Alien Pastures

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Tag: kde5 (Page 7 of 17)

Plasma5 – April 18 edition for Slackware

April 21, 2018 / / 44 Comments

One of my previous posts discussed “ABI breakage” and how that affects software to the point where it breaks and you need to recompile stuff to un-break it. Well… last week was most likely another, bigger, surprise to many of you. The Slackware-current ChangeLog.txt update of “Thu Apr 19 01:04:06 UTC 2018” started with:

Hi folks, and welcome to the third ever Slackware Mass Rebuild (and the
longest ChangeLog entry in project history). There were two primary
motivations for rebuilding everything in the main tree. The first was to
switch to the new C++ ABI. The second was to get rid of all the .la files
in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

That was fun, seeing 1365 lines of ChangeLog and realizing how long the upgrade would take!
But in the end, this was a painless migration. WIth a simple “slackpkg update ; slackpkg upgrade slackpkg” to upgrade the slackpkg package itself. Don’t forget to check the new /etc/slackpkg/mirrors file to see if your mirror is still configured there! Followed by “slackpkg update ; slackpkg install-new ; slackpkg upgrade aaa_elflibs ; slackpkg upgrade-all” and a lot of patience. That’s about all there was to it and after a reboot the Slackware-current system would run as well as ever. A big accomplishment and hats off to Patrick Volkerding who used the past months to (mostly under the radar) update all the SlackBuild scripts and write wrappers to enable him to recompile all of Slackware from scratch, while gaining a lot on the efficiency and time management front. Kudos!

Ah well, a painless migration you heard me say…
Unless you have a ton of 3rd party software bolted onto your Slackware – like my Plasma5… because that came out pretty much broken. On the Slackware forum as well as here on the blog I already advised to hold off with upgrading for a day or so to give me the opportunity to at least recompile Plasma5.

And it so happened that the KDE developers already had all-new source code tarballs waiting for us. I compiled that on the freshly rebuilt Slackware-current and yesterday evening I uploaded my new set of Plasma5 packages to the ‘ktown‘ repository.
The KDE-5_18.04 release of ‘ktown‘ for Slackware-current offers the latest KDE Frameworks (5.45.0), Plasma (5.12.4) and Applications (18.04.0). The Qt5 was upgraded to 5.9.5. Read the README file for more details and for installation/upgrade instructions. Enjoy the latest Plasma 5 desktop environment.

So, what’s new?

  • I had to deal with a couple of packages that were broken after the massive upgrade in Slackware, so I took the opportunity to upgrade gpgme, mlt, poppler and qt5 to a newer version; and I added QScintilla to extend the package (already available in Slackware) with support for Qt5.
  • In plasma-extra the kdeconnect-framework package was updated.
  • Applications 18.04.0 is the start of a new round of improvements. Two new packages are available starting with 18.04: kamoso which is a webcam recorder, and a backup program kbackup. The instant messenger client Kopete was ported to KF5 and is contained in the source distribution, but I was unable to compile it. Perhaps more luck next month.
    Finally, the hex editor okteta moved to the ‘applications-extra’ section because its developer no longer wants to be tied to Application release windows.
  • In applications-extra I have upgraded the kdiagram and krita packages.

If you want to read more about the history of Plasma5 development for Slackware, with lots more detail, check out my older blog posts. If you think a git log is easier to read, check out my ktown git repository instead 🙂

If you are using slackpkg with the slackpkg+ extension, don’t forget to run “slackpkg install ktown” to get any new packages installed, because “slackpkg install-new” will not catch new packages in 3rd-party repositories like ‘ktown’.

I hope to get a new PLASMA5 variant of the Slackware Live ISO image out soon, containing all this new stuff! This depends on my ability to recompile LibreOffice 6.0.3 for 64bit. I ran into a bit of a snag there with gpgme-related compilation errors I have as of yet not been able to fix. Also, VLC3 needs a rebuild since that broke too… and I have not been able to find the time to address that.

Enjoy the new batch!

