Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: nepomuk

Ready for download: KDE 4.13

April 16, 2014 / / 59 Comments

I am starting a new cycle of KDE packaging. The KDE community announced the general availability of KDE SC 4.13.0!

After creating three new “dependency” packages (xapian-core, qt-gstreamer and eigen3), I built my new KDE packages on Slackware-current. I have not tested them on Slackware 14.1 and will not guarantee that they are even useable on Slackware 14.1. If you want a taste of KDE 4.13 then please upgrade to slackware-current.

What’s new in KDE 4.13?

In KDE 4.13, major improvements are made to KDE’s Semantic Search technology, benefiting many applications. To be specific: Nepomuk has been replaced by Baloo, which performs better and avoids the data duplication currently seen in KDE (copies of the same data, think of emails, get replicated between nepomuk, akonadi and virtuoso leading to large homedirectory storage needs). A nepomuk-to-baloo migration should happen automatically when upgrading to the new KDE (according to the build log, that feature has been enabled), but I have not checked yet if that worked. Note that nepomuk is still part of the software compilation, to facilitate the migration and to allow non-KDE applications additional grace time to port their semantic search support from Nepomuk to Baloo.

KDE 4.13 can be seen as another transitional release: with Plasma Workspaces and the KDE Development Platform frozen and receiving only long term support, those teams are focusing on the transition to Frameworks 5. Still, there are interface and feature improvements to be found in several of the major applications, such as Okular (the document viewer) and Kate (the document editor) among which support for Baloo. And there is another new package: the foreign speech trainer Artikulate.

How to upgrade to KDE 4.13 ?

You will find all the installation/upgrade instructions that you need in the accompanying README file. That README also contains basic information for KDE recompilation using the provided SlackBuild script.

You are strongly advised to read and follow these installation/upgrade instructions!

Where to find packages for KDE 4.13 ?

Download locations are listed below (you will find the sources in ./source/4.13.0/ and packages in /current/4.13.0/ subdirectories). Using a mirror is preferred because you get more bandwidth from a mirror and it’s friendlier to the owners of the master server!

Postscript:

In two weeks, there will be another KDE 4.12 release; the final 4.12.5. Just like the previous 4.12 iterations, I will be compiling this on Slackware 14.1 and this final time, I will also publish them in the Slackware 14.1 directory of the ‘ktown’ repository, so that people running Slackware 14.1 and using slackpkg+ will automatically pick it up and get a nice upgrade to the latest super-stable KDE platform.

Have fun! Eric

Common questions on Akonadi and Nepomuk in KDE PIM 4.8

March 14, 2012 / / 4 Comments

 I am not usually a copy/paste kind of guy but I thought it is good to have the following information visible on this blog instead of “just” being a forum post.

I was triggered by a linuxquestions.org post which pointed to another post on forum.kde.org called “Common questions on Akonadi and Nepomuk in KDE PIM“. The post contains a Q&A between one of the board admins and Christian Mollenkopf. This is its full text, copied verbatim (and reformatted for this post). I hope this helps some people who wonder why their PC is so busy indexing on every boot.

 

Q&A session with Christian Mollenkopf:

Starting from version 4.7, KDE PIM has integrated Nepomuk for many operations such as search, message tagging, and address auto-completion. This post answers some of the common questions related to the state of this integration.

Q. Will email which is encrypted be indexed in any form, or will it be ignored?
A. It will be ignored since the search index is not secure.

Q. Will the indexer attempt to match the contents of my address book against emails?
A. Yes, the extracted contacts should be merged by email address.

Q. What occurs when email is read or deleted using other clients on shared mail boxes (such as IMAP mail boxes)?
A. It’s either removed or re-indexed.

Q. If the IMAP server supports it, does Akonadi use the server’s search capabilities or index it using Nepomuk anyway?
A. The indexer is protocol agnostic, that is, it works regardless of the server type used, be it POP, IMAP, or local mailbox. If a supported item (a message) is in Akonadi, it’s indexed. If it is changed it’s reindexed, and if it is deleted it’s removed from the index. It doesn’t really matter where the item is coming from.

Q. The performance of mail indexing is slow, how can it be improved?
A. There are different ways to achieve that:

  • Index only what you need. Right click on a folder, select Folder Properties, then the Maintenance tab, then “Disable fulltext indexing“: this will disable indexing for that specific folder;
  • Turn off email indexing altogether by unchecking the relevant option in System Settings, Desktop Search (only available from 4.8 and later);
  • Wait until initial indexing has completed. Indexing is completed when the akonadi_nepomuk_feederrc file in your KDEHOME/share/config directory (KDEHOME is usually .kde or .kde4) contains the following:
    [InitialIndexing]
    IndexCompatLevel=3
  • Locate the akonadi_nepomuk_feederrc file and change DisableIdleDetection to true:
    [akonadi_nepomuk_feeder]
    DisableIdleDetection=true

    This will cause the feeder to keep on indexing regardless of idle status, increasing CPU usage significantly but on the long run reducing the time to complete indexing. As a matter of fact, the real performance issue is the initial indexing, as it can take very long (days with large mailboxes), and is restarted if interrupted (i.e. because of a restart, not by sleep-mode or alike). Once initial indexing is over, performance will be significantly better. The KDE PIM developers are aware of this problem and will work on a solution.

