KDE6 ==== # ------------------------------------------------------------------------- # # BIG FAT NOTICE: # # Alien's ktown is installing a TESTING version of KDE Plasma6! # # These packages replace the complete KDE Plasma5 of Slackware-current. # # DO NOT install these packages on Slackware 15.0! # # ------------------------------------------------------------------------- # This is KDE 6_25.12 for Slackware! Using the template 'KDE 6_yy.mm' it's alienBOB's KDE6 release of December '25. The release consists of: KDE Frameworks 6.21.0, Plasma 6.5,4 and KDE Gear 25.12.0 on top of Slackware's Qt 6.10.1. KDE-6_25.12 is meant to be installed on top of Slackware -current. It will *replace* any version of KDE Plasma5 you might have installed! What is the NEWS for this batch: - It is a revival of my 2023 Plasma6 project which ended with publishing a 'Plasma6 Beta2' Slackware Live ISO plus the sources made available on my server. I was unable to continue with a Plasma6 build until now. - I call this a 'testing' release because it's the first batch. I want to go through a quarter of testing (and you, the reader, will be testing along with me!). In April 2026 with the new KDE Gear release I will promote the repository from 'testing' to 'latest'. Then you will have to update the 'ktown' download URL accordingly. - The 'deps' aka dependencies section contains the programs which are required by packages in the 'kde' section. Some of these deps replace the original Slackware versions; when the originals lack Qt6 support for instance. * You will find SDL3_ttf, freerdp, kddockwidgets, leptonica, libQuotient, libmaxminddb, olm, opentimelineio, phonon-backend-vlc, readstat, stellarsolver and tesseract. * stellarsolver is a rebuild of a Slackware package, to make KStars compile. * phonon-backend-vlc is built against VLC and therefore will never find its way into Slackware. I will keep providing this package in 'ktown'. You can download a vlc package from my repsository as well. * The other 'deps' packages are new to Slackware. Note that tesseract was added to provide OCR support in skanpage, but you will have to download at least one set of traineddata for your language here: https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Data-Files.html - Frameworks 6.21.0 is the stable base on which KDE Plasma6 is built. See https://kde.org/announcements/frameworks/6/6.21.0/ - Plasma 6.5.4 is an increment of the 6.5 cycle which is called an 'inflection point' for the Plasma desktop; See https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.5.4/ and if you want to read more about the goals for 6.5 you should check out: https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.5.0/ - In plasma-extra I offer the usual set of desktop enhancements, including a Qt6-enabled SDDM login manager. - KDE Gear 25.12.0 (aka Applications) may be the last release that contains Qt5-based applications, let's hope that the 26.04 release removes the need for KDE Frameworks5. See also https://kde.org/announcements/gear/25.12.0/ - KDEPIM is a subset of KDE Gear, containing the applications, tools and libraries for Personal Information Management. - The 'kde5' section contains the KDE Frameworks5 which are still required by all Qt5 based KDE applications and tools. This section will eventually be removed. - In 'applications-extra' you'll find KDE applications which I believe to be essential to have in a modern Linux system but are not (yet) part of KDE Gear. Further points of interest: - Original Slackware packages from the KDE section that you need to keep are: fcitx5-theme-breeze, futuresql, libindi, libnova, qca, qcoro and wcslib. If you follow the instructions below to remove KDE Plasma5, these packages will remain installed. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Install pre-compiled packages: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In order to install or upgrade KDE 6, follow these steps: Make sure you are not running KDE or even X ! If you are running an X session, log out first to return to the console. If your computer boots to runlevel 4 (graphical login) you first have to go back to runlevel 3 (console) after logging out. Press to switch to a console, logon there, and execute the command "init 3" to switch from runlevel 4 to 3, thereby effectively stopping X. If you still have a KDE Plasma5 installed, it must be removed first. No clean upgrade path can be provided! Do as follows: If you have Slackware -current's default KDE Plasma5 installed: Use the slackpkg template provided in the directory where you are reading this README. It is called 'plasma6_remove_plasma5.template'. This file contains the name of all packages that need to be removed. Using slackpkg: # cp plasma6_remove_plasma5.template /etc/slackpkg/templates # slackpkg update # slackpkg remove-template plasma6_remove_plasma5 Using pkgtools: # cat plasma6_remove_plasma5.template | while read PKGNAME; do removepkg $PKGNAME ; done Proceed with installing/upgrading KDE 6 as outlined below. NOTE: Instead of using the mirror host http://slackware.nl/alien-kde/ (its rsync URI is rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/), you could choose the alternative mirror http://slackware.uk/people/alien-kde/ (its rsync URI is rsync://slackware.uk/people/alien-kde/) which is faster for some people. Or if you live in the US, try http://us.slackware.nl/alien-kde/ (its rsync URI is rsync://us.slackware.