Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: kde4 (Page 2 of 4)

Integrating NetworkManager into KDE while keeping the Gnome out

October 11, 2011 / / 46 Comments

I think that I am not wrong when I say that Networkmanager is the de-facto way of network configuration management in Linux. Most Linux distributions have implemented it. Slackware on the other hand, traditionally encourages the use of “vi” for network configuration management (by editing “/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf“)… but in recent times, the WICD daemon has been added to the “/extra” directory of Slackware, and that includes a graphical network configuration utility. A lot of (particularly mobile) users like WICD, and so do I.

WICD is for the most part a one-man exercise and the main developer has stated that he is not able to work on the program as much as it deserves. That is not too good news, but I still have hopes for the project.

In the meantime, switching to NetworkManager is not a decision that should be taken lightly. Not because NetworkManager itself will give us issues, but because NM is only the service framework and it does not come with configuration utilities (either GUI or cli oriented – I do not consider the nmcli program adequate) that allow you, the computer’s user, to configure your network connections.

Traditionally, distros will add the “nm-applet” aka “network-manager-applet” to that purpose. The nm-applet is a graphical configuration utility that lives in your desktop’s system tray area. It is being developed by the NetworkManager team. However it is is a Gnome applet, and as such it is riddled with Gnome dependencies. Precisely for that reason it is not trivial to add nm-applet  to Slackware, one of the few Linux distros that does not contain Gnome.

I think that if you are a Slackware GUI lover, you should consider yourself very lucky that the WICD developer team has one passionate Slackware user (NaCl) as member!

Having said all that, I do not have any issues with Networkmanager itself. It’s just the default configuration tool which sucks because of its Gnome allegiance. Hmm, that is not completely true… in the well-known take-a-blunt-knife-and-kill-your-software style of Redhat they managed to break API as well as ABI compatibility with the release of the 0.9 series of NM last august… where did I hear this story before? Like with PolicyKit, HAL and systemd, Redhat managed to cause a lot of fuss when developers decided to throw away their code and start over with fresh insights…

Applications which have been written to interact with the old  0.8 interface of NM have to be re-written and that takes time. At this moment, many NM-aware programs still do not support NM 0.9.

While all of that passed, I have been keeping an eye on what happens in the KDE camp. The KDE software compilation has never had a good network configurator for the 4.x series and the team which was developing KNetworkManager seems to have dissolved. But there is good news: a new networkmanagement plasmoid (KDE widget) plus accompanying KControl is available, it supports NM 0.8.x and is stable enough that I have come to prefer it over WICD.

I have built a set of supporting packages (many thanks to Robby Workman for some of these SlackBuild scripts):

  • NetworkManager (the actual network service framework)
  • cnetworkmanager (a commandline interface to NM if you don’t like the GUI)
  • mobile-broadband-provider-info (world-wide database of mobile access providers)
  • ModemManager (accompanying bradband modem management)

These packages allowed me to recompile the kde-workspace package and make it pick up support for NM in KDE’s solid device management. And finally I added the package for the required configuration GUI, networkmanagement

You can get these packages from my ktown repository or any of its mirrors, I built them for KDE 4.7.2 and you will find them inside the directory called “test“.

You can install these packages (kde-workspace needs to be upgraded of course, not installed a second time) with a single command after downloading the packages appropriate for your hardware architecture (32bit or 64bit). Run the following command in the directory which contains the six packages:

# upgradepkg –install-new *.t?z

And please read the README file which specifies in great detail how to enable NetworkManagement while at the same time disabling WICD!

How does it look in KDE after you rebooted? Well, here is a screenshot:

My goal for the next releases of KDE (in case I will still be building the packages for it) is to compile kde-workspace in the presence of NetworkManager and thus add support for NM to the kde-workspace package. Then it will be up to you if you want to actually switch to NM or keep using WICD. The kde-workspace package will work fine even if you did not install NetworkManager.

