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A quick update regarding all things kalu; As you might have noticed since GTK+ 3.14 hit the official repos, there might be "glitches" due to the latest breakage changes in GTK, notably some icons in menus/buttons being quite oversized.

This, and a few other bugs, has been fixed, however no new version is available yet. This is mainly because the next version is planned to come alongside the next version of pacman (as it introduces API changes, thus requires an upgrade of kalu at the same time).

Worry not, you can simply switch to kalu-git (in the AUR) to benefit from all the fixes, already pushed to branch next since a few days now.

pacman 4.2, only now

Additionally, branch pacman-next was updated as well, not only to include the previously mentionned changes but also take into account the latest API changes pushed to pacman-git, so if you're using the latest pacman-git you can now use kalu alongside as well!

In addition to previously discussed changes you'll also see a new button in kalu's updater window, Abort. As you've guessed already, this wil allow to abort the current operation taking place.

This is basically similar to hitting Ctrl+C in your pacman-running terminal, which is to say it will handle aborting downloading packages just fine (that's in fact the reason this was added, specifically for use from the simulation's new "download packages only" feature) but could also be used to abort the actual system upgrade operation.

In that case however, just as in your terminal, you'll likely end with with an unstable/broken system, but if that's what you want, who am I to stop ya?

(Note that pressing "Abort" won't do anything until you've confirmed it, so clicking the button is actually safe.)

KDE and the systray

While kalu requires GTK+, some of you might be using it from KDE. And starting with Plasma Next, KDE doesn't support the XEmbed systray anymore in favor of their own Status Notifier Specification.

So for those who don't have a systray anymore, or simply prefer to use KDE's own notifier interface instead, I should probably mention that it is possible!

The code is now part of both branches next and pacman-next and is ready to be used, though not activated by default.

In order to use it, you'll need to edit the PKGBUILD file a little bit before, adding a new dependency to statusnotifier, a small library to use KDE's Status Notifier Interface, available in the AUR, and add option --enable-status-notifier to the ./configure line.

Then build & install the package as usual, and kalu shall try & register a StatusNotifierItem automatically, only using the systray as a fallback in case that failed (e.g. you don't have a Watcher running, etc).

As always, see kalu for more about kalu, download links, etc And don't hesitate to report bugs or suggestions via email, github, or through the Arch Linux forums.