April 24, 2015: installation of Kubuntu 15.04 on LDLC computer Saturne SG4-I3-8-S9H7
Installation
I have more or less followed the same procedure as for my installation of Ubuntu 14.04. So I have downloaded Kubuntu 15.04 and put it on a USB key. Then
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I have tried to run the graphical Kubuntu installer (called “Ubiquity”, and run from the desktop icon). Problem: it did not start, without error message. Running it in Konsole, it is more verbose:
$ ubiquity kde_ui rmdir: failed to remove ‘/run/udisks2/inhibit-polkit’: Device or resource busy
And not better when using the Gtk toolkit (in fact I would expect it does not work as Gtk is not installed):$ ubiquity gtk_ui rmdir: failed to remove ‘/run/udisks2/inhibit-polkit’: Device or resource busy
I have found a report on a similar behavior on the Ubuntu bugtracker here. The workaround I have found is to type two times:$ sudo umount /run/udisks2/inhibit-polkit
After that Ubuquity started correctly. Don’t ask me why. -
in Kubuntu 13.04 and 14.04, the Kubuntu (Qt) version of Ubiquity did not allow to manage my partition configuration, I was compelled in the 14.04 version to use the default version of Ubiquity (the one shipped with Ubuntu). This time the Kubuntu version worked correctly. Note that I have still used the tip given here:
The desktop image installer cannot unlock existing encrypted (LUKS) volumes. If you need to make use of existing encrypted volumes during partitioning, then use the "Try Ubuntu without installing" boot option to start a live session, open the encrypted volumes (for example, by clicking on their icons in the Unity launcher), enter your password when prompted to unlock them, close [i.e. unmount them, e.g. on command line] them again, and run ubiquity to start the installer. (1066480)
I have not tried to see if it was posssible to proceed without this tip (I will see that for the next installation). - yet it did not work perfectly, because contrary to e.g. the OpenSuse installer, I have still been compelled to do some manual changes at reboot, as indicated in my previous installation account: I used the text installer (i.e. debian-installer) of Lubuntu 13.03, in “rescue mode”, run a terminal and used ‘update-initramfs‘, as well as change a line in /etc/fstab (see previous address for more details). At next reboot a password is indeed asked to unlock one of my encrypted partition. Strangely, in the previous version two passwords were required (I have two encrypted partitions), whereas now only one password is asked; yet the two partitions are unlocked once the book is over. Maybe because I use the same password for the two partitions?
Plasma desktop 5.2: first feelings
The environment is similar to the KDE 4 of Ubuntu 14.04. Some configuration updates seem to have occurred without problem (e.g. KWallet, Kontact). Curiously I have not been compelled to install the libdvdcss library to read DVDs with VLC, it is probably installed by default in some way.
But there are some regressions compared to KDE4:
- I have lost all my KDE4 icons in the panel (I had to remake it manually);
- the desktop switcher (“Pager”) is far too large (it seems it is not possible to put my six desktops on two lines, contrary to KDE4);
- the previous Konsole sessions are lost when logging out. Thus in some way the “restore previous session” feature selected in the “Desktop session” panel of the System Settings does not work;
- there is no preview for DJVU and PDF files on the Desktop, whereas there was in latest versions of KDE4, and there is in the current version of Dolphin in Plasma;
- there is no CPU and network applets with a plot in function of time to follow the activity. I usually put this kind of applet in the main panel to keep an eye at it all the time;
- there is no more “color picker” widget;
- the “add entry” feature obtained when right-clicking on the left panel of Dolphin is not remembered when closing Dolphin;
- there is no list of actions associated to a data medium (as a USB key), contrary to KDE4 (open in Dolphin, open in VLC, etc.).
Update one week later: I have updated to Plasma 5.3, following the instructions given here. There is a new CPU and network monitor widget, but hardly usable in a panel because far too large; indeed these widgets have probably primarily designed for the desktop where is generally much more size.
