Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: qt (Page 1 of 2)

New KDE Frameworks and Plasma packages

April 10, 2026 / / 19 Comments

KDE just announced the KDE Frameworks 6.25.0, and earlier this week they came with Plasma 6.6.4.

I built the packages for those new releases – targeting Slackware -current of course. Along with these updates I also refreshed KleverNotes, Krita, Kstars and Okteta to their latest versions.

You can find the packages in my ‘ktown‘ repository: https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/testing/ with the sources in https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/source/testing/ and the changes tracked in git: https://git.slackware.nl/ktown/log/.

If you are using the slackpkg+ extension to slackpkg and have already switched from Slackware’s Plasma5 to my Plasma6 then the upgrade to the latest set of Slackware-current packages along with the new ‘ktown‘ Plasma 6 is trivial (assuming you tagged my repository with the string “ktown” in slackpkgplus.conf):

# slackpkg update
# slackpkg install-new
# slackpkg install ktown
# slackpkg upgrade-all

Are you still running Slackware’s own KDE Plasma5 on the other hand, it must be removed first. No clean upgrade path can be provided! Do as follows:

Use the slackpkg template provided in the package directory (https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/testing/plasma6_remove_plasma5.template is the online version).
The template is called ‘plasma6_remove_plasma5.template‘. This file contains the name of all original Slackware packages that need to be removed.
You can do this either using slackpkg (no slackpkg+ needed):

# cp plasma6_remove_plasma5.template /etc/slackpkg/templates
# slackpkg update
# slackpkg remove-template plasma6_remove_plasma5

… or else using pkgtools:

# cat plasma6_remove_plasma5.template | while read PKGNAME; do removepkg $PKGNAME ; done

And then proceed with the upgrade steps I shared higher-up.

The next major update is going to be KDE Gear 26.04 which will be the first release of KDE Gear (i.e. Applications & PIM) without dependency on Qt5 or the KDE Frameworks 5.
This move to Gear 26.04 requires some additional changes to the packages in Slackware -current itself, for which I asked Pat to assist. Let’s see what happens in the weeks to come.

Have fun and enjoy the weekend. Eric

Calibre 6.14.1 – I finally made it past 6.11…

April 3, 2023 / / 10 Comments

News for people who no longer read paper books!
Well 😉 I guess everyone needs paper from time to time, but in all honesty, my eyes are getting worse and an E-reader is the optimal device for me when I want to read books – I can enlarge the font and it has a night light.

Calibre 6.x is a really cool-looking and versatile graphical Python3 application, using PyQt to build the graphical interface based on Qt6 widgets. It is the application to use if you have a collection of E-books and an E-reader, and want a decent library management program to move these E-books onto your E-reader. In addition, it offers a good ebook-viewer application for your computer and even an impressively powerful E-book editor.

As you may know, I have been creating native Slackware packages for Calibre for many years. However I had some issues with the compilation of any Calibre release past version 6.11.0. Kovid Goyal, the developer of this e-book management software, removed some of the content from his release tarballs and since version 6.12.0 requires that the build process generates these required files instead.

This meant that I had to study the changes in the Python files which are used to build Calibre to discover how the missing pieces where getting downloaded and compiled during a ‘bootstrap’ build. That took a while but I found a way to get these sources in place before starting the build.
So now again, Calibre packages for Slackware 15.0 and -current will be getting refreshes in my repository.

Download the new Calibre 6.14.1 packages from my repository or any mirror (like my own US mirror). No external dependencies, works out of the box on Slackware 15.0 or -current.

 

Have fun! Eric

First package for Calibre6 in my repository

October 22, 2022 / / 32 Comments

Not so very long after I was finally able to produce my first packages for Calibre 5.x, Kovid Goyal ended that development cycle and bumped his e-book management application’s major version number to “6” in order to make a switch from Qt5 to Qt6 as its graphical engine.

