Living on the Edge with KDE Project Neon

[GreyGeek]

I installed the Neon5 iso as a guest OS in VirtualBox on my Kubuntu 14.04 installation.

A world of caution to those following this method -- the actual installation begins during the keyboard configuration and you can continue to "Continue" to subsequent config screens. The screen times out and thows the login screen back up, leading one to conclude that the installation is complete. It is not. Log back in and you will see the installation app and its progress bar continuing.

About Neon5 - I Love its look and feel! Gorgeous interface!

I installed my graphical test app, Stellarium, and it gave me 17 FPS in the guest OS with only one virtual CPU. and 2GB of RAM. Not bad! Very usable.

Things that appear to be broken:
1) No volume applet in the system tray. KMixer not installed. Alsamixer is, but not all sliders are active. No Pulse apps shown in the Mulitmedia menu.
2) A lot of system tray functionality present in KDE 4.13 is missing in Neon 5.
3) Widget selection still sparse.
2) Muon's auto search facility is not functional. Typing the first few letters of an app's name does not cause any activity. One has to locate the app manually, or use the Konsole and apt-get to install it.
3) In Konqueror Flash player is installed and active, but youtube videos won't play. Haven't tried FireFox yet.

Will continue playing with it.

[SteveRiley]

Want to see a funky kde?
This guy has too much time on his hands.

Trance music with Windows XP sounds. I really wish I could un-hear this, but it's burned into my brain forever!

[NoWorries]

I installed the Neon5 iso as a guest OS in VirtualBox on my Kubuntu 14.04 installation.

A world of caution to those following this method -- the actual installation begins during the keyboard configuration and you can continue to "Continue" to subsequent config screens. The screen times out and thows the login screen back up, leading one to conclude that the installation is complete. It is not. Log back in and you will see the installation app and its progress bar continuing.

I have encountered similar problems as the system suspends the desktop. What I do is go to System Settings > Power Management and disable the Energy Saving and Suspend Session options. This is handy for normal operations as I get tired of being asked to unlock. As I mentioned in a previous post, you will at times be logged out with some updates.

About Neon5 - I Love its look and feel! Gorgeous interface!

I also like the look, but I have configured my desktop to a slideshow of pictures that I have taken.

I have also found that I can add an Application Launcher option which gives cascaded popup menus, which is similar to the Classic Menu available on previous versions of KDE.

I installed my graphical test app, Stellarium, and it gave me 17 FPS in the guest OS with only one virtual CPU. and 2GB of RAM. Not bad! Very usable.

Things that appear to be broken:
1) No volume applet in the system tray. KMixer not installed. Alsamixer is, but not all sliders are active. No Pulse apps shown in the Mulitmedia menu.
2) A lot of system tray functionality present in KDE 4.13 is missing in Neon 5.
3) Widget selection still sparse.
2) Muon's auto search facility is not functional. Typing the first few letters of an app's name does not cause any activity. One has to locate the app manually, or use the Konsole and apt-get to install it.
3) In Konqueror Flash player is installed and active, but youtube videos won't play. Haven't tried FireFox yet.

Will continue playing with it.

I have also found that the Muon auto search is not functional. I got so frustrated with this, as well as video flashing problems and also I found that Dolphin wouldn't launch from a panel that I had created on the left of my desktop. I also had problems with plasmashell using excessive CPU cycles. Since I had not changed any of the hidden files in my home directory since my first installation in January, I decided to delete every file and directory that started with a "." in my home directory. I then downloaded the latest iso and did a re-install. I tested Muon in the trial desktop and it worked. However, when I finished the install is failed on searching for applications. What I have found is that after doing a number of installations, for some unknown reason it starts working. Currently it is now working and the video flashing is no more.

I have installed kmix and I have a volume control applet. In my Multimedia section, the Backend shows Phonon VLC as I have installed VLC. Also, I can look at YouTube videos using FIrefox as I have installed multimedia packages.

I agree that the Widget selection is sparse. Also, some of those that are provided cannot be managed on the desktop. For example, try changing the location of the Analogue Clock on the desktop.

[NoWorries]

The last lot of 83 updates fixed the System Monitor so that it now shows a graph of the System Load as shown below.



Also, I had previously commented about the CPU cycles taken up by plasmashell and how it was not working correctly as well as X11. (Note that I do not have a high powered system like in the demo's cited by NickStone.) The Processing Table is shown below.



As you can see the situation is much improved and I am pleased with the progress. As stated by GG, the Widgets are limited and I am still having trouble with those that are listed. Muon is still working for me without a hitch and I hope GG and ronw are having success.

[ronw]

I see steady improvements as well. Color Scheme is now working for me.

I'm really hoping Dolphin not remembering its window size is just a bug.

I still can't get Utopic+Kubuntu Next to work, but that's another thread.

[Notsonoble]

I noticed some missing widgets, and missing options on implimented widgets I'm gonna want back before moving as well.

It's fast though.

[NoWorries]

[QUOTE=ronw;354269I still can't get Utopic+Kubuntu Next to work, but that's another thread. [/QUOTE]

I have also been having problems with a computer which has Utopic and Neon5 installed in separate partitions. Neon5 boots without a problem but not so with Utopic. The way I have resolved this is to take the repair option and then resume a normal boot. If I cannot get this to work on one, I then boot the other operating system and do an update-grub.

At the moment I do not have the time to investigate editing the grub menus and options.

