out of frustration. That animosity has now subsided, the team is whole again, and development is progressing toward a new release.

I also want to thank the kind people who donated a few bucks after all the upheavals about the Slackware webserver’s outage. Although I work on Slackware in my spare time, because I like it, it’s my main hobby so to speak, getting some funds enabled me to buy a new and faster build box last year, and now I ordered a Raspberry-Pi (finally…) and I am also looking for a good tablet which allows the installation of a different OS than only Android… so that I can put my unfinished port of Slackware to modern ARM architectures on it and finally release that. A release does not make sense if it runs on only one device (the Trim Slice). Perhaps I will buy some more ARM hardware too. Even Pat was becoming excited about this ARM port.

Eric

KDE 4.8.3 packages

May 4, 2012 / / 34 Comments

The KDE team officially released the sources for KDE Software Compilation 4.8.3 today. I grabbed the tarballs from the packagers site a few days earlier, so that I could again have a full set of Slackware packages for you.

The upgrade will be trivial. Slackware-current was enhanced very recently with KDE 4.8.2 and all the software updates which that move required. Apart from the 4.8.3 release sources, I only had to compile a newer version of libbluedevil and bluedevil, and even those two will be updated in Slackware too, very soon (perhaps Pat already pulled the trigger).

Get my packages here; the official Slackware packages will remain at version 4.8.2, while Pat and the team concentrate on other parts of the distro.

The accompanying README file contains detailed installation/upgrade instructions. Do not fail to follow those instructions!

Have fun! Eric

Slackware-current gets KDE 4.8.2, hooray

April 15, 2012 / / 49 Comments

It was bound to happen, and while I was asleep Pat updated slackware-current with a fresh batch of packages… containing KDE 4.8.2 and all the stuff that it depends on!

The update to the ChangeLog.txt makes up almost 20% of the full ChangeLog length so far! Finally we have a beefy update to -current. It’s playtime for those who had not used my own unofficial “ktown” builds yet.

Note that Slackware’s version of Calligra (the successor to Koffice) is now at the official stable release, version 2.4. My own package was still a release candidate.

Also note that Networkmanager was added to Slackware! So, what I had kept separately in a “testing” directory because I was not sure what Pat would want to do with it, is now being used in the distribution after all. Enabling NetworkManager is done like in my own instructions: make the rc script executable (Slackware will ship NM disabled by default) using the command “chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.networkmanager”, and add the NetworkManager plasmoid (widget) to your KDE desktop in order to configure it.

The good old way of using rc.inet1 to configure your network is still available of course, this will not change! Also, you can still use WICD instead if you prefer that. Users of XFCE will want to stick with WICD anyway, since Slackware does not have a graphical configuration tool for managing NM connections, apart from the KDE widget.

Upgrade instructions:

If you are currently running “alien” packages for KDE 4.8.2 and want to upgrade to the official packages in Slackware-current, then you’ll have to be prepared for some manual labour. But it may not be that hard after all, except when you have a lot of my other packages installed as well (like multilib versions of gcc/glibc and lots of “compat32” packages).

  1. If you are using slackpkg to maintain your Slackware,  then probably you have blacklisted all of my packages.In this case, temporarily remove or comment the line in “/etc/slackpkg/blacklist” that goes “[0-9]+alien”. Then use slackpkg to upgrade to slackware-current as usual, with this condition: do not blindly accept the list of packages to be upgraded, but review every single package shown by slackpkg as a candidate for upgrading. De-select every package which you want to keep! All the “alien” packages related to KDE and its dependencies must stay in a “selected” state. Then let slackpkg do its upgrade work and you’ll end up with a proper slackware-current.
  2. If you want to upgrade using slackpkg but are not prepared to review lots of packages manually to see if they should be upgraded or left alone, then a very fast way of upgrading from my own to Slackware’s packages will be the following four commands followed by a regular upgrade using slackpkg (example paths are for 64-bit Slackware, so if you are running 32-bit Slackware then you have to ignore the “64”):
  1. upgradepkg /path/to/local-mirror-of/slackware64-current/slackware64/a/*.t?z
  2. upgradepkg /path/to/local-mirror-of/slackware64-current/slackware64/l/*.t?z
  3. upgradepkg /path/to/local-mirror-of/slackware64-current/slackware64/kde/*.t?z
  4. upgradepkg /path/to/local-mirror-of/slackware64-current/slackware64/kdei/*.t?z

Note that if you blindly ran these four commands and you are on a multilib system, you will have overwritten the multilib versions of the glibc packages with original (non-multilib) Slackware versions. You will have to download and upgrade to my multilib glibc packages again. Note that this will not break your Slackware installation… it merely disables the use of 32-bit software until you re-install my multilib glibc packages.

Have fun! Eric

KDE 4.8.2 – updated in Slackware soon (hopefully)!

April 4, 2012 / / 44 Comments

The KDE team released the next update in the KDE 4.8 cycle today. As expected it is mostly on target again.

The sources were made available to packagers some days earlier and that enabled me to update my scripts and start building on time.

I am running KDE 4.8.2 myself and so far, have not found issues. If you find any, be sure to discuss them on this blog page. I have packages ready for you to download & enjoy!

As usual, my README file contains  detailed installation/upgrade instructions. Do not fail to follow those instructions!

I have updated quite a lot of the dependencies for this release, in particular qt, libdbusmenu-qt, sg3_utils, sip, PyQt, QScintilla, shared-desktop-ontologies, raptor2, rasqal, redland, grantlee, phonon, phonon-mplayer, soprano, akonadi. I also moved libktorrent back from the “deps” directory into KDE’s “extragear” because libktorrent depends on kdelibs and therefore should be considered as being a KDE component.

 

And there may even better news in the near future. Pat Volkerding grabbed my build scripts to create official KDE 4.8.2 packages for Slackware-current which hopefully will be showing up in the repositories soon. This means that finally with the update from 4.5.5 to 4.8.2 (and skipping all the 4.6 and 4.7 releases) Slackware again would have a real “current” KDE environment by default. Let’s all hope Pat does not get distracted by the hordes of fans demanding attention!

Have fun! Eric

Make firefox understand downloaded files

March 15, 2012 / / 12 Comments

 It is quite annoying that Firefox always forgets what application to use for “opening” a file which you just downloaded. Also, the context menu “Open containing folder” in the Downloads overview does not work. Thanks to a hint from user cendryon in  a discussion at LinuxQuestions.org, a clean and simple solution surfaced which I had not thought of myself (even though I implement the same techique in my Dropbox client package):

Using “xdg-open” you can improve the integration of Firefox into your Desktop Environment a lot:

  1. Stop firefox if it is running
  2. Delete or rename the mimetypes cache (where firefox keeps its file association settings):
    $ rm ~/.mozilla/firefox/<yourprofile>/mimeTypes.rdf
  3. Start firefox again
  4. Download any file if you had not done this before
  5. Open that file from the “Tools > Downloads” menu (by right-clicking on it and selecting “Open“). When asked to choose the application for opening the fike, browse to “/usr/bin/xdg-open“. then check the checkbox to “Remember your choice“.

After you’ve configured Firefox like that, both the  “Open” and “Open containing folder” context menus will work. If you are running KDE (which was the subject of that discussion on LQ.org) you can then change the preferred programs through KDE’s “file associations” settings. Brilliant.

Have fun,

Eric

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