Alien Pastures

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Tag: frameworks (Page 2 of 2)

KDE 5 (Plasma 5.2.0) available for Slackware -current

January 28, 2015 / / 117 Comments

qt-kde-620x350And yes – let me get this clear right from the start: this Plasma 5.2.0 desktop environment will replace the KDE 4 packages you have installed.

What is this new ‘Plasma 5’

Plasma 5 is the “next-gen” KDE desktop. It has been in development for a long long time, with the goal of providing a gradual migration path away from the well-known KDE 4 desktop. All of this with the KDE 4.0 “debacle” in mind. You may recall that the KDE community released KDE 4.0 as a “tech preview” i.e. not ready for production, however some distributions upgraded their KDE from 3.x to 4.0 regardless of that. The backlash from the user community was understandable of course, because they went from a stable KDE 3 desktop to a buggy and crippled KDE 4 desktop. This was often blamed upon KDE itself, but that does the developers and their software grave injustice – it was the distros who forced their users to a non production-ready version of KDE,so it should be those distros who should be criticized for their bad judgement. Still, even to this day, harsh words about KDE 4.0 are targeted at its developers, not at the distros who made a strategic error.

Nevertheless, here we are, with a shiny KDE 5 desktop environment!

KDE 5 makes a switch from Qt 4 to Qt 5 as the base graphical toolkit. The old KDE 4 libraries have been ported to become the Frameworks: Qt 5 modules with no dependencies except Qt 5 and optionally, other Frameworks. This allows non-KDE developers to adopt the Frameworks in order to provide an expanded Qt 5 feature set. This porting effort has been going on for a long time now (its first technology preview for Frameworks was little more than one year ago) and the Frameworks are mature technology now. Plasma 5 is the set of packages that provide the core Desktop experience, built on top of the Frameworks.

The release of Plasma 5.2.0 earlier this week was the turning point for me – this release is the first one that I actually consider ready for prime-time, capable of replacing the KDE 4 Workspace. The KDE Applications (currently at version 14.12.1) are the collection of software which used to be grouped in meta-packages like kdebase, kdeedu, kdegraphics, kdemultimedia etcetera. The Applications currently get huge attention from the developers, because that is where the hard work is being done the coming year. Slowly, all individual Applications are being ported away from Qt 4 and the KDE 4 libraries, to Qt 5 and the Frameworks. In Applications 14.12.1, the only ported apps to date are kate, konsole, analitza, gwenview, kalgebra, kanagram, khangman, kig, parley, kapptemplate,  and okteta. As you can see, still a long way to go.

These KDE 5 packages of mine are going to be your only KDE desktop. The “kde-workspace” package which provided the well-known KDE 4 workspace has been replaced by “plasma-workspace” and the good old KDM graphical login manager has been retired and replaced with SDDM. While you will be presented with a pretty Plasma 5 workspace, most of the KDE applications you’ll be using are the familiar KDE 4 versions (with updates and bugfixes), nicely blending in to the new Breeze theme.

Some Plasma 5 highlights I mentioned in last year’s preview: Plasma 5 improves support for high-DPI displays and comes with a “converged shell”, i.e. one Plasma codebase for different target devices like desktop computers, laptops, tablet, phones etc. Plasma 5 uses a new fully hardware-accelerated OpenGL(ES) graphics stack. And with the Breeze themed artwork and its own Oxygen font, this desktop looks clean and modern.

Plasma 5 follows the same trend you can also witness in Android 5, Windows 8 and OS X: gone are the colourful, exuberant 3D-ish icons, buttons and other graphical design elements.  Flat and monochrome is the new dogma. The result is too clean in some regards, is my personal opinion: the monochrome system tray icons are just plain ugly and I get flashbacks of Windows 3.1 sometimes. Judge for yourself.

What to expect from these Slackware packages

These packages are only going to be useful if installed on top of Slackware -current. They are replacing the KDE 4 packages (plus adding/upgrading a lot of dependencies) that you might have installed. There is no co-installable option. Therefore if you rely on your KDE desktop for your daily productive work, please consider your upgrade carefully. The upgrade/migration should be painless if you follow the README instructions, but I can not guarantee that there will be no deal-breakers for you (missing functionality or persistent crashes).

