Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: plasma5 (Page 6 of 15)

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.

New set of Live ISOs

June 27, 2018 / / 16 Comments

blueSW-64pxI have uploaded a fresh set of ISOs for the Slackware Live Edition. They are all based on my ‘liveslak‘ scripts and contain the latest Slackware-current dated “Sat Jun 23 04:57:41 UTC 2018“).
The available ISO variants on https://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/ (remember to add support for CACert to your system if you see certificate warnings!) are:

  • Full unmodified Slackware (32bit and 64bit).
  • Stripped-down XFCE (32bit as well as 64bit), this ISO will fit on a CDROM medium.
  • Slackware with MATE 1.20 instead of KDE4 (64bit). Thanks to Willy Sudiarto Raharjo for the packaging.
  • Slackware with Plasma 5 instead of KDE4 (64bit) to showcase the Plasma 5.13.1 release. This ISO also contains LibreOffice 6.0.4 and VLC 3.0.3 among many others.

The new liveslak version 1.2.0 has a couple of updates, most related to changes in package lists and work to keep the XFCE ISO below 700 MB, but there is one update that I should mention. I have added – but have not yet tested myself – the possibility to create a configuration file “/liveslak/slackware_os.cfg” and in that file, define some of the variables you would otherwise have to set through boot commandline parameters. Those variables are:
BLACKLIST, INIT, KEYMAP, LIVE_HOSTNAME, LOAD, LOCALE, LUKSVOL, NOLOAD, RUNLEVEL, TWEAKS, TZ, XKB and you define them, each on their own line, as “VARIABLE=value”

Wayland?

This time the ‘testing’ branch in my ‘kown’ repository is focusing on the new Plasma Desktop 5.13, so there is no Wayland support in it now. For a future ‘testing’ release I’ll most likely re-visit Wayland but I want Patrick to add Plasma 5 to Slackware first so I can do my own stuff in just the ‘latest’ branch again and use ‘testing’ for actual tests.

Refreshing your USB stick instead of re-formatting

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. If you want to modify other parameters of your USB stick, use the script “upslak.sh“. It’s main feature is that it can update the kernel on the USB stick, but it also can replace the Live init script. As with most (if not all) of my scripts, use the “-h” parameter to get help on its functionality.

Historical info on liveslak

More detail about the features of Slackware Live Edition can be found in previous posts here on the blog.

Have fun!

Qt 5.11.1 and Plasma 5.13.1 in ktown ‘testing’ repository

June 24, 2018 / / 20 Comments

A couple of days ago I recompiled ‘poppler’ and the packages in ‘ktown’ that depend on it, and uploaded them into the repository as promised in my previous post.
I did that because Slackware-current updated its own poppler package and mine needs to be kept in sync to prevent breakage in other parts of your Slackware computer. I hear you wonder, what is the difference between the Slackware poppler package and this ‘ktown’ package? Simple: my ‘poppler’ package contains support for Qt5 (in addition to the QT4 support in the original package) and that is required by other packages in the ‘ktown’ repository.

But that was not all I updated this week. I have refreshed my ‘testing’ repository on ktown  with bugfix releases for Qt and Plasma. Both were introduced earlier this month in my repository with their ‘point releases’ 5.11.0 and 5.13.0 respectively, and within a week updates became available to squash reported bugs. Both releases are according to their schedules, so nothing alarming there. Business as usual. But since stability is a good thing, I decided not to adhere to my usual montly cycle of pushing updates to my repository.

Therefore I have built new packages for ‘qt5’ version 5.11.1 and for the full ‘plasma’ set (version 5.13.1) and uploaded them to my ‘testing‘ repository.

On this occasion I took the plunge myself and upgraded my laptop’s Plasma Desktop to these ‘testing’ packages. Works well!

