Greeting Groovy Gorilla Kubuntu 20.10

[woodsmoke]

Hi
No Worries posted about Kontact breaking and QT at the same time.

There has been mention of me not being able to access "as a pre-installed" folder in the left panel of Dolphin that the reason is that my install, which goes back to before Ermine on the Kparadigmshift machine does not play well with the new QT apps.

Kontact is of PARAMOUNT importance to me, giving the breakneck speed of things occuring with the college closing for the pandemic, now opening for a "nose up into the air"...me having two quarrantined students on day one, both fortunately, now out of quarrantine...soooooooo I have thought that the better part of valour FOR NOW is just to "stay with an OS that ain't broke"...

Any comments on this... in this thread or maybe another thread started by someone to address QT and "whatever" ?

woodjustthinkingsmoke.

[NoWorries]

Hi
No Worries posted about Kontact breaking and QT at the same time. . . . . . .

Kontact is of PARAMOUNT importance to me, giving the breakneck speed of things occuring with the college closing for the pandemic, now opening for a "nose up into the air"...me having two quarrantined students on day one, both fortunately, now out of quarrantine...soooooooo I have thought that the better part of valour FOR NOW is just to "stay with an OS that ain't broke"...

Any comments on this... in this thread or maybe another thread started by someone to address QT and "whatever" ?

woodjustthinkingsmoke.

I only had trouble with Kontact for a short period of time back at post #15 on 19/05/20. Since then it has been working like a charm and has been extremely stable.

A new version of QT might or might not get in before the release date, but I am sure that the developers will make sure that it will not compromise the performance of Groovy when it finally does become available.

The only problem I have with Groovy, and you could say I am not very happy about it, is that I cannot use the Kernel Version 5.8.0 as it does not correctly recognize my Intel CPU and my system runs at 800MHz instead of 3.1GHz or more. This makes my system extremely sluggish. So I boot my system with Kernel 5.4 which does know about the speed of my Intel CPU.

So glad that your students are now out of quarantine and hope you can continue to keep up your good work.

[Radcliff]

Qt 5.15.1 Is Out With 400 Bug Fixes

It will be in Proposed in the days to come, or we will have to wait HH. Otherwise, Ku remains stable here, but for no reason since one or two days, Sticky Note (yellow) shows up each new session (top left).

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa....15.1-Released

If this can help for your speed issue, it is the fourth consecutive weeks that mainline Kernel does not require any correction, meaning that there is no need to compile the daily Kernel.

[cookiemuncher]

I get screen artefacts on some web pages using Chromium on 20.10. Same as I get with KDE Neon. See my post in the Neon section.

https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showth...-Google-Chrome

I installed Google Chrome (Version 84.0.4147.135 (Official Build) (64-bit)) and no more artefacts.

.

[NoWorries]

IMO;
1. Report your findings as a bug.
2. Boot to the 5.4 by default kernel instead
3. Then try and figure out which kernel parameters are causing the problem and then build your own 5.8 kernel or just wait for the upgrade/bug fixes to work it out.

I have had no response to the bug report that I did on this problem. I have found that I am not the only one who has encountered this problem with Intel CPU's. The most interesting one that I found is here: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/kernel-5...-800mhz/2919/8. When I issue the command cat /proc/cmdline it does not have any parameter "intel_pstate" as mentioned in the above reference. What it gives is

[FONT=monospace][COLOR=#000000]cat /proc/cmdline [/COLOR]
BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-5.7.0-15-generic root=UUID=4dde9252-9d77-4147-aed2-3197c4928ff9 ro quiet splash vt.handoff=7[/FONT]

You will notice that I have installed the Kernel 5.7. I no longer have 800MHz but I now have the following

[FONT=monospace][COLOR=#000000]cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "MHz" [/COLOR]
cpu MHz         : 3916.087 
cpu MHz         : 3758.485 
cpu MHz         : 3872.073 
cpu MHz         : 3860.811 
cpu MHz         : 3871.602 
cpu MHz         : 3778.694 
cpu MHz         : 3744.680 
cpu MHz         : 3649.385[/FONT]

I was doing speed checks for starting a LibreOffice presentation. For the Kernel 5.8 I measured 7.75s whereas Kernel 5.4 was 2s.