Highlights:

  • Lots of packages in the ‘deps’ department which are completely new to Slackware. Since KDE 5 is built on Qt5 (KDE 4 had Qt4 as its base) you’ll find many Qt5 related packages. Also, in order for Qt4 and GTK based applications to dock into the Plasma 5 system tray, more dependencies were needed. So, apart from updates to regular Slackware packages, these are the new ones (some of them will be familiar if you are already running my KDE 4.14.3):
    LibRaw, OpenAL, akonadi-qt5, eigen3, gst1-plugins-base, gst1-plugins-good, gstreamer1, json-glib, libappindicator, libdbusmenu-gtk, libdbusmenu-qt5, libepoxy, libfakekey, libindicator, orc, polkit-qt5-1, qca-qt5, qt-gstreamer, qt-gstreamer1, qt5, sni-qt, wayland and xapian-core.
  • Qt 4.8.6 of Slackware was patched to support the docking of Qt 4 application icons into the Plasma 5 system tray (and the ‘sni-qt’ package actually implements this support). While I was at it, I also added some patches which Libreoffice requires for native KDE file-open dialog support.
  • Note for users of multilib Slackware64 and also using Skype: you will have to grab the 32-bit version of Slackware’s “libdbusmenu-qt” and my “sni-qt” packages and run “convertpkg-compat32” on them and then install both “libdbusmenu-qt-compat32” and “sni-qt-compat32”, or else Skype won’t be able to dock its icon in the Plasma 5 systray.
  • A bit sneakily, I built phonon-vlc for you. You will also need a VLC package to be able to use phonon-vlc though.
  • I added the latest Calligra 2.8.7 office suite.
  • Even though I compile a ‘kde-workspace’ package as part of the whole set (otherwise kdeartwork refuses to compile), I do not actually ship that package. It conflicts with the new plasma-workspace package.
  • Several source tarballs in Plasma 5.2.0 have not been compiled to Slackware packages: libbluedevil and bluedevil (they need BlueZ 5 which is not part of Slackware), muon (a debian/ubuntu package manager), libkface (needs opencv which I was not willing to add as a dependency).
  • One dependency which you’ll probably find curious, is wayland. It is required in order to compile KWin’s X11 driver, but it is apparently not needed at runtime. Nevertheless, I left the package in, just in case you want or need to recompile kwin.
  • Graphical login: KDM has been replaced with SDDM. Installation of the sddm-qt5 package triggers the creation of a “sddm” user and group. The “sddm” user is then also added to the “video” group. If you already have a local “sddm” account, then all of that will be skipped. You’ll have to add the “sddm” user to the “video” group manually if you experience graphical glitches.

Testing Repository URL

I still consider KDE 4.14.3 the “latest stable” version for Slackware-current, and therefore the repository URLs http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/current/latest/x86_64/ (for 64-bit) and http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/current/latest/x86/ (for 32-bit) will keep pointing to KDE 4.14.3. You can use this repository URL for slackpkg+ or slapt-get or whatever package manager you use.

The URL http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/current/testing/x86_64/ (for 64-bit) and http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/current/testing/x86/ (for 32-bit) is pointing to my KDE 5 testing ground. I consider Plasma 5.2.0 as a “testing” release, with potential to be your next stable desktop, but with some caveats and reservations. The URL itself will remain permanent, even when the versions of the software components get updated. Currently “testing” points to version “5” in the repository because versions of Frameworks, Plasma and Applications are not co-ordinated and package updates may appear in the next months for these sub-sets. The “5” is a good middle ground. You should use this “testing” URL when you configure slackpkg+ or slapt-get if you want to upgrade to Plasma 5.

You must use only one of these URLs! I remind you that the KDE 5 preview I released last August was meant to be installed in parallel with KDE 4.14… but these new KDE 5 packages I am releasing today are going to replace the majority of KDE 4 packages. Therefore, the upgrade from KDE 4 to KDE 5 must be done manually, by closely following the provided README . Reading that README is even more important than before!

