Alien Pastures

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Tag: plasma (Page 2 of 4)

Poll: who needs 32bit packages for latest Plasma 5?

January 25, 2017 / / 81 Comments

During the past week I have been spending time on getting the latest KDE Frameworks, Plasma and Applications built. The new Applications 16.12 was quite a bit of work due to the splitting of tarballs in many smaller ones. Also, the Slackware 14.2 and -current versions have now diverged sufficiently that the packages I compile on 14.2 are no longer guaranteed to work on -current, so that introduces additional work.

This effort took much longer than I am comfortable with. I do not have as much time available as I used to have due to “real life” – meaning my new job is quite a bit more demanding than my previous one.
This made it clear to me that I have to start making decisions about my Slackware activities, with more detail than what I said in the past along the lines of “updates may come less frequent”. It is obvious that I can not keep releasing a new set of ‘ktown‘ packages every month, for both 32bit and 64bit platforms, and for both Slackware 14.2 and -current. I have a few options:

  1. stop releasing 32bit packages for Plasma 5 (ktown repository)
  2. stop releasing Plasma 5 for Slackware 14.2 and start focusing on -current exclusively

I tend to lean into option (1) and therefore wrote this blog post. Who is using my Plasma5 (ktown) packages on a 32bit Slackware OS?

If there are users running a 32bit Slackware-current OS then this could mean a stop to new Plasma5 releases for Slackware 14.2. Updates to the graphical desktop does not have priority at this time in the development cycle of Slackware-current which means I will have to keep maintaining my ‘ktown’ repository for a while to come.

Bottomline: I will have to make one of the two above choices, and I will listen to you – the users of my packages – to help me make that decision.

New Slackware-current Live ISOs with latest Plasma

December 11, 2016 / / 45 Comments

blueSW-64pxI am ready with a new batch of packages for Plasma 5 and to showcase that in a Slackware Live Edition, I stamped a new version on ‘liveslak‘.
Version 1.1.5 is ready, again containing only minor tweaks compared to the previous release. I made a set of ISO images for several variants of the 64bit and 32bit versions of Slackware Live Edition based on liveslak 1.1.5 and using Slackware-current dated “Thu Dec  1 08:49:20 UTC 2016“. These ISO images have been uploaded and are available on the primary server ‘bear‘. You will find ISO images for a full Slackware, Plasma5, MATE and Cinnamon (yes, I did one this time!) variants and the 700MB small XFCE variant.

If you already use a Slackware Live USB stick that you do not want to re-format, you should use the “-r” parameter to the “iso2usb.sh” script. The “-r” or refresh parameter allows you to refresh the liveslak files on your USB stick without touching your custom content.

liveslak-1.1.5

New in the ISOs

The new ISOs are based on the latest slackware-current with Linux kernel 4.4.32.

The SLACKWARE variant contains exactly that: the latest slackware-current and nothing else.

The XFCE variant contains a stripped down Slackware with a minimalized package set but still quite functional. The small size is also accomplished by excluding all documentation and man pages, and the localizations for the languages that are not supported in the boot menu. This ISO is small enough that you can burn it to a ’80 minutes’ CDROM (700 MB).

The MATE variant (a Slackware OS with KDE 4 replaced by Mate) contains packages from the repository at http://slackware.uk/msb/current/ which is still Mate 1.16 (GTK3 version).

The Cinnamon variant (KDE 4 replaced by Cinnamon) contains the latest Cinnamon 3.2 desktop environment created from the repository at http://slackware.uk/csb/14.2/ .

The PLASMA5 variant (Slackware with KDE 4 replaced by Plasma 5) comes with the latest Plasma 5 release “KDE-5_16.12” as found in my ktown repository. This ISO also contains the LXQT and Lumina Desktop Environments. Both are light-weight DE’s based on Qt5 so they look nice & shiny.
One word of caution when using the Lumina DE:

  • The network applet is not enabled by default, and you may have to enable the network manually. I used “nmtui” in a terminal window but you can try enabling the networkmanager-applet instead. I did not find out how, yet.

