Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: plasma (Page 1 of 4)

KTOWN Live ISO based on liveslak-1.8.1 and Plasma6 Beta2

December 24, 2023 / / 18 Comments

My work on the new Plasma6 for Slackware finally reached a level that I am OK with. I have uploaded a new KTOWN Live ISO image based on liveslak-1.8.1 and it contains a fully functional KDE Plasma6 Beta2 release.

The ISO is 5.2 GB in size, it is huge. Slackware has come to a point (already a while ago) where the full release does not fit on a DVD medium anymore. It’s the new age of digital, it’s really easy to install the distro via a network mirror, and if you want to run it off physical media (like the Live environment) a USB stick is required. I can really recommend using a Ventoy USB thumb drive onto which you can simply copy the full un-modified ISO image and then boot from the stick.
Making the Live environment persistent when you boot from an ISO file is detailed in an update to the liveslak documentation.

Points of note:

  • Plasma6 Beta2 is based on Qt 6.6.1 and consists of: KDE Frameworks5 5.113.0, Frameworks 5.247.0, Plasma 5.91.0 and Applications 24.01.85; The Frameworks5 package-set is still needed to support KDE Plasma5 applications.
  • Pipewire is the default audio server, fully replacing Pulseaudio.
  • The default graphical session is still X11 based but Wayland is fully functional and stable and you can select it from the SDDM session dropdown list.
    When you boot to runlevel 3, the command “startkwayland” will also give you a full Wayland session.
  • I added xwaylandvideobridge to allow Wayland windows to be streamed to X11 applications. You’ll need this to share your screen in applications like Discord, Skype etc.
  • I will soon make available in the ktown repository, my sources and scripts as well as the ‘deps’ packages (such as the new qt6 package and several Slackware originals recompiled to add Qt6 support to them).
  • I also added a background to celebrate the festive season, taken here in Brabant during a COVID pandemic winter walk. The two ice-skaters in the background, that’s not us 🙂

Get the new ISO from one of the following locations (the ISO is accompanied by a MD5 checksum file and a GPG signature):

Tell me what you think of it and what issues you ran into that I might be able to fix in either the Slackware packages or else in liveslak. Don’t forget to report actual functional issues to the KDE bug tracker: https://bugs.kde.org/

Have fun! Eric

KDE Plasma6 Beta2 (but the Live ISO won’t work)

December 22, 2023 / / 8 Comments

Hi folks.

I have a nice set of packages ready for KDE Plasma6 Beta2 which was just announced two days ago.
As you see from below screenshot, it runs nicely as a Wayland session, both logged in via the SDDM login manager and by running “startkwayland” from a console in runlevel 3.

A few issues that I see may be related to running this test in a QEMU virtual machine, connecting to its VNC server interface from inside another remote VNC session… maybe that’s overdoing the complexity, I don’t know. I can not logout from either the X11 or the Wayland session, the virtual display freezes and I have to login via ssh and reboot the VM or do a back-and-forth switch between runlevels 3 and 4.

Another problem I am facing is the fact that I cannot yet test this on real hardware. I intend to generate and release a KTOWN variant of liveslak, i.e. an ISO image containing this Plasma6 Beta2 release. Unfortunately, the ISO I generated refuses to start either X11 or Wayland sessions, complaining about Qt6 interfaces that are missing or corrupt. I compared the Plasma6-specific package list in the ISO to what I have installed in this QEMU VM, and they are identical.
I will continue my troubleshooting and hope to fix this before Christmas. If not, then this will have to be delayed until after the family visits.

Happy Christmas!
Eric

KTOWN: live ISO with Plasma6 Alpha. Also, chromium now supports HEVC/AC3 playback

November 10, 2023 / / 20 Comments

I have uploaded a 5 GB ISO file containing a new KTOWN variant of Slackware Live. This is the KDE Plasma6 Alpha release. Play around with it and perhaps you will be able to contribute to an improved Beta by finding and reporting the bugs you encounter.

Get the ISO from my NL or my US server (US ISO still uploading at the moment). There’s also an MD5 checksum and a GPG signature file in those same locations if you want to validate the download.

A lot of packages did not compile yet for various reasons. I am not too concerned about that, next update hopefully will be more complete. A lot of work still needs to be done however (by the KDE developers) to port the remainder of KDE Gear (formerly called Applications or Software Collection) to Qt6.
Not ported to Qt6 as of yet are: artikulate cantor cervisia juk kamoso kde-dev-utils kdenlive kdesdk-thumbnailers kdev-php kdev-python kdevelop kget kgpg kig kio-gdrive kipi-plugins kiten kmix konversation kqtquickcharts krfb ktorrent ktouch kwave libkipi lokalize marble okular parley poxml rocs umbrello.