Update two weeks later: I have obtained crash of Plasma from time to time. To restart Plasma, type in a terminal:
$ plasmashell
Unicode problems in Konsole
Unicode characters do not appear correctly in Konsole; I had to change “US-ASCII” in “UTF-8” for the default character encoding in the configuration dialog (Settings->Edit current profile->Advanced); then they can be displayed correctly:
$ unicode 2297 U+2297 CIRCLED TIMES UTF-8: e2 8a 97 UTF-16BE: 2297 Decimal: ⊗ ⊗ Category: Sm (Symbol, Math) Bidi: ON (Other Neutrals)
But even after that, interrogation marks are displayed instead of unicode characters for the key combinations I have defined in my ~/.XCompose file, whereas it works perfectly in other applications, including xterm (note however that using ‘im-config‘ as explained at the end of the previous page is necessary). The only possible conclusion is that Konsole modifies in some way the UTF8 sequence given by the X server. Let us see how; for that we will use the utilities ‘od‘ and ‘unicode‘:
$ echo -n a|od 0000000 0061 0000001
Indeed the hexadecimal address for ‘a‘ in the ASCII encoding is 61 (type ‘man ascii‘). Now, when I use the XCompose key to get the unicode character ⊗ (see above), I get:
$ echo -n �|od 0000000 bfef 00bd 0000003
Let us try to see which character it is (“efbfbd”, taking into account byte order). For that, we can use unicode:
$ echo -n ⊗|od 0000000 8ae2 0097 0000003 $ unicode --fromcp utf-8 -x e28a97 U+2297 CIRCLED TIMES UTF-8: e2 8a 97 UTF-16BE: 2297 Decimal: ⊗ ⊗ Category: Sm (Symbol, Math) Bidi: ON (Other Neutrals)
For the special character given above:
$ unicode --fromcp utf-8 -x efbfbd U+FFFD REPLACEMENT CHARACTER UTF-8: ef bf bd UTF-16BE: fffd Decimal: � � Category: So (Symbol, Other) Bidi: ON (Other Neutrals)
This is indeed the precise unicode character representing a “video inverted exclamation mark”, called the replacement character. So, no surprise here. In some way Konsole does not accept the “character stream” coming from the X server. After extensive research I finally found someone having encountered the same problem here. For the time being, the workaround will be to copy/paste the unicode characters from another application.
Baloo search engine
It is activated by default. Several hours after the installation, it seems that indexing is finished:
$ ls -l ~/.local/share/baloo/file/ total 6.4G -rw-r--r-- 1 jscordia jscordia 128M 2015-04-24 22:20 fileMap.sqlite3 -rw-r--r-- 1 jscordia jscordia 32K 2015-04-25 10:48 fileMap.sqlite3-shm -rw-r--r-- 1 jscordia jscordia 1.1M 2015-04-25 10:48 fileMap.sqlite3-wal -rw-rw-r-- 1 jscordia jscordia 0 2015-04-25 10:48 flintlock -rw-rw-r-- 1 jscordia jscordia 28 2014-04-25 09:32 iamchert -rw-rw-r-- 1 jscordia jscordia 66K 2015-04-25 10:48 position.baseA -rw-rw-r-- 1 jscordia jscordia 66K 2015-04-25 10:48 position.baseB -rw-rw-r-- 1 jscordia jscordia 4.1G 2015-04-25 10:48 position.DB -rw-rw-r-- 1 jscordia jscordia 26K 2015-04-25 10:48 postlist.baseA -rw-rw-r-- 1 jscordia jscordia 26K 2015-04-25 10:48 postlist.baseB -rw-rw-r-- 1 jscordia jscordia 1.6G 2015-04-25 10:48 postlist.DB -rw-rw-r-- 1 jscordia jscordia 258 2015-04-25 10:48 record.baseA -rw-rw-r-- 1 jscordia jscordia 258 2015-04-25 10:48 record.baseB -rw-rw-r-- 1 jscordia jscordia 15M 2015-04-25 10:48 record.DB -rw-rw-r-- 1 jscordia jscordia 9.3K 2015-04-25 10:48 termlist.baseA -rw-rw-r-- 1 jscordia jscordia 9.3K 2015-04-25 10:48 termlist.baseB -rw-rw-r-- 1 jscordia jscordia 589M 2015-04-25 10:48 termlist.DB
If indeed it is the case, it is a great improvement compared to the situation of Kubuntu 14.04.
Printer and scanner Canon MF4330d
The scanner works out of the box as in previous releases: just install and run the ‘skanlite‘ program.
For the printer, I have installed the Canon drivers version 2.90 (available here):
$ wajig install cndrvcups-common_2.90-1_amd64.deb [...] $ wajig install cndrvcups-ufr2-uk_2.90-1_amd64.deb [...]
The printer is automatically detected in the Plasma control center:
And the just installed drivers are detected and recommended when clicking on “Next”:
Clicking one more time on “Next”, printing a test page works perfectly. libxml2:i386 is already installed, so there is no errors as it was the case in Kubuntu 14.04 (but this may be due to the fact I have already installed many packages on my machine, these ones possibly having installed libxml2:i386 as a dependence).
Error when trying to install a package
$ wajig install abe Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done You might want to run ’apt-get -f install’ to correct these: The following packages have unmet dependencies: abe : Depends: abe-data (= 1.1+dfsg-1) but it is not going to be installed kde-l10n-engb : Breaks: kde-config-telepathy-accounts (< 15.04) but 0.9.0-0ubuntu1 is to be installed kde-l10n-fr : Breaks: kde-config-telepathy-accounts (< 15.04) but 0.9.0-0ubuntu1 is to be installed E: Unmet dependencies. Try ’apt-get -f install’ with no packages (or specify a solution).
An easy solution has been found here: start the Muon Package Manager, then go in the “by status” “stacked widget”, click on “Broken”, and remove the broken pages. After that everything should work fine.
