Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: kde5 (Page 8 of 17)

Rebuilt packages for Plasma5 (ktown)

December 7, 2017 / / 66 Comments

The updates in Slackware-current this week (icu4c, poppler, libical) broke many programs in my Plasma5 ‘ktown’ repository, to the extent that the complete Plasma 5 desktop would no longer start.

That is the fun of using the bleeding edge – if something disruptive happens in slackware-current you’ll have to wait for the 3rd party repositories to catch up. And I am one of those 3rd party packagers.

I have researched the list of packages that needed a recompilation, and in some cases I performed an upgrade at the same time (qt5 went up to 5.9.3, poppler synced to the 0.62.0 in Slackware-current, qtav went up to 1.12.0). The 64bit packages have already been uploaded but if you are running 32bit Slackware-current (why are you doing that?) you’ll have to wait another day because I just started the compilation there.

What has been updated in the ‘ktown’ repository? Here is a list, mostly in order of compilation:

  deps:qt5,qt5-webkit,phonon,qtav,poppler
  kde4:kdelibs,akonadi4,kdepimlibs4
  frameworks:kfilemetadata5
  kdepim:EVERYTHING
  plasma:plasma5-nm
  applications:okular
  applications-extra:calligra,digikam,kile

Every package in kdepim? Well yeah, there were many broken packages and it was simply faster to recompile all of kdepim and be done with it.

Users of slackpkg+ will be up & running fast with these updates; the others probably just need to download the individual packages I listed above from a mirror like https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/latest/.

When the 32bit package set has been finished The 32bit packages have now been recompiled and uploaded to the repository.

I will also recompile whatever is needed in the ‘testing’ repository (that’s where the Wayland related packages are stored).

Other – not related to Plasma5 – updates/rebuilds are coming soon have finally been uploaded too. Those are LibreOffice, Pale Moon, Calibre; these programs are also affected by the updates in slackware-current but the urgency was lower than with the Plasma5 desktop.

Slackware Plasma5 updates for November

November 20, 2017 / / 48 Comments

I have uploaded my November ’17 set of Plasma 5 packages for Slackware 14.2 and -current. KDE 5_17.11 contains: KDE Frameworks 5.40.0, Plasma 5.11.3 and Applications 17.08.3. All based on Qt 5.9.2 for Slackware-current and Qt 5.7.1 for Slackware 14.2.
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 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+.
NOTE: I will no longer be releasing Plasma 5 packages for 32bit Slackware 14.2.

The Applications 17.08.3 release which is part of this November package set, will be the last that contains software based on the old kdelibs (aka KDE4). Any application which has not been ported to KDE Frameworks 5 (KF5) yet will be removed from the Applications collection. Starting with Applications 17.12.0 we should have a legacy-free Plasma5 desktop. If anything, this would be a nice moment to add Plasma5 to Slackware-current and say goodbye to KDE4. We’ll have to wait and see what Patrick thinks of this. Looking at recent updates in -current (the ‘etc‘ ‘network-scripts‘ and ‘pkgtools‘ package versions were changed from “14.2” to “15.0”) I would hazard a guess that we are past the mid-point of the current development cycle 😉
I am really looking forward to getting Plasma5 into Slackware proper. It will allow me to cut loose from the monthly time-consuming update cycles and concentrate on creating an add-on repository for Slackware’s Plasma5 – containing speech synthesis, Wayland of course, and all the esoteric stuff I added to Plasma5 over time which will be scrapped by Patrick (I am thinking of Digikam for instance).

What’s new in the November release

Nothing world-shaking this month. All KDE sofware updates are meant to improve stability and usability. I did add two packages to ‘kde/applications-extra‘ however: both kaudiocreator and kwebkitpart have KF5 ports that are about ready for production, so I thought it would be good to give them a spin on Slackware. Now there are only two packages left from Slackware’s old KDE4 that you may want to install: Amarok (for which a KF5 port is also in the works) and KPlayer (which seems dead in the water, but instead you can try QMLPlayer from the ‘qtav‘ package in my ‘ktown‘ repository).
I also updated PyQt5 in the ‘deps ‘ directory and it has picked up Python3 support (in the slackware-current package at least).