Still, I was impressed with the fully working and stable Plasma6 Wayland session when I tested an unreleased KTOWN Live ISO a week ago. Of course, as things go, I seem to have broken the Wayland session in this public release of the KTOWN Live.
The version of SDDM graphical session manager should also be Wayland-capable but I will test that in a future ISO.

Let me know in the comments section below what you think of this Alpha release.

News about my chromium package (also its ungoogled sibling).

I was finally able to get the HEVC video and AC3 audio codec support working. There’s a patch set on github, maintained by StaZhu but I did not like the complexity and I am not really interested in GPU hardware-only support. The browser’s internal ffmpeg libraries playback HEVC just fine, taxing your CPU a bit more than in the case of a supported GPU.
Now, the Thorium Browser is also Chromium based and its developer Alex313031 used StaZhu’s patches and wrote some of his own to add not just HEVC video but also AC3 playback support.
Again, I did not like the complexity of his solution (documented on github) but could not get around using some of the patches provided by both. I simplified some of the others into a bunch of ‘sed’ commands. And that made it work for me.

The browser will now playback HEVC and AC3 media formats, as long as the container file is a MP4. I have not found how I can convince Chromium to also support MKV containers.
The chromium-119.0.6045.123 package is already available in my repository, and chromium-ungoogled is still compiling (the ungoogled patch kit only became available earlier today).

You can test the new HEVC playback capability here: https://test-videos.co.uk/ if you select any MP4/HEVC sample (none of those have sound) or Thorium browser test page: https://thorium.rocks/misc/h265-tester.html (those have AC3 audio).

Have fun!

KDE: February 2024 MegaRelease

October 25, 2023 / / 18 Comments

Just a heads-up to you people who wondered when Alien BOB would pick up on the KDE Plasma bleeding edge again.
Simply put: Patrick did a hell of a job pushing every new KDE Plasma update into the slackware-current package tree (even before the 15.0 release) in no time. There was nothing for me to do (or to improve on) since Plasma5 got added to the distro.

My intention is to change that, soon.

Exactly one month ago, KDE published their planning for Plasma6, the successor to Plasma5, so numbered after the version of the Qt framework which underpins it. As seen on the ‘February 2024 MegaRelease‘ page, the first Alpha release of the Qt6-based Frameworks, Plasma and Gear (the three main components of KDE Plasma) is expected to see the light on November 8th, 2023. The final stable release of KDE Plasma6 will be on February 28th, 2024.

I don’t expect that Slackware itself will absorb this new software immediately upon release. Perhaps we will have a Slackware 15.1 next February, maybe not – but a new KDE desktop is a major and potentially disruptive upgrade. Still, it needs solid testing on Slackware -current somehow. Therefore I will have that stable KDE Plasma6 in my ktown repository when it is released.

I am currently working on updating the kde.SlackBuild infrastructure which I took from Slackware-current, to make it work with the new Plasma6 sources. It is not a trivial task; there are new non-KDE dependencies, new KDE programs and changed interdependencies, patches to remove and patches to add.
So far, I have finalized the scripts for all of the new dependencies, as well as the Frameworks and Plasma. Currently working on KDEPIM, and then the Gear collection (formerly called Applications) awaits. The results up to now took me a full week, and the Gear will probably have the same level of unpleasant surprises (hey, it won’t compile! what did they sneak in now? <initiates another search through KDE Invent>…).

Meaning, I won’t make promises on the timeline for a first Slackware-based test release. I aim to make it coïncide with KDE’s own Alpha release, but I may not be able to finish on time. To be clear about my roadmap: anything that I make available before the stable release of Feb 28, will take the shape of a Slackware Live ISO image (the ktown variant, we haven’t seen that one for two years almost!) for you to test and play with.
There will be no new packages in the ktown repository until the time when KDE Plasma6 stable gets released. I am supportive of people who want to compile this set themselves, so I will make the sources available in ktown as soon as I release the first live ISO and will keep updating those sources.

Note that I will not make Plasma6 co-installable with Plasma5. It’s going to be one or the other. Any official Slackware package that I have to recompile to add Qt6 support, will not lose its Qt5 support. Meaning, my ktown versions of gpgme, kdsoap, phonon, polkit-qt-1, poppler, qca, qcoro or qtkeychain will be 100% compatible with standard Slackware.