Enabling SDDM in runlevel 4 instead of KDM

Runlevel 4

If you want to see the new graphical session (login) manager SDDM in action, add the following lines to the Slackware file “/etc/rc.d/rc.4” right after the line: echo “Starting up X11 session manager…”

# — 8< ————————————–
if [ -x /usr/bin/sddm ]; then
exec /usr/bin/sddm
fi
# — 8< ————————————–

… and then switch to runlevel 4 by typing at the command prompt (as root):

# init 4

Select “Plasma” from the SDDM session dropdown. Alternatively, if you prefer good old runlevel 3, you can type this at the command prompt (logged in under your own regular user account):

$ xwmconfig

… and select “xinitrc.plasma” as your default window manager for X11. Then run:

$ startx

To enter your desktop session.

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 three subdirectories below “kde”, instead of directly in “kde”. This makes it easier for me to do partial updates of packages. The subdirectories are “kde4”, “frameworks” “plasma”,  “plasma-extra” and “applications”.

Upgrading to this KDE 5 is non-trivial. 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.

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

Notes

  • In earlier preview release, HPlip would show an error message about not finding a system tray area. The reason is because the Plasma 5 workspace does not implement the X11 “Xembed” protocol. The system tray area works differently now. Not just HPlip, but all other applications that are not part of  Plasma  5, would have this issue, but only HPlip shows an error. Therefore some additional work was required to make the icons for Dropbox, Skype, Chromium, etc show in the Plasma 5 systray. This was done in the form of several notification support packages in the “deps/” directory and a patched Qt 4.
    • There is a solution for applications like SCIM who still can’t show a systray icon even with these added packages –  which is not elegant, but it works. Use a third-party Xembed system tray implementations like stalonetray or wmsystemtray . I have stalonetray and wmsystemtray in my own repository (I like wmsystemtray better). Both are also available at SBo.
  • Certain conditions may crash your Plasma Shell. I noticed this in a QEMU virtual machine where it was reliably reproducible: The crash occurs every time you move your mouse pointer into an Application Window placeholder in the taskbar. A crash of plasmashell makes your desktop go black and you are left with only the application windows that were currently open. Automatic restart should happen, but not for me unfortunately. You can fix it if you had a Konsole window open at the time of the crash. Type “plasmashell –shut-up &” and your desktop will re-appear.
  • The updated harfbuzz package breaks the library’s ABI. As a result, LibreOffice 4 will no longer work (error looks like “symbol lookup error: libvcllo.so: undefined symbol: hb_icu_script_to_script“).
    • Solution: Downgrading to the original Slackware harfbuzz package solves it, which is a pity because I thought I had taken care of the ABI breakage by applying a patch which re-adds that missing symbol.
  • The hardware keys for altering volume and mute still do not work on a global level (at least on my Lenovo T400 laptop). They seem to work for some applications – VLC is one of them. Sound is working fine though.
    • Solution: How dumb of me… just run “kmix” and a systray icon will appear, and the support for on-screen display of your hardware volume buttons will be enabled.
  • KRunner (Alt-F2) will still not save your command history.
  • When you try SDDM in runlevel 4 and the screen stays black with a blinking cursor in the upper left, this is probably caused by a missing homedirectory for the “sddm” user.
    • Solution: Check the output of command, it should return “/var/lib/sddm” and that directory must exist and be owned by the “sddm” user:

      $ getent passwd sddm | awk -F ‘:’ ‘{print $6}’

  • Even though you’ve selected “Plasma” as your desktop in the SDDM dropdown or in “xwmconfig”, the KDE 4 desktop is still starting up instead of the Plasma 5 desktop.
    • Solution: Remove the kde-workspace package and re-install the plasma-workspace package.
  • I have installed slackpkg+ and configured it as instructed. After installing KDE 5, when I run “slackpkg upgrade-all” it tries to pull in or upgrade all sorts of original Slackware packages. What’s up?
    • Solution: none yet… you’ll have to be careful for a while until I figure out what to do with all those packages.
  • The shutdown and reboot options are missing from the Leave menu.
    • Solution: a simple patch which removes the use of “kwrapper5” to start the KDE services will bring back both options. Kwrapper is meant to speed up the start of the Desktop Workspace and be a bit friendlier on resource usage but if you really do need shutdown and reboot options present, then apply the following patch to “/usr/bin/startkde”:
    • --- /usr/bin/startkde.orig       2015-01-31 18:09:25.744173291 +0000
+++ /usr/bin/startkde    2015-01-31 17:49:18.938578280 +0000
@@ -380,7 +380,7 @@
 # lock now and do the rest of the KDE startup underneath the locker.
 KSMSERVEROPTIONS=""
 test -n "$dl" && KSMSERVEROPTIONS=" --lockscreen"
-kwrapper5 ksmserver $KDEWM $KSMSERVEROPTIONS
+ksmserver $KDEWM $KSMSERVEROPTIONS
 if test $? -eq 255; then
   # Startup error
   echo 'startkde: Could not start ksmserver. Check your installation.'  1>&2
  • Please report any other issue you encounter and I will add it here if it is serious enough.

