Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: opengl

KDE 5_18.07 for Slackware, includes Plasma 5.13.3 and Qt 5.11.1

July 29, 2018 / / 38 Comments

Last week, Slackware-current updated its poppler package . The ‘ktown’ repository for Plasma5 contains a custom built ‘poppler’ package, one that includes Qt5 support. That means that the ‘ktown’ version needs to be kept in sync with the Slackware version to prevent breakage in your Slackware installation. Therefore I recompiled my ‘poppler’ and at the same time, I used the opportunity to grab all the latest sources from the KDE download server and built a whole new and fresh Plasma5 experience for Slackware.

Important to know is that I have bridged the ‘latest’ repository to the ‘testing’ repository. Meaning: I have said goodbye to the LTS (Long Term Support) versions of Qt5 (5.9.6) and Plasma (5.12) and will focus again on the bleeding edge of KDE’s development.
I did this after talking to Patrick to see what his ideas are about Plasma5 and whether he would adopt LTS releases of the software, or perhaps stick with the latest and greatest. Based on discussions in the LinuxQuestions.org forum it was clear that the latest Qt (5.11) combined with the latest Plasma Desktop (5.13) gets rid of bugs that have been annoying Slackware users who have been installing my ‘ktown’ packages. So that settled it, and the difference between ‘latest’ and ‘testing’ is gone again. In future I will probably use the ‘testing’ repository to test Wayland usability in Slackware, like I did in the past. For that reason, it’s best if you point your package manager (slackpkg+ comes to mind) to the ‘latest‘ URL instead of using the ‘testing‘ URL.

What’s new

If you had not yet installed the Plasma 5.13 from my ‘testing’ repository then you will see a fresh new Plasma Desktop with a lot of visual and under-the-hood changes. Read more about those in the official releasenotes. Highlights:

  • browser integration: you need to install a browser extension from the respective browser web store, and then your Firefox, Chrome or Chromium will be tighter integrated into the desktop. Plasma media playback controls will operate on browser tabs; etcetera.
  • re-designed System Settings
  • re-designed login and lock screens
  • fall-back to software rendering if the OpenGL drivers fail
  • plugging in a new monitor will cause a configuration window to popup

Apart from the new Plasma 5.13.3, the other updated components are Frameworks 5.48.0 and Applications 18.04.3. There’s also some updates in the ‘extras’ section for Applications: I rebuilt ‘calligra’ and ‘kile’ because of the newer poppler library incompatibility and updated ‘krita’ and ‘okteta’ to their latest versions.

Go get it

The KDE-5_18.07 is running smooth & stable here on the Lenovo T460 laptop, and I am interested to hear about your experiences. As always, the README file in the root of the repository will tell you all you need to know about installation or upgrade.

I have updated the ‘qt5’ package in my regular repository to 5.11.1 as well, to prevent surprises when you upgrade to the latest ‘ktown’ but stick with qt5-5.9 by accident, like I did today. That was a bit scary for a moment, seeing the new Desktop Environment break inexplicably on the laptop (I had already tested all of it in a virtual machine).

A new Plasma Live ISO is currently being generated, based on the latest slackware-current with kernel 4.14.59. I hope to upload that one later today so that you can check out the new Plasma Desktop without having to install it to your computer.

Busy spheres

November 7, 2010 / / 6 Comments

Last week, we had visitors at work who had done a Linux related job for us and were ready to demo their product. One of the consultants had a nice screensaver running on his Debian-powered laptop (or was it Ubuntu… I don’t remember). He told me it was called “busy spheres” but it took me a while to find out that that is nowadays part of the GLX port of the “Really Slick Screensavers” collection.

Busy Spheres

I liked it enough that I created a Slackware package for it…. http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/rss-glx/ After installation, the screensaver collection will be available for selection both in XScreenSaver and KDE screensaver (KDE will show some of them twice, since some of the RSS are already incorporated in the kdeartwork package).

The list of screensavers contained in the package is quite large: biof, busyspheres, colorfire, cyclone, drempels, euphoria, feedback, fieldlines, flocks, flux, helios, hufo_smoke, hufo_tunnel, hyperspace, lattice, lorenz, matrixview, pixelcity, plasma, skyrocket,solarwinds, spirographx and sundancer2 .

By the way, I noticed that Really Slick Screensavers has another recent addition which is not available yet in the Linux port – MicroCosm – which looks really slick (pun intended). Let’s hope rss-glx gets updated soon.

Eric

Compositing hard lock in KDE 4.5

October 16, 2010 / / 6 Comments

People have written about their computer locking up with KDE 4.5.x in Slackware.

These locks seem to be caused by the open source video drivers that are part of X.Org. These drivers incorrectly advertise some OpenGL capabilities when the KDE compositing manager queries them. As a result, the KDE window manager tries to enable non-working functionality in “3d desktop effects” which results in a hard lock of X.Org.

There was some talk about this when I first released KDE 4.5.1 packages, see the comments section of http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/kde-4-5-1-i-took-the-plunge/ and some developer talk can be found here: http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2010/09/driver-dilemma-in-kde-workspaces-4-5/

Today I installed Slackware-current on an “old” ThinkPad T41 with an onboard Radeon RV250 (Mobility FireGL 9000) graphics chip. I experienced the hard lock there for the first time.

This is what I did to get KDE running (after forcedly shutting down the machine by pressing the OFF button for 8 seconds…): edit the KDE Window Manager configuration file:

~/.kde/share/config/kwinrc

In that file, look up the section called “[Compositing]” and then add these lines (perhaps in your case you have to modify, not add lines):

DisableChecks=true
Enabled=false

That first line disables the functionality checks so that if you enable “3d effects” manually you have a good chance of it actually going to work because KDE is not going to query your graphics drivers and just assumes it’ll work. As a result you will see an error about not being able to use the “blur effect” which is exactly where the query would result in incorrect data – the error message is not fatal though.

The second line disables the “3d effects” entirely, allowing KDE to start properly.

Eric

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