Alien Pastures

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Tag: kde (Page 28 of 28)

Second beta of KDE 4.4

January 4, 2010 / / 10 Comments

Just before christmas in 2009, the KDE community released the second beta of the upcoming KDE 4.4 desktop environment (or to use the correct name, KDE Software Compilation 4.4).

In Slackware Linux’s development tree we still have 4.3.4 which works really well, but in KDE 4.4 some major strides are being made towards an even better work environment.

I decided to have a look at these new developments, especially since the Nepomuk search should work a lot better with the new and fast Virtuoso backend, and built the whole of KDE 4.4.beta2 for our 64-bit Slackware Linux.

I was not disappointed. Even though this KDE 4.4 prerelease is labeled “beta”, I have found it to be quite stable, fast, slick and very useable. The improvements which I have seen from 4.1 -> 4.2 -> 4.3 -> 4.4 keep amazing me… let alone the giant leap that lay between 4.0 and 4.0… everybody remembers the heated debates between the early adopters of KDE4 and those who hated it. At the time we added KDE4 to Slackware, that was seen as a milestone release. Now, I can not imagine ever going back to using KDE3 as my default desktop. And yes, Nepomuk search is pretty nifty, lightning fast and it does not feel like it is eating away my computer’s resources.

So, I am making my Slackware packages available to the general public – for all of you to enjoy. There is one caveat though:

You will need to run a development snapshot of 64-bit Slackware (meaning, slackware64-current of around 25-december-2009 or newer).

These packages do not work on the 64-bit release of Slackware 13.0. Neither do I have packages for the 32-bit release of slackware-current, simply because I do not have a computer in the house which is running slackware-current and is powerful enough to build KDE4 and the various dependencies in a reasonable time.

KDE 4.4 has requirements that are a bit different than with KDE 4.3.x which we have in slackware-current, or even 4.2.4 which we have in Slackware 13.0. You will have to upgrade several non-KDE Slackware packages as well as add some new ones.

Now, go and have a look at http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.3.85/ . Version 4.3.85 is the same as 4.4.beta2.

  • All of the dependencies that you need are in the “x86_64/deps” directory.
  • All KDE packages can be found in “x86_64/kde”.
  • KDE localizations (language packs) are available in “x86_64/kdei”.

These are the steps you take to upgrade slackware64-current to KDE 4.4.beta2. It will bring you KDE4 even if you did not have it installed before. As part of the steps you will be downloading the new Slackware packages, but not the source or SlackBuilds. It is easy to modify the download command to also get you the sources if you want this.

  1. Download all of the directory http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.3.85/x86_64/ :
    # lftp -c "open http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.3.85/ ; mirror x86_64"
  2. Change into the directory “x86_64” which has been created:
    # cd x86_64
  3. Remove the no longer required kdelibs-experimental package:
    # removepkg kdelibs-experimental
  4. Install/upgrade the new dependencies:
    # upgradepkg --reinstall --install-new deps/*.t?z
  5. Install/upgrade KDE4.4.beta2 packages:
    # upgradepkg --reinstall --install-new kde/*.t?z

Of course, you should not run those commands while running X and certainly not while running KDE… After the upgrade process finishes, you can start a KDE session and you will be greeted by the familiar yet subtly different  user interface of KDE4.

NOTE: Some of the localizations (the KDEI series) had errors while building. Missing from this beta release are the localizations for the following languages:

ca, da, es, et, it, sr.

Here is a screenshot of my desktop with Dolphin showing a Nepomuk-powered search result for the word “slackware” in documents that it indexes, as well as Dolphin’s extremely convenient “terminal mode” (just press F4 to open Dolphin’s terminal if you need the speed of the commandline for some file operation). You’ll also notice that adding widgets to your desktop looks quite different now.

Have fun, Eric

Leaps and bounds

April 8, 2009 / / 7 Comments

Updates to Slackware’s development tree

Today, a lot of changes found their way into slackware-current.  Slackware’s development speed shows leaps and bounds 🙂  The newest set of updates is nearly as long as last month when Slackware added KDE4 to mainstream. The kernel packages have now arrived at 2.6.29.1 which is the most recent kernel available to date.  The KDE series is now at 4.2.2, which is a bug fix release to the previous 4.2.1. We also updated a lot of the KDE dependencies.

New packages which were added: jasper (provides jpeg2000 support in Okular), crda and iw (user-space support for wireless drivers in the new kernel, useful for people in non-US countries).  M2Crypt, libnl and libmcrypt are other newcomers (and the php package has now been compiled with mcrypt support, this was a much asked-for feature).  An interesting addition is xz.  This compression tool based on Lasse Collin’s LZMA offers better compression than bzip2 and much faster de-compression than bzip2.

The curl package was recompiled with support for a set of CA root certificates. This provides a fix for the errors people would get if they used curl to download stuff from secure (aka https://) web sites.  The mkinitrd package was enhanced with the mkinitrd_command_generator.sh script (written by PiterPUNK and me) which makes it very easy to build an initrd.gz image for your kernel. It can also write an update for your /etc/lilo.conf file. Just run:

sh /usr/share/mkinitrd/mkinitrd_command_generator.sh -h

to see what it can do.

Again, there were changes which did not make their way into the official ChangeLog.txt announcement…

I will not give full disclosure and let you find out for yourself. The changes are in the Slackware installer. One will be quite obvious from the start (just look at the messages during the final stage of the boot), the second will only become apparent for those of you who perform NFS installs and the third is not even visible – consider it an easter egg (tested only by me thusfar I believe). It adds yet another possible package source when installing Slackware.

Have fun with this new installment of slackware-current! And don’t get scared when you boot your updated computer and see the new kernel logo: a small animal (Tuz) which replaces the familiar penguin (Tux) for the duration of the 2.6.29.x kernel releases…

Eric

Massive updates in slackware-current

March 10, 2009 / / 20 Comments

Today, Pat Volkerding published a massive amount of package updates to the slackware-current tree. The entry in the Slackware ChangeLog.txt measures more than 200 lines, and is probably the largest update to the development tree ever.

Many of the core packages have received an version upgrade, but those changes may not be immediately visible to the average end user. Some of the absolute highlights mentioned in the ChangeLog are indication of a big step forward for Slackware: a new kernel (2.6.28.7), new gcc (4.3.3), new glibc (still called 2.9 but the snapshot we use is more like 2.10), a new XFCE (4.6.0) and most importantly: KDE 3.5.10 is gone, replaced by KDE 4.2.1 (which had been living in the /testing directory for a long time).

I have been working with KDE4 releases for nearly a year now, running it as my default desktop, and 4.2.1 is stable, fast and beautiful. People who heard or read that the new KDE is bloated and slow, should try it out and decide for themselves; I think it performs better than KDE3. I also ran the new XFCE for a while and it looks sweet. Note that when you upgrade from XFCE 4.4 you may experience missing icons in the panel. This happens because the Rodent icon theme was removed from XFCE in the new release. The file CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT (located in the toplevel directory of slackware-current) explains this issue and what you can do about it.

One neat feature addition which did not make the ChangeLog, but is definitely worth mentioning: the initrd.img and usbboot.img files which contain the Slackware installer,  have also been updated for the new 2.6.28.7 kernel. As a result, you can now install Slackware to an ext4 filesystem!

If anyone out there with a Netbook (one of those Intel Atom powered, 9 or 10 inch sized laptops with long battery life) is going to install Slackware-current on it, I would like to hear your impressions. Leave a comment to this blog post.

Have fun, Eric

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