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/ ,  /14.2/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 will be uploaded to http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/latest/ later this week, in case you want to try the new Plasma5 desktop out first in a non-destructive way.

Have fun! Eric

Plasma5 Wayland works on Slackware

October 24, 2017 / / 27 Comments

Last year August 2016 I experimented with Wayland, the alternative to the X Window system. My goal was to see if it is possible to run a Plasma5 desktop session on a Wayland compositor instead of using X.Org.
There was one big showstopper at the time. Kwin_wayland has a dependency on the ‘logind’ DBus API and at that time last year, this API was only provided by systemd-logind. Luckily, someone treated the logind component of systemd similarly to its udev component. Where Slackware already uses “eudev” which is a standalone udev source extracted from the systemd source, there’s also “elogind” which is the standalone logind sourcecode, extracted from systemd sourcecode. With some difficulty I managed to create a Slackware package for elogind and everything compiled. I just could not get a working Wayland session.
As it turns out today, that failure to get Wayland working was an omission on my side… more on that later.

Shortly after, IBM told me I would lose my job, I found another job at ASML and life was hectic and remained so. I never got another opportunity to research the root cause of my Wayland failure.
Now that I have a week off, I decided to revisit the old Wayland disaster. After last year’s frustration over the need for elogind, I talked to the ConsoleKit2 developer and to the KWin developer, to see if CK2 could be extended with the required logind DBus API (parts of that API were already incorporated) and to get CK2 accepted as an alternative to systemd-logind on systems that don’t ship with systemd. Both wishes were fulfilled this summer, so I could drop elogind from my package set. I still needed to recompile / upgrade some other packages to add wayland support to them, but the fact is: Slackware does not need PAM or systemd to get Wayland working.

Therefore, my KDE 5_17.10_testing repository contains mostly what you already know and love: KDE Frameworks 5.39.0, Plasma 5.11.0 and Applications 17.08.2. All based on Qt 5.9.2. Just with 17 differences in the package list.

Why does Wayland work now, while it did not last year?
Well, that was entirely my perception of things. Probably would have worked last year as well, if only I had recognized the signs. Last year, and yesterday as well, all the puzzle pieces seemed to be OK, but their integration failed. The signs (using strace and gdb to find out why the Wayland session would not start) were telling me that KWin was trying to find a logind provider on the DBus and no-one was answering. It took a sudden insight this morning, the realization that there is one difference between Slackware and all those other distros. And I have been using a workaround for ages, and I just did not think about that.
It’s PAM.
When you login on a system running PAM, a login session is registered on the bus using either ConsoleKit2 or systemd-logind. Our PAM-free Slackware needs an additional “ck-launch-session” command in front of the “dbus-launch” command to connect a new ConsoleKit2 session to the bus and let KWin find it there… when I fixed that, my Wayland session just sprang into existence!

How to start a Plasma5 Wayland session

  • Runlevel 3 (console): run the ‘startkwayland‘ command as your regular user.
  • Runlevel 4 (SDDM): select “Plasma (Wayland)” from the session dropdown and then proceed to login.

Caveats

Of course… nothing works 100% the first time. So what have I ran into? Note that I have been running Wayland for a couple of hours only, so I can say little about its stability.

  • Dropbox does not start, unless you ‘unset’ the QT_QPA_PLATFORM variable first. This is caused by the fact that Dropbox uses its own internal Qt5 libraries and it does not come with Wayland support.
  • Gnome-keyring does not start for some reason, so you can not auto-login to skypeforlinux for instance
  • HP-tray was eating 100% CPU at some point and draining my battery. I had to kill the process.
  • Yakuake does not work (I know, it is not part of my ‘ktown’ package set)
  • Unlike an X.Org session, the Wayland session does not require an additional <Ctrl> keypress to switch to a virtual console. Therefore, when I wanted to invoke krunner with <Alt><F2>, instead I was switched to the second virtual console, tty2. Upon returning to the Wayland session (which was running on VT4 as opposed to VT7 for X.Org) the krunner window was waiting for me. Apparently both the OS and KWin process the <Alt><FunctionKey> combos.