Eric

It’s been released: KDE SC 4.4.0

February 9, 2010 / / 26 Comments

The KDE community has announced the immediate availability of the KDE Software Compilation 4.4.0 (“KDE SC” is the new name of what used to be called just “KDE“). In preparation for this event, the kde.org website was re-vamped yesterday to reflect their “shift in marketing and promotion vocabulary”. Looks shiny and new! Also, I think that the new layout makes it easier for people to find information about the KDE community and the software compilation.

Users of small form-factor laptops will be interested to learn that the new Plasma desktop manager now offers two workspace choices. One is the usual desktop-oriented workspace. The interesting addition is a netbook-oriented workspace, with special consideration for the netbook’s smaller screen and typical mobile usage patterns. I have not yet installed KDE 4.4 on my own Asus EEE netbook but I will most certainly do so, later this week!

In order to fully appreciate the work that went into KDE SC 4.4 and learn what has changed since KDE 4.3, you should definitely take the visual tour. Lots of new functionality and usability improvements are hidden beneath this new desktop workspace and just waiting to be discovered and used to the fullest.

Slackware packages galore!

Like I did with the pre-releases of KDE 4.4, I have prepared new goodies for all you Slackers. Get those 32-bit and 64-bit packages for Slackware Linux and install them on your computers (or build them yourself using the accompanying SlackBuild scripts, patches and sources).

You will find all of those at http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.4.0/ .

Please take good notice of the fact that these packages are built for Slackware-current. You can safely install the KDE 4.4.0 packages if you are running a slackware-current from around 01 february 2010 or newer. Do not try to install these packages on Slackware 13.0.

Slackware 64-bit:

  • Don’t forget to also install the updated or new dependencies! These “deps” packages can be found in the “x86_64/deps” directory.
  • The KDE 4.4.0 packages themselves can be found in “x86_64/kde“
  • And of course, the localization packages (non-english language translations of KDE) are available in “x86_64/kdei“.

Slackware 32-bit:

  • Don’t forget to also install the updated or new dependencies! These “deps” packages can be found in the “x86/deps” directory.
  • The KDE 4.4.rc2 packages themselves can be found in “x86/kde“
  • If you need a language pack, you can grab one from the 64-bit package tree “x86_64/kdei” since these packages are in fact architecture-independent.

Here are the steps on how you download the packages and install them. You can have an older version of KDE installed, but that is not required. You will end up with KDE 4.4.0 installed on your system.

Instructions are for the 64-bit packages, I think you can figure out how to change them if you want the 32-bit versions:

  1. Download everything in the directory http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.4.0/x86_64/ :
    # lftp -c "open http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.4.0/ ; mirror x86_64"
  2. Change into the directory “x86_64? which has just been created in your current directory:
    # cd x86_64
  3. Remove the no longer required kdelibs-experimental package if you still have that installed. It is part of KDE 4.3.x (i.e. Slackware 13.0 did not have this package). If you do not have kdelibs-experimental on your system, you will get a harmless error message that you can ignore:
    # removepkg kdelibs-experimental
  4. Install/upgrade the KDE 4.4 dependencies:
    # upgradepkg --reinstall --install-new deps/*.t?z
  5. Install/upgrade KDE4.4.0 packages:
  6. # upgradepkg --reinstall --install-new kde/*.t?z
  7. Install/upgrade a language package if you prefer to have the KDE interface in your local language (I used “nl” in the example command, you should substitute your own language code there):
    # upgradepkg --reinstall --install-new kdei/kde-l10n-nl-*.t?z

Of course, you should not run those commands while running KDE…!

If you want to compile the packages from source like I did, that is entirely possible using the provided sources and build scripts. It will take quite a while though…

Have fun, Eric

Note for users of any KDE 4.4 pre-releases:


If you never before installed and used one of the Betas or Release Candidates of KDE 4.4 , then you can safely remove one package,  virtuosoconverter. This package is only needed if you were using “nepomuk desktop search” before this final release of KDE 4.4.0.

