My Experiences with Kubuntu 14.10 [Utopic]

[NoWorries]

As well as installing Neon5 on my "Sacrificial Desktop", I installed the pre-alpha release of Utopic about a week ago. It is now in Alpha and as with Trusty it is working very well. I have had to deal with a few dependency problems which have, to me, been a challenge to get my desktop back to normal. All is well now and I am enjoying seeing the rate of development that is occuring with this new release. The KinfoCenter output is shown below.

The only problem that I have encountered is with Gwenview. I use it to play images as well as movies that I take as appropriate. In this case the movies have a definite blue bias. This is shown below as well.

I have installed all my favourite applications and I am pleased to report that I was able to install that latest version of Skype 4.3 as well, and it works.

Well done developers.

[NoWorries]

I am now pleased to report that the colour problem I had when I played videos with Gwenview, has been resolved. As an alternative, I decided to try digiKam with photos that included mp4 videos and found that I needed to install phonon-backend-gstreamer and phonon-backend-vlc. The list of phonon packages is shown in the graphic below.



I could get digiKam to play the video in the file list, but when I did the slideshow, it just sailed past the videos without playing them. So after doing this, I tried gwenview and it now plays the jpg and mp4 files correctly with no colour abberations.

On my laptop, I have not been able to get the HDMI output to work. So I tried the installation USB on it and installed the nvidia drivers and I had an HDMI connection.

Edit:
When I used Gwenview to step through photos displayed on the DTV screen, I found that it was necessary to use F5 to re-write the image as the previous image was faint and gave the impression that the image was of poor quality and not as good as the VGA connection.

Also, the screen size used for the DTV went slightly outside the TV screen. This made it tricky to control Gwenview as the controls along the top of the screen were only partially visible.

It was not as good as the VGA as there were problems with screen refresh and the resolution was not great. The output from System Settings, xrandr -q and sudo lshw -C display are shown below



One additional application that gave no output on my 14.04 system, but did work on 14.10, is the Network Monitor. On 14.10, I could monitor the upload and download rates. I could also see this on the System Monitor > System Load. So with this feature working, I will be able to monitor network activity once again - this has been sorely missed by me on 14.04.

After these experiences, I am beginning to wonder why the 14.04 system is LTS? To me, for my system, 14.10 is more likely to work better all round than 14.04, and I am eagerly waiting for it to reach beta.

[Fintan]

Hi NoWorries. Just wondering to install utopic did you use a DVD or a USB?

Yesterdays utopic download wouldn't boot from USB.
I tried the tab key but nada.

I'll try a DVD version later.

Edit.
Okay on boot with usb I got this error:
gfxboot.c32: not a 32 R image

Hit tab key and get this:
boot:
live check memtest....
boot:

So I tried:
boot: live

Prestrow, I could install uptopic.

[NoWorries]

Yes, I used a usb created by using Startup Disk Creator with the downloaded iso image as source. When I booted from the usb, I got the message gfx.boot.C32: not a COM32R image. I used the tab key and entered live and it started the boot-up of the installation "disk". Glad to know that you have had success with this approach.

I hope that when Alpha 2 is released on the 26th July that this iso will boot correctly.

Edit:

Sorry, I got my dates wrong on the release schedule, which is currently:

• July 31st - Alpha 2 (Not Public Release - opt-in)
• August 28th - Beta 1 (Not Public Release - opt-in)
• September 25th - Final Beta
• October 23rd - Final Release

[Fintan]

I hope so as well. But for now it is working. Now for plasma 5

[NoWorries]

I now have the latest Alpha 2 installed for about a week and the USB install worked as it should without the need to use the Tab key and enter live!

Every aspect that I need is working very well and it is great to have the Network Monitor working as it should. I am sorely tempted to put this system on my "production" system as it is sooo gooood.

[Fintan]

Good to know. Thanks
I will be trying that in the next couple of days. Couldn't get get alpha 1 to work with plasma-next at all.

I had a look at the release note and found this:

Plasma 5 a work in progress. The next generation of KDE Software is still a work in progress. You can test it and install it from the Kubuntu Plasma 5 image but beware it will remove your stable software.

Does that mean I can install plasma5 on alpha2 with an iso? Never done that before (didn't even know one could).

Or does it mean I have to install from a usb/DVD?

[NoWorries]

With the Alpha 1 release I tried adding the ppa for plasma5 and I was not impressed with its performance. So I have decided to keep utopic as is and use a separate partition for the neon5 iso that I installed.

[NoWorries]

Fixed Baloo File (baloo_file), signal: Segmentation fault

For some time now, I have been getting crash information about Baloo File (baloo_file), signal: Segmentation fault every time I boot Utopic. I have finally located the fault in my ~/.local which had root User and Group! When I changed this to my login user name and group it removed the crash message and added files to ~/.local/share/.

I have no idea how User and Group were set to root in my home directory. I would like to know if anyone else has encountered this problem?

[claydoh]

I'm running the plasma 5 (not a neon install) tech preview and am not seeing any errors. Plasma crashes and recovers gracefully at random times, but that is about it here.

[verndog]

I'm running the plasma 5 (not a neon install) tech preview and am not seeing any errors. Plasma crashes and recovers gracefully at random times, but that is about it here.

Are you getting "system-logind" failures? I have been on every ISO update, after I install nvidia-304. I have to login manually, even though I selected auto-login. I then have to use startx to get a desktop.
I looked at all the "/etc/systemd/system" and "/lib/systemd/system" files, but can't use any of them. I found a hack, or work around here.:
https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php?t...6_with_Systemd

EDIT: I think I found the reason for the system-logind failures. Lightdm is not installed, and I'm unsure how its logging in.
I just installed Kubuntu-Utopic and it works perfectly, and it also uses Systemd, but lightdm is installed..

[claydoh]

It's using sddm instead
Of lightdm, and I am not getting any errors at all

[kubicle]

But are they really going with the Breeze theme for plasma5?

The thing looks like it was drawn by a newly-born fruit bat with coordination disabilities

Doesn't really bother me as I've never used any DE with the default theme...but seriously...even Motif looks good compared to the thing.

[verndog]

I don't know for your reasons to run nVidia 304 but it is pretty old...
Why not try the present 331?

Because I have a really old integrated chip "GeForce 6150".

[NoWorries]

Beta with Pepperflash

With the release of the first beta, I decided to do a fresh install and it is now up and running and fully networked. One particuar problem that I was having was that I could not view TV programs using the latest flash play on http://iview.abc.net.au/ . I was using Firefox, so I tried the Chromium web browser and this also failed. To fix this I installed pepperflashplugin-nonfree from the repositories.

To get this working with Firefox, I used the procedures from this site. The procedure that I used was

sudo mkdir -p /opt/google/chrome/PepperFlash
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/pepperflashplugin-nonfree/libpepflashplayer.so /opt/google/chrome/PepperFlash
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install freshplayerplugin

Before executing the above commands, check the location of libpepflashplayer.so. Before I did the re-install, the location I used was /usr/lib/pepflashplugin-installer/libpepflashplayer.so.

For the Chromium web browser the procedure that I used is here. In this case file pepflashplayer.sh is required and what I did in this case was:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:skunk/pepper-flash
sudo apt-get install pepflashplugin-installer
cd /etc/chromium-browser/
sudo nano default
Add to last line ". /usr/lib/pepflashplugin-installer/pepflashplayer.sh"
then save and exit.

I hope this procedure is not required to be done by new users that install 14.10 when it is released. It is important that websites using the latest flash player can be viewed even though Adobe no longer supports Linux.