As you most certainly noticed, there was virtually no movement with regard to building Slackware packages after the announcement of the KDE Software Compilation 4.7.0 …but today that changes. Let me point you to a (huge… it’s triple the old number) set of KDE 4.7.0 packages for Slackware.

The 4.7.0 release comes in the form of many more tarballs than usual. I needed to find time to re-write the KDE.SlackBuild we use to compile all of the KDE-related packages, and the holiday period was the first time I found some time to think and work on the script. I took the modular X.Org script and modeled the new KDE.SlackBuild after that. The advantage with the new script is that new source tarballs can easily be incorporated into the build framework now, and the new package that would be created from that source takes only a few extra lines of configuration to be added. Unfortunately, writing and testing took a while, and you had to wait for a complete set of packages a little longer.

The obvious advantage to you, the end user of the modular KDE in Slackware, is having more control over what you want to install or leave out if your primary interest lies with KDE’s applications, not with the desktop environment as a whole.

I want to stress the point that you have to be running Slackware 13.37 (32bit or 64bit) or (preferably) slackware-current in order to use these packages. The packages themselves were built on slackware-current. Note that between 13.37 and -current, there was an incompatible Perl upgrade which may cause some of the “language bindings” to fail on Slackware 13.37 (causing for instance plasmoids to break if those were programmed in perl).

Please read the accompanying README file for installation and upgrade instructions! Be prepared for some bumps in the transition from KDE 4.6 to 4.7… I had some crashes but they always occur right after login (kwin, kded, nepomuk-stub) but they disappeared after I quit KDE, deleted the KDE related “*username*” directories in /tmp and /var/tmp, and logged on again.

Some of the highlights of these KDE packages:

PIM (kdepim and kdepim-runtime) is finally back in sync with the overall KDE development cycle and is now at version 4.7.0 too.

There are several updated dependencies since KDE 4.6.5 if you had that installed already. KDE 4.7.0 is a big stride away from 4.6. You’ll have to update akonadi, phonon, shared-desktop-ontologies, soprano.

The list of updated dependencies with regard to the stable Slackware 13.37 is a bit bigger: PyQt, QScintilla, akonadi, attica, ebook-tools, hunspell, libdbusmenu-qt, phonon, shared-desktop-ontologies, sip, soprano, system-config-printer, virtuoso-ose.

Not part of Slackware 13.37 at all (yet): grantlee, herqq (added for KDE 4.7.0), libatasmart, libbluedevil, libssh, sg3_utils, udisks.

You will find two useful new applications as “KDE extragear”, compared to Slackware’s own version of KDE: I already added bluedevil to my 4.6.5 package-set. Bluedevil is the new KDE bluetooth stack with a nice GUI, based on the BlueZ libraries already present in Slackware. I added its package to the “kde” directory. It integrates a lot better into KDE than the GTK application “blueman” which is now primarily meant to be used with the non-KDE desktop environments. And with KDE 4.7.0 I have included kplayer, a KDE front-end to MPlayer. The ugly “gmplayer” GUI of MPlayer has been abandoned by its own developers, so there was a need for a better GUI. Even though I really like the Qt-based UMPlayer front-end, I think kplayer is a better choice for KDE users, since it integrates properly into KDE.

The KDE 4.7.0 packages for Slackware 13.37 & current are available for download from my “ktown” repository and several mirrors. The Indonesian mirror may need a bit of time to sync up but Willy is usually very fast with that:

http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.7.0/ (the master repository), rsync URI: ﻿rsync://alien.slackbook.org/alien/ktown/4.7.0/ (note that the rsync URI has changed)

http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.7.0/ (my fast mirror), rsync URI: rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.7.0/

http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.7.0/ (willysr’s Indonesian mirror), rsync URI: rsync://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.7.0/

Have fun! Eric