Wednesday 26 December 2018

Mint 19.1 KDE / Plasma 5

I just updated Mint from Mint 19 XFCE to Mint 19.1 using Mint Update Manager.
Now my system thinks it is running Kubuntu 19.1 (There's no such critter yet!!)


Saturday 22 December 2018

2018 Gigabyte Brix and Raspberry Pi SUMMARY

2018 Brix and Raspberry Pi SUMMARY
             
December 21 2018
2018  has been an interesting year.  Between lots of doubts about ever getting a Linux KDE distro working properly in the Brix, and the new Raspberry Pi 3B+ being released and finding out it is firstly a power hog (compared to earlier models) and secondly, a hell of an improvement over them. Life has been interesting.

Towards the end of the year, Mint dropped the KDE release of Mint (from Mint 19 onwards).  A lot of trial and error with everything from various releases of Mint, including the late KDE releases, to trying Kubuntu and KDE Neon and failing miserably with all of them, led to eventual success after installing Plasma 5 into Mint 19 XFCE.  This time the system is rock solid and almost as fast as Mint 17.3 KDE.  It is so good actually, that I have finally been able to use Mint 19 “PLASMA” as my every day system and even have all my video wallpapers and graphics scripts working perfectly.

To top it off, with a full screen animated desktop (including sound of rain in a tropical forest), as well as Chromium with a couple of tabs open, and LibreOffice open editing a document, the Mint 19 XFPE (Plasma 5 installed into Mint 19 XFCE) is using less than 2.0GB of system memory and since I have 8GB RAM it never goes into swap unless I am doing some pretty heavy video editing etc.  In fact the highest I have actually seen in system load is 3.7GB since I got this working.  Previous distros with Plasma 5 often got into the 7GB memory use region.

My next job will be to install Linux Mint Debian Edition into the old Mint KDE 17.3 /root so I can test it against the day when Mint might move away from Ubuntu base.  I also swapped the 500GB HDD for a Crucial brand 500GB SSD at  remarkably good price, and the poor old Brix feels like a new more powerful computer.

As for ahe Raspberry Pi.  The serious problems there, were caused as I suspected, by not enough power coming from the USB power adapters I was using.  Today I found a dual USB power adapter that has 2.4 amps out of one USB socket, and 1 amp out of the other.  I hooked up the Pi main power in, to the 2.4 Amp socket, and the male plugs of a y-splitter cable to the USB socket of the Pi and the 1Amp output socket of the same adapter.  The bootable SSD is plugged into the female socket of the splitter cable.

That seems to have solved the Pi’s power dramas.  Now I have done something similar with the other y-splitter cable.  One male end to the Pi USB, the other male end to one socket of my old twin port USB power adapter.  That leaves the female socket of the y-splitter cable free to plug in an external USB drive with media files on it.

Tested it tonight and it works great.  No more lightning bolt low power warning.  No more boot failures or screen flashing on and off  under load.

December 22 2018
The Raspberry Pi is still behaving itself nicely this morning, and some things are even working faster that on the Brix.  One example is LinreOffice, which opens and edits considerably more quickly, probably because of the low overhead of Raspbian.  Although on the Pi I also had Firefox and Chromium open when I opened Libre, while on the Brix, there was nothing open.

But overall, the Raspberry Pi is responding well to the increase of power with the new adapter setup.  In theory there is a maximum of 5.8 Amps available when all USB adapters are being used to power the Pi and external drives.  But most of the time only  the new adapter for a total of 3.4 is used.  (the main 2.4 Amp USB output to power the Pi and the 1.o Amp USB output to power the SSD).  The second 2 outlet adapter is only needed if I plug in an external USB drive for multimedia.

The difference in performance though is amazing :-)
                                                                                                               

Saturday 15 December 2018

Linux MInt 19 KDE - Batch Converting .webp images

Google's insistence on using .webp for web page images is a pain. I know we shouldn't be downloading images from web pages - but a lot of us do. And if we use right click in Chrome/Chromium we end up with a heap of .webp images that need specific viewers, and often don;t show as thumbnails in file managers.

I was converting one file at a time using the dweb command from webp tools, but I wanted to do a batch convert. I found that Flemming Mahler had shared a simple command to batch convert, so I'll share it here for anyone else who finds .webp to be annoying.

Flemming Mahler posted this little solution to converting .webp files (google's current image format - not liked by many image viewers) to png (easily read by common image viewers) on the Netfactory website

https://netfactory.dk/2015/07/16/bulk-c ... ng-format/

(1) Install webp tools:
sudo apt install webp

(2) Run the following command in the terminal:
find . -name "*.webp" | xargs -I {} dwebp {} -o {}.png

Wait a few moments...

Wednesday 12 December 2018

Mint 19 KDE at December 2018 with Video of xwinwrap in action)



I have posted a lot about my fight to get a decent Plasma 5 desktop so that I can update from KDE4 and Mint 17.  In the process I have installed and tested Mint 18, Kubuntu, KDE Neon and various other alternatives, but until I managed to get Plasma 5 desktop installed on Mint 19 XFCE - nothing worked smoothly on a fairly low end Celeron system.

I posted an update here recently that said I was finally happy with the way this combination works.  So this time I have decided not to be so lazy, and because I wanted to try Command Line desktop video capture, I recorded a 15 minute video of my Mint 19 Plasma desktop the way it is currently set up, using ffmpeg from a terminal.

Here is the code for the terminal command:

ffmpeg -f x11grab -video_size 1680x1050 -framerate 15  -i :0.0 -c:v libx264 -qp 0  -preset ultrafast screentest04-15fps.mp4

I ran it from a terminal opened in the Dolphin folder where I wanted the video capture to be saved.

Here is the Desktop Screen Recording made by ffmpeg.  I did not bother with audio, but I typed some information into OpenOffice Writer because I was planning to show that anyway.


Video of Mint 19 XFCE with Plasma 5

Base Operating System is Mint 19 XFCE.  Plasma 5 desktop was added by searchin in synaptic for plasma desktop, kde desktop and plasma 5 and selecting whatever looked obvious from the results.  As mentioned previously, there's a lot of 'How To' information on YouTube.  The biggest thing was finding a base distro that worked.  Using XFCE gave me a QT based distro but without 'clashes' in the version of QT widgets.  Using GTK based distros like Mate and Cinnamon caused problems.

From there I found some Themes I liked for my transparent title bars and panels.  Then I installed my usual extras like Shantz-xwinwrap and KIM (KDE Image Management for resizing and compressing images in Dolphin)

I found all my Bash scripts for xwinwrap worked fine, and all I changed was from full screen video to an oval 'port hole' so that the original still image wallpaper on each 'Activity' gabe me a quick reference to which Activity I was on.  Mint 17 KDE allows both Virtual Desktops AND Activities to have individual wallpaper.  Plasma 5 only allows Activities to have individual wallpaper.

On the other hand, while Activities are better in many respects than Virtual Desktops, at this stage it is necessary to have at least 2 Virtual Desktops so that the odd non-KDE program that tends to take over ALL Activities, can be opened in its own desktop.

OK, I've written lots about the journey.The video above shows the arrival!

And below are the specs for my Mint 19 KDE system