Be Wily and Enjoy the Progress of Kubuntu 15.10

[xennex81]

I am beginning to wonder if there is something wrong with my video driver or it is just a case of being too early and I need to do a re-install to "clean up" the system.

No, it's because the system is buggy. There's nothing wrong with you .

[NoWorries]

No, it's because the system is buggy. There's nothing wrong with you .

I now have all the updates for Alpha 1 and I must say that I am not so enthusiastic with its performance.

The time it takes from power-on to desktop is still about the same that I reported before. The added problem is that Firefox hangs, it also takes a long time to either display KInfoCenter or open a file with LibreOffice. I feel certain that there are other cases of slow response.

I am wondering if anyone else is experiencing these problems. If I find time this weekend, I will try installing the current build to see if that fixes the problems. In the meantime, the power button is the fastest way to close the system down.

[NoWorries]

I must confess that I have had a rather torrid time this weekend with Wily.

I tried the iso for the 24th June and when I tried it on my Compaq Presario system it come up with a blank screen. I should point out that the iso did start correctly on my other systems, ie gave the screen with the Try Kubuntu, etc.

I then waited and tried the iso for the 27th June. That worked and allowed the installation to proceed Unfortunately, it ended with the boot error messaage

The 'grub-efi-amd64-signed' package failed to install into /target/

So I now had a system the would not boot.

I then decided to try using the rEFInd boot manager on a USB flash drive. I can now boot up the system, BUT I have to always boot using the USB flash drive. If I don't, I get the grub prompt.

This is not a satisfactory solution and I am wondering it anyone knows how to progress from using rEFInd to booting normally. I have tried the update-grub command but that does not solve this problem.

[InsideJob]

I have tried the update-grub command but that does not solve this problem.

grub-install then update-grub

I'm always doing install-grub and grub-update though. I want to slap whoever named them.

[Qqmike]

One idea:
Boot into Kubuntu, using your package manager (Muon) or the CLI, un-install the GRUB package it is using. Then re-install it. If there's a damaged file, that should fix it. These master files are usually stored at /usr/lib/grub.

Then, if you run sudo grub-install and sudo update-grub, they will be playing with good files.

Another idea:
Try Boot Repair (which will also, probably, just try to do the above):
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

[NoWorries]

Another idea:
Try Boot Repair (which will also, probably, just try to do the above):
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

Thanks for suggesting Boot Repair. I have tried it previously and found it worked very well. In this case, I could not get it to work. When I tried it from the command line, I got the following output:

/usr/bin/glade2script:1919: Warning: The property GtkImage:stock is deprecated and shouldn't be used anymore. It will be removed in a future version.
  self.widgets.add_from_file(f_glade)
/usr/bin/glade2script:1919: Warning: The property GtkButton:use-stock is deprecated and shouldn't be used anymore. It will be removed in a future version.
  self.widgets.add_from_file(f_glade)
/usr/bin/glade2script:1919: Warning: The property GtkSettings:gtk-button-images is deprecated and shouldn't be used anymore. It will be removed in a future version.
  self.widgets.add_from_file(f_glade)
/usr/bin/glade2script:1919: Warning: The property GtkContainer:resize-mode is deprecated and shouldn't be used anymore. It will be removed in a future version.
  self.widgets.add_from_file(f_glade)
/usr/bin/glade2script:1919: Warning: The property GtkMisc:ypad is deprecated and shouldn't be used anymore. It will be removed in a future version.
  self.widgets.add_from_file(f_glade)
/usr/bin/glade2script:1919: Warning: The property GtkButton:xalign is deprecated and shouldn't be used anymore. It will be removed in a future version.
  self.widgets.add_from_file(f_glade)

(glade2script:1675): Gtk-WARNING **: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gtk-3.0/3.0.0/immodules/im-fcitx.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

(glade2script:1675): Gtk-WARNING **: Loading IM context type 'fcitx' failed

(glade2script:1675): Gtk-WARNING **: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gtk-3.0/3.0.0/immodules/im-fcitx.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

(glade2script:1675): Gtk-WARNING **: Loading IM context type 'fcitx' failed

It suggested that I run it from a bootable USB flash drive. I downloaded the file boot-repair-disk-64bit.iso which was 631.2MiB and took over 3 hours to download!!! I do not have a slow connection as I can download the 1.2GiB Kubuntu iso file in about 10 minutes.

Booting with the boot-repair USB, went to completion but the system would not boot. This process said to make sure that I boot using the file sda1/EFI/ubuntu/shimx64.efi. When I use KDE Partition Manager, it gives /dev/sda1 as fat32 with file /boot/efi which is 512MiB and 3.5MiB used.

One idea:
Boot into Kubuntu, using your package manager (Muon) or the CLI, un-install the GRUB package it is using. Then re-install it. If there's a damaged file, that should fix it. These master files are usually stored at /usr/lib/grub.

Then, if you run sudo grub-install and sudo update-grub, they will be playing with good files.