I have now done a comparison using glmark2 and on my system the 5.7 Kernel is just over 9 times faster than on the 5.8 Kernel. So I think that there is some error in the 5.8 Kernel for Intel CPU's.

[NoWorries]

This is the final month before the release of Groovy Gorilla.

Groovy continues to advance with lots of updates and improvements. I am sure that my only major complaint is not with Groovy developers but with those involved in kernel development.

As I have an Intel CPU on my main Laptop and when I use the 5.8 Kernel, my system runs at 800MHz. So I have the 5.7 Kernel installed and my system performs great, rather than running like a dog on the 5.8 Kernel.

On my sacrificial Laptop, which does not have an Intel CPU, I use pre-released updates. The current state of the major features on this system are:

	Last Month	1 Month to go
KDE Plasma Version	5.19.4	5.19.5
KDE Frameworks Version	5.73.0	5.74.0
QT Version	5.14.2	5.14.2
Kernel Version	5.8.0-16-generic	5.8.0-19-generic

Once again you will notice that the QT Version is unchanged I look forward to it happening after the release date. It will certainly be great when it comes.

My thanks to the developers for the great job they have done at putting this system together - well done!

[NoWorries]

Problem with Pulse Audio and Solution

I am currently experiencing a lot of trouble with PulseAudio. I make changes and I can play mp4 video files with VLC, but then the next time it is totally silent and the options that I previously selected are not there. On my LTS I can see "Speakers (Built-in Audio Analogue Stereo)". However on Groovy it is not there, but a list of HDMI unavailable devices for output, all of which do not work!

I have the exact list of pulseaudio files that are listed in Muon on my installation usb which plays the audio files.

As you can understand, a Silent Computer is very frustrating.

I have found a solution which totally fixed my problems as well as removing the list on unavailable HDMI devices. The clue came from https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=286393. I deleted the contents in .config/pulse and that sort of worked. I then decided to do a search using:

find ~/ -name "pulse*"

I then found pulseaudio folders in .gconf/system/ and kde/share/apps/plasma/plasmoids/veromix-plasmoid/dbus-service/. I renamed the pulseaudio files by adding _bk. When I rebooted and used PulseAudio, every thing returned to normal, ie looked the same as on my LTS with no HDMI listings as before.

What I found interesting was that the system did not make new files to replace the renamed files. I can only assume that my problems were caused by doing an installation of Groovy with an existing home folder.

[NoWorries]

I tried the above changes on my "Sacrificial Laptop" which is an ASUS F3Jr bought in 2007. I found that for this system, I needed to have the pulseaudio folder in .kde/share/apps/plasma/plasmoids/veromix-plasmoid/dbus-service/ file.

I also now find that all the packages that I have listed for pulseaudio in Muon need to be reinstalled and the system then shutdown, ie OFF and then started again.

After all my experiences with PulseAudio, I must say that I am not impressed with the current application as it seems so fragile.

[MeMyself]

Groovy has been running really well for me. I've been testing the 5.8 kernels and have been running primarily the 5.9 Release Candidates with no issues.

I have the Proposed and Staging Repositories off, so the stable updates are currently all I'm using.

Last night and this morning, I have an issue with the updates that are available.

The updates want to zap faudio and my wine install, without installing or upgrading either...

I have tried switching back to the default kernel, tried turning on the staging and proposed, no combination seems to eliminate the zapping of Wine if I upgrade...

UPDATE: the cause appears to be libsdl2-2.0 and libsdl2-dev.

Has anyone else seen anything like this?

[NoWorries]

What I found interesting was that the system did not make new files to replace the renamed files. I can only assume that my problems were caused by doing an installation of Groovy with an existing home folder.

I have found that my "Sacrificial Laptop" was once again silent. I tried a number of options to fix this with no success.

I then decided to list other packages related to audio and installed libao-dbg and libao-dev. After adding these packages my system was no longer silent and worked as it should.

I then added these packages to my main Laptop and it continued to work without a problem. So I think that these are essential packages for trouble free PulseAudio performance.

[NoWorries]

Over the past days I have been having various problems on both of my Groovy Laptops with PulseAudio not holding settings and becoming "SILENT". I think that the latest updates have fixed this problem.