What all happened in March so far

March 14, 2018 / / 69 Comments

I realize I have been a wee bit silent on the blog (not counting my replies in the comments section). This was due to private issues that drained the desire for social interactions. Nevertheless there was quite a bit of activity on the Slackware packaging front.

So, what new stuff?

First of all: yesterday, Adobe released a security update for their Flash plugins for Mozilla-compatible (NPAPI) and Chromium-compatible (PPAPI) browsers. Check the version 29.0.0.113 installation status on http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/about/. You are encouraged to upgrade.

Chromium browser was updated twice… last week I made the final release in the 64 series available and today (repositories have not been updated yet) I am updating again, to the 65 release. Version 65.0.3325.146 comes with a large list of 45 security fixes, read the release notes to get the gist. Unfortunately, this new release has cost me a full week of recompiles, day & night, all the time running into new compilation errors. It was not trivial to come up with a set of patches that eradicated all the compilation errors. I wrote a couple myself, reverted a chromium commit and borrowed from Gentoo – thanks as always for these guys’ code troubleshooting skills. The discussion on the Chromium Packagers list has given me some ideas for the next iteration of the SlackBuild script that may not require this much patching. But I am pushing this version to my repository anyway, even though I just spotted a newer version on the Google blog… released yesterday. Damn.

Pale Moon browser got an update to  27.8.1. Many improvements and fixes over the 27.7.x versions, check their release notes for the details. Despite the fact that the new Mozilla Firefox is much improved as well, and a lot speedier since Mozilla switched to the Quantum codebase, people may still prefer the older codebase of Firefox from which Pale Moon was forked.

LibreOffice 6.0.2 was released last week and I built packages for Slackware 14.2 as well as -current. Still the best office suite available. I should try to build the LibreOffice online version sometime…

When Slackware 14.2 was graced with an updated set of gcc packages in the “patches” section (gcc-5.5.0 with a series of patches related to retpoline countermeasures for the recent Meltdown/Spectre vulnerabilities) I took the opportunity not only to give the multilib repository for Slackware 14.2 a refresher to gcc-5.5.0_multilib, but I also updated the gcc5 package for slackware-current in my regular repository to that 5.5.0 release – including the retpoline patches. Remember, my gcc5 package for slackware-current contains just the C, C++ and Java compilers and has two purposes: first it re-introduces  the GCC Java compiler which was removed in gcc-7; and second, compiling Pale Moon on slackware-current can not be done with its gcc-7 compiler… you need this gcc5 package.

E-book lovers with a fondness for organizing their collection using open source software will find a new Calibre package in my repository. Calibre 3.x for Slackware 14.2 and -current depends on libxkbcommon, podofo, qt5, qt5-webkit and unrar, and for Slackware 14.2 two additional dependencies are libinput and libwacom. All of those can be obtained from my repository as well. If you are not in need of an e-book catalogue and library program, then Calibre still has its usefulness as it includes a versatile E-book reader and a powerful EPUB editor.

Last but not least: I released a new set of Plasma5 packages. The KDE-5_18.03 release of ‘ktown‘ for Slackware-current offers the latest KDE Frameworks (5.44.0), Plasma (5.12.3) and Applications (17.12.3). Read the README file for more details and for installation/upgrade instructions. If you are adventurous, check out the ‘testing‘ variant of the ktown repository as opposed to the ‘latest‘ variant. In ‘testing’ you will find Wayland support. Note that this is experimental (hence the ‘testing’ tag of course) and not fit for day-to-day production work. The ‘latest’ repository contains a stable and productive, complete, and fun to use, Plasma 5 desktop environment.
One thing I want to mention is that I have added the new Falkon browser to the applications-extra section. Falkon is the renamed Qupzilla browser, based on Qt5, and it is destined to be added to the core Applications (not sure when precisely, probably later this year) and it will take the place of the venerable Konqueror. If you are using slackpkg with the slackpkg+ extension, don’t forget to run “slackpkg install ktown” to get the new falkon package installed, because “slackpkg install-new” will not catch new packages in 3rd-party repositories like ‘ktown’.

