En/Trinity desktop environment 14.1.6

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Welcome to Simone Giustetti's wiki pages.


Languages: English - Italiano

TDE 14.1.6 and Slackware 15.0

Right on time, 14.1.6 the new stable release of the Trinity Desktop Environment was released last April. A minor upgrade version that introduces small fixes and improvements to an already very stable and well-established graphical environment for UNIX. As usual, as soon as I had some free time to spare for the project, I took care of building and testing all the packages that constitute TDE for Slackware Linux.

No significant changes were introduced since the previous 14.1.5 release from the perspective of compiling software end building working packages from source code. I was particularly keen to revisit the issues I had with the PERL programming language bindings, which worked for years, but have been having issues since version 14.1.5 of TDE. Unfortunately, such issues afflicting the previous release are still there and I was still unable to produce a working package for libTQt-Perl. Having all but one of the basic system packages leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but due to my lack of knowledge of PERL I am unable to approach the task and find a solution.

The errors encountered while compiling the libTQt-Perl source code mirror those described 6/7 months ago and I will not report here again the outcome of the tests carried out. Anyone interested in learning more about this can follow the link for more information. Should anyone be able to solve the issue, please e-mail me the procedure at my e-mail address: studiosg@giustetti.net. A mention on these pages is up as a no-prize.

What Changed in 14.1.6

TDE has been around for quite some time an is now considered a stable project; changes between releases are never substantial. The transition from 14.1.5 to 14.1.6 introduced some significant changes only in the localization packages collectively labeled tde-i18n. In release 14.1.6, a new slack-desc file and related tde-i18n-ia package were introduced for Interlingua: A constructed international auxiliary language. Moreover the tde-i18n-xh package for the Xhosa language, mainly used in South Africa, was removed. There are no other notable changes to the list of packages included in the TDE build tree.

Building Packages

In order to build TDE successfully, please remove any installed TDE packages from your Linux box, logout then login again in order to reset the environment variables, removing unwanted TDE options. Before you start you are strongly suggested to:

  • Back-up all of your data, the configuration directory ˜/.trinity and the configuration file ''˜/.tderc in your home directory. I never experienced any data loss or other issue updating, but you definitely want to have a fail-safe in case any of that should happen.
  • Removing TDE packages means no graphical interface will be available until the new release will be ready. 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. To remove release 14.1.5, for example, execute command:
   removepkg /var/log/packages/*trinity-14.1.5*
  • Delete configuration scripts left over by the removepkg command.
   rm /etc/profile.d/tqt3.*
   rm /etc/profile.d/trinity.*
  • Logout, then login again as user root to ensure that all references pointing to TDE are removed from the environment configuration.
  • Install or update some packages required by TDE. Optional packages include:
  • Heimdall;
  • Imlib;
  • Linxslt if you use the XML debug functionality;
  • Compilers and other tools used too build software;
  • Programming languages to bind to TDE (Optional);

If you don't install the prerequisites, some functionality could go missing for the resulting packages.

Ready the Build Tree

The Trinity Desktop Environment includes about 50 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 files in the proper directory.

  • Download and decompress the build tree archive in a local directory. Both /tmp and /usr/src/tde-14.1.6 are valid candidates.
  • Download and decompress the tar archive containing the source code for all of the packages.
  • Move the compressed source code archives in the target directories. 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 packages, a missing build tool or something 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-14.1.6.tar.xz. The tar archive includes every and each SlackBuild script, patch and configuration file. The archive will be updated in the future if and when patches for the LibTQt-Perl package will be released. The package will be unusable until then.


CONCLUSIONS

This web page includes brief instructions to successfully install TDE 14.1.6 on Slackware Linux from source code. Al of the scripts were provided along with some example commands. All the of the 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 deserved praises to all of the TDE developers for their commitment and efforts are renewed. Check back in a semester 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

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