Morning folks.

So far iv'e been happy with a vanilla 14.2 x64 running kde4, been happy with it since its initial release. But having used Opensuse recently on a friends computer I am liking the look of plasma.

I headed over to Alien Bobs Site and followed the instructions. Everything went as expected and Plasma is installed fine.

Maybe a stupid question or I am just blind, My question is about updating packages as and when Alien Bob releases them. What is the best way to do this? I assume if I just slackpkg update/install-new/upgrade-all it would download packages from the mirror I selected which in my case is Slackbuilds and overwrite anything alienbob has installed, I have blacklisted anything with *kde, kde* just to be sure at the moment, can Alien Bobs repo be incorporated into slackpkg?

AlienBOB has instructions in how to install KDE, and you can use slackpkg+ (the official slackpkg don't support repos). If you google it you'll see there are plenty of people who installed KDE5 this way.

HOWEVER: All the times I tried I ended up with a borked KDE that will freeze upon reboot, or in one case corrupt my install. I just gave up. The only semi-success I had was to download from AlienBOB a Slackware -current iso modified to use KDE5. However I had some other problem I can't remember now.

Maybe I was unlucky and I just tried during some odd timing with incompatible libraries, or who knows what. I have KDE5 working fine with freeBSD on a different partition. It is AlienBOB's which refuse to work....

So if you try my recommendation is: Follow the instructions carefully, and please, be prepared to reinstall KDE4 or even having to reinstall Slackware all together.

When he reports an update I just rsync the files to a download area and install. Had no trouble converting to Plasma from KDE4 following his excellent directions. BTW, a belated happy birthday to Eric und eine gute Besserung.

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Read Alien Bob's information and you can see that Plasma 5 for Slackware 14.2 is not being updated and hasn't for a long time now. Current only

Cheers folks for the reply.

Ah didnt see that 14.2 x64 was not being updated. Moving to current I just dont see an option for at the moment, no need for bleeding edge. I may just revert back to kde4 and keep it as is, it worked just fine in the first place, plasma just had some nice eye candy

A couple of months ago I made some hardware changes to my system and did a total Slackware reinstall. First installed 14.2, then upgraded to current and then upgraded to Plasma from KDE. Since I had already been using Plasma for some time I really didn't like the old KDE. Got used to the look and feel of Plasma.

Being that this is Slackware....Why should the DE be updated unless for a severe security problem? What other distros do has little relevance on what Slackware does.

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I no longer have any computers running plain old 14.2 x64. Everything is up on -current and has been for awhile.
I had a "chance" to re-view KDE4 last week and I am definitely staying with KDE5.
For upgrading kde5 -latest I don't use slackpkg+ anymore although it does automate the process. It is simple enough to do it by hand.
I use nano to open the README from the -latest directory which contains the command line codes for rsync and upgradepkg and then open a second getty with alt-f2 where i sign in again as root and paste into the command line. I flip back and forth between the gettys with alt-f1 and alt-f2 until the process is finished. The upgrade of the kde apps section takes a little longer so I usually go get a cup of coffee while that runs. Come back, it's done, reboot, voila new KDE5.

Regarding -current, I do find it is cutting edge more than bleeding edge. One does have to manage an occasional issue with boost or ic4uc but there are AlienBob patches that fix those smoothly. It is often good to read the Changelogs before proceeding blindly with an upgrade to -current. Dont forget to run lilo or eliloconfig or update-grub as appropriate after a kernel upgrade or you will not like the results. A second copy of slackware or another version of linux on a different partition bails me out if I bonehead forget to run eliloconfig for what ever reason and I can go fix the problem by copying the vmlinuz files over by hand. If you run the NVIDIA driver, it needs to be updated after each kernel upgrade. I keep the nvidia driver in a directory in root and go there, type sh NV, hit tab, enter, and follow the prompts.

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there has been a good break through in plasma kde5 Nivida bug in KDE5 will be fixed.
Seems the dev's figured ut why Kwin was draging down Nvidia.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...E-High-CPU-Fix

It was supposedly fixed on 2 April 2019, with the release of Plasma-5.15.4.

https://kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.15.4.php

This post gave me the courage to try again, and I was successful

I think the problem was me using only the Ktown repository. After reading carefully Bob's instructions I noticed he talks about installing manually and THEN updating with Ktown (if you want to).

So that's what I did: removed KDE4, installed plasma manually using rsync, and then after checking it starts, configuring slackpkgplus.conf so it updates it when I do a "slackpkg upgrade-all".

That said, I haven't tried xddm or kdm yet, I am running in init level 3

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I keep my computers in "good old runlevel 3" as they say.
I had used runlevel 4 and autostart into KDE, etc. but partly because I had read that I needed runlevel 4 to use SCIM (for chinese character input). I found out after a while that SCIM doesnt care how you start X so runlevel 3 works fine.

The utility for me of runlevel 3 is that I am always ready to do whatever I need to do with my computer in command line mode then I can "startx" to run a graphic desktop environment if I need that. Usually it's KDE Plasma5. Sometimes I use Fluxbox so I use xwmconfig rather than those login menus that just waste my time.

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There are some potentially easier ways to jump between desktop environments.

The easiest is to setup two user accounts with different .xinitrc files.
A .xinitrc in your home directory will override the system default at /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.

I suppose if one didn't want to deal with two separate user accounts, one could write a quick and dirty script to copy the appropriate xinitrc before invoking startx.

Edit: I just tried out another way, since you use KDE most of the time set that as default. When you feel like using fluxbox run instead of startx.

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FWIW, for WM/DE selection I just boot to Runlevel 3 and invoke "kdm" which gives me the Chooser/Login allowing quick selection of User and Desktop choice as well as back to Console, Reboot or Shutdown. Since Slackware has several WM/DEs and I've added a couple more, I find it faster and easier than relying on startx and 10+ User accounts. This also provides initial root login to Desktops to setup obvious graphic differences so that there is never a question which version, User or Root, of say Dolphin is running on my normal User account. It's a one time login but very valuable to me. The facility to switch WM/DEs gets used substantially more often.

I am a bit curious about the ways of starting an X session from the users...

I can get the ".xinitrc" way, as it is the standard Xorg. What I use in most distros and freeBSD.

The starting in runlevel 3 and invoking KDM makes me wonder why you do it like that?

Slackware has that exclusive tool "xwmconfig" to automagically do the .xinitrc function and start the desktop you want with startx for a certain user. I even compiled some WM like I3 and it was there in the menu.

I remember years ago, you needed to start is as an RC daemon and it wouldn´t start invoking the executable.

So, how and why you do it instead of either using a .xinitrc or booting into level 4?

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