The changes between liveslak scripts 1.1.4 and 1.1.5

The ‘1.1.5’ tag was applied to accompany the release of the new ISOs so the progress is not stellar – liveslak is quite stable:

  • (e)liloconfig are patched when installed, so they work properly when executed from a Live environment through the harddisk installer ‘setup2hd’. I had some issues in the past when installing from PLASMA5 Live to an UEFI based computer and hope that these patches are the cure.
  • various updates in package content for the XFCE, PLASMA5, MATE and CINNAMON ISOs.
  • the ‘bonus’ subdirectory in the ISO the download area contains multilib related modules which you can copy to either the ‘addons’ or the ‘optional’ subdirectory of liveslak. The two will add multilib capability to your 64bit Live environment. Note that the PLASMA5 ISO already contains these two modules in ‘optional’:
    • 0050-multilib-current-x86_64.sxz
    • 0060-wine-1.9.23-current-x86_64.sxz

Multilib considerations

I added a live module to enable multilib support out of the box in the PLASMA5 variant of Slackware Live. Inside the ISO that module-file is called “/liveslak/system/0020-slackware_multilib-current-x86_64.sxz”.
I host a copy of that module online as “0050-multilib-current-x86_64.sxz” so that you can download it and add it to the ‘addons‘ or ‘optional‘ subdirectory of your non-plasma5 liveslak.
Multilib is something you’d need for Wine, so I also added a live module for Wine (including the 32bit OpenAL libraries) as a separate module in the ‘optional‘ subdirectory of the PLASMA5 ISO and made copy of it available in the aforementioned ‘bonus’ directory online.
This is how I created that live module for wine: by installing the 32bit OpenAL libraries on top of my 64bit wine package for Slackware (which contains both 32bit and 64bit wine):

# SCRATCHDIR=$(mktemp -t -d makesxz.XXXXXX)
# installpkg --root $SCRATCHDIR wine-1.9.23-x86_64-1alien.txz
# installpkg --root $SCRATCHDIR OpenAL-compat32-1.17.1-x86_64-1aliencompat32.txz 
# ./makemod $SCRATCHDIR ./optional/0060-wine-1.9.23-current-x86_64.sxz 
# rm -r $SCRATCHDIR

Remember, the modules in the ‘optional‘ subdirectory of liveslak can be loaded into the live OS on boot when you use the “load=” boot parameter in syslinux or grub. Loading the optional wine module for instance, needs this as additional boot parameter: “load=wine” and if you would be using a non-plasma5 based Live OS and have added the multilib module in the ‘optional‘ subdirectory also, then the boot parameter needs to load both multilib and wine: “load=multilib,wine”.
Of course, if you place both modules in the ‘addons‘ subdirectory instead, they will always be loaded on boot unless you want to prohibit that using the “noload=multilib,wine” boot parameter in syslinux or grub.

Download the ISO images

The ISO variants of Slackware Live Edition are: SLACKWARE, XFCE, PLASMA5, MATE and CINNAMON. These ISO images (with MD5 checksum and GPG signature) have been uploaded to the master server (bear) and should be available on the mirror servers within the next 24 hours.

Download liveslak sources

The liveslak project can be found in my git repository: http://bear.alienbase.nl/cgit/liveslak/ . That’s all you need to create a Slackware Live ISO from scratch. Documentation for end users and for Live OS developers is available in the Slack Docs Wiki.

Have fun! Eric

KDE 5_16.06 for Slackware -current

June 15, 2016 / / 49 Comments

plasma5_startupIt’s that time of the month again, where the three main software collections of the KDE community have had new releases. Time to package and release for Slackware!

KDE 5_16.06 is the June release of the combined KDE Frameworks 5.23.0, Plasma 5.6.5 and Applications 16.04.2 for Slackware.

plasma5_about_distro

You will certainly have noticed that I am still using the words “current” and “testing” in the URLs for my Plasma5 Slackware repository. With the release of Slackware 14.2, I want to change that. The Plasma5 repository on http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/ will move from “current/testing” to “14.2/latest” to indicate that I no longer consider Plasma5 a “testing ground”. Plasma5 is production-ready as far as I am concerned. When a new iteration of slackware-current starts rolling post-14.2 I will see if there is again something that needs “testing” otherwise “current” and “14.2” will become equal in the repository for the time being.

What’s new in KDE 5_16.06?

This upgrade should be straightforward if you already have Plasma 5 installed. See below for install/upgrade instructions. And if you want to check it out before installing, I am currently generating new Live ISO’s for all variants, PLASMA5 included. They will become available at http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/latest/ soon. Check the timestamp of the “slackware64-live-plasma5-current.iso” ISO.