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/), this server has a lot of bandwidth available. NOTE: If you use 'slackpkg' to automate your upgrades, be sure to blacklist my custom packages or else slackpkg will always try to replace my packages with the stock Slackware versions if the package names are identical. As an example, you can add the following lines to the file "/etc/slackpkg/blacklist" to prevent this unintentional downgrading to Plasma5: # These three lines will blacklist all SBo, alien and multilib packages: [0-9]+_SBo [0-9]+alien [0-9]+compat32 If on the other hand you are using the 'slackpkg+' extension for slackpkg then your "/etc/slackpkg/blacklist" file should *not* contain the above lines! The slackpkg+ extension enables the use of 3rd-party repositories with slackpkg and then Plasma5 package upgrades will be handled properly. To make it easy for you, here is a one-line command that downloads the whole '5' directory (excluding the sources), with 32-bit and 64-bit packages. # rsync -Hav rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/current/testing/ testing/ Or else, if you want to download packages for just one of the two supported architectures, you would run one of the following commands instead. If you want only the 64-bit packages: # rsync -Hav --exclude=x86 rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/current/testing/ testing/ If you want only the 32-bit packages: # rsync -Hav --exclude=x86_64 rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/current/testing/ testing/ Assuming you just downloaded the bits you want from the directory tree "testing" you must now change your current directory to where you found this README (which is the directory called 'testing'). If you used one of the above "rsync" commands then you can simply do: # cd testing From within this directory, you run the following commands as root: On Slackware 32-bit: # upgradepkg --reinstall --install-new x86/deps/*.t?z # upgradepkg --reinstall --install-new x86/kde/*/*.t?z On Slackware 64-bit: # upgradepkg --reinstall --install-new x86_64/deps/*.t?z # upgradepkg --reinstall --install-new x86_64/kde/*/*.t?z NOTE: If you installed the slackpkg+ extension and configured a 'ktown' repository with the label 'ktown' then the commands to upgrade would become: # slackpkg update # slackpkg install ktown # slackpkg upgrade-all The first command fetches the repository metadata from the remote server(s); The second command installs any new package that was added to the repository; And the third command will upgrade all installed packages, including the 'ktown' packages, to their latest versions in the repositories. Finally: Check if any ".new" configuration files have been left behind by the upgradepkg commands. Compare them to their originals and decide if you need to use them. # find /etc/ -name "*.new" A graphical (ncurses) tool for processing these "*.new" files is slackpkg: # slackpkg new-config Then reboot your system. If all you want is to install the packages I created, then you can skip the remainder of the README which details how to (re)compile the packages from their sources; it is not required reading material. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Building it all from source: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sources and scripts are separated from the packages in my 'ktown' repository. If you want the sources for KDE 6, run the following command to download them (downloading from a mirror will usually be much faster): # rsync -Hav rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/source/testing/ sources/ There are a lot of 'dependencies' for KDE 6 which you'll have to compile and install before attempting to compile KDE 6. Compiling and installing these dependencies on Slackware-current is as easy as this: # cd sources/kde # ./kde.SlackBuild frameworks:extra-cmake-modules # cd - # cd sources/deps # ./alldeps.SlackBuild # cd - The finished packages will be stored in /tmp and will already have been installed/upgraded automatically. Then if you want to compile the KDE packages on your computer, run: # cd sources/kde # ./kde.SlackBuild Wait a long time, and you will find the new packages in /tmp/kde_build . Note that these packages will already have been installed by kde.SlackBuild ! Reboot your computer and login to a Plasma session. ============================================================================== Eric Hameleers / alien at slackware dot com / 28-dec-2025