Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: kde45 (Page 2 of 2)

Wondering how to spend my computer cycles

July 30, 2010 / / 15 Comments

I am beginning to feel the lack of computing power in my attic…

There is a pending KDE 4.5.0 release, which needs to be built for slackware-current. Then there is also VLC 1.1.2 which was released a few days ago… and those packages need to be built for Slackware 13.1 (so that they can join my main repository). I have only one “build box” which is fairly old and sporting a CPU without hardware virtualization capabilities.

Decisions, decisions… there’s only 24 hours in a day.

So I decided to start with building a test set of KDE 4.5.0 (the sources of which I already have) because that will be a big event for a lot of people, and leave the new VLC for another time. Don’t worry! Linux users will find that the 1.1.2 release of VLC does not offer anything worthwhile, except perhaps for some bugfixes in the DVB (digital video) module. The VLC 1.1.1 packages which I have created for Slackware are still very much OK.

Having to build packages for Slackware 13.1 as well as -current, and for two architectures (32-bit and 64-bit) is proving a bit too much for that old computer (which happens to be my home desktop as well), so I decided to use the donation money that has been accumulating and order an Athlon II X4 640 boxed CPU, along with an Asus M4N68T motherboard and 8 GB of RAM, completed with a 2 TB SATA hard drive. Once all that arrives on my doorstep, I will assemble a full computer using the case I have here (with a motherboard that caught fire last month because of a crappy condensator). That machine will become my new server.

Thanks to all of you who took the trouble to click my PayPal button – you know who you are, even if I did not thank you in person. Your gracious gifts will be spent with the purpose of making Slackware an even better experience.

By the way – I intend to use qemu-kvm to run a load of virtual machines on that computer, so that it will be easier to build in parallel. I have been considering VMware, VirtualBox and Xen as well. I decided against VMware for being closed-source. VirtualBox could still find its way onto the computer at some later stage; I decided against it because of the mixed license model where you get additional functionality only in the closed-source version. And Xen, well I am quite interested in how that works and performs, but unfortunately it requires a patched “xenified” kernel for the host and Linux guest. That was one bridge too far for me.

Nevertheless, there was a recent post from Chris Abela on the slackbuilds.org mailing list about the “The Xenification of Slack” which will most certainly help Slackware users get jumpstarted into the Xen world. Worth checking out, there is a tarball attached to that post with scripts and configuration files. Well done.

Enough of this, time for a beer.

Cheers, Eric

Beta alert: KDE 4.5 beta2 for the adventurous

June 9, 2010 / / 14 Comments

I hinted at this in my previous post; I have been building packages for the second beta of KDE SC 4.5.

I was not so sure if I should make them publicly available after I had installed them on my laptop running Slackware64 and very soon, noticed some serious issues:

  • I can not have virtual desktops with separate widget sets for instance.
  • I had some initial problems with KDM which is now configured to run as a non-existing “kdm” user – but I patched “/etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc” and reverted to the old, working, situation.
  • The drop-down menu when you click on the “cashew” in the top-right corner has many double or even triple entries, which is very annoying

However, in the meantime I received positive feedback from people who are eager and willing to test the beta packages. Good, thank you! That made me feel all warm inside!

All the joking aside, I am glad with the reponses to my blog posts. It’s what drives me to create these packages for you.

Here they are (64-bit as well as 32-bit): http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.4.85/

You’ll notice that there are a few updated dependencies and one new package, libdbusmenu-qt. Grab those too! There are no pre-compiled language packs for now (I just lacked the time), but I have added the sources and updated the build script for “KDEI” so you can easily build a single package yourself. For example, compile the “nl” language pack with this command:

# PKGLANG=nl  ./kde-l10n.SlackBuild

Good luck! Don’t forget to report the bugs you find at http://bugs.kde.org/ and feel free to discuss them in the comments section of this post.

By the time KDE4.5 sees its first Release Candidate, I will have updated the Qt4 package too. At this moment I did not want to diverge too much from Slackware 13.1.

Cheers, Eric

Fiddling with the KDE 4.5 beta

June 8, 2010 / / 7 Comments

Although it seems (by looking at the changelog between 4.4.3 and 4.4.4) that there were no spectacular updates in the latest stable KDE Software Compilation, I got some feedback that 4.4.4 does feel “snappier” than the 4.4.3 which is part of Slackware 13.1.

Good news (that people actually use my packages)!

It made me think again about the upcoming KDE SC 4.5 for which the second beta was released very recently (the sources at least). I had not really planned on a Slackware build for KDE 4.5 until I had access to the stable sources, which will not happen all too soon.

But if even a small (bugfix) upgrade is received so positively, some people may find it interesting or challenging enough to get their hands dirty with the new beta release. So I decided to move ahead, locate the updated and new dependencies and start building packages.

At this moment there are no kdepim packages planned for KDE 4.5. The kdepim developers decided that the current quality of their software is not high enough to be included in KDE 4.5 – they expect kdepim to be re-integrated into KDE SC 4.5.1 and will release preview versions on their own in the meantime.

The software requirements for 4.5 are not yet written down like they are for older releases, but after reading through the mailing lists I have a feeling that I will have to upgrade Qt to 4.7 in the end. There is no such Qt release yet… so at some point I will start using source snapshots from the Qt git repository.

Not right now however, because the compilation recognized my already installed Qt 4.6.2 and did not complain about that. Tonight I will finish a 64-bit build of KDE SC 4.4.85 (aka 4.5-beta2) and install that to my laptop. If that does not break everything, I will also build a set of 32-bit packages and release the lot to my “ktown repository“.

Let me know if you are interested in tying out the beta! If there is no interest, I may leave it at just the 64-bit packages and use the time to debug my VLC package (which seems to crash on VAAPI support).

Watch this space for more news, soon (I hope).

Eric

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