Yesterday, I noticed a huge update in Slackware current change log. It was a huge update for KDE with version 4.8.2 hits the current branch. After taking come scouting on the forum and the other Slackware people, I synced my copy and applied the updates after overnight download (it was slow here).
Stop!
There are instructions and notices about the update. It was because KDE is now a broken into several packages as opposed to previously a huge software package packed in groups of packages. QT stuff is also updated. Below are my observations about the update experience.
Download
First, I have to download the huge update. I’m not sure if it exceeds more than a gigabyte but what I’m sure is that it will take the whole evening to download so I just leave the rsync running overnight. Why should I worry? There is no cap in my SLOOOOW plan. I should download now or else I will get signal disruptions again in the morning.
The download process is already complete when I woke up in the late morning. It was huge since I synced up everything including the source.
Update?
After everything is in place, the very first thing to do is run the update command then install the new packages. This new packages are actually existing but they came from the huge packages of old KDE. There are tons of them. Then the last step is to run the cleanup to remove the packages that are replaced by individual packages in KDE 4.8.2.
By the way, I choose to install the packages in runlevel 3.
telinit 3 # Login again as root in the terminal slackpkg install-new slackpkg update-all slackpkg clean-system
When executing the clean-system command, be sure to select the packages to remove that are mentioned in the ChangeLog.txt file.
Observation
Of course there’s a brand new KDM theme and I kinda like it. I also noticed that the previous disable-composite.conf configuration can now be removed and I was able to login without problems regarding compositing. Of course, with this, desktop effects are enabled which was not possible on my laptop more than 2 years ago.
All those eye candies like glowing window borders, transparency when re-sizing a window, fade effects and stuff are all working but of course it slows down the system and I have to immediately so save my laptop. The strigi/virtuoso/nepomok are still there and are being disabled immediately as my laptop hates them.
As to my surprise, Network Manager was there. I tried it as a replacement for WICD. To do so, we need to disable WICD from the rc.d directory.
cd /etc/rc.d chmod -x rc.wicd chmod +x rc.networkmanager
However, if you like wicd better, disable Network Manager instead. Another observation is that Network Manager has no UI for XFCE. However, Network Manager UI for XFCE is available in XFCE 4.8.
They’ve mentioned that Dolphin and Gwenview have several improvements but I really didn’t bother anyway. My machine is just too old to handle the whole KDE stack although I used mostly KDE based applications in XFCE 4.6.2 instead.
KDE is good but I need a good hardware first to enjoy it.
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