Hope to have more news in a week or two!

Sunday update (Oct 29) – a screenshot of the “about” screen after I compiled the new dependencies, Frameworks, Kdepim, Plasma, Plasma-extra and Gear (excluding some twenty packages which are not yet compatible with Qt6):

Eric

Patrick, next Slackware and moving forward with KDE Plasma5

July 26, 2018 / / 25 Comments

I assume that many of you will have been reading the recent Linux Questions thread “Donating to Slackware” and in particular Patrick Volkerding’s reply where he explains that the Slackware Store (an entity independent of Slackware with which he has a business arrangement involving a percentage of sales profit and medical insurance) has not been paying him any money for the last two years and that most likely all the PayPal donations through the Store have gone into the pockets of the Store owners. Read that thread if you have not done so yet.
Basically Pat is broke. That thread lists a PayPal address which Pat eventually shared and where donations can be sent directly to him, so that he can fix his roof, his airco, his crashing server and his wife’s car. That would be a start.

That LQ thread is also perused to discuss possible ways forward for Pat (setting up a Patreon account, or a business PayPal account, etc) so that he can support his family and continue working on Slackware. To me it looks like the Store will be a thing of the past unless they change their attitude. Switching from a business model where revenue is generated from optical media sales, to a model where supporters set up a recurring payment in exchange for the prolonged existence of their favorite distro, and possibly get Pat to write up some hands-on stories as a reward, may ultimately benefit Pat, and Slackware, more than the way things are handled at the moment. If you are doubting the financial impact of a recurring payment through Patreon or PayPal, look at it this way: if you donate one euro per month, you will probably not even notice that the money is shifted out. But with 2000 people donating one euro per month, Pat would have a basic income (pre-tax) already. Not a lot, but it’s a start. The 2000 people is a rough estimate of the people who ordered a DVD or CD through the store: the owners told Pat that the earnings of the 14.2 release were 100K (and Pat got 15K out of that, go figure!). Divide that through ~50 euro per DVD, results in 2000 people. Then there’s all these people who donated money through the Store or bought shirts, caps and stickers. I think the amounts of money even a small community (like us Slackware users) can contribute should enable Pat to shed his financial worries. The fact that the Slackware Store basically has been ripping off the hand that feeds them is enraging and inexcusable.
This is all about a community standing up to provide support for what (or who) bonds us together.

Very important to take from Pat’s reply is that he’s “never really been in this for the money” but without income, Slackware’s development is ultimately affected too. I hesitated writing this article, even after Patrick’s LQ post, because it is Patrick’s life and I won’t decide for him how to live it. But I am passionate about Slackware, and care a great deal for Pat, Andrea and Briah, and wish them nothing but the best.

So, in that LQ thread and in private talks, I guess that there will be a lot of discussions as well about the shape and form of a future Slackware. Should it shrink to a “core distro” on which others can build their repositories, for instance offering Plasma5, MATE, Cinnamon desktop environments? How to integrate these external repositories so that a new install could effortlessly be expanded with extra functionality? Should Plasma5 be included? Should PAM be included? And so forth. Lots of exciting developments in stock!

As for KDE Plasma5, I talked with Pat about the way forward and what his plans are with regard to Slackware and Plasma5. Pat indicated that he would at this moment be in favor of going with the latest and greatest instead of adopting LTS (Long Term Support) releases of KDE, because of the reports from several Slackware Plasma5 users that several usability bugs have been solved in the latest releases (part of those improvements can be attributed to the newer Qt5). If Pat decides not to adopt Plasma5 into Slackware, then as long as he provides a solid base in Slackware 15.0 I can keep providing Plasma5 as an add-on through my ‘ktown’ repository. That “solid base” would at least have to be Qt5, its supporting libraries, and recompiled/upgraded phonon, poppler, harfbuzz etc packages to add Qt5 support so that I can cut my “deps” section substantially and no longer have to provide alternate versions of packages that are also part of Slackware but lack required functionality.

And that is why my next update of ‘ktown‘ will see the removal of the LTS software versions in the ‘latest‘ sub-repository and at the same time, the bleeding edge ‘testing‘ sub-repository will be promoted to the ‘latest‘. The ‘testing’ and ‘latest’ will then contain the same packages, so that everyone will upgrade to the same July ’18 packages.
I still need to start collecting the new KDE source archives, sync my virtual machines to latest -current and start compiling. Don’t expect packages before the weekend…

Eric

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