En/Trinity desktop environment 14.0.13
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TDE 14.0.13 and Slackware 15.0
30th October 2022 marked the release of latest Trinity Desktop Environment: 14.0.13. A support release aimed at fixing open bugs, enhancing stability of the desktop environment and adding some minor features. Being a maintenance release, new features meant for standard users are very few, nevertheless something changed in the development and build department. For a full list of changes to the Trinity Desktop Environment, please consult the release notes:
Or the related change log:
I'll detail the changes introduced in the build scripts I use to build working packages of TDE for Slackware Linux 15.0 for the amd64, arm and x86 architectures in the following article.
What's New
Updates are somewhat numbered when compared to the latest stable release that came out at the same time of the Slackware one. I took the opportunity to clean up the scripts removing:
- Code invoking old patches, unneeded by recent releases.
- Commented code, used for older TDE releases, but redundant for recent ones.
- Code related to autotools in packages fully migrated to cmake.
- Support for the naming conventions of old archives. Developers seem to have, at last, agreed on a naming convention and supporting all the old alternatives is useless.
Code Cleanup
Code of the following packages was subject to some cleanup. I hope the resulting scripts to grant a small performance increase and be better suited for future updates and maintenance.
- Optional Libraries
- kipi-plugins.
- libkdcraw.
- libkexiv2.
- libkipi.
- libksquirrel.
- libtdeldap.
- libtqt-perl.
- pytdeextensions.
- python-trinity.
- Base Packages
- tde-i18n.
- tdeaccessibility.
- tdeaddons.
- tdeadmin.
- tdeartwork.
- tdebase.
- tdeedu.
- tdegames.
- tdegraphics.
- tdelibs.
- tdemultimedia.
- tdenetwork.
- tdepim.
- tdesdk.
- tdetoys.
- tdeutils.
- tdevelop.
- tdewebdev.
- Prerequisites
- akode.
- avahi-tqt.
- cmake.
- dbus-1-tqt.
- dbus-tqt.
- libart-lgpl.
- libcaldav.
- sip4-tqt.
- tqca.
- tqscintilla.
- tqt3.
- tqtinterface.
A list of packages which underwent more substantial changes follow.
Arts
The path of the directory targeted for documentation files was updated to comply with the recent file layout of the package. This is a minor update that prevents an error from arising during package build, but does not affect the package or the included server and binary files otherwise.
Libcarddav
The code lines responsible for building man pages were removed. This is again a minor update, that does not affect package functionality.
Libr
The code lines responsible for building man pages were removed. This is a minor update that prevents an error from arising during package build, but does not affect the library in any way.
Polkit-tqt
The code invoking cmake was refactored removing some options that were ignored during the actual configuration of the source code therefore the update does not affect the generated package, but only its configuration.
Python-tqt
All references to Python 2 were removed thus concluding the migration to Python 3. The new package includes only one directory for code snippets used in the documentation. If you still need Python 2 for your installation, you are strongly discouraged from upgrading TDE to release 14.0.13.
Tdebindings
After the aforementioned code cleanup, I tested removing the HACK_PERL variable and the related hack from the SlackBuild script for the tdebindings package. The variable was introduces in TDE 14.0.6 to consent building bindings for the Perl programming language. The tests performed were unsuccessful. The update caused configuration errors resulting in an incomplete package: the great majority of the libraries related to the Perl, Python, Ruby and more programming languages were missing. Even worse, the missing bindings made it impossible to build a working libtqt-perl package. The hack was introduced again; it is not yet time to do without it.
UPDATED BUILD TREE
Here is the link pointing to the build scripts packaged into a conveniently compressed archive: tde_build_tree_sg-14.0.13.tar.bz2. Please follow some basic instructions to use the build tree to its fullest:
- Download and decompress the archive.
- Distribute the source code, split in many compressed archives, among the proper directories. One archive with tar.xz extension for each directory with the same name.
- Enter runlevel 3 and authenticate again.
init 3
- Remove all of the previously installed TDE packages to avoid any mismatch while building. For release 14.0.12 for example, the command is:
removepkg /var/log/packages/*14.0.12*
- 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.
- 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
- Set the configuration options for the desired architecture. For a computer with a 32 bit x86 CPU inside, for example, use the following command:
rm TDE.options
ln -s TDE.options.i486 TDE.options
- Move to directory tde_build_script/bin and run script TDE.SlackBuild.
cd ./tde_build_script/bin
sh ./TDE.SlackBuild
- Wait patiently for the script to conclude. Many hours are required for a Trinity Desktop Environment full build. The amount of time usually doubles if building localization files too. The script will build and install automatically all of the GUI packages.
- Remove unwanted packages.
- Run the startx command to check the desktop environment installation and configuration to work.
- Close the TDE session and change back the runlevel to 4.
init 4
CONCLUSIONS
The previous paragraphs provide a summary for the updates introduced in release 14.0.13 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 desktop PC running Slackware Linux 15.0 for 64 and 32 bit Amd 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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Languages: English - Italiano
