Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: qt6 (Page 1 of 2)

KDE 6_26.04 for Slackware-current (almost free of Qt5)

April 29, 2026 / / 18 Comments

To be honest, I was waiting for a move from Pat. But I got restless, Pat is otherwise occupied for a few days so I took the plunge.
What I am talking about is of course packaging KDE Gear 26.04.0 for Slackware. The latest release of Applications and KDEPIM is nicknamed the “KDE at 30″ edition because KDE is around for 30 years already (!). Congratulations are in order.

The reason I wanted to wait for Pat is that the new Kleopatra release (part of KDEPIM) requires a version of gpgme which is not present in Slackware-current. I had hoped to see an upgrade to gpgme 2.x in Slackware first, followed by a rebuild of affected packages, which according to avid Slackware user gmgf aka Gérard Monpontet is at least: gmime, gpa, libcups-filters, mccabber, mutt, poppler, samba, volume_key, wget2 and labplot. But that did not happen, and I wanted to have a stable ‘ktown’ which is fully ported to Qt6 before my 65th birthday next week.
Therefore I decided to trick Slackware by upgrading gpgme from 1.24.3 to 2.0.1 but not rebuilding all those other Slackware packages that depend on gpgme 1.24.3. Instead I added another package to ‘ktown’ called gpgme1 which contains all the libraries from the previous gpgme 1.24.3 package. Zero broken Slackware packages and I could finally move on with KDE Gear without having to wait for the upstream.
As you might have guessed after all these years – I hate to be dependent on others and like to have full control. So, move aside Pat 😉
Jokes aside, I hope that Pat picks up this completed work and adds it to Slackware-current soon.

As promised when I revived the ‘ktown’ repository for Plasma6, the addition of a legacy-free KDE Gear 26.04.0 marks the change for this repository from ‘testing’ to ‘latest’, as witnessed by the change in the package download URL: https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/latest/. The latest KDE Plasma6 Desktop Environment is absolutely ready for production use. It’s snappy, feature-complete and beautiful. I have been using the Wayland session ever since my first batch of packages and the quirks have by now been removed that annoyed me in the beginning. By now, okteta in ‘applications-extra’ is the only left-over of the old Qt5/KF5 era.

Formally kwayland-integration is also still built against Qt5 and the two old Frameworks kwayland5 and kwindowsystem5, but that’s required for the Plasma6 Wayland session to still support older 3rd-party Qt5 based applications).

The new release of packages is accompanied by an expansive README which will help you remove KDE Plasma5 from your Slackware-current computer and install the ‘ktown‘ version of KDE Plasma6 instead.
The origin host is of course https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/ (rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/), but you could choose the alternative
mirror https://slackware.uk/people/alien-kde/ (rsync://slackware.uk/people/alien-kde/) which is faster for some people, but you may have to wait until it syncs against slackware.nl. Or if you live in the US, try https://us.slackware.nl/alien-kde/ (rsync://us.slackware.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/), this server has a lot of bandwidth available.

If you want to peek at the source code management, I track everything in a git repository. You will find the new 6_26.04 branch at: https://git.slackware.nl/ktown/

Have fun with KDE Plasma6 and please  leave your feedback in the comments section below.

Cheers, Eric

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

KDE 6_26.02 for Slackware-current

February 17, 2026 / / 25 Comments

Today I released a fresh batch of KDE Plasma6 packages for 32bit and 64bit Slackware-current to my ‘ktown‘ repository.

You will find these packages at the origin location: https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/testing/ together with an expansive README which will help you remove KDE Plasma5 from your Slackware-current computer and install the ‘ktown‘ version of KDE Plasma6 instead.

My intention is to keep this new Plasma6 package repository in a ‘testing‘ state (as reflected in the repository URL) until KDE Gear (Applications and PIM) version 26.04 is released in April 2026
I expect that the few remaining Qt5 based KDE applications will finally have been ported to Qt6 by that time. That moment, the repository will be promoted from ‘testing‘ to ‘latest‘ and that will then reflect in the repository URL.

If you want to peek at the source code management, I track everything in a git repository. You will find the 6_26.02 branch at: https://git.slackware.nl/ktown/

Let me know what you think after trying out these Plasma6 packages. As usual you can leave your feedback in the comments section below.

Cheers, Eric

KDE: February 2024 MegaRelease

October 25, 2023 / / 18 Comments

Just a heads-up to you people who wondered when Alien BOB would pick up on the KDE Plasma bleeding edge again.
Simply put: Patrick did a hell of a job pushing every new KDE Plasma update into the slackware-current package tree (even before the 15.0 release) in no time. There was nothing for me to do (or to improve on) since Plasma5 got added to the distro.

My intention is to change that, soon.

Exactly one month ago, KDE published their planning for Plasma6, the successor to Plasma5, so numbered after the version of the Qt framework which underpins it. As seen on the ‘February 2024 MegaRelease‘ page, the first Alpha release of the Qt6-based Frameworks, Plasma and Gear (the three main components of KDE Plasma) is expected to see the light on November 8th, 2023. The final stable release of KDE Plasma6 will be on February 28th, 2024.

I don’t expect that Slackware itself will absorb this new software immediately upon release. Perhaps we will have a Slackware 15.1 next February, maybe not – but a new KDE desktop is a major and potentially disruptive upgrade. Still, it needs solid testing on Slackware -current somehow. Therefore I will have that stable KDE Plasma6 in my ktown repository when it is released.

I am currently working on updating the kde.SlackBuild infrastructure which I took from Slackware-current, to make it work with the new Plasma6 sources. It is not a trivial task; there are new non-KDE dependencies, new KDE programs and changed interdependencies, patches to remove and patches to add.
So far, I have finalized the scripts for all of the new dependencies, as well as the Frameworks and Plasma. Currently working on KDEPIM, and then the Gear collection (formerly called Applications) awaits. The results up to now took me a full week, and the Gear will probably have the same level of unpleasant surprises (hey, it won’t compile! what did they sneak in now? <initiates another search through KDE Invent>…).

Meaning, I won’t make promises on the timeline for a first Slackware-based test release. I aim to make it coïncide with KDE’s own Alpha release, but I may not be able to finish on time. To be clear about my roadmap: anything that I make available before the stable release of Feb 28, will take the shape of a Slackware Live ISO image (the ktown variant, we haven’t seen that one for two years almost!) for you to test and play with.
There will be no new packages in the ktown repository until the time when KDE Plasma6 stable gets released. I am supportive of people who want to compile this set themselves, so I will make the sources available in ktown as soon as I release the first live ISO and will keep updating those sources.

Note that I will not make Plasma6 co-installable with Plasma5. It’s going to be one or the other. Any official Slackware package that I have to recompile to add Qt6 support, will not lose its Qt5 support. Meaning, my ktown versions of gpgme, kdsoap, phonon, polkit-qt-1, poppler, qca, qcoro or qtkeychain will be 100% compatible with standard Slackware.

Hope to have more news in a week or two!

Sunday update (Oct 29) – a screenshot of the “about” screen after I compiled the new dependencies, Frameworks, Kdepim, Plasma, Plasma-extra and Gear (excluding some twenty packages which are not yet compatible with Qt6):

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

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