Installing or upgrading Frameworks 5, Plasma 5 and Applications

You can skip the remainder of the article if you already have my Plasma 5 installed and are familiar with the upgrade process. Otherwise, stay with me and read the rest.

As always, the accompanying README file contains full installation & upgrade instructions. Note that the packages are available in several subdirectories below “kde”, instead of directly in “kde”. This makes it easier for me to do partial updates of packages. The subdirectories are “kde4”, “kde4-extragear”, “frameworks”, “kdepim”, “plasma”, “plasma-extra”, “applications”, “applications-extra” and “telepathy”.

Upgrading to this KDE 5 is not difficult, especially if you already are running KDE 5_16.04. You will have to remove old KDE 4 packages manually. If you do not have KDE 4 installed at all, you will have to install some of Slackware’s own KDE 4 packages manually.

What I usually do is: download all the ‘ktown’ packages for the new release to a local disk. Then run “upgrade –install-new” on all these packages. Then I check the status of my Slackware-current, upgrading the stock packages where needed. The slackpkg tool is invaluable during this process of syncing the package installation status to the releases.

Note:

If you are using slackpkg+, have already moved to KDE 5_16.05 and are adventurous, you can try upgrading using the following set of commands. This should “mostly” work but you still need to check the package lists displayed by slackpkg to verify that you are upgrading all the right packages. Feel free to send me improved instructions if needed. In below example I am assuming that you tagged my KDE 5 repository with the name “ktown_testing” in the configuration file “/etc/slackpkg/slackpkgplus.conf“):
# slackpkg update
# slackpkg install ktown_testing (to get the newly added packages from my repo)
# slackpkg install-new (to get the new official Slackware packages that were part of my deps previously)
# slackpkg upgrade ktown_testing (upgrade all existing packages to their latest versions)
# removepkg xembed-sni-proxy ktux amor kde-base-artwork kde-wallpapers kdeartwork (they don’t exist in the repo anymore)
# slackpkg upgrade-all (upgrade the remaining dependencies that were part of my repo previously)

And doublecheck that you have not inadvertently blacklisted my packages in “/etc/slackpkg/blacklist“! Check for the existence of a line in that blacklist file that looks like “[0-9]+alien” and remove it if you find it!

Recommended reading material

There have been several posts now about KDE 5 for Slackware-current. All of them contain useful information, tips and gotchas that I do not want to repeat here, but if you want to read them, here they are: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/tag/kde5/

A note on Frameworks

The KDE Frameworks are extensions on top of Qt 5.x and their usability is not limited to the KDE Software Collection. There are other projects such as LXQT which rely (in part) on the KDE Frameworks, and if you are looking for a proper Frameworks repository which is compatible with Slackware package managers such as slackpkg+, then you can use these URL’s to assure yourself of the latest Frameworks packages for Slackware-current (indeed, this is a sub-tree of my KDE 5 “testing” repository):

Where to get the new packages for Plasma 5

Download locations are listed below (you will find the sources in ./source/5/ and packages in /current/5/ subdirectories). If you are interested in the development of KDE 5 for Slackware, you can peek at my git repository too.

Using a mirror is preferred because you get more bandwidth from a mirror and it’s friendlier to the owners of the master server!

Have fun! Eric

KDE 5_15.07 – July release for Slackware-current

July 10, 2015 / / 35 Comments

Plasma5_lockedpowerpenguin Today my son had his last day at school – holiday time! We had little hope he would pass his semi-final year at the “middelbare school” but he managed to pull of a small miracle and passed anyway. Yay! His dad will sleep better now… and I used the relaxed mood to sit behind this computer and write a blog post about the July release of KDE 5 for Slackware-current. While my son went out to party, we slackers just install the latest and greatest software and pound it hard to see if any bugs seep out of the cracks.

The past month saw various KDE component releases which I let slip, because I intend to offer upgrades only when newer versions of all of Frameworks, Plasma and Applications are available. Well, there was Frameworks 5.11.0 several weeks ago but I skipped that one entirely, and today Frameworks 5.12.0 was released. The KDE Applications 15.04.3 release was already more than a week ago, and Plasma 5.3.2 one day before that, on 30 June.  Time for some package building, and because the Frameworks sourcecode was made available to packagers a number of days ago, I had them ready on wednesday… but needed to wait for the public release of the new Frameworks.