Have fun! Eric

Thinking about working on KDE 5 again (frameworks, plasma, applications)

January 7, 2015 / / 7 Comments

qt-kde-620x350During these final days of my relatively long Christmas holiday, I have started looking at the KDE 5 build scripts again. KDE 4 has seen its final release sometime ago, and Patrick shows no signs of updating the KDE in slackware-current, so in order to bring some fresh excitement to KDE users on Slackware, I am pondering an update of the “testing” repository aka the KDE5 repository.

In December, the KDE community released the first tarballs of the “Applications” which is the first step to completion of the new KDE 5 desktop. Remember: the Frameworks 5 came first (a set of modular libraries that expand the functionality of Qt5), Plasma 5 builds a desktop workspace on top of the Frameworks, so that had to come next, and finally there are the Applications which are now ported from the KDE 4 Development Platform to Frameworks 5 slowly.

In particular that recent release of Applications 14.12 (the notation used here is YY.mm) gave me some headaches. Most of these applications are familiar from KDE 4, and only a few are now ready for the Plasma 5 desktop workspace (Kate and KWrite, Konsole, Gwenview, KAlgebra, Kanagram, KHangman, Kig, Parley, KApptemplate and Okteta). It is impossible for me to separate the KDE 5 applications from the KDE 4 applications. Their names have not changed, and whereas I needed to rename a few packages in Frameworks and Plasma in order to prevent a clash with package names in the KDE 4 set, I do not want to do the same for the Applications. After all, when running Plasma 5 you do not want to see both KDE 4 and Plasma 5 versions of the Konsole application in your desktop menu – just the Plasma 5 version. Also, compiling these “Applications 14.12” will cause a lot of KDE 4 packages to be overwritten – for example, marble-4.14.3 with marble-14.12.0 et cetera. That is a one-way road. I can not think of a clean method of separating the old and the new.

In my “preview” of KDE 5, I was able to offer the KDE 5 packages as co-installable to KDE 4 because it was not yet more than Frameworks and Plasma packages – it needed the presence of KDE 4.x in order to provide a meaningfull Plasma 5 workspace. That meant, you could install KDE 5, play around with it for a bit, and then un-install the packages if you had seen enough, without this process touching or destroying the configuration of your KDE 4 environment. That was a good thing, because Plasma 5 was quite unstable at that time, and the whole exercise was not meant to probide an actual day-to-day work environment.

We are now 5 months further in time, and the current state of Frameworks/Plasma 5 combined with the new set of Application releases, should provide a stable platform that is slowly migrating from KDE 4 to 5.

That is why I decided to not stretch my luck and try another co-installable version of KDE 5 but instead go all the way and provide a full upgrade from KDE 4.14.3 to Frameworks/Plasma/Applications. It will take a while because of all the unknowns, but I think I have done most of the preparations now (gathering all the sources, updating the build scripts). It will be a matter of compiling, fixing failures and retracing issues to their resolution.

I think I will also provide scripts for an easy roll-back from the new KDE 5 packages to either the default Slackware packages or else my KDE 4.14.3 packages.

Note that this is going to be relevant and beneficial only to people who are running Slackware-current (our development version) so if you are going to want to try this later on, you need to know what you are up to. Once you will upgrade from KDE 4 to my new KDE 5 packages, it may not be trivial (i.e. without cleaning out your ~/.kde and ~/.local directories) to downgrade at a later point in time.

End transmission.

Eric

KDE galore

September 18, 2014 / / 14 Comments

qt-kde-620x350The KDE community now has multiple release tracks for their software. It used to be just the monthly incrementals to the KDE Software Compilation, but part of the transition to Qt5, QML and the new Frameworks, this monolithic release schedule has been abandoned. The Frameworks 5 (successor of kdelibs) and Plasma 5 release schedules are now pretty much disconnected. The new release schedule can be found here for Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5. This complicates things quite a bit for the planning of my Slackware packages. I do not want to get obsessed with providing these packages the day their source code is released. That will be unmanagable at a personal level.

