Enjoy Monitoring Mantic Kubuntu 23.10

[NoWorries]

The first preliminary release of Kubuntu 23.10 is now available at:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/daily-live/current/

I have just downloaded and installed it on My Laptop in a partition that was originally used by Kubuntu 22.10. I no longer use my Asus Laptop for testing new releases as it only has an NVIDIA card and it does not cope with an external monitor and Wayland.

The Info Centre is:




I am looking forward to progress by developers over the next 5 months or more. I hope the adventurous at heat will also participate in the monitoring of Mantic

[Schwarzer Kater]

Interesting that they don't already use Frameworks 5.105 …

I am looking forward to your reports.

[claydoh]

Interesting that they don't already use Frameworks 5.105 …

Because everything is still 23.04 at this stage, or mostly is, until they actually merge enough stuff from Debian.
I believe that basically the things needed to build infrastructure stuff are set up at this stage, so there isn't much if anything that has been changed from 23.04 yet. Same kernels etc.

Kubuntu won't actually start doing any packaging for 23.10 for a bit still, usually until that part is done, or at least partially stable in terms of package building.

[NoWorries]

I find that there are updates 7 days a week, so the developers are not sitting on their hands but are beavering away. To give you some idea of the recent developments, I have the following comparison between recent package updates for Mantic and their status on Lunar.

Package	Mantic	Lunar
ibus	1.5.28-4	1.5.28-3
ibus-data	1.5.28-4	1.5.28-3
libibus-1.0-5	"	"
python3-ibus-1.0	"	"
gir1.2-ibus-1.0 ibus-gtk ibus-gtk3 ibus-gtk4	" " " "	" " " "
libsoup-3.0-common	3.4.1-1	3.4.0-1
libatk-wrapper-java	0.40.0-3	0.40.0-2
libatk-wrapper-java-jni	"	"
libnspr4	2:4.35-1.1	2:4.35-1
libnss3	2:3.89-2	2:3.87.1-1
mediainfo	23.04-1	22.12-1
libgnutls30	3.7.9-2	3.7.8-5
less	590-2	590-1.2

As you can see the updates vary between minor and significant. This is very early days and it is good to see progress so far

I decided to use Mantic for LibreOffice Impress projection and it worked very well. Particularly, after I found a way to get rid of the white lines on right and bottom edge of the projection screen. If anyone is interested as how I did this please let me know. My impression is that very few use LO Impress for projection as I don't see anyone reporting problems in this area.

[claydoh]

My usual point is that at this stage, the core OS is still Kinetic, and that Kubuntu are still some time away from beginning work themselves.
Once they have enough infrastructure in place to build kernels and other actual OS components, the race is on

As to versions, almost all the packages you list are just rebuilds of the existing ones:

ibus 1.5.28-4 vs 1.5.28-4, for example.
The version is 1.5.28 in both. The difference here is just the build number (-4), a patch or configuration edit to fix a compiling issue in Debian. This package is directly imported from Debian, and not something that will actually be packaged by Ubuntu, so it may be a bad example.
You can spot non-Ubuntu-built packages as they lack an 'ubuntu' or something somewhere in the build number. Debian keep things to a single character, like "-4". Ubuntu have longer strings there.
And of course some things just have different versioning schemes just to confuse everyone. Like the kernel.


Actually much of these are Debian packages, being imported into the Mantic channel. Which is the stage things are at, at the moment.

But tl;dr: anything before the dash (or the third dot in some cases), is the version number, while anything to the right is normally build number or similar.

[NoWorries]

Thanks for the clarification. Today was the first day for about a week, that I had updates to Lunar.

From what you say, the package less on Lunar is 590-1.2 and on Mantic is 590-2, while mediainfo is 22.12-1 and Mantic is 23.04. So are these significant updates for Mantic?

[claydoh]

the package less on Lunar is 590-1.2 and on Mantic is 590-2

Not significant, so much as security-patched, as there is no version change.
http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changel...90-2/changelog

mediainfo is 22.12-1 and Mantic is 23.04

Maybe, it depends on the specific project. Mediainfo seems to release quite regularly at the moment but that may not be the case long-term. The actual changes or features may not be huge (ie- I have no idea on this one )
http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changel...04-1/changelog
https://github.com/MediaArea/MediaInfo/releases

[NoWorries]

Finally got a version change today, ie

mesa-utils (9.0.0-1) over (8.5.0-1) ...
mesa-utils-bin:amd64 (9.0.0-1) over (8.5.0-1) ...

And I am looking forward to seeing more in the coming days.

[NoWorries]

It is now 5 months to go before the release of Mantic Minotaur.

For those who have succeeded with the installation and testing of Mantic, you may have a similar summary of System Information as shown in the table below.

	5 Months to go
KDE Plasma Version	5.27.5
KDE Frameworks Version	5.104.0
KDE Applications Version	22.12.3
QT Version	5.15.8
Kernel Version	6.2.0-21-generic

For this System Info I use Pre-released and Unsupported updates. I am also using the non-standard repositories:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/staging-plasma
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/staging-frameworks

If you use these repositories on Lunar, you will find that it has the same versions with the exception of the Kernel, which is 6.2.0-20-generic. At this stage, these proposed repositories make very little difference to Mantic.

This similarity with Lunar and the systematic development of Mantic by the developers, allows me to use Mantic 100% of the time. I eagerly look forward to the progress by the developers in the next month.

[Schwarzer Kater]

Thank you.
Perhaps you could also provide the KDE Gear version in the future (as shown in e.g. "About Dolphin")?

[NoWorries]

Thank you.
Perhaps you could also provide the KDE Gear version in the future (as shown in e.g. "About Dolphin")?

I maybe a bit dumb, but I cannot find KDE Gear or "About Dolphin" anywhere on my system. Perhaps you could give more details on where to find this item.

[Schwarzer Kater]

KDE Gear (also known as the KDE Applications Bundle or KDE Applications) includes Dolphin (and many other "core" programs like Konsole, Spectacle, Okular, …).

Whenever I want to know the KDE Gear version I usually open something like Dolphin and look at its version in the -> hamburger menu -> Help -> About Dolphin.
This version number equals the KDE Gear version number.

[NoWorries]

I decided to install Mantic on my Asus R501VM Core i7 3610QM Laptop which I bought in December 2012. It has a Nvidia GeForce GT 630M 2GB video card.

The installation went well and the Nvidia 390 driver was installed. On reboot, the system hung. I then went into recovery mode to install bumblebee-nvidia and successfully rebooted and got a desktop. Bumblebee was not installed with the Nvidia 390 driver installation.

The only remaining problem is that my external monitor is not connected. If I purge all Nvidia packages and remove bumblebee, the external monitor works and is quite usable. I did try other NVIDIA drivers such as 470 and they did not solve the problem with my external monitor.

I have not been able to find a way to get the external monitor to work with the NVIDIA driver. Does anyone have a solution to this problem without having to somehow update my NVIDIA card hardware? I assume that I am not the only one who has tried using Mantic with a NVIDIA card and I would like to know if your external monitor works?

[Schwarzer Kater]

The only thing I can tell you is that 390-driver is the last one to officially support the GeForce GT 630M according to Nvidia.

[NoWorries]

At least the developers got it right.

I assume that you have a NVIDIA graphics video card and you have successfully connected it to an external monitor.