I promise to get a new PLASMA5 variant of the Slackware Live ISO image out soon, containing all this new stuff! Stay tuned for more.

February release of the Plasma5 Desktop for Slackware

February 10, 2018 / / 33 Comments

Yesterday, I uploaded my Febrary’18 release of Plasma 5 packages for Slackware-current. The KDE-5_18.02 release contains: KDE Frameworks 5.43.0, Plasma 5.12.0 and Applications 17.12.2. All based on Qt 5.9.4 and exclusive for Slackware–current because as explained in a previous post, I stopped providing regular Plasma 5 version updates for Slackware 14.2 (only security updates).
There’s again a choice of ‘latest‘ and ‘testing‘ where the ‘testing’ repository contains 17 recompiled packages that provide a Wayland compositor stack. This means you can have a working Plasma5 Wayland session if you use ‘testing‘ as opposed to ‘latest‘.
The ‘testing‘ repository is for… testing. Do not use those packages on a production environment unless you are familiar with Slackware, debugging graphical sessions and know your way around slackpkg/slackpkg+.

What’s new in this KDE 5_18.02 release

  • The ‘deps’ section has been graced with an updated qt5 package. I opted for qt5-5.9.4 which is the last one in the 5.9 series in the hope that Pat updates to qt5-5.10 when adding Plasma5 to Slackware.
    Also, I added two new packages here: cryptopp and cryfs. The Plasma Vault requires an encryption backend but I had not yet added one so the application was not useful. Cryfs seems to be the best choice (alternative backends would be encfs or tomb). I had ignored Vault for the past few releases but it looks like an interesting solution to store your data securely on cloud storage so I decided to make it functional.
  • Frameworks update is a stability release, see: https://www.kde.org/announcements/kde-frameworks-5.43.0.php .
  • Plasma is the highlight of the month. Version 5.12 is a Long Term Support (LTS) release, which replaces the previous LTS version 5.8. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.12.0.php .
  • Applications 17.12.2 is an incremental update for the 17.12 series and fixes some bugs.
    See https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-applications-17.12.2.php .
  • In ‘applications-extra’ I have upgraded the packages for calligra and added calligraplan.

The accompanying README file contains full installation & upgrade instructions. I have some further reading material in case you are interested in the Wayland functionality of the ‘testing’ repository: README.testing.

Package download locations are:

If you are interested in the development of KDE 5 for Slackware, you can peek at my git repository too.

A new Plasma5 Live ISO image (based on liveslak-1.1.9.6) will be uploaded soon to http://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/ , in case you want to try the new Plasma5 desktop out first in a non-destructive way.

Have fun! Eric

What’s new for January? Plasma5 18.01, and more

January 19, 2018 / / 55 Comments

When I sat down to write a new post I noticed that I had not written a single post since the previous Plasma 5 announcement. Well, I guess the past month was a busy one. Also I bought a new e-reader (the Kobo Aura H2O 2nd edition) to replace my ageing Sony PRS-T1. That made me spend a lot of time just reading books and enjoying a proper back-lit E-ink screen. What I read? The War of the Flowers by Tad Williams, A Shadow all of Light by Fred Chappell, Persepolis Rising and several of the short stories (Drive, The Butcher of Anderson Station, The Churn and Strange Dogs) by James SA Corey and finally Red Sister by Mark Lawrence. All very much worth your time.

