Desktop access stopped working Ku18.04.2 eeePC

[frankus333]

Thanks claydoh

I now think I did install Muon myself, because that was what I was used to with Kubuntu 14.04. Maybe that is what has been all these problems. I will install Synaptic and uninstall Muon and see what happens.

[frankus333]

Sorry folks; I was mistaken. The live USB of Kubuntu 18.04.1 has Muon as the package manager, so it has been there all the time.

After removing Muon with Synaptic, and rebooting, starting Synaptic starts the same sequence of processes; kde5, update-apt-xapi, and python3. So, nothing has been gained by swapping package managers.

Interestingly, starting Discover in the live USB environment does NOT start update-apt-xapi, only plasma-discover, taking up a similar 50% cpu. Starting Muon DOES start update-apt-xapi. There are a couple of "unknown" entries in the CPU% column, so that must be normal for this distro version.

This is getting more weird. Maybe the previous problems and attempted solutions have seriously corrupted the installation, and a fresh install is the only way to clear up all these anomalies?

The other possibility is that some additional software I have loaded has affected the system. I have added:

Clamav, including the scanning daemon and clamtk GUI
Simple Scan scanner utility
Gufw firewall GUI
Thunderbird mail client
Used HPLIP to set up printer and scanner

Unless anyone has any good ideas of what else might be turning xapi rogue, I think I will have to re-install after all this.

[claydoh]

Again, you need to remove apt-xapian-index, it is still there. it is separate. Discover and muon trigger the apt system to check for updates, and apt-xapian-index is designed to run when apt does this. Kill it with fire

clamav *may* be resource hungry, but i do not recall, as it has probably been at least 12 or 15 years since I even looked at it. A Linux desktop normally does not need this, it is mainly for file and mail servers that transfer files to others, so it helps prevent Windows viruses, etc from being passed on to others. It will at least add some extra disk activity, which is probably a good factor in your slowdowns

You mentioned previously you were seeing a small bit of swap usage. This is disk read and writes, which will slow things down, and can have an effect on cpu usage as it tries to schedule processes, ram, and disk usage all at the same time. From my experience, swap usage will increase cpu usage as it tries to juggle things that ar happening faster than it can handle. As per the link i a previous post, set the swappiness to 10 an see if that helps.

[claydoh]

fwiw if you go the reinstall route, go with Lubuntu, I do not think it includes apt-xapian-index specifically as it is a hog on older machines.
KDE Neon does not have it as it does not include Muon package manager, which needs it, or the Ubuntu Driver Manager, which also requires it.

[frankus333]

Thanks claydoh

I removed "update-apt-xapian" using Synaptic. The "Remove" and "Completely Remove" options seemed to remove the same list of packages, so I opted for just "Remove", not "kill with fire" . Opening Discover to check settings was faster, and after reboot, the clamd process finished much earlier, and there was no "xapi" to be seen anywhere. Updates notification showed 4 packages, and updating via this seemed to be faster as well, so this is still useable, but not as quick and easy as via the Konsole was previoulsy. I suspect I will still continue to update via Konsole, but it is useful to have the notifications, without the system drag after bootup.

Changing swappiness to 10 doesn't seem to have made an apparent diference.

I will play around with this over the next couple of days to ensure everything still works reasonably, and there are no deficits in anything I want to do.

I had a quick look at KDE Neon, but they don't seem to have a 32 bit edition; have I missed something?

[Snowhog]

No. KDE neon is available only in 64-bit. From the KDE neon FAQ:

Is KDE neon 64bit only?

Yes. As computers without 64bit have become increasingly rare, we have chosen to focus our resources on higher-quality 64bit builds.

[claydoh]

Oops I messed up on that, forgot we are talking 32 bit hardware.....sorry!

Sent from my LG-H931 using Tapatalk

[frankus333]

The system is working satisfactorily, with similar performance to the LM18.3 KDE and XFCE partitions, so I am happy to mark this as solved.

I have added a brief summary of what seemed to be happening in the first post.

Thanks claydoh, jlittle and snowhog