Enjoy Monitoring Mantic Kubuntu 23.10

[Schwarzer Kater]

Sorry to disappoint - I sold my last Nvidia graphics card several months ago and I am not planning to buy Nvidia ever again if I can avoid it (I have some computers with Linux I do service for that do have Nvidia cards - no laptops among them, though. And certainly nobody who would install Mantic… ).

[claydoh]

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1467...-lunar-lobster

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...0/+bug/2019869
(there are other similar ones in recent months where things have been patched to work. Seems common for this)

Looks like they are working on patching 390 to force it into submission?
And/or kernel work itself hasn't begun, as Mantic will have a much more current kernel. It seems that 390 drivers have needed custom patching to work in recent kernels the past few years, so I wonder if support will end for this driver in the near future.

[NoWorries]

Thanks very much for your knowledgeable update. Do you have the NVIDIA driver working with an external monitor on your system? For me it works well on my laptop, but does not recognise my external monitor.

[claydoh]

Thanks very much for your knowledgeable update. Do you have the NVIDIA driver working with an external monitor on your system? For me it works well on my laptop, but does not recognise my external monitor.

No, I haven't used Nvidia in many years now as I don't like the constant tweaking and other hassles. I did consider getting one recently, but the cost for a card equal to or better than my current AMD graphics is still significantly higher.


But being a dev release, and the kernel still being Lunar's 6.2, I imagine things should get sorted eventually once they move to a newer one and hammer it into shape.

[NoWorries]

Thanks for your reply. I have spent some considerable time following advice by those who claim to have a solution on older systems but totally fail on Mantic.

So I have just purged all NVIDIA packages from my system and now I am back to basics with a working external monitor and await some notification of a solution to the NVIDIA drive problems.

[claydoh]

So I have just purged all NVIDIA packages from my system and now I am back to basics with a working external monitor and await some notification of a solution to the NVIDIA drive problems.

So, the improving open-source stock Nouveau drivers are working well overall, or are there issues with these? I wonder if there is any reason to even bother with the proprietary driver at all in this case.

[NoWorries]

For some time now I have wanted to install grub-customizer so that I could have Kubuntu listed instead of Ubuntu in my boot menu. I also wanted to arrange my boot list to have Mantic, Luna and Windows 10 in the right order with a suitable background image.

I found out how to do this at:
https://www.vivaolinux.com.br/dica/I...no-Ubuntu-2204

and it involves doing the following:

sudo apt install gdebi-core
wget https://launchpadlibrarian.net/570407966/grub-customizer_5.1.0-3build1_amd64.deb
sudo gdebi grub-customizer*

I have done this on Mantic and it works fine. It also will work on Lunar.

As I am not an expert in grub menus, I hope you find this as useful as I did

[NoWorries]

It is now 4 months to go before the release of Mantic Minotaur.

This last month we would have experienced many Mantic updates to keep advancing past the previous equilibrium with Lunar. Mantic has been an incredibly stable distribution at this very early stage of development and a real credit to the ability of the developers.


The Mantic’s advances over the lsat month are illustrated in the table below.

	5 Months to go	4 Months to go
KDE Plasma Version	5.27.5	5.27.5
KDE Frameworks Version	5.104.0	5.107.0
KDE Applications Version	22.12.3	23.04.2
QT Version	5.15.8	5.15.9
Kernel Version	6.2.0-21-generic	6.2.0-21-generic

For this System Info I still use Pre-released and Unsupported updates, For better or worse. I include non standard repositories:

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

With these two I only found that I had an early release of KDE Frameworks 5.107, but this version has recently been updated in the standard repositories.

No doubt many of us are looking forward to the release of KDE Plasma 6 in the next six months or so. At least the advances in Frameworks and QT versions are getting ready for this to happen.

Once again congratulations to the developers on a job well done!

[claydoh]

I include non standard repositories:

The staging PPAs are purely places where they stash in-progress builds so that all packages have been built successfully before being pushed out to regular, or even testing or beta PPAs as a whole. So that they all work together.

I will say it every time, but this is a completely useless addon in a dev release of Kubuntu. It adds unnecessary and valueless complexity to one's apt dependency database, and quite literally adds zero benefit, unless one likes incomplete package sets.

It doesn't provide pre-release software, but pre-release and testing packages of regular software.

Staging is only slightly less useless on a normal release.

Please, folks. Take this into account if you are thinking of adding the Staging PPAs.

[claydoh]

On a less negative note, when the heck are they gonna finally update the kernel here, lololol!

Yes, I am impatient. I meed the more current kernel in hopes it supports my Ryzen 5 based Chromebook, which is difficult to get working sound on before later 6.2.x.
No, the 6.2.0 in Lunar and soon to be in Jammy don't work.

Fedora as a desktop OS is a bit clunky, even for me, among other things.

[NoWorries]

On a less negative note, when the heck are they gonna finally update the kernel here, lololol!

Yes, I am impatient. I meed the more current kernel in hopes it supports my Ryzen 5 based Chromebook, which is difficult to get working sound on before later 6.2.x.
No, the 6.2.0 in Lunar and soon to be in Jammy don't work.

Fedora as a desktop OS is a bit clunky, even for me, among other things.

I hope that you are now as happy as I am since today, my Mantic Kernel is 6.3.07 and more importantly the Qt Version is 5.15.10. So i am looking forward to great advances be developers in the coming days.

[NoWorries]

I have always been interested in getting the latest software installed. Recently I made a big mistake in not thoroughly checking what I do. I unfortunately accepted a pre-release frameworks update last week which, at that early stage of development, removed loads of essential files while installing the new KDE Frameworks 5.108 files. So after this oversight I didn't have a bootable system.

I responded by doing a re-installation. Because btrfs is so popular, I decided to make the system disk format btrfs instead of an ext4. After doing this, the boot options failed to show my other Kubuntu distribution but it did show Windows 10 and other partitions. No matter what I tried, I could not get more than one of my two Kubuntu distribution listed. With my limited understanding of btrfs, I finally concluded that Grub2 does not handle btrfs Root partitions easily. So I did yet another re-installation so that all my Root partitions were ext4 with btrfs Home partitions. I could now see my two Kubuntu distributions. As I have a 4K Monitor, which requires a magnifying glass to read the boot menu, I decided to install and configure Grub-Customizer. Now all is back to normal with a working Frameworks 5.108.0.

The developers continue dong a great job at advancing Mantic. The only problem is this user who is not totally with it early in the morning.

[claydoh]

Grub2 does not handle btrfs Root partitions easily

Actually, it does, just fine.
I suspect a bug in the installer, or a misconfiguration.
If you have just an EFI partition, plus a / set as BTRFS, plus swap, it will set up both @/ and @home subvolumes. You don't have/need separate partitions for these.

I am sure the gurus on the topic can point you in the right direction. Having snapshots and rollbacks for your @/ is extremely ideal for your use case here, most definitely

[NoWorries]

I will be interested to see what you think of my disk partitions. This shows the separate root and home partitions for Kinetic and Lunar as well as Windows.

[Schwarzer Kater]

I think claydoh suggested to install your test system(s) on a / partition with btrfs.
I am sure the btrfs fans will chime in.

I would make the EFI partition at least 300 MB nowadays (I usually use 304 or 320 MB) and IMHO your swap partition could be a tad bigger to be on the safe side - but you know your use case best, of course (I assume you don't use hibernation and use the same swap partition from the different Linux installations - which makes perfect sense).

PS: If you want to compare your test installation(s) with other distributions you can do so here
https://www.kubuntuforums.net/forum/...f-its-siblings