Give me feedback! Eric

 

Another maintenance release: KDE 4.7.2

October 5, 2011 / / 33 Comments

This time, the KDE release team was pretty quick with their KDE 4.7.2 source tarballs. Normally, distro packagers get a few days of headstart so that they can create packages in time for the source release, but this time I was not yet ready compiling.

Anyway, here they are, myKDE 4.7.2 packages for Slackware.

I guess all of you are used to the modularized KDE. Read my post about KDE 4.7.0 if you want to know more about the reasons for splitting KDE for Slackware into many more (and smaller) packages.

These packages were compiled on Slackware-current but there is a good chance that they will work problemfree on Slackware 13.37 too. I have received several reports from people who tried this and were happy. Still:

Read the accompanying README file for installation and upgrade instructions!

Some of the highlights of these KDE packages:

  • There are several updated dependencies compared to Slackware’s own KDE 4.5.5: PyQt, QScintilla, akonadi, attica, clucene, ebook-tools, hunspell, libdbusmenu-qt, phonon, polkit-qt-1, qt, raptor2, rascal, redland, shared-desktop-ontologies, sip, soprano, strigi, system-config-printer and virtuoso-ose.
  • In comparison with my previous 4.7.1 there are only two updated dependencies: libbluedevil and strigi. The upgrade of Qt to 4.7.4 which I did for the previous 4.7.1 package set added stability to the 4.7 series. I wish I had added an up-to-date Qt4 when I released 4.7.0 packages because I was quite unhappy with the desktop experience back then. However the new Qt4 package deals with the false SSL certificates issued after the CA authority DigiNotar got hacked which is another good thing to have.
  • KDE dpendencies that are not part of Slackware 13.37 at all (yet): grantlee, herqq, libatasmart, libbluedevil, libssh, phonon-gstreamer, phonon-xine, sg3_utils and udisks. Note that I added phonon-gstreamer and phonon-xine only after I had already released KDE 4.7.0 packages because people reported that they no longer had sound. These two packages solve that issue.

Not new since I added these to KDE 4.7.1 before (but you may be new to KDE 4.7 so I will repeat myself here):

  • You will find three useful new applications, compared to Slackware’s own version of KDE: I already added bluedevil to my 4.6.5 package-set. Bluedevil is the new KDE bluetooth stack with a nice GUI, based on the BlueZ libraries already present in Slackware. And with KDE 4.7.0, I included kplayer, a KDE front-end to MPlayer. This time, I added Quanta Plus, which disappeared from KDE4 because that migrated from Qt3 to Qt4. It is now being worked on again, but no longer as a standalone application – instead it is available as a plugin to the Kdevelop Platform.
  • I also added oxygen-gtk, which is not really an application, but a theme engine. It (optionally) makes GTK applications visually blend in with KDE’s own Oxygen theme. There is a README in its documentation directory which explains how to enable it.

The KDE 4.7.2 packages for Slackware-current are available for download from my “ktown” repository and several mirrors (taper is in sync when I post this, the other mirrors still have to catch up):

Have fun! Eric

KDE security fix, Flashplayer 11, random bla

October 4, 2011 / / 6 Comments

KDE team have issued a security advisory (CVE-2011-3365) for the KSSL component in KDE 4.6 and 4.7. I have applied the proposed patch to fix the security hole and updated packages for kdelibs are available from my ktown repository, for both KDE 4.7.1 and KDE 4.6.5 (because I intend to keep that release for a while, it works very well with Slackware 13.37).

Direct links to the packages follow, but you can check out any of the available mirrors of course.

KDE 4.6.5:

KDE 4.7.1:

The new KDE 4.7.2 wich is right beyond the corner will have this fix incorporated.

 

Then there is the Adobe Flash Player.

Finally we have a Linux flash player for both 32bit and 64bit that is on the same terms as the MS Windows version. Yesterday, Adobe announced the official release of their Flash Player release 11 for all platforms. Some of you will cheer, others will moan, but nevertheless this is a milestone in 64bit Linux support. It was (in part) because of the availability of 64bit Flash for Linux that I started the 64bit Slackware port in 2008.

