Tag: kde49 (Page 1 of 2)

When I announced the “final release in the 4.9 series” last month I had no idea that there would be another incremental bugfix release… but the KDE 4.9 Release Schedule page was updated shortly after and here we are with KDE Software Compilation 4.9.5! What happened was that too many bugs had crept in the software right before release of 4.9.4 which were only discovered after the sources had been officially released. You can check out the release notes if you want to read more about this release of KDE 4.9..

And similar to this adding a rather unexpected extension to the 4.9 series, the developers are also talking about adding an extra Release Candidate before giving the green light to KDE SC 4.10. Several proposals for improvements in Dolphin and Akonadi/nepomuk are considered important enough that these patches should be added before releasing 4.10. This seems to be irritating several other distro packager teams who – unlike Slackware – have fixed release dates and therefore, fixed freeze periods. Well, we don’t suffer from a week’s delay and I would say, add those patches and make 4.10 a solid first release!

In spite of that (my opinion is irrelevant in the above story) the recent slips in the KDE release schedule and discovery of too many critical last-moment bugs make me a bit wary about possible resource issues in the KDE developer community. I hope this is not the start of a trend.

Another thing should be mentioned. I don’t know how many people use Kolab groupware in their organization (or at home) but if you do, you will have noticed that support for Kolab has disappeared from Slackware KDE packages after 4.8.x (meaning that Slackware’s own KDE still supports Kolab groupware). I discussed the lack of Kolab support in KDE 4.9 with one of the people using my packages. Indeed KDE 4.9 and later needs a couple of additional packages in order to be able to support the Kolab groupware server like it did in earlier versions. You will need libkolab, libkolabxml and this in turn needs xerces-c to compile. I added SlackBuild scripts and sources for these kolab dependencies in the “deps” directory of the KDE 4.9.5 sources, and xerces-c can be obtained from slackbuilds.org. So: if you need Kolab support, then you have to build packages for these dependencies (first xerces-c, then libkolabxml, then libkolab) and then rebuild the kdepim-runtime package of KDE 4.9.5.

I have no idea if this will ever end up in Slackware proper but it is not hard to add yourself.

Anyway. On with the show.

As you may expect, the Slackware packages for KDE SC 4.9.5 are ready for download and installation. Remember: my ktown packages for KDE are meant to be used on Slackware-current, since that is what they are built on. But the development of -current still has not deviated too much from the latest stable release (14.0), so that these KDE 4.9.5 packages work without any issue on Slackware 14. That is why you will find the packages in a “14.0” directory.

How to upgrade to KDE 4.9.5? Whether you are upgrading from the stock KDE 4.8.5 of Slackware 14.0/current, or if you are upgrading from my previous 4.9.4 packages, you will find all the installation/upgrade instructions that you need in the accompanying README file.

You are strongly advised to read and follow these instructions!

Highlights for the new set of Slackware packages:

• You will find five updated dependencies compared to Slackware’s own KDE 4.8.5: akonadi, qt, shared-desktop-ontologies, soprano, virtuoso-ose.
• Some of the “extragear” of the KDE in Slackware 14/current has been updated: with new versions of kdevelop, kdevplatform and oxygen-gtk2.
• The “extragear” section also introduces two new packages: oxygen-gtk3 (compared to the stable Slackware) which should give any software which uses the GTK+3 widget set a nice integrated look and feel when you run it in KDE; and kio-mtp which is required in order to access and manage files on devices running Android 4.0 and later. I heard that the version which I added to the KDE 4.9.4 set did not work so well, therefore I upgraded to the latest git snapshot. Feedback is welcome.
• Compared to KDE 4.8.5, there were two package removals:
  • kdemultimedia has been split up into several smaller individual packages.
  • ksecrets has been removed completely in the 4.9.x series.

Download locations (using a mirror is preferred:

• http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/ (the master repository), rsync URI: rsync://alien.slackbook.org/alien/ktown/
• http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/ (my fast mirror), rsync URI: rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/
• http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/ (willysr’s Indonesian mirror), rsync URI: rsync://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/

Have fun! Eric

I was busy with other stuff and luckily I had already built my packages, but today the KDE team released the KDE Software Compilation 4.9.3 and I had to be reminded by reading Willy’s tweet about it. I have uploaded my new stuff and it is now available for download.

This is again a bugfix and improved stability release, so an upgrade from 4.9.2 should be painless. The translations have been improved as well. The release notes will have more details if you want to read them.

My packages are for Slackware 14 (and -current) and if you are still on 13.37 and want a more modern KDE, you’ll have a lot of work hunting down required updates for KDE dependencies… my advice is to upgrade to Slackware 14 now! And then grab my KDE 4.9.3 packages from my master repository or better, use one of the (faster) mirror servers, see below.

I have updated the guidelines for upgrading to this release of KDE in the accompanying README (some people wanted explicit instructions for downloading only the packages for the architecture they are running) and you are strongly advised to read and follow them.

