Thursday 27 September 2018

Mint 19 Tara KDE Screen lock problem (Power Settings)

Ok, so I modified my Mint 19 XFCE to add Plasma 5, and although I had solved most glitches, I still immediately had a problem I could NOT solve.  But today I think I fixed it.

Mint 19 (Tara) XFCE with Plasma 5 installed from Repos, and my usual Transparent Theming applied..   -Photo was taken whilst I was 'relief caretaking' on Brampton Island a couple of years ago.

The screen was locking any time I left the computer for a few minutes.  I had tried ALL the usual power settings both logged into XFCE and logged into Plasma desktop.  To prevent the locking I had to go into the battery power indicator in the System Tray and click on the checkbox to disable power management every tie I booted the computer. I wrote about it in the last blog post.  I had also used an old trick and installed xscreensaver, and disabled stuff in there, to no avail.  It wasn't a big deal, but having to remember to disable Power Management every time I turned the computer on or rebooted was a little annoying.


Today I was thinking about something new I had noticed in the power settings in Plasma.  A 'per Avtivity' Power Management feature that I had not seen before.  So off I went to explore.


The Battery Power icon is left of the 'Down Arrow' (for Show Hidden Icons).  Right clicking on the Battery Power icon shows the choices above.  Choose Configure Power Saving.


That opens the window above.  On the LEFT, choose Activity Settings.




Choose 'Define a special behaviour)  then the next window will open.



Now click the boxes next to 'Never shutdown the screen', and 'Never suspend or shutdown the computer'.



When you are finished it should look like the window above.  Click 'Apply' then 'OK'.

Reboot the system.



I found that the checkbox still showed power management was ON, and I could still uncheck it, but leaving the computer for about 10 minutes at a time, the screen did NOT lock.  A nice change form ot locking every time I left it for about 2 minutes.  I'll update this in a day or two once I know it it is a permanent fix :-)

So now I have a rather nice Mint 19 KDE running Plasma 5.12 with my usual transparencies and my video wallpaper on my activities when I want it.  It is a bit slower than Mint 17.3 KDE, but at least it will be updated to the most recent versions of everything regularly.  As usual, I have Mint 17.3 in one 30GB root partition(using about 14GB)  and Mint 19 in another, just in case something dies.  With my /home in a separate partition.

Friday 21 September 2018

The best Linux Distro with PLASMA 5 ?

The title question more or less says it all.  With Mint 17.3 KDE nearing its end of life as far as updates go, I have been searching for a replacement that is as configurable and fast as Mint with the KDE desktop.
But every time I ran Plasma, I had problems.  Mint 18 versions running KDE Plasma were unreliable, Plasma itself was flawed, and trying Kubuntu and even KDE Neon, both of which run Plasma 5, were problems.

I even gave up and tried other Linux distributions, but Clem and the team have done so much great work with Mint, that I just prefer the stability and overall feel of Mint.
Then recently came the bombshell announcement.  Mint would no longer create a KDE/Plasma release!

So I tried Mint 19 Cinnamon and hated it.  I know Cinnamon is Mint's flagship, but I simply don't like Gnome style stuff.  I tried an old faithful, XFCE, this time Mint 19 XFCE.  I had the same problem there as with Cinnamon.  I simply couldn;t ge tthe look and feel I enjoy, especially considering I am still running it on my Brix with a Celeron processor.

While I was there however, I decided to install Plasma 5 from the suppositories.  And I was pleasantly surprised when it picked up all the appearance and theming I had left in my home directory from a few years experimenting with Plasma off and on.  That was a pleasant start.  As I have mentioned before I always set up two root partitions, one with my main OS and one for experiments or new releases.  That lets me simply edit one line in /etc/default/grub  to choose the default boot OS once decide to use the new one as my regular main OS.  And it picks up all my defaults for programs as I install them.

The only things I have not been able to fix, that I previously had working, are the KIM (K Image Management) context menu additions in the Dolphin File Manager.  That annoys me because I had it working previously in Plasma 5.  And the persistent logging out after a few minutes of screen inactivity.  I have disabled all power management settings I can find in both XFCE and PLASMA (I can now simply log out of one and back into the other if I need to).

However, I have found a once per session fix, and I will write about that in the next blog entry, so it should show up on a Google search if anyone else has the problem.  Briefly though, there is now a 'Battery' icon in my system tray, even though the Brix does not have a battery.  Clicking that and clicking again shows an option to enable or disable Power Management - independently of the stuff in System Settings > Power.

So at the beginning of any session I just go in there and uncheck to disable it.  It is annoying to haver to remember to do it, and I can;t find a way disable it by default, but at least it is available.
And the first time each day that I forget, I remember as soon as the system drops to the login screen :-)

I have done all the usual stuff like installing xwinwrap so I have my video wallpapers, and installing smplayer, then mpv, and editing smplayer preferences to use mpv instead of mplayer, so I can run my xwinwrap video wallpaper on my desktop, and still use smplayer to play a music video as I am doing at the moment.

I have my transparent Plasma themes, so menus and panels are translucent.  I also can;t add the kde-gtk editor I normally use for font matching across programs.  For now I have that solved using the scaling function on my System Settings > Display and Monitor.  And for some programs like Darktable (an open source replacement for Lightroom) I can edit the fonts in the /home/.config/programnamerc   file for each program.

Here's the system usage with some programs open while I am writing this post, and with xwinwrap (using mplayer) video wallpaper running on all Activities and a video playing in smplayer (using mpv).