I also took the opportunity to check how dependent the Frameworks would be on the new Qt5 release, since I have rebuilt all of the Frameworks packages in ‘testing’ against this 5.11 release of Qt5. As it turns out, there is only one Frameworks package that needs a recompilation when switching from Qt 5.9 to 5.11 and that is the ‘kdeclarative‘ package. If you use all the Frameworks package from ‘latest‘ repository instead of ‘testing’ then the Plasma Shell will not start and you will end up with a black desktop and only the application windows that were started because of session-restore will be visible. As you may know, the Plasma Shell can be restarted from the commandline in case of issues (crashes, graphical artefacts etc) with the command “plasmashell –replace” at a terminal command prompt. What happens if your kdelarative package is compiled against the wrong Qt5 is this:

eha@baxter:~$ plasmashell –replace
org.kde.kwindowsystem: Loaded plugin “/usr/lib64/qt5/plugins/kf5/org.kde.kwindowsystem.platforms/KF5WindowSystemX11Plugi
n.so” for platform “xcb”
org.kde.plasmaquick: Applet preload policy set to 1
plasmashell: relocation error: /usr/lib64/libKF5Declarative.so.5: symbol _ZN15QQmlPropertyMap15allocatePrivateEv version
Qt_5 not defined in file libQt5Qml.so.5 with link time reference

This can be fixed by replacing the ‘kdelarative’ package in Frameworks with a version that was compiled against the Qt5 your system is using.

So, in future Frameworks updates I will likely only have to recompile ‘kdeclarative’ for the ‘testing’ repository and create hard-links for all the other packages. I already am using hard-linking for all the packages that are identical in both ‘latest’ ad ‘testing’ to conserve space.

And with my laptop’s upgrade to ‘testing’, my Chromium browser stops complaining about missing browser integration support. Remember that Plasma 5.13 has a new package ‘plasma-browser-integration’ which introduces desktop controls (in your system tray for instance) to manage certain aspects of browser behavior (Chrome, Chromium, Firefox). I installed and activated the Plasma extension from the Chrome Web Store into Chromium and now I have a control widget in my system tray whenever music or a video is playing in a browser tab. Also, Plasma search (Alt-F2) is able to find individual browser tabs now.

Again I promise to generate a Plasma Live ISO, containing the latest Qt5 and Plasma5… this time I hope to be able to keep that promise. The last ISO was more than 2 months ago and is due a refresh.

Plasma5 – April 18 edition for Slackware

April 21, 2018 / / 44 Comments

One of my previous posts discussed “ABI breakage” and how that affects software to the point where it breaks and you need to recompile stuff to un-break it. Well… last week was most likely another, bigger, surprise to many of you. The Slackware-current ChangeLog.txt update of “Thu Apr 19 01:04:06 UTC 2018” started with:

Hi folks, and welcome to the third ever Slackware Mass Rebuild (and the
longest ChangeLog entry in project history). There were two primary
motivations for rebuilding everything in the main tree. The first was to
switch to the new C++ ABI. The second was to get rid of all the .la files
in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

That was fun, seeing 1365 lines of ChangeLog and realizing how long the upgrade would take!
But in the end, this was a painless migration. WIth a simple “slackpkg update ; slackpkg upgrade slackpkg” to upgrade the slackpkg package itself. Don’t forget to check the new /etc/slackpkg/mirrors file to see if your mirror is still configured there! Followed by “slackpkg update ; slackpkg install-new ; slackpkg upgrade aaa_elflibs ; slackpkg upgrade-all” and a lot of patience. That’s about all there was to it and after a reboot the Slackware-current system would run as well as ever. A big accomplishment and hats off to Patrick Volkerding who used the past months to (mostly under the radar) update all the SlackBuild scripts and write wrappers to enable him to recompile all of Slackware from scratch, while gaining a lot on the efficiency and time management front. Kudos!

Ah well, a painless migration you heard me say…
Unless you have a ton of 3rd party software bolted onto your Slackware – like my Plasma5… because that came out pretty much broken. On the Slackware forum as well as here on the blog I already advised to hold off with upgrading for a day or so to give me the opportunity to at least recompile Plasma5.

And it so happened that the KDE developers already had all-new source code tarballs waiting for us. I compiled that on the freshly rebuilt Slackware-current and yesterday evening I uploaded my new set of Plasma5 packages to the ‘ktown‘ repository.
The KDE-5_18.04 release of ‘ktown‘ for Slackware-current offers the latest KDE Frameworks (5.45.0), Plasma (5.12.4) and Applications (18.04.0). The Qt5 was upgraded to 5.9.5. Read the README file for more details and for installation/upgrade instructions. Enjoy the latest Plasma 5 desktop environment.

