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.