And then work began in all earnest, and I tried to do the packaging activities for Slackware in the wee hours of the night:

  • wine got an update to 2.21 (the final one before the 3.0 release which I intend to package when the staging patches are also available)
  • chromium was updated to 63.0.3239.132 accompanied by the usual security fixes (these Google guys are pretty good at exposing vulnerabilities… think Meltdown and Spectre most recently)
  • Flash plugins for Mozilla and Chromium based browsers were updated to 28.0.0.137 – also accompanied by a security advisory
  • Lumina Desktop was updated to 1.4.0.p1 and I added two supporting packages as well: poppler-qt5 and acpilight.
  • Pale Moon got an update to 27.7.1

And most recently, I finished the January ’18 set of Plasma 5 packages for Slackware -current. My KDE-5_18.01 contains: KDE Frameworks 5.42.0, Plasma 5.11.5 and Applications 17.12.1. All based on Qt 5.9.3 and exclusive for Slackware–current because as explained in the previous post, I stopped providing Plasma 5 updates for Slackware 14.2.
There’s again a choice of ‘latest‘ and ‘testing‘ where the ‘testing’ repository contains 17 recompiled packages that provide a Wayland compositor stack. This means you can have a working Plasma5 Wayland session if you use ‘testing‘ as opposed to ‘latest‘.
The ‘testing‘ repository is for… testing. Do not use those packages on a production environment unless you are familiar with Slackware, debugging graphical sessions and know your way around slackpkg/slackpkg+.

I will be short about the updates in this latest Plasma 5 package set: all the major components got stability fixes and it’s all not so exciting. In the ‘applications-extra’ division I updated most of the big boys: digikam, krita, partitionmanager, kstars, and the Kdevelop Suite. The kdevplatform package has been removed as it has been obsoleted.

The accompanying README file contains full installation & upgrade instructions. I have some further reading material in case you are interested in the Wayland functionality of the ‘testing’ repository: README.testing.

Package download locations are:

If you are interested in the development of KDE 5 for Slackware, you can peek at my git repository too.

A new Plasma5 Live ISO image (based on liveslak-1.1.9.5) has been uploaded to http://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/ , in case you want to try the new Plasma5 desktop out first in a non-destructive way. And for the curious: I sneakily added a VLC 3.0 preview package to the Plasma5 Live ISO (vlc-3.0.0.rc6 to be precise). Much improved compared to the vlc-2.2.x releases!

Have fun! Eric

December packages for Slackware’s Plasma 5 – focus shift

December 23, 2017 / / 87 Comments

Jingle Bells galore! I have some goodies for you, right before Christmas. If your winter holiday starts today, there’s some nice new stuff to play with – especially if you have not dared touch slackware-current until now. Perhaps it’s time to free up a partition on your hard drive now?

The KDE Applications 17.12 have been released by the KDE community. This set of KDE applications is completely free of the legacy KDE4 stuff (kdelibs4). The KDE developers have removed everything from their regular release cycles that is still based on kdelibs4 and/or unmaintained or broken anyway.

This made me consider my strategy for future upgrades in my ‘ktown’ repository. I expect that users of Slackware 14.2 are typically still using all kinds of 3rd party applications that are dependent on KDE4. If I just went ahead and removed all KDE4 support from the ‘14.2‘ section of the repository, that would likely not be received well. On the other hand, I want to go forward with Plasma 5 and make sure that the scripts and sources are in good condition to transition to Slackware-current when Pat feels the time is right. Plus, a complete removal of old KDE4 stuff needs testing too. Perhaps (small) parts of the old KDE4 should be re-added to support older applications… what do I know. For that reason I have left the ‘kdelibs‘ package in its ‘kde4’ subdirectory.

I have decided to freeze the ‘ktown’ package repository for Slackware 14.2 (for 64bit; I had already ceased 32bit updates a while ago). It will stay as-is and will not get updates anymore (unless something serious happens and a need for updates is present). From this December ’17 release onward, I will focus exclusively on Slackware-current (both 32bit and 64bit) with my Plasma 5 packages in ‘ktown‘.
The remainder of this article is perhaps only relevant if you are (or want to start) running -current.

So here we are. The December ’17 set of Plasma 5 packages for Slackware -current. My KDE-5_17.12 contains: KDE Frameworks 5.41.0, Plasma 5.11.4 and Applications 17.12.0. All based on Qt 5.9.3 and exclusive for Slackware-current.
There’s again a choice of ‘latest‘ and ‘testing‘ where the ‘testing’ repository contains 17 recompiled packages that provide a Wayland compositor stack. This means you can have a working Plasma5 Wayland session if you use ‘testing‘ as opposed to ‘latest‘.
The ‘testing‘ repository is for… testing. Do not use those packages on a production environment unless you are familiar with Slackware, debugging graphical sessions and know your way around slackpkg/slackpkg+.

