Getting Chatty with Yakkety 16.10

[NoWorries]

As stated here this distribution is now available. I have installed it and got it working. Not surprisingly it is currently Xenial re-badged. My first problem was when I got the updates I was presented with the error:

Reading package lists... Error!
E: Failed to fetch store:/var/lib/apt/lists/partial/au.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_yakkety_main_dep11_Components-amd64.yml.gz  Hash Sum mismatch
E: Failed to fetch store:/var/lib/apt/lists/partial/au.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_yakkety_main_dep11_icons-64x64.tar.gz  Hash Sum mismatch

This was solved by:

sudo rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*
sudo apt update; sudo apt full-upgrade

At the moment it is not very exciting as by stealth I got the Xenial to the following state:



By comparison Yakkety has the following:



No doubt this distribution will have all these extra additions in the near future. I will have to be patient.

[NoWorries]

Yakkety Report Card

Last few days there have been many updates to Yakkety and I am pleased to report that it now has the following Plasma, QT and Kernel Versions:


So it is now up to Xenial status and it is advancing for the Alpha 1 release at the end of June when it should be one step ahead.

I have also installed Wayland on this system and I can Login with Plasma (Wayland) instead of Plasma. I must say that it is very easy to crash the Wayland desktop, ie a black screen which is then restored in a matter of seconds. the Wayland packages that I have on this system are:

kwayland-data 
kwayland-integration:amd64
kwin-wayland 
kwin-wayland-backend-drm
kwin-wayland-backend-wayland 
libkf5waylandclient5:amd64  
libkf5waylandserver5:amd64
libqt5waylandclient5:amd64
libwayland-client0:amd64 
libwayland-cursor0:amd64
libwayland-egl1-mesa:amd64 
libwayland-server0:amd64  
plasma-workspace-wayland 
qtwayland5:amd64 
xwayland

In the case of the Info Center, Graphical Information, Wayland, gives the following:


Some applications work but others like Firefox and Thunderbird don't. I look forward to seeing what progress is made by Alpha 1.

[NoWorries]

Neon is Available for Yakkety

I have now installed neon on Yakkety and all is working after over 250 packages were installed. The way I did it was to use the details here. I used Synaptic and added the address:

http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ci/stable/ubuntu, Yakkety, main.

What I have found is that there is no neon-desktop that can be installed but the neon graphics are present.

When I log into plasma (Wayland) I get the message "No system tray detected on this system, Unable to Start, Exiting". Still early days and I expect many changes in the coming weeks.

At the moment I have not found any show stoppers and it is all working well for the plasma desktop with neon and KDE Frameworks Version 5.23.0.

[acheron]

KCI is not neon.

This is neon: https://neon.kde.org/

which uses Xenial LTS as a base, and their repositories on top, but no launchpad ppas.

[NoWorries]

Thanks for the advice on this matter. I had done a Google for the 16.10 ppa on neon and got the KCI ppa. I found that one neon package had been installed and the desktop looked the same as when I had neon installed in Xenial.

My launch area looks like this now.



So it looks like neon features are being migrated into Yakkety.

[acheron]

There are no 'neon' packages in KCI, so I'm curious as to what the 'one neon package had been installed' was?

The launch icon in that screenshot is the upstream plasma5 one, which is what you get when there is no distro branding applied, which suggests you've just lost some of the kubuntu branding somehow.

Personally I would not run KCI in anything other than a test virtual machine, if even that. It's a build/dev tool, really.

[NoWorries]

There are no 'neon' packages in KCI, so I'm curious as to what the 'one neon package had been installed' was?

The packages that I have installed and which are related to neon are:

libneon27:amd64
libneon27-gnutls:amd64

I originally just had the second one installed and I decided to install the first.
When I tried to remove libneon27-gnutls there was a long list of applications that would have been removed.

The launch icon in that screenshot is the upstream plasma5 one, which is what you get when there is no distro branding applied, which suggests you've just lost some of the kubuntu branding somehow.

Personally I would not run KCI in anything other than a test virtual machine, if even that. It's a build/dev tool, really.

The system that I have Yakkety installed on is a separate All-in-One Desktop that I just use for testing new distributions. It is not critical for my daily use, so if there are bugs in it, it doesn't matter.

I must say that I am very impressed with the current state of Yakkety and I am using the KCI with both "stable" and "unstable" options - lots of updates and lots of fun seeing the progress.

[acheron]

The packages that I have installed and which are related to neon are:

libneon27:amd64
libneon27-gnutls:amd64

I originally just had the second one installed and I decided to install the first.
When I tried to remove libneon27-gnutls there was a long list of applications that would have been removed.

Well, those are nothing to do with the old kubuntu 'project neon' or the new 'kde neon'.

It's just coincidental naming, and they are from the main archive:

http://packages.ubuntu.com/yakkety/libneon27

http://www.webdav.org/neon/

[NoWorries]

Unable to Start Plasma (Wayland) Desktop

For some weeks now, I have not been able to start the Plasma (Wayland) desktop. I get the login screen and it proceeds to the point where the horizontal bar shows everything is loaded. It then goes to a Black screen and after some time the message appears saying:

No system tray detected on this system
Unable to start, exiting.

The Wayland packages that I have installed are:

dpkg --get-selections | grep wayland
ibus-wayland                                    install
kwayland-data                                   install
kwayland-integration:amd64                      install
kwin-wayland                                    install
kwin-wayland-backend-drm                        install
kwin-wayland-backend-wayland                    install
kwin-wayland-backend-x11                        install
libkf5waylandclient5:amd64                      install
libkf5waylandserver5:amd64                      install
libqt5waylandclient5:amd64                      install
libwayland-client0:amd64                        install
libwayland-cursor0:amd64                        install
libwayland-egl1-mesa:amd64                      install
libwayland-server0:amd64                        install
plasma-workspace-wayland                        install
qtwayland5:amd64                                install
xwayland                                        install

Does anyone know what would be causing the Wayland desktop to start?

[NoWorries]

Wayland Improved Considerably

I have had a period of over a week when the system I had installed Yakkety on would not boot, ie I didn't get the login screen. I initially assumed that it was just a case of getting more updates as I was able to do this with Alt+Ctrl+F1 and get a console to enter all the commands.

I eventually tried installing a new desktop and it was only when I installed sddm that my system was bootable and I could test it out. To me, it is unknown why this all happened.

I am doing this on the Plasma (Wayland) desktop and it is not crashing nearly as much as it used to before my unknown absence. I can get it to crash, ie log me out these days, when I use Gwenview with files that contain mp4 movies.

I have found that in doing this post, copy and paste does not work as I was trying to add the list of Wayland packages that I now have installed. Another problem is that Spectacle launches but does not work. It is interesting that there are many packages that use the Wayland window system. Also, other packages that still use X, such as Skype, work OK.

I can now use a Launcher based on cascaded menus and I can also launch applications that I have in an empty panel on the side of the screen. Previously these actions would crash Wayland.

So I am very impressed with the Wayland progress.