After trying the above I also tried this approach and that also failed, ie goes to the grub prompt.

I am beginning to think that there is something seriously wrong with the boot procedure on this PC. If I fail to find a proper solution, I think that I might try downloading the Wily iso each week to check if this problem has been fixed by the developers.

In the meantime, I boot using the rEFInd flash drive.

[Qqmike]

In the meantime, I boot using the rEFInd flash drive.

Good idea. Sorry the other ideas didn't work. It does sound like an anomalous situation, doesn't it? And I guess you are running the PC is UEFI mode, and running the flash drive in UEFI mode, too.

[xennex81]

I personally use all kinds of flash drives to boot into my Linux machine . I hate seeing the hideous Grub menu when I boot my pc, and the added benefit is that the casual bystander won't know that another system is installed or how to boot it . So I just do grub-install on the flash drive (usb stick, sdcard). Strange that you have a system that can't get grub installed. I have no hopes for Wily seeing that they are already pushing alpha-1s. I think this system is so bad (I mean 15.x, in general) that it'll take years to get something satisfactory but people are running round and trying to push it into months. One bleak release after another. They should just have extended 14.10s period to keep the leeway for introducing something bigger and more difficult (especially for Kubuntu since it's KDE plasma 5).

[xennex81]

That saying, the plasma5 devs are really working hard. I'm on their list and it's a busy place.

[NoWorries]

I have now installed the iso for the 2-July-2015. I did this on America's 4th July Birthday in the hope that the problems I was facing would be fixed.

The install went though without any Grub catastrophe and I was able to boot the system. Unfortunately it ended up with a black screen. I interpreted this as a problem with not having the required video drivers. So I shut-down and used the recovery mode which booted successfully to give a desktop that looked like a 640x320 resolution.

This mode allowed me to connect to my wireless network and get muon installed. I then installed the video drivers for my system which required the fglrx-amdcccle package plus a few others.

Rebooting was successful and I had a desktop that was useful. I seem to find kwallet getting in the way and a nuisance when I reboot and connect to my wireless network. I have found that by putting "kwallet" in the search for muon and then go through each installed package and only remove those that do not remove any other package. This then removes all the problems I had with kwallet.

I have now installed over 200 of my favourite packages and added this system to my home NFS network. Just for the record, the current plasma version is 5.3.2!

So I wish to thank the developers in Europe and America for the improvements that have been made since the Alpha 1 release and hope that they have had a good break. I am now a very happy chappee.

[NoWorries]

I have no hopes for Wily seeing that they are already pushing alpha-1s. I think this system is so bad (I mean 15.x, in general) that it'll take years to get something satisfactory but people are running round and trying to push it into months. One bleak release after another. They should just have extended 14.10s period to keep the leeway for introducing something bigger and more difficult (especially for Kubuntu since it's KDE plasma 5).

After the latest updates, I am very pleased with the current state of Wily. I hope you and others are finding that it is improving at a great rate of knots. While I agree that Vivid was released before it was ready, I am pinning my hopes on Wily as it encapsulates all the developments since the release of Utopic. This is essentially 1 year of development in which, for the open source environment, is truckload of development.

If you want a good example of poor response to development, I would suggest that you take a look at the time it is taking Yahoo to get their Yahoo Weather Widget to show the correct time for the selected WOEID. It is still not fixed.

For those who have not tried Wily, you will find that it now has the Linux Kernel 4.0. On my slow sacrificial system for testing new releases, the KInfoCenter list is:

[SteveRiley]

Would you say Wily is more usable than Vivid?

[NoWorries]

Would you say Wily is more usable than Vivid?

Yes, I would. At this stage, after I see how good the Alpha 2 release is, I am seriously considering replacing it on my USB stick which has Vivid on it.

I will only replace my Utopic distribution by Wily when the widgets are improved, particularly in the area of showing international time on the Clock. I hope that is not too much of a tall ask

[SteveRiley]

Yes, I would. At this stage, after I see how good the Alpha 2 release is, I am seriously considering replacing it on my USB stick which has Vivid on it.

Hm. Then I might just do a sed s/vivid/wily/ on sources.list followed by apt full-upgrade and examine the results myself.

But only, of course, after taking a Btrfs snapshot beforehand. I love this stuff

[NoWorries]

Hm. Then I might just do a sed s/vivid/wily/ on sources.list followed by apt full-upgrade and examine the results myself.

But only, of course, after taking a Btrfs snapshot beforehand. I love this stuff

Hm Steve, I am glad that you are more knowledgeable than me, as I would not take such a risk. Since I have separate root and home partitions, I always download the latest iso and make it bootable, then do the installation.

Best of Luck, and I look forward to finding out what you think.

NoWorries

Edit:

It looks like you are using the Btrfs file system. I use the EXT4 file system and I found it interesting to see a comparison between the file systems by Phoronix . Since this review showed that EXT4 has better speed, I am wondering what you see as the advantages of Btrfs for your area of work.