The main hurdle for me when the upgrade from Calibre 4.x to 5.x happened was that internally, Calibre switched from Python2 to Python3. Essentially the whole of Calibre is written in Python and it uses PyQt to build the graphical interface using Qt widgets.

It took me a lot of work to re-write the calibre.SlackBuild to also make that Python switch. After all, my single calibre package is actually getting built from many sources (44 tarballs for Calibre 4, 55 tarballs for Calibre 5) and a lot of those had to be replaced to work with Python3. Moving my calibre.SlackBuild to Python3 took so much effort that I decided to apply some simplification as well: I removed the script’s ability to build its own Qt5 libraries from source, instead I let my calibre-5.x packages depend on the qt5 package which is already present in the Slackware OS since release 15.0.
Naturally I was not looking forward to doing the same cumbersome and time-consuming exercise again, now having to figure out the intricacies of Qt6, a graphical toolkit I had never built or used before.

But I was bothered by the consequence that I had to stick with Calibre 5.44 being the final release using Qt5, and so I decided to take my time, and inbetween other activities I started gradually re-writing the calibre.SlackBuild script to encompass the new sources and get these compiled and tested.

Now then finally, you can install Calibre 6 on Slackware using a 170 MB large natively-built package which needs 64 source tarballs to compile You can get the new Calibre 6 packages from my repository or any mirror (like my own US mirror). No external dependencies, works out of the box on Slackware 15.0 or -current.

To refresh your memory in case you are still thinking “what the heck is he talking about” – Calibre is an e-book library management program which I started using after buying my first E-reader (a Sony TRS-T1) and discovering that the accompanying e-book management software was proprietary and not user-friendly. The functionality and ease-of-use of Calibre were so much better than the commercial software that I never looked back.
I now read my e-books on a Kobo Aura2 H2O . Adding books to the reader is dead-simple: Calibre exports my book library on the internet as a OPDS server that works with any e-reader that has Internet connectivity, and I can scroll through my library even when on vacation and pick a new book to read. The power of Open Source.

A note for those of you who are on a 32bit Slackware and are currently using my Calibre 5.x package. With Calibre 6 it is no longer needed to set the “QTWEBENGINE_CHROMIUM_FLAGS” variable to disable seccomp. Qt6 does not appear to have the issues that the embedded Chromium browser of Qt5 had.

I also checked that the application’s screenreader still works. Right-click the current page in your open e-book text and then click “Read Aloud“. The text-to-speech is provided by an embedded speech-dispatcher program.
This is great, but the downside of it is, that the default espeak voice sounds like Steve Hawking came to visit you. If you find out how to improve the text-to-speech capability of Calibre by adding voices (especially non-english) and playing with the various engines, please let me know in the comments section below. I really would like to improve the out-of-the-box TTS experience for people with visual disabilities or dyslexia.

Have fun! Eric

KDE SC 4.10.0 released

February 6, 2013 / / 62 Comments

Right on time, here is KDE Software Compilation 4.10.0. We left behind the 4.9 series but since this is a “zero release” I will keep my 4.9.5 packages around for a while. With this 4.10 series, one of the most interesting new features for end-users is the enhanced scripting possibilities for Plasma Workspaces (using QML, the Qt Markup Language and QtQuick) and the KWin window manager using external scripts. A new print manager has been added as well.

I have had packages ready for a few days already, and that allowed for limited testing by the people I trust. No strange bugs surfaced, if there are any left I hope you will uncover them 🙂

Remember: my ktown packages for KDE are meant to be used on Slackware-current, but I built this set of packages on Slackware 14.0. It allows these KDE 4.10.0 packages to work on Slackware 14 as well as -current.

How to upgrade to KDE 4.10.0? Whether you are upgrading from the stock KDE 4.8.5 of Slackware 14.0/current, or if you are upgrading from my previous 4.9.5 packages, you will find all the installation/upgrade instructions that you need in the accompanying README file.