A note about NVIDIA: I know that there are issues between the binary driver and Wayland. Please do your research if you use the binary Nvidia blob. My laptop has an Intel GPU which runs on the open source kernel driver, and has no issues.

Note: check out the KDE page which documents the Wayland issues: https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers

What’s needed to make Plasma5 work with Wayland in Slackware

We need Wayland support in the core of the OS as well as in the dependencies for Plasma5. Also we need a version of ConsoleKit2 that works with Kwin_wayland. Which means:

  • add a wayland-protocols package (wayland is no longer sufficient)
  • add an upgraded ConsoleKit2
  • recompile Slackware’s mesa using a slightly modified SlackBuild script (change the package tag from ‘alien’ to ‘wayland’)
  • write a xorg-server.SlackBuild script based on the code in the x11.SlackBuild framework of Slackware, and recompile xorg-server with that script (change the package tag from ‘alien’ to ‘wayland’)?
  • recompile libxkbcommon (change the package tag from ‘alien’ to ‘wayland’)
  • recompile qt5 (change the package tag from ‘alien’ to ‘wayland’)?

With the ‘deps’ taken care of, proceed to Frameworks:

  • recompile kwayland and plasma-framework (change the package tag from ‘alien’ to ‘wayland’)

And finally the Plasma packages that use Wayland in some way or other:

  • recompile kinfocenter, kscreenlocker, kwayland-integration, libkscreen2, plasma-desktop, plasma-integration, plasma-workspace, powerdevil and kwin (change the package tag from ‘alien’ to ‘wayland’)

You will have noticed that the packages I tagged with ‘wayland‘ instead of the usual ‘alien‘ tag, are the ones that picked up Wayland support as compared with their originals. This makes it quite easy for you to switch back to the original packages (mesa and xorg-server in Slackware and the other 13 in ‘ktown’) if you are done with your testing. The remaining ‘alien’ packages (wayland-protocols and ConsoleKit2) can be kept without penalty.

A final note about this updated xorg-server package. My version of that package is a 4-into-1 package; it contains xorg-server-xephyr, xorg-server-xnest and xorg-server-xvfb as well. If you decide to remove the testing packages and want to go back to Slackware’s non-wayland version of xorg-server, you must also re-install the other three xorg-server-x* packages.

Installing or upgrading Frameworks, Plasma and Applications

Please use the README file in the ‘latest’ repository for the installation & upgrade instructions. I reserved the README.testing in the ‘testing’ repository to highlight the differences between the two repositories.

Where to get these ‘testing’ packages for Plasma Wayland

Package download locations are listed below (you will find the sources in ./source/5/ and packages in /current/testing/ subdirectory). 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. There is now only one source tree to create both ‘latest‘ and ‘testing‘ repositories.

Live ISO of PLASMA5

There will probably not be a Plasma5 Live ISO image based on the ‘testing’ repository with working Wayland support. My ‘bear’ server just does not have the disk space to host an additional 4 GB ISO file. Nevertheless, you can tranfer the existing Plasma5 Live ISO to USB stick, change the ‘latest‘ ktown repository to ‘testing‘ in the slackpkg+ configuration file “/etc/slackpkg/slackpkgplus.conf” and run “slackpkg update ; slackpkg install ktown ; slackpkg upgrade ktown” to get the 4 new packages and upgrade the 13 other packages. If you do not use slackpkg with slackpkg+ then simply look at the short list of packages to be installed or upgraded, higher up on this page.

Have fun! Eric

October updates for the Slackware Plasma5 desktop

October 14, 2017 / / 65 Comments

There’s been updates to all the major components of the KDE Software Collection (I know they stopped using that name but I think it is still fitting). So I tasked my build box to compile hundreds of new packages and today I have for you the October ’17 set of Plasma 5 packages for Slackware 14.2 and -current. KDE 5_17.10 contains: KDE Frameworks 5.39.0, Plasma 5.11.0 and Applications 17.08.2. All based on Qt 5.9.2 for Slackware-current and Qt 5.7.1 for Slackware 14.2.
NOTE: I will no longer be releasing Plasma 5 packages for 32bit Slackware 14.2.