[woodsmoke]

I tried the Ubuntu Neon and the desktop appeared but the drivers would not display it, I could get some of the menu items to work such as "settings" but then could not get to the "drivers", so I'll have to pass right now, but from what little I could see it looks kind of "pleasantly coloured" metro(very flat instead of 3-Dimensional).

and if I have that wrong, about the "flat" somebody please correct me.

woodsmoke

[GreyGeek]

I did the update & dist-upgrade thing in my Neon 5 guest OS. I opened an xterm to do it. Halfway through the screen timed out and displayed the locked screen. I clicked the "unlock" button without putting in a password and it returned to the desktop. The xterm showed a failure to install lightdm-somethingorother because of a package conflict. I did the "dpkg --configure -a" thing and it configured and repaired a lot of packages, and logged me out. I logged back in and was confined to a black screen with the lower right quarter being a console with small print. I logged back out, changed the mode from "default" to "Neon 5" and logged in. Everything looked good and ran good. At least what I tested did. Neon 5 is very fast.

[NoWorries]

I tried the Ubuntu Neon and the desktop appeared but the drivers would not display it, I could get some of the menu items to work such as "settings" but then could not get to the "drivers", so I'll have to pass right now, but from what little I could see it looks kind of "pleasantly coloured" metro(very flat instead of 3-Dimensional).

and if I have that wrong, about the "flat" somebody please correct me.

woodsmoke

I am not sure if you have tried System > KInfoCenter as I always go to this it find out what drivers are being used.

I also find the "icons" rather flat. They do not seem to be sculptured as in Trusty. I tend to ignore that aspect and concentrate on what does and does not work.

I am wondering if you and others find that all the software being installed is 32B rather than 64B? I could not find an iso that was for a 64B architecture.

[NoWorries]

I did the update & dist-upgrade thing in my Neon 5 guest OS. I opened an xterm to do it. Halfway through the screen timed out and displayed the locked screen. I clicked the "unlock" button without putting in a password and it returned to the desktop. The xterm showed a failure to install lightdm-somethingorother because of a package conflict. I did the "dpkg --configure -a" thing and it configured and repaired a lot of packages, and logged me out. I logged back in and was confined to a black screen with the lower right quarter being a console with small print. I logged back out, changed the mode from "default" to "Neon 5" and logged in. Everything looked good and ran good. At least what I tested did. Neon 5 is very fast.

Sounds like you now have the new login screen. I had the regular 83 updates which included an update to sddm a few minutes ago and it did the logout as usual and the login screen option was "Failsafe". Once again I also got the small terminal window which I entered "exit" and then did, as you, changed to "Neon 5". I personally find that the colour scheme of the login window does not match the yellow - green - blue of the other Neon 5 screens.

BTW, I hope you now have volume control working on your system and enjoy literally living on the edge with this new software.

[woodsmoke]

DISABLE PROPRIETARY VIDEO DRIVERS BEFORE RUNNING NEON.
I installed from the PPAs and the fonts were miniscule.
Stupid woodsmoke went to settings and increased the font size.
Kinda worked, was putzing around in drivers and saw that I was using the Nvidia 304 with updates driver.
For grins and giggles changed it to Xorg and all menues were monsterous.
After an hours worth of fiddling I got everything back PARTIALLY back ok except the kiker menu, it is just nothing panel is nothing.
So, I'm glad I put this on a non-critical system, I'll just reinstall Kubu and then Neon again.
BTW could not get Kmail to work, Akonadai is not there, and also could not get Thunderbird to work. Could not get Synaptic to work.
Internet worked, Amarok worked, terminal worked.
Login Screen presents Plasma and Project Neon as options.
So, again, switch to Xorg before doing the Neon thing and things should work great.
woodsmoke

[GreyGeek]

Tried an update & dist-upgrade this morning. Here are the results:

Fetched 663 kB in 23s (28.4 kB/s)                                              W: GPG error: http://extras.ubuntu.com trusty Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 16126D3A3E5C1192
W: Failed to fetch bzip2:/var/lib/apt/lists/partial/us.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_trusty-updates_main_binary-i386_Packages  Hash Sum mismatch
W: Failed to fetch bzip2:/var/lib/apt/lists/partial/us.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_trusty-updates_universe_binary-i386_Packages  Hash Sum mismatch
W: Failed to fetch bzip2:/var/lib/apt/lists/partial/us.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_trusty-security_main_source_Sources  Hash Sum mismatch
W: Failed to fetch bzip2:/var/lib/apt/lists/partial/us.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_trusty-security_main_binary-i386_Packages  Hash Sum mismatch
W: Failed to fetch bzip2:/var/lib/apt/lists/partial/us.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_trusty-security_universe_binary-i386_Packages  Hash Sum mismatch
E: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.
jerry@jerry-VB-Neon5:~$

[GreyGeek]

I find that while using Neon5 Konqueror on this forum I cannot edit my previously posted msgs. Clicking the "Save" button is unresponsive. FireFox seems to work OK.

[SteveRiley]

I find that while using Neon5 Konqueror on this forum I cannot edit my previously posted msgs. Clicking the "Save" button is unresponsive. FireFox seems to work OK.

Yeah, there's a weird interaction between vBulletin and the KHTML rendering engine. If you switch to Konqueror to WebKit, this problem goes away. Install kpart-webkit and then change the default engine under Settings -> General.