Let Testing Snowball with Kubuntu 19.10 Eoan

[NoWorries]

Catch up to what exactly? Do you even notice any difference from one minor KDE update to the next? I don't.

The catchup I was referring to was the KDE version number that Neon currently has and is listed above.

One small change I noticed on my system was that applications which cover my "empty panel", that is loaded with my favourite apps, can now be uncovered. This is on both my Plasma and Plasma(Wayland) desktops.

I did a search to see what had been fixed and this is listed at https://kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.16.2.php. A complete changelog is also available at https://kde.org/announcements/plasma...-changelog.php. Regarding the clipboard fixes, I encountered problems with that before the update and now it is fixed.

Looks like it is one small step for KDE Plasma and one giant leap for Kubuntu.

[NoWorries]

Because I have the LibreOffice pre-release ppa, ie

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/libreoffice-prereleases

I got version 6.2.5.2 today. I found, to my delight, that Impress now correctly handles embedded videos. This option has not worked since version 6.1.6.3. So I have been waiting a long time for this to be fixed.

Eoan is the first version to get this update, so I am justified in using this as my production system.

PS. I am doing this post from Eoan's Plasma (Wayland).

[acheron]

Qt 5.12.4 is now in Eoan

[NoWorries]

For those who are not using Eoan, you may be interested to know how well is is progressing. It is now three months before release and is half way through its development. As usual with all my extra ppa's, I would like to show my current Info Centre, ie



As you can see, all items from KDE Plasma to Kernel have had significant updates. During the last month with the myriad of updates, I continue to enjoy the stability of Eoan. It is a real tribute to the developers who are doing such an excellent job even considering I use pre-release options and all the extra ppa's that give me the latest.

[Don B. Cilly]

Very nice. You can fix your clock hands now

[NoWorries]

For some time I was getting the message on startup from Kontact that

KOrganizer Reminder Daemon Closed Unexpectedly
Please report this error to help improve this software

I am pleased to report that this error message no longer occurs and the developers have fixed it in latest version of Kontact 5.11.3.

From what I can tell, this latest version of Kontact is only on Eoan. The only remaining error that I get on bootup is from Baloo File Indexing. So I look forward to this being fixed.

I must say that these errors are just startup "features" which do not impact on the superb performance that I am getting from Eoan.

[NoWorries]

Another month has past and it is now 2 months before the release of Eoan. For the past 20 days I have been keeping a record of how many updates I get per day and it is currently just over 45/day. To me this indicates the rate of development being undertaken.

I can well understand that there are those who do not like this pace of change and relish a stable system. I am at the other extreme and enjoy the developer's improvements being made to Eoan.

Even though I use the Pre-Released and Unsupported updates, together with kernel unstable and libreoffice prereleases, my system desktop continues to be amazingly stable for all the applications that I use.

On my system, the following Info Centre improvements are:

KDE Plasma Version 5.16.3 > 5.16.4
KDE Frameworks Version 5.59.0 > 5.61.0
Kernel Version 5.2.0-7-generic > 5.2.0-13-generic

Well done and keep up the great work!!

[NoWorries]

I still get the Baloo crash on startup. I have been using Audacity to edit a 1hr 44min audio file and when I try to amplify the audio, I get a failed to write to a file. It suggests that /var/tmp/audacity disk is full.

When I searched to find where my disk space had gone I found that /proc currently has 3141 folders numbered 1 to 3141. I suspect that this is related to the Baloo error and I am wondering if I should try and remove some of these.

Could someone, who is familiar with this, advise on the best way to resolve this proliferation of folders?

[vinnywright]

@hear /proc has 343 folders labeled 1 to 32760 so ,,,,,are you sure their are actually 3141 of them ?

VINNY

[NoWorries]

Thanks for your response. I just selected all the numbered folders in /proc and there were 313 in my system. This still seems a lot and I am puzzled by the need for all of these.

BTW, I should have mentioned that I solved my Audacity problem by making my /tmp directory in my home partition. It is just that the Audacity problem caused me to look around and I found that the properties of /proc had 0 B free of 0B and its size corresponded to my entire disk.

Looks like I need to undergo an education on the role of /proc

[jlittle]

... I found that /proc currently has 3141 folders numbered 1 to 3141.

Hold up there, /proc is a pseudo file system, generated by the system.

That stuff isn't on any drive anywhere, rather it's a window into the system's internals. Those folders are for processes in your system, and the folder name is the process id (actually they're threads, each thread gets a process id in Linux). The commands ls -d /proc/[1-9]* | wc -l and ps -e | wc -l give about the same number. The contents are various characteristics of the process; f.ex. exe is a link to the programme running in the process. Now my system has about 260 processes, so if yours has 3141 something has gone rogue generating processes, maybe chewing through memory, maybe ballooning the swap file. You could try running ps -ef or top to identify what they are.

[jlittle]

My own efforts with Eoan did not get far, because the casper scripts used by an iso boot are broken. I found a bug report for the same problem in Xubuntu, bug 1841455 so I suspect the problem affects all the *buntus' daily isos.

IMO, for a daily build an iso boot is essential; it becomes feasible to check it daily (given reasonably fast, uncapped internet, I suppose.)

[Don B. Cilly]

Well, it certainly totally confuses Dolphin (on Neon 18).
It's reported as
128.0 TiB (140,737,477,924,352)
96,556 files, 6,691 sub-folders

My disk has 26 GB used.

Look:



And the system has only been up for less than 15 minutes.
And between copying and screenshooting, it grew almost 1000 "files" and 30 "subfolders".

[NoWorries]

Hold up there, /proc is a pseudo file system, generated by the system.

That stuff isn't on any drive anywhere, rather it's a window into the system's internals. Those folders are for processes in your system, and the folder name is the process id (actually they're threads, each thread gets a process id in Linux). The commands ls -d /proc/[1-9]* | wc -l and ps -e | wc -l give about the same number. The contents are various characteristics of the process; f.ex. exe is a link to the programme running in the process. Now my system has about 260 processes, so if yours has 3141 something has gone rogue generating processes, maybe chewing through memory, maybe ballooning the swap file. You could try running ps -ef or top to identify what they are.

Thanks for the details that you provided. Vinny corrected me as I only found 313 on my system but the directory number can go to large values like 5761 which is what Dolphin is now showing after F5. I have found that using the command ps -ef gives all the current files and in fact the list changes after repeating this command.

I must confess that I am not sure if Baloo is implicated in this behaviour.

[NoWorries]

In the past I have found VLC to work perfectly for every video that I played.

Unfortunately on Eoan, I ran into trouble with videos that were 1280x720. I got a black screen and VLC crashed. I tried a few other options and even got VLC to totally crash my desktop and had to recover using the power button. I also have to use ctrl+Q to exit VLC when it runs on higher resolution videos. Otherwise when I use the screen "x" option, VLC is still in memory and I have to kill it before starting another session of VLC.

The VLC version I have is 3.0.8 Vetinari. This is the same version that is on Disco and this version works perfectly for me.

I eventually found the solution to my problems at: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1663...player-and-vlc.

It involves going to VLC Tools > Preferences > Video. On this screen change Output to X11 video output (XCB).

I hope this provides a quick solution for those who also encounter this problem and have solved it, as I did, by installing Dragonplayer.