So, what’s new?

  • I had to deal with a couple of packages that were broken after the massive upgrade in Slackware, so I took the opportunity to upgrade gpgme, mlt, poppler and qt5 to a newer version; and I added QScintilla to extend the package (already available in Slackware) with support for Qt5.
  • In plasma-extra the kdeconnect-framework package was updated.
  • Applications 18.04.0 is the start of a new round of improvements. Two new packages are available starting with 18.04: kamoso which is a webcam recorder, and a backup program kbackup. The instant messenger client Kopete was ported to KF5 and is contained in the source distribution, but I was unable to compile it. Perhaps more luck next month.
    Finally, the hex editor okteta moved to the ‘applications-extra’ section because its developer no longer wants to be tied to Application release windows.
  • In applications-extra I have upgraded the kdiagram and krita packages.

If you want to read more about the history of Plasma5 development for Slackware, with lots more detail, check out my older blog posts. If you think a git log is easier to read, check out my ktown git repository instead 🙂

If you are using slackpkg with the slackpkg+ extension, don’t forget to run “slackpkg install ktown” to get any new packages installed, because “slackpkg install-new” will not catch new packages in 3rd-party repositories like ‘ktown’.

I hope to get a new PLASMA5 variant of the Slackware Live ISO image out soon, containing all this new stuff! This depends on my ability to recompile LibreOffice 6.0.3 for 64bit. I ran into a bit of a snag there with gpgme-related compilation errors I have as of yet not been able to fix. Also, VLC3 needs a rebuild since that broke too… and I have not been able to find the time to address that.

Enjoy the new batch!

New Live ISOs for Slackware-current 20180209

February 11, 2018 / / 13 Comments

blueSW-64pxI have uploaded a fresh set of ISOs for the Slackware Live Edition. They are (of course) based on the ‘liveslak‘ scripts and contain the latest Slackware-current dated “Fri Feb 9 19:59:54 UTC 2018“), which sports the new 4.14.18 kernel which is mitigated against the Meltdown and Spectre v1 vulnerabilities.
The ISO variants you will find at the download URL https://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/ (remember to add support for CACert to your system if you see certificate warnings!) are:

  • Full unmodified Slackware (32bit and 64bit).
  • Stripped-down XFCE (32bit as well as 64bit), this ISO will fit on a CDROM medium.
  • Slackware with MATE instead of KDE4 (64bit) to showcase the new 1.20 release of just 2 days ago. Thanks to Willy Sudiarto Raharjo for the packaging!
  • Slackware with Plasma 5 instead of KDE4 (64bit) to showcase the Plasma 5.12 Long Term Support (LTS) release. This ISO also contains LibreOffice 6.0.1 and VLC 3.0.0.

The new liveslak version 1.1.9.6 has seen only a few updates since the previous tag, they are related to the package additions in Plasma 5.

Wayland and X.Org

The PLASMA5 ISO image does not feature Wayland support this time, but if you want you can build an ISO version that does! Download my liveslak scripts and use the following command to generate a PLASMA5 ISO (you will find it in /tmp afterwards) with the additional packages from my ‘testing’ repositories that add Wayland support:

# git clone --depth 1 git://bear.alienbase.nl/liveslak.git
# cd liveslak
# ./make_slackware_live.sh -d PLASMA5 -m plasma5wayland -M -X

If you run a Wayland-enabled Slackware Live, you can login to a regular X.Org Plasma5 session but you can also choose the “Plasma – Wayland” session from the SDDM dropdown menu.

Refreshing your USB stick instead of re-formatting

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. If you want to modify other parameters of your USB stick, use the script “upslak.sh“. It’s main feature is that it can update the kernel on the USB stick, but it also can replace the Live init script. As with most (if not all) of my scripts, use the “-h” parameter to get help on its functionality.

Historical info on liveslak

More detail about the features of Slackware Live Edition can be found in previous posts here on the blog.

Have fun!

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