# removepkg virtuosoconverter

If you ran any Beta or Release Candidate of KDE 4.4.0 prior to upgrading to 4.4.0, then you will notice that your nepomuk database will automatically be converted from virtuoso v5 to v6, the very first time you login to your KDE 4.4 desktop. This process will take a while (not too long) and will temporarily double the size of your nepomuk database (by default, this database consumes a maximum of 50 MB in your homedirectory below ~/.kde).

If this database is not valuable to you, you can also decide to skip this database conversion by just deleting the database before starting KDE:

$ rm -r ~/.kde/share/apps/nepomuk/repository/*

or by following the instructions in Sebastian Trueg’s tutorial: http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Metadata/Nepomuk/TipsAndTricks#Remove_all_Strigi-indexed_data

If you manually remove the old nepomuk data, you can also remove the virtuosoconverter package of course.

If you do not have any clue about what I am talking about and what you should do, just don’t do anything… and all will be well.

A final remark about nepomuk and strigi – I think that KDE 4.4 finally has a desktop search which is optimized to a level that it no longer eats all your CPU cycles or claim a large chunk of your harddrive. Now I just wish that the strigi developer properly fixes the indexing of my PDF files!

Second beta of KDE 4.4

January 4, 2010 / / 10 Comments

Just before christmas in 2009, the KDE community released the second beta of the upcoming KDE 4.4 desktop environment (or to use the correct name, KDE Software Compilation 4.4).

In Slackware Linux’s development tree we still have 4.3.4 which works really well, but in KDE 4.4 some major strides are being made towards an even better work environment.

I decided to have a look at these new developments, especially since the Nepomuk search should work a lot better with the new and fast Virtuoso backend, and built the whole of KDE 4.4.beta2 for our 64-bit Slackware Linux.

I was not disappointed. Even though this KDE 4.4 prerelease is labeled “beta”, I have found it to be quite stable, fast, slick and very useable. The improvements which I have seen from 4.1 -> 4.2 -> 4.3 -> 4.4 keep amazing me… let alone the giant leap that lay between 4.0 and 4.0… everybody remembers the heated debates between the early adopters of KDE4 and those who hated it. At the time we added KDE4 to Slackware, that was seen as a milestone release. Now, I can not imagine ever going back to using KDE3 as my default desktop. And yes, Nepomuk search is pretty nifty, lightning fast and it does not feel like it is eating away my computer’s resources.

So, I am making my Slackware packages available to the general public – for all of you to enjoy. There is one caveat though:

You will need to run a development snapshot of 64-bit Slackware (meaning, slackware64-current of around 25-december-2009 or newer).

These packages do not work on the 64-bit release of Slackware 13.0. Neither do I have packages for the 32-bit release of slackware-current, simply because I do not have a computer in the house which is running slackware-current and is powerful enough to build KDE4 and the various dependencies in a reasonable time.

KDE 4.4 has requirements that are a bit different than with KDE 4.3.x which we have in slackware-current, or even 4.2.4 which we have in Slackware 13.0. You will have to upgrade several non-KDE Slackware packages as well as add some new ones.

Now, go and have a look at http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.3.85/ . Version 4.3.85 is the same as 4.4.beta2.

  • All of the dependencies that you need are in the “x86_64/deps” directory.
  • All KDE packages can be found in “x86_64/kde”.
  • KDE localizations (language packs) are available in “x86_64/kdei”.

These are the steps you take to upgrade slackware64-current to KDE 4.4.beta2. It will bring you KDE4 even if you did not have it installed before. As part of the steps you will be downloading the new Slackware packages, but not the source or SlackBuilds. It is easy to modify the download command to also get you the sources if you want this.

  1. Download all of the directory http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.3.85/x86_64/ :
    # lftp -c "open http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.3.85/ ; mirror x86_64"
  2. Change into the directory “x86_64” which has been created:
    # cd x86_64
  3. Remove the no longer required kdelibs-experimental package:
    # removepkg kdelibs-experimental
  4. Install/upgrade the new dependencies:
    # upgradepkg --reinstall --install-new deps/*.t?z
  5. Install/upgrade KDE4.4.beta2 packages:
    # upgradepkg --reinstall --install-new kde/*.t?z

Of course, you should not run those commands while running X and certainly not while running KDE… After the upgrade process finishes, you can start a KDE session and you will be greeted by the familiar yet subtly different  user interface of KDE4.

NOTE: Some of the localizations (the KDEI series) had errors while building. Missing from this beta release are the localizations for the following languages:

ca, da, es, et, it, sr.

Here is a screenshot of my desktop with Dolphin showing a Nepomuk-powered search result for the word “slackware” in documents that it indexes, as well as Dolphin’s extremely convenient “terminal mode” (just press F4 to open Dolphin’s terminal if you need the speed of the commandline for some file operation). You’ll also notice that adding widgets to your desktop looks quite different now.

Have fun, Eric

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