So, during the past week I have been sitting on Slackware package sets for KDE 4.14.1, Frameworks 5.2.0 and Plasma 5.0.2. I have decided not to release these package sets one by one but instead I waited until all three of these were publicly announced to the world. Willy Sudiarto Raharjo tested these packages and he provided valuable feedback on the packages as well as my documentation – thanks again, Willy.

Today, the packages have been made available on my ‘ktown‘ repository and you can grab them!

None of the dependencies for KDE 4 and 5 had to be upgraded since the release of the previous KDE 4 and 5 package sets. The KDE 4.14.1 package set uses the sources of kactivities-4.13.3 (taken from the KDE 4.13 major release) because no new tarball is being made available. For kde-workspace, an update to 4.11.12 was provided.

What to expect from these new packages ?

The KDE 4.14.1 is the first increment of the 4.14 release cycle. It focuses on bug fixing, not feature enhancements. A list of changes is found here. Frameworks 5.2.0 is also a bug fix release. The Frameworks have been in development for a long time and are pretty stable. Plasma 5 software is much younger, and that shows. The release of Plasma 5.0.2 is an ongoing process of fixing annoying bugs. The 5.1.0 release in October will finally see some new functionality – several programs that are part of Plasma 5 have reduced functionality compared to their KDE4 predecessors.

My previous post on Plasma 5 for Slackware has a lot of additional information, tips, known issues and such. You might want to (re-)read it.

 

How to upgrade to KDE 4.14.1 ?

You will find all the installation/upgrade instructions that you need in the accompanying README file. That README also contains basic information for KDE recompilation using the provided SlackBuild script.

You are strongly advised to read and follow these installation/upgrade instructions!

How to upgrade to KDE 5 (frameworks & plasma) ?

If you want to try out KDE 5 (Frameworks & Plasma) please be warned that KDE5 is incomplete. Lots of programs still have to be ported to Qt5 and QML, and therefore your new KDE5 desktop will heavily rely on the availability of KDE4 programs. You need to have already installed my KDE 4.14.1 packages with dependencies, before you install/upgrade to the Frameworks 5 / Plasma 5 packages and their dependencies. Not the other way round please! Some dependencies for KDE5 need to overwrite stuff of the KDE4 dependencies.

I provide a README file for KDE5 as well. Read it carefully!

Once you have installed these packages you can run “xwmconfig” and select “xinitrc.plasma” (if you are in runlevel 3) before running “startx”. If you are in runlevel 4 (graphical login session manager) you should select “KDE Plasma 5” from the KDM session dropdown. You can also use SDDM, a new graphical login manager, which will have been installed as part of the KDE5 packages, but you need to do some editing of “/etc/rc.d/rc.4” to enable SDDM. See my previous post on Plasma 5 for more details.

Where to find Slackware packages for KDE ?

Download locations are listed below.

You will find the KDE 4.14.1 sources in ./source/4.14.1/ and packages in /current/4.14.1/ subdirectories, whereas KDE 5 (Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5) sources can be downloaded from ./source/5/ and packages from /current/5/ .

Note that I have symlinks in place (useful for users of a package manager and running slackware-current) so that ./current/latest/ will always point to the latest stable KDE release, and ./current/testing/ will always point to the most recent testing release (currently that’s Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5).

Perhaps you noticed the directory name for KDE5 is “5” and not “5.0.2” or “5.2.0”. I decided to treat KDE5 as a “rolling release” and in future will probably update parts of it. For instance, when a new Frameworks 5 is released, I will only update the sources in ./source/5/kde/src/frameworks/  and the packages in ./current/5/*/kde/frameworks/ . The toplevel directory name will stay at “5”.

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

First preview for Slackware of Plasma 5

August 13, 2014 / / 40 Comments

qt-kde-620x350Today is my son’s 16th birthday, and I do have a gift for all of you, not just for him. I present to you a first preview for Slackware, of the KDE Frameworks 5.1.0 libraries, combined with Plasma 5.0.1, the next-generation desktop workspace from KDE.