Now then, my July release of the next-gen KDE for slackware-current: KDE 5_15.07. Its main components, as said earlier, are Frameworks 5.12.0, Plasma 5.3.2 and Applications 15.04.3. The updates to Applications also contain the usual KDE 4 Long Term Support (LTS) updates for kdelibs, kdepimlibs, kdepim, kdepim-runtime and kde-workplace. Hopefully Pat will fold those LTS releases back into the official KDE 4 for Slackware-current.

What’s new in KDE 5_15.07?

Well… probably all sorts of improvements under the hood of the various packages, but nothing exciting jumps out that I feel compelled to tell you about. Overall, more stability and less bugs, let’s hope. Read the Release Notes and you’ll know it all. Hey, weekend ahead! Time is on your side.

Installing or upgrading Frameworks 5, Plasma 5 and Applications

As always, the accompanying README file contains full installation & upgrade instructions. Note that the packages are available in several subdirectories below “kde”, instead of directly in “kde”. This makes it easier for me to do partial updates of packages. The subdirectories are “kde4”, “kde4-extragear”, “frameworks” “plasma”, “plasma-extra” and “applications”.

Upgrading to this KDE 5 is not difficult this time, especially if you already are running KDE 5_15.04 or later. You will have to remove old KDE 4 packages manually. If you do not have KDE 4 installed at all, you will have to install some of Slackware’s own KDE 4 packages manually.

Note:

If you are using slackpkg+, have already moved to KDE 5_15.01 or newer and are adventurous, you can try upgrading using the following set of commands. This should work but feel free to send me improved instructions if needed (assuming in this example that you tagged my KDE 5 repository with the name “ktown_testing” in the configuration file “/etc/slackpkg/slackpkgplus.conf“):
# slackpkg update
# slackpkg install ktown_testing (to get the newly added packages from my repo)
# slackpkg install-new (to get the new official Slackware packages that were part of my deps previously)
# slackpkg upgrade ktown_testing (upgrade all existing packages to their latest versions)
# slackpkg upgrade-all (upgrade the remaining dependencies that were part of my repo previously)
# removepkg sddm-theme-breeze (gone after KDE 5_15.01)
# removepkg libmm-qt5 (gone after KDE 5_15.03)
# removepkg qt-gstreamer0 (gone after KDE 5_15.04)
# slackpkg reinstall qt-gstreamer (ensure that none of the overlapping files of qt-gstreamer0 are left)
# slackpkg reinstall kactivities-framework (ensure that you are using the frameworks version of kactivitymanagerd)

And doublecheck that you have not inadvertently blacklisted my packages in “/etc/slackpkg/blacklist“! Check for the existence of a line in that blacklist file that looks like “[0-9]+alien” and remove it if you find it!

Recommended reading material

There have been several posts now about KDE 5 for Slackware-current. All of them contain useful information, tips and gotchas that I do not want to repeat here, but if you want to read them, here they are: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/tag/kde5/

A note on Frameworks

The KDE Frameworks are extensions on top of Qt 5.x and their usability is not limited to the KDE Software Collection. There are other projects which rely (in part) on the KDE Frameworks, and if you are looking for a proper Frameworks repository which is compatible with Slackware package managers such as slackpkg+, then you can use these URL’s to assure yourself of the latest Frameworks packages for Slackware-current (indeed, this is a sub-tree of my KDE 5 “testing” repository):

Where to get the new packages for Plasma 5

Download locations are listed below (you will find the sources in ./source/5/ and packages in /current/5/ subdirectories). If you are interested in the development of KDE 5 for Slackware, you can peek at my git repository too.

Using a mirror is preferred because you get more bandwidth from a mirror and it’s friendlier to the owners of the master server!

Have fun! Eric

KDE 5_15.06 with a few useful fixes

June 3, 2015 / / 20 Comments

Yesterday there was a new release for the KDE Applications. I know that I updated my KDE 5 package set barely a week ago, but there were a few updates that I wanted to push anyway, so adding the updated Applications packages seemed like the proper thing to do.

