En/Trinity desktop environment 14.0.10

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TDE 14.0.10

30th April 2021 marks the 14.0.10 release of the Trinity Desktop Environment. A new release of the stable branch meant to correct user reported bugs and to add small functionality to the included software. The main innovation being the addition of some new applications to the list of included ones:

KlamAV: A GUI to manage the ClamAV antivirus.
Komposè: A tool to provide a graphical representation of running programs / processes.

And some improvements to the virtual keyboard subsystem. For a full list of changes you are recommended to consult the release notes or the full list of introduced changes. The new functionality included since previous release 14.0.9 was kept to a minimum and only a small percentage of the build scripts is affected by it. The main changes will be described in the following lines. For the impatient, at the bottom of the page you'll find a link to download the archive containing all of the build scripts.

What Changed

The 10th release was meant to correct bugs and does not change much in comparison to the previous one. Some optional software was added to the application list, but they do not touch the base functionality of the environment, some dependencies were updated to keep up to software versions adopted by the main Linux distro and, luckily, the touched software is supported by Slackware 14.2 current and presents no problem for the build procedure.

CMake 2.8.12

CMake is the build system adopted by recent TDE releases. Almost all of the included packages use CMake as well as the majority of the optional applications. CMake 2.8.12 is the minimum required version for a successful build. While writing this article, Slackware Linux Current ships CMake 3.19.6 thus fully supporting TDE 14.0.10 minimum requirements.

Tqca

The tqca library provides an API to add cryptography and hash functions to the Trinity Desktop Environment. Past versions of the library used to be built with qmake only, but recent releases introduced CMake support and, consequently, deprecated qmake planning for its final removal. With release 14.0.10 qmake was removed for good and CMake is now the only option to build a working package. The SlackBuild script included in the build tree archive has been fully supporting CMake since TDE 14.0.8 thus requiring no update whatsoever.

Tdeaccessibility

Package tdeaccessibility migrated to CMake, finally reaching one of the long term project goals, dating back to the very first TDE public release. The old, autotools based, build script still works, but since the tool will be deprecated for sure in future releases, the tdeaccessibility.SlackBuild script was ported to the new build system. The build tree archive includes the new version of the SlackBuild script. If you wish to use the old one, please download the script included in the 14.0.9 archive updating the release number. Both versions take the same amount of time to build a working package.

Ltmain_version_update.patch

The file ltmain_version_update.patch is a patch required by some packages to identify the libtool version installed. If libtool is not properly identified while building a package from source the resulting error causes a general failure of the process. The list of packages requiring libtool is getting scarcer and scarcer with every new release of TDE and 14.0.10 follows in this trend. Lines calling the patch command were commented in the build scripts of the following packages:

libkipi.
tdeaccessibility.
tdeaddons.
tdeadmin.
tdeedu.
tdegames.
tdemultimedia.
tdewebdev.

Those lines will be removed entirely in a future release alongside the patch files. If you experience libtool related issues while building one of the aforementioned packages, please remove the comment from line:

   # Patch the admin/ltmain.sh script in order to solve a version mismatch.
   # patch -p0 -i ${SRCDIR}/ltmain_version_update.patch

Changing it in:

   # Patch the admin/ltmain.sh script in order to solve a version mismatch.
   patch -p0 -i ${SRCDIR}/ltmain_version_update.patch

Then run again the build script. Applying the patch should solve every issue.

UPDATED BUILD TREE

Here is the link pointing to the build scripts packaged into a conveniently compressed archive: tde_build_tree_sg-14.0.10.tar.bz2. Download and decompress it, copy the source archives to the target directories bearing the same name then run the TDE.SlackBuild script to start building the desktop environment from scratch. I strongly suggest removing any installed version of TDE to avoid conflicts when building new packages.

CONCLUSIONS

This article provides a summary for the updates introduced in release 14.0.10 of the Trinity Desktop Environment. The build scripts were updated, tested and collected in a compressed archive in order to ease their adoption and use. For more in depth instructions on the use of the scripts, please refer to the other articles available in this web site. Compiling, installing, configuration and testing were preformed on a Raspberry Pi model 4 which runs a version of Slackware Linux for the 32 bit ARM platform. In conclusion, the usual tanks to the Trinity Desktop Environment developers and maintainers for their hard work and passion.

For any feedback, questions, errors and such, please e-mail me at studiosg [at] giustetti [dot] net

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