I wrote about this in my previous post, but now you can experience it first-hand: Plasma 5.0 improves support for high-DPI displays and comes with a “converged shell”, i.e. one Plasma codebase for different target devices like desktop computers, laptops, tablet, phones etc. Plasma 5 uses a new fully hardware-accelerated OpenGL(ES) graphics stack. Plasma 5 is built using Qt 5 and Frameworks 5.

And with the Breeze themed artwork and its own Oxygen font, this desktop looks clean and modern.

If you want to start an application quickly, use the new KRunner (usually hidden behind Alt-F2) which will now be activated directly when you start typing when your desktop has the focus.

 What to expect from these Slackware packages

I think it worked out very well that I waited with my packages until after the first bugfix release of both the Frameworks libraries and the Plasma programs. The latest sources provide a much stabler desktop with more functionality. Still, we are only at the beginning of KDE 5 (or whatever the name for the software compilation will end up being). KDE 4 will be here for a while and developers are busy porting their applications away from Qt4 and kdelibs, to the new Frameworks libraries based on Qt5 and QML. Give it a year to mature and then we will be able to leave KDE 4 behind, is my guess.

These new packages are only going to be useful if installed on top of Slackware -current and my KDE 4.13 packages (plus dependencies). KDE 5 is still very much  a work in progress and needs the KDE4 applications and artwork to provide you with a fully functional desktop.

Testing Repository URL

I created a repository URL that you can use for slackpkg+ or slapt-get or whatever package manager you use.

The URL http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/current/testing/x86_64/ (for 64-bit) and http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/current/testing/x86/ (for 32-bit) will remain permanent, even when the versions of the software gets updated. Currently “testing” points to “5.0.1” in the repository because that is the current version of Plasma 5.

Enabling SDDM in runlevel 4 instead of KDM

Runlevel 4

If you want to see the new graphical session (login) manager SDDM in action, add the following lines to the Slackware file “/etc/rc.d/rc.4” right after the line: echo “Starting up X11 session manager…”

# — 8< ————————————–
if [ -x /usr/bin/sddm ]; then
exec /usr/bin/sddm
fi
# — 8< ————————————–

… and then switch to runlevel 4 by typing:

# init 4

Select “KDE Plasma 5” from the SDDM session dropdown. Alternatively, if you prefer good old runlevel 3, you can type:

$ xwmconfig

… and select “xinitrc.plasma” as your default window manager for X11. Then run:

$ startx

To enter your desktop session.

Installing or upgrading Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5

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

Note that the new Plasma5 packages do not upgrade any package from my KDE 4.13 set, although they will upgrade several Slackware original packages. Be careful when upgrading Slackware packages afterwards. Slackpkg+ will help you, if you add the above repository URL to the slackpkgplus.conf file and give these packages higher priority than the Slackware originals.

If you decide to remove the Plasma 5 packages but not KDE 4.13 (or whatever latest version of KDE I have in my ktown repository), be sure to re-install two packages at least: akonadi from my ktown repository and harfbuzz from the Slackware-current repository.

Separated configuration files

I have taken great care to ensure that the configurations for the new KDE5 are not overwriting your old configuration files for KDE4. New configurations will be written to ~/.local5 , ~/.cache5 , ~/.config5 and ~/.kde5 . That way, you should be able to go back to your stable KDE4 desktop without ill effects after having played with KDE5.

One “issue” you will notice, is that some non-KDE applications will forget their configuration and will start as if you are using them for the first time. Chrome/Chromium is such an example. If you want to use the old configuration in Plasma 5 as well, simply create a symlink, This is how I did it for my Chromium after I found out (first remove the new chromium directory that was created by starting Chromium in Plasma 5):

$ rm -r ~/.config5/chromium
$  ln -s ../.config/chromium ~/.config5/

Where to get the new packages for Plasma 5

Download locations are listed below (you will find the sources in ./source/5.0.1/ and packages in /current/5.0.1/ subdirectories). Using a mirror is preferred because you get more bandwidth from a mirror and it’s friendlier to the owners of the master server!