What’s new in the December release

  •  Several recompiled/upgraded ‘deps’: OpenAL, PyQt5, cfitsio, ddcutil, gpgme, json-glib, libburn, libpwquality, libxkbcommon, lmdb and poppler.
  • The telepathy section of the ‘deps’ also saw several upgrades: libaccounts-glib, libaccounts-qt5, libnice, libsignon-glib, signon, signon-plugin-oauth2, signon-ui, telegram-qt, telepathy-gabble, telepathy-glib, telepathy-logger-qt5, telepathy-mission-control, telepathy-morse and telepathy-qt5.
  • The Frameworks update is a stability release, see: https://www.kde.org/announcements/kde-frameworks-5.41.0.php .
  • The Plasma updates are also a meant to be a stability update, see https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.11.4.php .
    I compiled plasma5-nm against openconnect so that it picks up support for it. However I did not add a ‘openconnect‘ package to the ‘deps’ section, you need to install it separately if you need it.
  • Applications 17.12.0 is where the hammer hits. KDE Applications 17.12 is the first release that sheds its KDE4 legacy. Any program which was not yet ported to KDE Frameworks 5 has been removed. This means that we say goodbye to the following packages:
    libkface (unmaintained), blogilo (unmaintained and broken), jovie (replaced by Qt Speech), kaccessible (superseded by Qt5 functionality), ksaneplugin (no one used it), kde-runtime (split up), kremotecontrol, kppp, kfilereplace, klinkstatus, kopete and kscd (I did not have a package for kscd anyway).
    New to the stage is ‘ksmtp’ which belongs to the KDEPIM suite (also part of Applications).
    And ‘kstars’ has moved out of Applications and into applications-extra because it no longer follows the regular release schedule. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-applications-17.12.0.php .
  • In applications-extra I have added kstars (hm, I already said that). I rebuilt calligra and krita. Upgraded to a newer version are kile, kpmcore and partitionmanager. Removed is kuser because that was still KDE4 based and no longer works now.
  • I have emptied the kde/kde4 and kde/kde4-extragear subdirectories except for the ‘kdelibs’ package. The ‘oxygen-gtk2’ package has moved to ‘applications-extra’ because it may still be needed for Mozilla-based browsers (like Pale Moon).
    If you have a KDE4-based application that needs library support on this Plasma 5 desktop, let me know which of the removed packages needs to return in ‘kde/kde4’! Use the ‘ldd’ command to find what libraries you are missing.
  • The ‘kdei’ subdirectory which used to contain the localization packages, is gone. The Plasma 5 localizations are contained in the packages themselves now. This means that you can no longer selectively install just one language, or even none at all. This will increase the disk space requirements a bit.

Installing or upgrading Frameworks 5, Plasma 5 and Applications

As always, the accompanying README file contains full installation & upgrade instructions. I have some further reading material in case you are interested in the Wayland functionality of the ‘testing’ repository: README.testing.

Recommended reading material

There have been several posts now about KDE 5 for Slackware-current. All of them contain useful information, tips and gotchas. If you want to read them, here they are: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/tag/kde5/

Where to get the new packages for Plasma 5

Package download locations are listed below (you will find the sources in ./source/latest/ and packages in /current/latest/ and /current/testing/ subdirectories). Only “bear” has the packages for now, the mirrors should follow within 24 hours. If you are interested in the development of KDE 5 for Slackware, you can peek at my git repository too.

Live ISO of PLASMA5

A new Plasma5 Live ISO image (based on liveslak-1.1.9.4) has been uploaded to http://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/ , in case you want to try the new Plasma5 desktop out first in a non-destructive way. Note that this ISO (contrary to last month’s ISO) does not contain Wayland support.

Have fun! Eric

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