You are strongly advised to read and follow these instructions!

Highlights for the new set of Slackware packages:

  • You will find nine updated dependencies compared to Slackware’s own KDE 4.8.5:  PyQt, akonadi, attica,phonon-gstreamer, qt, shared-desktop-ontologies, sip, soprano, virtuoso-ose. Several of those were updated after my previous 4.9.5 packages. I added a new one as well: qjson.
  • Some of the “extragear” of the KDE in Slackware 14/current has been updated: with new versions of calligra (accompanying the KDE 4.10.0 release), kdevelop, kdevplatform, oxygen-gtk2, skanlite (already updated for my previous package sets).
  • The “extragear” section also introduces new packages (compared to the stable Slackware): oxygen-gtk3 – which should give any software which uses the GTK+3 widget set a nice integrated look and feel when you run it in KDE; and kio-mtp which is required in order to access and manage files on devices running Android 4.0 and later. Starting with the KDE 4.10.0 release, I also added libkscreen and kscreen – this is a new screen management software which plugs into the System Settings of KDE’s Plasma Workspace. It tries to make multilple-screen management as easy as possible
  • Compared to KDE 4.8.5, but also compared to KDE 4.9.x, there were some package removals:
    • kdegames has been split up into several smaller individual packages, starting with 4.10.x
    • kdemultimedia had been split up into several smaller individual packages already, starting with 4.9.x.
    • ksecrets has been removed completely since the 4.9.x series.
    • printer-applet has been replaced by print-manager since the 4.10.0 series.

Download locations (using a mirror is preferred:

Have fun! Eric

Last maintenance release in KDE 4.9 series

December 5, 2012 / / 22 Comments

The KDE developers are already well underway to a 4.10 release, having published the second Beta yesterday. But as I stated before, I will stick with the 4.9 series until at least there is a stable release of 4.10. Today marks the final update in the 4.9 series. With the publication of KDE Software Compilation 4.9.4 we are at the end of the maintenance cycle. Check out the release notes if you want to know all about what happened in the past month.

I think that 4.9.4 is a perfect companion for people running Slackware 14 or current.

My Ktown packages for KDE are specifically targeting Slackware-current, since that is what they are built on. At the moment, the development of -current has not deviated much, so that the KDE 4.9.4 packages will work well on Slackware 14 as well. That is why you will find the packages in a “14.0” directory.

Whether you are upgrading from the stock KDE of Slackware, or if you are upgrading from my previous 4.9.3 packages, you will find proper installation/upgrade instructions in the accompanying README and you are strongly advised to read and follow them.

Highlights for the new set of Slackware packages:

  • You will find five updated dependencies compared to Slackware’s own KDE 4.8.5: akonadi, qt, shared-desktop-ontologies, soprano, virtuoso-ose.
  • Since qt-4.8.4 was released a few days ago, I decided to add this version to the package set. I would have had to rebuild qt anyway in order to apply fixes for crash bugs, but 4.8.4 should be better even..
  • I had upgraded some of the “extragear” of KDE in my 4.9.3 package set and they are kept for 4.9.4: you will find new versions of kdevelop and kdevplatform, as well as oxygen-gtk2.
  • I had added a new package oxygen-gtk3 to my 4.9.3 set which is also carried to this 4.9.4 set. The package should give any software which uses the GTK+3 widget set a nice integrated look and feel when you run it in KDE.
  • And to conclude, I have added an entirely new package to this KDE 4.9.4 set, “kio-mtp” which is required in order to access and manage files on devices running Android 4.0 and later. I have not tested this, and am hearing mixed reports about its usefulness. Let me know if you use this!
  • Compared to KDE 4.8.5, there were two package removals:
    • kdemultimedia has been split up into several smaller individual packages.
    • ksecrets has been removed completely in the 4.9.x series.

Download locations (using a mirror is preferred, both my own taper and Willy’s server are fully synchronized):

 

Have fun! Ericbb

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