So here is my first (there will probably a second) June release: KDE 5_15.06. Components are Frameworks 5.10.0, Plasma 5.3.1 and Applications 15.04.2. The updates to Applications contain KDE 4 Long Term Support (LTS) releases of kdelibs, kdepimlibs, kdepim, kdepim-runtime and kde-workplace.

What’s new in KDE 5_15.06?

The highlights of 5_15.06 (June release) are:

  • KDE Applications have been updated to 15.04.2 (a maintenance release containing the aforementioned KDE4 LTS updates)
  • KDE 4 Extragear has one package now: kdeconnect4, a barebones version of the kdeconnect-kde package that comes with slackware-current. It contains just those files that are required to access your Android device’s filesystem through Dolphin (which itself is still KDE 4 based). The rest of the old KDE 4 extragear is now part of slackware-current itself: grab these extragear packages (calligra, k3b, kdev-python, kdevelop, kdevelop-php, kdevelop-php-docs, kdevplatform, kio-mtp, kwebkitpart, oxygen-gtk2, oxygen-gtk3, partitionmanager, skanlite) from any slackware-current mirror.
  • KDE 4 based package kactivities no longer ships with the daemon kactivitymanagerd. The daemon is incompatible with the Frameworks version of kactivities, and in some cases this file overwrote the Frameworks version of kactivitymanagerd, causing severe desktop crashes.

Installing or upgrading Frameworks 5, Plasma 5 and Applications

As always, the accompanying README file contains full installation & upgrade instructions. Note that the packages are available in several subdirectories below “kde”, instead of directly in “kde”. This makes it easier for me to do partial updates of packages. The subdirectories are “kde4”, “kde4-extragear”, “frameworks” “plasma”, “plasma-extra” and “applications”.

Upgrading to this KDE 5 is not difficult this time, especially if you already are running KDE 5_15.04 or later. You will have to remove old KDE packages manually. If you do not have KDE installed at all, you will have to install some of Slackware’s own KDE 4 packages manually.

Note:

If you are using slackpkg+, have already moved to KDE 5_15.01 or newer and are adventurous, you can try upgrading using the following set of commands. This should work but feel free to send me improved instructions if needed (assuming in this example that you tagged my KDE 5 repository with the name “ktown_testing” in the configuration file “/etc/slackpkg/slackpkgplus.conf”):
# slackpkg update
# slackpkg install ktown_testing (to get the newly added packages from my repo)
# slackpkg install-new (to get the new official Slackware packages that were part of my deps previously)
# slackpkg upgrade ktown_testing (upgrade all existing packages to their latest versions)
# slackpkg upgrade-all (upgrade the remaining dependencies that were part of my repo previously)
# removepkg sddm-theme-breeze (gone after KDE 5_15.01)
# removepkg libmm-qt5 (gone after KDE 5_15.03)
# removepkg qt-gstreamer0 (gone after KDE 5_15.04)
# slackpkg reinstall qt-gstreamer (ensure that none of the overlapping files of qt-gstreamer0 are left)
# slackpkg reinstall kactivities-framework (ensure that you are using the frameworks version of kactivitymanagerd)

And doublecheck that you have not inadvertently blacklisted my packages in “/etc/slackpkg/blacklist“! Check for the existence of a line in that blacklist file that looks like “[0-9]+alien” and remove it if you find it!

Recommended reading material

There have been several posts now about KDE 5 for Slackware-current. All of them contain useful information, tips and gotchas that I do not want to repeat here, but if you want to read them, here they are: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/tag/kde5/

A note on Frameworks

The KDE Frameworks are extensions on top of Qt 5.x and their usability is not limited to the KDE Software Collection. There are other projects which rely (in part) on the KDE Frameworks, and if you are looking for a proper Frameworks repository which is compatible with Slackware package managers such as slackpkg+, then you can use these URL’s to assure yourself of the latest Frameworks packages for Slackware-current (indeed, this is a sub-tree of my  KDE 5 “testing” repository):

Where to get the new packages for Plasma 5

Download locations are listed below (you will find the sources in ./source/5/ and packages in /current/5/ subdirectories). If you are interested in the development of KDE 5 for Slackware, you can peek at my git repository too.

Using a mirror is preferred because you get more bandwidth from a mirror and it’s friendlier to the owners of the master server!

Have fun! Eric

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