I have packages for you here:

Or on any of my package mirrors, like:

 

And Slackware-current, some people are speculating on huge updates in the near future because there has been such a long silence on the update front. Please do not get too disappointed if the amount of updates is not as big as you might hope. Sometimes, there is real life to take care of.

 

And then there was this:

I am pondering about another blog post, but the idea has not yet finalized in my mind. What it boils down to is, how should I digitize my rather big library of vintage Science Fiction books? I have many tens, maybe a hundred books that certainly will never be released in digital format, and I am looking at the tools to make the conversion. Slackware packages for all the (OCR and scan cleaning) software that I think I will need have been compiled but I hesitate to release them. Mainly because I have not yet tested them myself… ideas are welcome, especially ideas about how to go about the scanning process (I do not want to cut up my books). More to follow!

Cheers, Eric

KDE 4.7.1 packages for Slackware

September 7, 2011 / / 62 Comments

Right after the announcement of the KDE Software Compilation 4.7.1 – I present you with KDE 4.7.1 packages for Slackware.

It’s my second batch of modularized KDE. Read my previous post about KDE 4.7.0 if you want to know more about the reasons for splitting KDE for Slackware into many more (and smaller) packages.

Whereas my KDE 4.7.0 packages should still be applicable to a Slackware 13.37 system, my strong advice for these new 4.7.1 packages is to install them onto Slackware-current (32-bit or 64-bit). I can not guarantee that they will run without issues on Slackware 13.37 – I did not try myself. If you should decide to give it a go on Slackware 13.37 and it works fine for you, please tell me so that I can update this warning.

Read the accompanying README file for installation and upgrade instructions!

Some of the highlights of these KDE packages:

  • There are several updated dependencies compared to Slackware’s own KDE 4.5.5:  PyQt, QScintilla, akonadi, attica, clucene, ebook-tools, hunspell, libdbusmenu-qt, phonon, polkit-qt-1, qt, raptor2, rascal, redland, shared-desktop-ontologies, sip, soprano, system-config-printer and  virtuoso-ose.
  •  In comparison with my previous 4.7.0 there are several updated dependencies too (this list is a bit smaller): PyQt, akonadi, clucene, libbluedevil, polkit-qt-1, qt, raptor2, rascal, redland, sip and soprano. The upgrade of Qt to 4.7.4 makes this desktop a whole lot more stable, and it deals with the false SSL certificates issued after the CA authority DigiNotar got hacked.
  • KDE dpendencies that are not part of Slackware 13.37 at all (yet): grantlee, herqq, libatasmart, libbluedevil, libssh, phonon-gstreamer, phonon-xine, sg3_utils and udisks. Note that I added phonon-gstreamer and phonon-xine only after I had already released KDE 4.7.0 packages because people reported that they no longer had sound. These two packages solve that issue.
  • You will find three useful new applications, compared to Slackware’s own version of KDE: I already added bluedevil to my 4.6.5 package-set. Bluedevil is the new KDE bluetooth stack with a nice GUI, based on the BlueZ libraries already present in Slackware. And with KDE 4.7.0, I included kplayer, a KDE front-end to MPlayer. This time, I added Quanta Plus, which disappeared from KDE4 because that migrated from Qt3 to Qt4. It is now being worked on again, but no longer as a standalone application – instead it is available as a plugin to the Kdevelop Platform. My previous blog post has more information about my reasons for adding quanta.
  • I also added oxygen-gtk, which is not really an application, but a theme engine. It (optionally) makes GTK applications visually blend in with KDE’s own Oxygen theme. There is a README in its documentation directory which explains how to enable it.

The KDE 4.7.1 packages for Slackware-current are available for download from my “ktown” repository and several mirrors. The Indonesian mirror may need a bit of time to sync up but Willy is usually very fast with that:

Have fun! Eric

Starting with KDE 4.6

December 12, 2010 / / 35 Comments

Hi folks!

It took a while, because I have been fighting with properly packaging the LibreOffice software for so long, and playing with slackware-current to find bugs and areas of improvement.