Hard drive load cycle count
I already discussed about the problem of the increase of hard drive load cycle count here. It is well explained on Wikipedia:
Some laptop drives and "green power" desktop drives are programmed to unload the heads whenever there has not been any activity for a very short period of time, such as about five seconds.[31][32] Many Linux installations write to the file system a few times a minute in the background.[33] As a result, there may be 100 or more load cycles per hour, and the load cycle rating may be exceeded in less than a year.[34]
I have found that with regard to my hard drive there is no problem with my Kubuntu 15.04 installation, except sometimes after sleep to RAM and wake up operation (perhaps some, perhaps all sleep/wake up operations, I have not checked rigorously). The solution I have found is to do:
$ hdparm -B 254 /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: setting Advanced Power Management level to 0xfe (254) APM_level = 254
The hard drive model is a Samsung/Seagate Momentus ST1000LM024 HN-M101MBB (1TB):
$ sudo hdparm -i /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb:
Model=ST1000LM024 HN-M101MBB, FwRev=2AR10001, SerialNo=S2TPJ9GC401022
Config={ Fixed }
RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=4
BuffType=unknown, BuffSize=8192kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=off
CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=1953525168
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
PIO modes: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5 *udma6
AdvancedPM=yes: disabled (255) WriteCache=enabled
Drive conforms to: unknown: ATA/ATAPI-0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7
* signifies the current active mode
With this setting, the load cycle count remains almost constant (except after a reboot or a wake up, of course). At this time, I have the following count:
$ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdb|grep -i load_cy 225 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 5078
Setting instead a level of 1, the load cycle count increases very quickly (and the hard drive even stops turning after a some seconds of inactivity: this is certainly not what I want). Interestingly, I first tried a level of 255, but it did not have any effect:
$ sudo hdparm -B 255 /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: setting Advanced Power Management level to disabled APM_level = off
This is in confirmance with what I reported here: the maximum level is not always the most suitable one. To make the setting permanent, I have uncommented the line “apm = 255” in /etc/hdparm.conf, and put 254 instead of 255. But it does not work, after an hibernate on RAM and wake up, we have:
$ sudo hdparm -B /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: APM_level = off
So the problem reappears. The solution with systemd is found here: put a file named for instance ‘hdparm_set‘ in /lib/systemd/system-sleep:
#!/bin/sh hdparm -B254 /dev/sdb
And make it executable:
$ chmod +x /lib/systemd/system-sleep/hdparm_set
Other
Integrated graphic card
As in Kubuntu 14.04, the Intel integrated GPU works out of the box, and shows similar performance (see my previous account). I have not tried to configure the NVidia GEForce GT650M chipset. After a reboot, I got the following popup appearing:
As I have not the time and need to configure the NVIDIA card, I have simply accepted the proposed configuration (“Nouveau” driver).
Systemd
It is no more possible to do:
$ restart cron
Instead, we have to do (see here):
$ systemctl restart cron
I have looked over ‘man systemd‘ and ‘man systemctl‘ only briefly.
Howtos in English
The howtos are no more available in recent Ubuntu releases: here. Fortunately, it is still possible to download and install an old package of Ubuntu 12.04: here:
$ wajig install doc-linux-html
This package contains the following directories:
- /usr/share/doc/FAQ/Linux-FAQ
- /usr/share/doc/HOWTO/en-html
with the two index pages:
- file:///usr/share/doc/FAQ/Linux-FAQ/index.html (there are more FAQs online here)
- file:///usr/share/doc/HOWTO/en-html/HOWTO-INDEX/index.html (online here)
But there are more recent versions on the Linux Documentation project webpage, It may interesting to read the last versions. Most HOWTOS are many years old, but yet some are general and may be very interesting, as these ones:
- file:///usr/share/doc/HOWTO/en-html/Program-Library-HOWTO/index.html (online version here)
- file:///usr/share/doc/HOWTO/en-html/C++-dlopen/index.html (online version here)
- file:///usr/share/doc/HOWTO/en-html/Unix-and-Internet-Fundamentals-HOWTO/index.html (online version here here).
So you may keep a bookmark or two for these pages in your preferred web browser. The main page for the Linux Documentation Project is here.
Qarte (software to download emissions from the ARTE+7 website)
I have followed the instructions given here:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:vincent-vandevyvre/vvv $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo install qarte
Cinnamon, Gnome 3, Mate
By curiosity I have installed these desktop environments to give them a try. This has not broken the Plasma configuration, and everything works fine after a reboot, in particular the session manager has not be changed (e.g. for gdm) and the auto-login feature I use for Plasma still works.
Reading Blurays in Linux
Blurays are really not made to be read, according to this page: here. Today this is possible to read them in Linux, but the protections used to protect them prevent to read them on any device. This does not motivate me to buy them and read them. And this motivates me to download illegal copies on the web. Let the “majors” sell blu-rays at lower price and without protection, and I shall buy blu-rays.