To get PulseAudio to work as I want, I had found the following solution which works after reboot. It is:

[FONT=monospace][COLOR=#000000]killall pulseaudio; pulseaudio -k  ; rm -r ~/.config/pulse/* ; rm -r ~/.pulse* [/COLOR]

[FONT=monospace][COLOR=#000000]pulseaudio --start[/COLOR][/FONT][/FONT]

With the start of PulseAudio you may need to delay a few seconds.

I must admit I was getting to the desperate stage as I have a presentation with Videos which, until I found the above solution, I was thinking of using my LTS. Now is all well and I can start with Groovy with confidence.

OOPS, I was a little hasty in saying it was fixed. I turned both Laptops off and returned a couple of hours later to find that the in-built microphones were not recognized. Also, the PulseAudio Volume Control still lists numerous HDMI options which are all "(unavailable)".

All I can say is, that I am so glad to have found the above solution which reinstates all my audio.

[NoWorries]

All I can say is, that I am so glad to have found the above solution which reinstates all my audio.

No updates have fixed this problem, and the release of Groovy is about 5 days away. So to avoid constantly being face with a SILENT COMPUTER, I have added the killall command to the home folder file /.conf/autostart/xscreensaver -nosplash.desktop. It now contains at the end of the file the following:

Type=Application
X-DBUS-ServiceName=
X-DBUS-StartupType=
X-KDE-SubstituteUID=false
X-KDE-Username=
Exec=killall pulseaudio; pulseaudio -k  ; rm -r ~/.config/pulse/*

I have found that I do not need to start pulseaudio. I tested this by changing my PulseAudio Volume Control settings to the list options that are unavailable and then rebooted.

On reboot, it set the Audio Volume values so that my Laptop was no longer silent.

If anyone has a better solution to this problem, please let me know.

[NoWorries]

With all the positive reports on new features in the Linux Kernel 5.9, I was wondering if the slow performance with my AMD CPU would be solved.

I decided to try it out using the procedure listed at: http://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/...-5-9-released/. After installing it, my system booted up without a problem. I tried the command

[FONT=monospace][COLOR=#000000]cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "MHz"[/COLOR][/FONT]

and once again I was treated with a list of 8 cpu MHz frequencies in the 800 range rather than the 3,800 range.

So my conclusion from this initial test is that I will have to continue waiting for a Kernel update that provides the performance I am getting from the Kernel Version 5.7.0-15-generic.

[NoWorries]

This morning I was hoping to use Groovy to watch a YouTube video with my Wife over Lunch. I was on wireless and connected my Laptop to our Digital TV. Problem was that, while my Wireless connection was working, I could not connect to the internet and with my browser or email. So I had to abandon the lunchtime viewing and try to find out what was going.

I eventually found that when I removed ufw, which stands for "uncomplicated firewall", everything worked as it should.

Is there is any value in having ufw installed? If so, what is the best way to have it setup so the internet works for me?

[bobbicat]

Over the past days I have been having various problems on both of my Groovy Laptops with PulseAudio not holding settings and becoming "SILENT". I think that the latest updates have fixed this problem.

To get PulseAudio to work as I want, I had found the following solution which works after reboot. It is:

[FONT=monospace][COLOR=#000000]killall pulseaudio; pulseaudio -k  ; rm -r ~/.config/pulse/* ; rm -r ~/.pulse* [/COLOR]

[FONT=monospace][COLOR=#000000]pulseaudio --start[/COLOR][/FONT][/FONT]

With the start of PulseAudio you may need to delay a few seconds.

I must admit I was getting to the desperate stage as I have a presentation with Videos which, until I found the above solution, I was thinking of using my LTS. Now is all well and I can start with Groovy with confidence.

OOPS, I was a little hasty in saying it was fixed. I turned both Laptops off and returned a couple of hours later to find that the in-built microphones were not recognized. Also, the PulseAudio Volume Control still lists numerous HDMI options which are all "(unavailable)".

All I can say is, that I am so glad to have found the above solution which reinstates all my audio.

I too have a problem with the audio in groovy 2010. I did a 'do-release-upgrade' from focal 2004.
It upgraded smoothly and within a short time.
Now I am beginning to wonder if I should have done an install from usb thumb drive, as I have in the past.

Your workaround works for me, but I am not tech savvy and would prefer things that don't need such tweaks and adjustments.