En/Trinity desktop environment 14.1.1

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TDE 14.1.1 and Slackware 15.0

Trinity Desktop Environment 14.1.1, a desktop environment for Linux and other UNIX flavors, was released the past 29 October 2023. A maintenance release, fixing all bugs reported since the previous public release. Nothing big was introduced, mainly some small improvements to the applications and graphics. Some annoying bugs were ironed out. Among them:

High CPU use impacting performances on some rpm based distros;
The Arts sound server unexpected crash at startup;
An issue concerning the brightness control of tdepowersave.

Moreover a cleanup of the TQt3 and tqtinterface libraries was started, whose resulting improvements will benefit future releases.

After a chaotic period with too much work and too little time left over, I could finally catch up and build packages for the latest TDE, updating the build scripts I host in this web site. The task proved to be an easy and straightforward one. Due mainly to the few changes introduced, the SlackBuild scripts required no update. I changed the version number to 14.1.1 and that was it; nothing more was needed to start the build and successfully finish it, obtaining working packages for the desktop environment. Instructions to build the packages by yourself are provide below. For the impatient: A link to the build scripts is available at the bottom of this web page, in the section preceding the conclusions.

Before You Start

To build TDE successfully you must start with a clean, well configured environment. Please remove previously installed TDE packages from your Linux box, logout then login again in order to reset the environment, removing unwanted options. Specifically:

Back-up all of your data, the configuration directory ˜/.trinity and the configuration file ''˜/.tderc in your home directory. I never happened to lose data or corrupt configuration files during a TDE update, but better safe than sorry and you definitely want some means to restore your configuration in case something goes wrong.
Removing TDE packages means no graphical interface for your machine for the time needed to build the new release. The required time interval depends on your machine. You are suggested to switch to runlevel 3 (Command Line Interface) for the duration of the procedure:

   init 3

Remove all previously installed TDE packages. The removepkg command will do the trick. To remove release 14.1.0 packages, for example, execute command:

   removepkg /var/log/packages/*trinity-14.1.0*

Delete configuration scripts left over by the removepkg command.

   rm /etc/profile.d/tqt3.*
   rm /etc/profile.d/trinity.*

Logout, then login again to ensure that all references pointing to TDE are removed from the environment configuration.
Install or update some packages needed by TDE. It's a bunch of optional packages including:
Heimdall;
Imlib;
Compilers and other tools used too build software;
Programming languages to bind to TDE (Optional);
...

If you don't, some functionality could be prevented from working for the resulting packages.

Ready the Build Tree

A project as big as the Trinity Desktop Environment includes a lot of packages, which require building and installing in the right order. Download the source code, available as a big tar archive, decompress it and move the resulting compressed archive files in the proper directory.

Download and decompress the build tree archive in a local directory. Both /tmp and /usr/src/tde-14.1.1 are valid candidates.
Download and decompress the tar archive containing the source code for all of the packages.
Move the compressed archive files constituting the source code in their proper target directory. Every archive with tar.xz extension to the directory bearing the same name.
Set the build options required by your CPU. For a computer with a 64 bit Amd CPU inside, for example, use the following command:

   rm TDE.options
   ln -s TDE.options.x86_64 TDE.options

Move to the directory where script TDE.SlackBuild is located.

   cd ./tde_build_script/bin

If you wish to build all of the localization packages together with the base ones, update the main build script tde_build_script/bin/TDE.SlackBuild turning lines

      # Build package
   #   bash ./${PKG}.SlackBuild

into

      # Build package
      bash ./${PKG}.SlackBuild

Run the main script and wait patiently for its conclusion:

   sh ./TDE.SlackBuild

The script will build each and every package in the base, library and prerequisite group then install and configure them. A full installation will require several hours. When the script will finish, TDE will be installed and ready for use. The script will stop before its programmed conclusion only when encountering issues such as a missing dependency package or build tool or similar.

Check the Trinity Desktop Environment installation running the startx command to load the graphical interface.
Last, whoever usually starts its Linux box in GUI mode should close the TDE session and revert the runlevel to 4:

   init 4

The Updated Build Tree

The updated build tree can be downloaded from the following link: tde_build_tree_sg-14.1.1.tar.xz. The tar archive includes every and each SlackBuild script, patch and configuration file.

CONCLUSIONS

This web page includes a summary of the changes introduced in release 14.1.1 of TDE and the updates required by the build scripts for Slackware Linux. Brief instructions to successfully use the scripts were provided along with some example commands. Trinity Desktop Environment is nowadays a stable project and its 14.1.x branch shows it: the transition from 14.1.0 to 14.1.1 required no change to the build scripts and the procedure itself worked without issue. All the compile, build, installation, configuration and subsequent use tests were conducted on 64 and 32 bits AMD CPUs running an up to date version of Slackware Linux 15.0. In conclusion, the usual praises to all of the TDE developers for their commitment and efforts are renewed. Until the next official release for the usual update.

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

External links

Languages: English - Italiano