But I finally found time to work on a set of Slackware packages for the second beta of the KDE 4.6 Software Compilation. The release of version 4.5.85, otherwise known as “4.6-beta2” was a few days ago. I had been following the issues which were reported in the days before making the sources public, so it was not too difficult to prepare the dependencies and update Slackware’s KDE build scripts.

Note #1: running Slackware-current (32-bit or 64-bit) is a requirement! Slackware 13.1 is simply too old for my packages.

Note #2: this is beta software, some things will not work reliable or are broken. Do not use this on machines you depend on for your daily work unless you know what you are doing! Use at your own risk!

Apart from the new KDE packages, there are several Slackware packages that need upgrading if you decide you want to test KDE 4.6-beta2. Also, four new non-KDE packages have entered the arena: these are libatasmart,sg3-utils, udisks and upower. The new packages are required because KDE 4.6 no longer depends on HAL. Instead, it uses udisks and upower (born out of the DeviceKit family). The reason is simple: HAL is no longer developed. The X.Org developers took this step away from HAL earlier during the development of X11R7.6 (the version of X in slackware-current does not use HAL anymore). This happened for the same reasons, however X.Org talks to udev directly and does not need udisks and upower. I wish KDE would have done the same… it seems we are now stuck with these DeviceKit offsprings…

Where are the packages?

Packages are available as usual in my “ktown” repository: http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.5.85/ which is mirrored to http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/ and http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/.

I have added a nice README with instructions on how to install or upgrade to this beta2 of KDE 4.6.

What are my experiences so far with this new software?

  • Of course, the first thing I tried was disabling HAL entirely by running “chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.hald” and rebooting.. That went well enough, apart from a piece of audio hardware that was no longer recognized: “HDA Intel (CONEXANT analog)” but I still have proper sound anyway. KDE will complain about hardware that goes missing and will ask you if it should forget about that hardware altogether, or ask again next time.
  • I found that k3b and kaudiocreator no longer worked. I have built new packages for both, with the latest sources checked out from the repositories, and that fixed k3b. Unfortunately, kaudiocreator still crashes on startup, complaining about “QSocketNotifier: Invalid socket 10 and type ‘Read’“. This is caused by the same change in the Solid API which made k3b crash initially, but that team fixed it. If you find a patch for kaudiocreator, tell me!
  • After the upgrade, I had big issues with akonadi. As you may know, akonadi is the storage service for PIM data (kmail wants to store its emails there) and meta data indexed by Strigi and Nepomuk. The upgrade from 4.5.4 to 4.5.85 caused disruption here. On login to KDE, I found that several instances of akonadi_control were being started as well multiple instances of mysqld (akonadi uses MySQL as the database backend) and every time I started KDE, more of these processes would run and all of them would complain about their brethren.  I have not found a decent troubleshooting and repair guide for Akonadi, and out of despair I deleted the akonadi directories “~/.local/share/akonadi” and “~/.config/akonadi” entirely… now that solved the issues!  However, you really do not want to end up with this scenario, especially if all your emails are stored in an akonadi database. Akonadi developers, please provide better documentation on how to fix a broken service!
  • I found that the guidance-power-manager package is no longer needed, because KDE’s own power-devil does a good job of managing the power. I simply removepkg-ed the guidance-power-manager.  There is a widget with a l battery gauge if you need one – it is not added to the system tray by default.
  • I added a package for “kwebkitpart” so that you can now switch konqueror’s rendering engine from KHTML to Webkit (which is a descendant of KHTML).

To sum it all up: if you are adventurous, get my packages and upgrade your Slackware computer with them. It’s a lot of fun trying to find the quirks and bugs in new software, especially if you find fixes for them. And generally, this software works well, even if it is still e beta. But like I said before, you should not use this beta software on a computer that you depend on for your daily business… unless you know what you are doing and are confident that you can overcome any hurdles.

Post your findings in the Slackware forum of linuxquestions.org. Or even better: let me know right here on this blog, and I’ll try to help you out.

Have fun, Eric.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2024 Alien Pastures

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