What’s new in the October release

There was a new Qt5 release just after my September packages, so this time the ktown repository comes with a ‘qt5‘ 5.9.2 package for Slackware-current.
The other major update is Plasma which had its first 5.11 release with lots of visual, UX and under-the-hood improvements. You can read the release announcement if you are curious. Most notable is a new functionality called “Plasma Vault” which enables you to add documents to an encrypted vault and hide that from sight. It’s not (yet) functional in my repository because plasma-vault depends on an external encryption program to do the job – and neither of the two candidates are part of Slackware or any of my own repositories. Install either ‘encfs‘ or ‘cryfs‘ to make this work.
The Frameworks and Applications updates are targeting stability and bugfixes.

I was unable to update KDE Partition Manager on Slackware 14.2, because its dependency ‘kpmcore‘ needs a newer ‘blkid‘ program than what’s available through the util-linux package. No problem for Slackware-current, it sports the latest ‘partitionmanager’ package.

I ran into an issue when I tried adding SDDM 0.16.0. SDDM is the graphical session manager aka login manager. It turns out that the new release is not compatible with ConsoleKit2 (which we have in Slackware) because the new code was only tested against systemd. Therefore I stuck with the 0.15.0 release which I know works well. We’ll just wait for a bug-fix release 0.16.1.

Installing or upgrading Frameworks 5, Plasma 5 and Applications

As always, the accompanying README file contains full installation & upgrade instructions.

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/5/ and packages in /current/5/ and  /14.2/5/ 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 1.1.9.2) has been uploaded to http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/latest/ in case you want to try the new Plasma5 desktop out first in a non-destructive way.

Have fun! Eric

Plasma 5 for Slackware – KDE 5_17.09

September 11, 2017 / / 77 Comments

For some time now, no news about Plasma 5 for Slackware appeared on this blog. I just have been too occupied with family life and the demands of my day job.

But the configuration of my new server, the one I bought last month, finally is at a point where I can use it for running virtual machines and compiling packages. And it is fast… compiling LibreOffice in 90 minutes where in the past it would take me 10 times as long. Therefore I was able to create a new release of Plasma 5 packages while at the same time working on new LibreOffice packages.

I have uploaded the September ’17 set of Plasma 5 packages for Slackware 14.2 and -current to the ‘ktown’ repository. KDE 5_17.09 contains: KDE Frameworks 5.38.0, Plasma 5.10.5 and Applications 17.08.1. All based on Qt 5.9.1 for Slackware-current and Qt 5.7.1 for Slackware 14.2.
NOTE: I will no longer be releasing Plasma 5 packages for 32bit Slackware 14.2.

What’s new this time

Well, the good news is that ‘qt5‘ for Slackware-current is now at version 5.9.1. I did not want to risk waiting any longer for the 5.9.2 release which should be imminent but who knows what new bugs that will bring. Several of the other “deps” have been updated as well.
I added MP3 support to ‘kwave‘, and updated ‘digikam‘ and ‘krita‘ to their latest releases. Although… on Slackware 14.2 I had to stick with digikam 5.6.0. The newest digikam requires ‘exiv2‘ version 0.26. I did not want to risk breaking other (non-KDE) programs by adding a binary incompatible ‘exiv2‘ package to my ktown repository.
Other than that, it’s mainly stability and bugfix updates in the KDE software collection.

Installing or upgrading Frameworks 5, Plasma 5 and Applications

As always, the accompanying README file contains full installation & upgrade instructions.

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/5/ and packages in /current/5/ and  /14.2/5/ 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 will follow shortly on http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/latest/ in case you want to try it out first (check the timestamp of the ISO on the web page).

Have fun! Eric

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2024 Alien Pastures

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