Highlights for the new set of Slackware packages:

• You will find five updated dependencies compared to Slackware’s own KDE 4.8.5: akonadi, qt, shared-desktop-ontologies, soprano, virtuoso-ose. The qt package is basically the same as Slackware 14, with some additional patches: I applied a patch which disables TLS compression by default which should safeguard against the “CRIME” SSL attack , and I applied a patch which is needed to fix crashes in kdevelop (QTBUG-27322 and QTBUG-23871).
• The qt and akonadi packages have been refreshed since my previous KDE 4.9.2 package set.
• I have added some upgrades to the “extragear” of KDE: you will find new versions of kdevelop and kdevplatform, as well as oxygen-gtk2.
• I have added a new package, oxygen-gtk3, which should give any software which uses the GTK+3 widget set a nice integrated look and feel when you run it in KDE.
• Compared to KDE 4.8.5, there were two package removals:
  • kdemultimedia has been split up into several smaller individual packages.
  • ksecrets has been removed completely in the 4.9.x series.

Download locations (using a mirror is preferred):

• http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/ (the master repository), rsync URI: rsync://alien.slackbook.org/alien/ktown/
• http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/ (my fast mirror), rsync URI: rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/
• http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/ (willysr’s Indonesian mirror), rsync URI: rsync://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/

A word of warning… I have not yet installed and tested these packages myself 🙂 Please tell me about anything that is not right.

And to all US citizens, congratulations with the re-election of Barack Obama as your President.

Have fun! Eric

Gee wizz! I was happily editing the new SlackDocs Wiki (article submissions are very welcome btw) while at the same time the KDE team released KDE SC 4.9.1 !! I had read on the “kde-packager” mailing list that the public announcement would be on Wednesday, so I was not paying all that much attention to the KDE site. And then all of a sudden there was the announcement on kde.org!

Luckily, I was prepared. I had already built the packages for Slackware-current (or better call that Slackware 14 RC4) and uploaded them to my two mirror servers. Get your KDE 4.9.1 packages .

This release is a bug fix release. Still, there is at least one glaring bug which was only uncovered after the public release (a message about the bug was posted to “kde-packager” which alerted me to the fact that the sources were already public). This is the message:

A nasty regression (was introduced) while fixing a bug inKWin for 4.9.1. With the “wrong” settings and the wrong set of open windows distributed over multiple desktops this can result in a freeze. A freeze in KWin means that the compositor stops, that is the user has no chance to recover from this state unless he knows how to switch to a tty.

A fix should be ready soon, which means a new kde-workspace package. It is a bug which should not affect a lot of people (I have been running KDE 4.9.1 for a few days here without ill effects), so I decided to push out my packages anyway.

The upgrade from Slackware’s KDE 4.8.5 to my KDE 4.9.1 should be safe and fairly trivial, As always, follow the guidelines in the README and you’ll be OK.

Highlights for the new set of Slackware packages:

• You will find four updated dependencies compared to Slackware’s own KDE 4.8.5: akonadi, shared-desktop-ontologies, soprano, virtuoso-ose.
• Compared to KDE 4.8.5, there were two package removals:
  • kdemultimedia has been split up into several smaller individual packages.
  • ksecrets has been removed completely in the 4.9.x series.
• A noteworthy feature in KDE 4.9 has been added to Okular, the document viewer in KDE. Many people will cheer: Okular is now able to save the annotations you make to PDF files.

These KDE 4.9.1 packages are available for download from my “ktown” repository and several mirrors:

• http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/ (the master repository), rsync URI: rsync://alien.slackbook.org/alien/ktown/
• http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/ (my fast mirror), rsync URI: rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/
• http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/ (willysr’s Indonesian mirror), rsync URI: rsync://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/
• http://scw.net.br/alien-ktown/ (a mirror maintained by Herbert Alexander Faleiros), rsync URI: rsync://rsync.scw.net.br/alien-ktown/

Parrot speak: this is a bit of text which I wrote at the time of release of KDE 4.9 release candidate 1 but I will repeat it one last time. After today, you should remember:

As you may have noticed when inspecting the above URLs, I have re-arranged my “ktown” repository. People were confused about what version would work with Slackware -current and what would work for 13.37. Also, some people have asked for sources of older releases for which I no longer host the packages.

I moved all the sources out of the package trees, you will now find a “source” directory right at the top level of the repository. Below that will be the sources of all package sets which I currently have in my repository (KDE 4.6.5, 4.7.4, 4.8.4 and 4.9.1, including all the dependencies you may want for compiling it on Slackware 13.37). The packages will be available below a toplevel directory equal to the Slackware version they were compiled for (at the moment those are “13.37” and “current“). Below that you will find the actual KDE versions and further down, the 32-bit and 64-bit packages.

Have fun! Eric