Today has been a good day. First off, I just uploaded an updated set of lancelot packages. These packages are now compiled against KDE4.1.1 (they’ll probably work on older ones but don’t quote me on that) and contain a fix in the slack-desc file (thanks Kenjiro Tanaka for pointing that out).
Secondly, I’m now running KDE4.1.1 for bluewhite64 mere days after the official release, another big thank you going out to Kenjiro once more as he was the one who built these packages. I love how alive the community around BW64 is 
KDE4.1.1 is quite impressive for a mere maintenance release and I definitely has a slicker feel to it. Things just work that tiny bit better especially in plasma. Still runs slow on my system though and I still blame NVidia, despite the fact that it now renders at a good speed, kwin still uses massive amounts of CPU even with effects turned off.
Finally I also discoverd wicd, courtesy of Robby Workman – finally a lovely userspace tool for network management that doesn’t bugger up the slackware philosophy, handles WPA with sweet beauty and doesn’t depend on half of gnome like NetworkManager does.
When I saw the blog post for the 1.0 release of lancelot. Today, I felt like a small contribution so I created a slackbuild script for it and built a bluewhite64 package from that. The slackbuild should work just fine on normal 32-bit slackware versions and maybe even on the official sparc version and I am actively using the bluewhite64 package.
More details and downloads here:
I am canceling the slamdunk project, sorry to anyone who was hoping on it. My reasons are simple: slamd64′s multilib setup is just too far from slackware, for most packages it’s fine but for kde4.1 – it’s a disaster and makes it very hard, 3 days later and I still cannot get QT to build.
Add to that, slamd64 is just not up to date enough, there isn’t a current and this meant it was a backport too. It also means that, since Fred is low on time, I have no idea when the next slackware will become slamd64.
Some slamd64 users have flamed bluewhite64 as a ripoff, and it’s true that the early version used a lot of Fred’s work – but the fact is- bluewhite64 is up-to-date (meaning KDE4.1 packages are already there). The pure 64bit distro can be much closer to it’s 32-bit cousin so it’s also easier to port packages. So tonight, I’ll be replacing slamd64 with bluewhite. I know I’ll pay a price as the ia32 emulation layer for 32bit apps is not complete (you need a multilib to do it right) but everything I use either already has a native 64bit version or I can build one.
Ultimately, it was just more work than I could handle, and too long without a KDE desktop to get there.
I would rather donate time hacking my box and working on KDE and since this is all hobby-stuff I do not want it to be bogged down with hundred hour wastes that doesn’t seem to get anywhere.
Kudos to Fred for his great work, but if he cannot maintain the current tree he should allow somebody else who has time to do it, even if he maintains an oversight role – that’s just my feeling. I was a distro developer for five years and if you develop a distro you take on a responsibility to the users who depend on you. If you are not able to maintain that responsibility anymore you should quit and let somebody else take over. Sometimes, stepping aside from your own pet project is just a part of the way free software works.