Known issues

The “known issues” section ends this article, and I will keep it updated with the feedback I receive in the comments section below, direct email, LinuxQUestions.org, Google+ etc. Be sure to visit here regularly! For the first batch, I simply used the information that Willy had already gathered on his own blog:

  •  When you switch back to KDE 4, in some cases, all the icons in the Applications tab in the KDE  Menu will change to a blue folder icon.
    • Solution: reinstall KDE 4.13.3 packages, log out and login again. That will fix it.
  • Adding a new entry to the KDE Menu using the Menu Editor sometimes does not seem to work.
    • Solution: Logout/login and the changes you made will appear. This happened to me and Willy -but only the first time we tried it. After that first time, all seems to work normally.
  • HPlip shows an error message about not finding a system tray area. The reason is because the Plasma 5 workspace does not implement the X11 “Xembed” protocol. The system tray area works differently now. Not just HPlip, but all other applications that are not part of  Plasma  5, will have this issue, but only HPlip shows an error. You will not see any icons for Dropbox, SCIM etc… as they don’t have a place to dock.
    • Solution: There is a short-term solution which is not elegant, but it gives you back your old systray ocins. Use third-party Xembed system tray implementations like stalonetray or wmsystemtray . I have stalonetray in my own repository, and both are also available at SBo.
  • There are now two SystemSettings programs. One is part of Plasma 5 and the other is the one from KDE 4. The Plasma 5 version is found in the “Favorites” tab of the K-Menu, while the one from KDE 4 (which is more complete) is available in the menu as “Applications > Settings > System Settings“. The Plasma 5 version is not yet feature-complete.
  • Certain conditions may crash your Plasma Shell. E.g. typing in the  Search field in the K-Menu “Favorites” tab and then removing that text will crash plasmashell (your desktop goes black), fortunately it will restart automatically.
  • KRunner (Alt-F2) will not save your command history.
  • Public holidays are not yet shown in the System Tray clock. See this URL for more information.
  • Resource usage of this new desktop is currently rather high due to a design limitations in KWin, The cause is known and this will be fixed in future releases.
  • In some cases, if your desktop becomes unresponsive, you might want to take a look at “top”. You may find that kded5 runs at 100%, eating all CPU resources available.
    • Solution: Killing the kded5 process or logout/login will fix this.
  • The updated harfbuzz package breaks the library’s ABI. As a result, LibreOffice 4.3.0 will no longer work (error looks like “symbol lookup error: libvcllo.so: undefined symbol: hb_icu_script_to_script“).
    • Solution: Downgrading to the original Slackware harfbuzz package solves it, which is a pity because I thought I had taken care of the ABI breakage by applying a patch which re-adds that missing symbol.
  • The hardware keys for altering volume and mute do not work on a global level. They seem to work for some applications – VLC is one of them. Sound is working fine though.

Have fun! Eric

KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma Next

June 3, 2014 / / 3 Comments

qt-kde-620x350The KDE4 series is still actively developed (in August we will see the release of KDE SC 4.14) but the KDE developers have been working long and hard at the next generation desktop. I wrote some generic phrases in the past about KDE Frameworks 5 (the successor to the KDE Platform aka kdelibs) and Plasma Next (the Qt5 based successor of the Plasma Workspaces of KDE4 which uses Qt4 for its graphical splendor).

But in the next few months we will actually see the first stable release of the Frameworks and the Plasma 2. There are beta sources available now and I grabbed those in order to re-write Slackware’s KDE.SlackBuild build harness. That took a lot more effort than I anticipated but I am glad I did it in an early stage (I don’t usually concern myself with KDE beta releases). My scripts are ready and it’s mostly empty slack-desk files which need some more attention.

I won’t be sharing more than screenshots at this moment. The KDE-5 desktop is just too crash-prone in this beta stage, and I want to spare Slackware the disaster of pushing an unstable desktop. Just think of how the “big distros” handled the release of KDE 4.0 which was basically a “technology preview” but got added to distros anyway, much to the chagrin and frustration of their endusers.

Some interested parties have received a link to the new packages to try them out and give me feedback. My first attempt was missing a lot of things (missing icons, menus, application entries) but thanks to the feedback, my second compilation attempt (using the sources for Frameworks 5 Beta3, to be released tomorrow, and git snapshots of  Plasma Next) looks a lot better:

kf5_startup

KDE 5 startup (Breeze theme)

kf5_menu

The KDE 5 menu – Qt5 co-esisting with Qt4

kf5_systemsettings_compositor

The OpenGL Window Compositor has become intelligent

This is just a taste of things to come in the summer, I hope!

Eric

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