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Tag: kde46 (Page 2 of 2)

Package rebuilds for KDE 4.6.0

February 13, 2011 / / 8 Comments

For those of you who are using my KDE 4.6.0 packages:

Lately there have been some massive changes to the software in slackware-current. New versions of boost, libexiv2, perl made it necessary to re-compile several of my own KDE 4.6.0 packages. Perhaps you already noticed that Gwenview no longer worked, or you were having issues with plasmoids.

So, check out my ktown repository packages and upgrade the following:

kdeartwork, kdebase-runtime, kdebindings, kdegraphics, kdeplasma-addons

They have the build number “2alien”

Good luck, Eric

KDE 4.6.0 is here

January 26, 2011 / / 37 Comments

We have explosive!

Targeted with deadly precision, we witness the emergence of a new major KDE release.

Have fun with these KDE Software Compilation 4.6.0 packages for Slackware-current (32-bit as well as 64-bit versions available). Slackware itself will stick with the 4.5.5 version, which is rock stable and well-tested.

Highlight of this version is that it no longer relies on HAL. This is the same approach as taken by the X.Org and XFCE developers. While X.Org relies purely on udev, there are a few additional requirements for KDE (and XFCE) which is why you won’t see these new versions of both Desktop Environments yet. The Slackware Team does not want to be confronted with a potential de-stabilization of the desktop at the end of a release cycle.

If you want to replace Slackware’s own KDE 4.5.5 with the new release, several stock slackware packages need to be updated. There are even some entirely new packages (grantlee, libatasmart, libssh, sg3-utils, udisks, upower) which are required in order to run this new version of KDE4.

You can find all of these packages in the “deps” directory for your architecture.

Accompanying this KDE release are updated packages for k3b, kaudiocreator, kdevplatform and kdevelop because the versions that are contained in Slackware will not work with KDE 4.6.  New companions for KDE 4.6 are kwebkitpart (which allows you to use webkit instead of khtml as the rendering engine in Konqueror), polkit-kde-kcmodules-1 and polkit-kde-agent-1. The two “polkit” packages replace the Slackware  “polkit-kde-1” package which does not work with KDE 4.6.

The kdepim & kdepim-runtime

There has been quite a bit of discussion about the development of the Personal Information Manager (PIM) software like kontact, kmail etc. The PIM developers were not able to release a stable version of their product in time for KDE 4.6, so you now have two choices. I’ll accompany those choices with a word of caution:

  • you can either keep the version 4.4.9 of kdepim and kdepim-runtime (these are already included in slackware-current), which is stable, and compatible with KDE 4.6,
  • OR you can upgrade to the new version 4.6beta4 which I have included together with my KDE 4.6.0 packages… and with “new” I mean “new“! The PIM software has been largely re-written from scratch and does not only integrate fully with the Akonadi storage framework but also looks quite different. Also, this is very much Beta software and may not be stable enough for production use.

See the README file for detailed installation instructions! They are especially important because of the Slackware packages you have to upgrade or remove.

Feedback welcome of course. I have been running all intermediate betas and release candidates and see many improvements over 4.5.x releases, but there are some quirks (application crashes) that I think should be ironed out in a .1 or .2 release before this should be added to Slackware itself.

Get your Slackware packages for KDE 4.6.0 here: http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.6.0/ or on any of my mirrors (http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.6.0/ or http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.6.0/). These packages are not fit for Slackware 13.1.

And rsync access is available as always:

  • rsync://alien.slackbook.org/alien-kde/
  • rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/
  • rsync://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/

Cheers, Eric

KDE 4.6 second release candidate

January 6, 2011 / / 30 Comments

Here it is, the second release candidate of what will become KDE Software Compilation 4.6.

Get your Slackware packages for KDE 4.6.RC2 (4.5.95 is the official version) here: http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.5.95/ or on any of my mirrors (http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.5.95/ or http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.5.95/). These packages are not fit for Slackware 13.1. You have to be running an up-to-date Slackware-current!.

Follow the instructions in the accompanying README for installing these packages, or upgrading from an earlier release.

You can read my previous article on KDE 4.6 beta and RC1 here: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/starting-with-kde-4-6 and http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/kde-4-6-first-release-candidate/. KDE 4.6 no longer needs HAL I have disabled HAL on my laptop (chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.hald), and do not miss any functionality.

And I will repeat this from the previous post: read the announcement by the PIM team (read the story) that the 4.6 version of kdepim which should have accompanied the official release of KDE 4.6 has been delayed. At the time when KDE 4.6 will be officially released, you may want to keep the stable PIM release 4.4.9 which is already part of slackware-current and which is fully compatible with KDE 4.6.

In the meantime, I ship packages for the third beta of kdepim 4.6 along with KDE 4.5.95.

Have fun, Eric

PS: rsync is available as always:

  • rsync://alien.slackbook.org/alien-kde/
  • rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/
  • rsync://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/

KDE 4.6 first release candidate

December 24, 2010 / / 27 Comments

It’s that time again! Nicely following the KDE release schedule, a series of tarballs was uploaded to the KDE ftp server, containing the first release candidate of what will become KDE Software Compilation 4.6.

The Slackware packages I created and had silently uploaded to my server, have already been noticed… but anyway, better late than never, so here is my official announcement:

Your gift for Christmas: grab Slackware packages for KDE 4.6.RC1 (4.5.90 is the official version) here: http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.5.90/ or on any of my mirrors (http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.5.90/ or http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.5.90/). These packages are not fit for Slackware 13.1. You have to be running an up-to-date Slackware-current! This is still beta software, use at your own risk, yada yada.

Follow the instructions in the accompanying README for installing these packages, or upgrading from an earlier release.

Lots of bugs will certainly have been squashed, although I have not experienced all that many. You can read my previous article on KDE 4.6 beta here: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/starting-with-kde-4-6. KDE no longer needs HAL, but if you disable it, the k3b CD-writing software will complain about not being able to find an optical drive. Still some work to be done for these guys. If you don’t care for k3b I invite you to disable HAL (chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.hald) like I did, and see how that works out.

What’s important to know is the announcement by the PIM team (read the story) that the 4.6 version of kdepim which should accompany the official release of KDE 4.6 has been delayed. At the time when KDE 4.6 is released, there will be an update to the PIM 4.4.x series which is compatible with KDE 4.6 (look out for kdepim 4.4.9, sources are already available I think, and I will certainly package them along with the final KDE 4.6).

In the meantime, I ship packages for the third beta of kdepim 4.6 along with KDE 4.5.90. Please share your thoughts on requiring PIM version 4.6beta3 or  4.4.9 with KDE 4.6. One of the two will have to go into some sort of “testing” directory.

Have fun, Eric

PS: rsync is available as always:

  • rsync://alien.slackbook.org/alien-kde/
  • rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/
  • rsync://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/

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.

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