Things I like about XFCE.

As I mentioned previously I have decided to use Linux Mint XFCE as my desktop environment for the second hand Lenovo M93p Tiny computer.  For a long time I have preferred the KDE Desktop, and until the shift from Plasma 4.x to plasma 5.x, KDE was more or less everything one could ask for in a Desktop operating system.

It was Fast.  It seemed infinitely configurable.  It seemed to have a wonderful selection of programs and applets that worked seamlessly with it, some of which felt nicer than those of other environments like Gnome, Cinnamon, Mate etc.

But then came Plasma 5 by KDE.  Having gone through the transition form KDE 3 to KDE 4 I knew that for a while KDE 4 got horribly slow and clunky before it magically got back to its old 'snappy' self.
So I 'knew' Plasma 5 would do the same thing - eventually.

But it didn't!  It was only when I was setting up the M93p Tiny, that GRUB picked up the Plasma 5 entries on my 500GB SATA HDD that had been in the Brix before I bought the SSD, and let me boot into them, that I began to realise just how slow and cumbersome Plasma 15 or 16 or whatever it is now, is.

I had been playing with the idea of Elementary OS when the accidental dual boot thing happened.  I found Elementary to be still so bad that I tried Peppermint Linux out of curiosity.  It was really horrible.  And that was the point where I noticed GRUB had picked up the Plasma entries.  So I booted into one.

First, it took forever to boot.  After it booted, I rebooted, and it was just as bad.  Then I went through the thing where I clicked on something and waited for it to load.  I really had become used to all this simply because I had persisted.  And there was still an entry on the old drive for KDE 4.
I booted into that and it was fast, everythign opened as soon as I clicked it.  WOW!!  This was the KDE I loved.  Back into Plasma 5 and aaarrrggghhh!!!!!

So I sat back and thought about Linux Distros I has played with.  I still use Raspberry Pis for fun, and I like the responsiveness of LXDE.  But I don't like that I can't personalise it.  However I did test out Manjaro Linux on the Pi and it was quite a lot of fun, and it allowed me to set things up my way, a lot more then I could with LXDE.

So maybe an XFCE distro would be good on the M93p Tiny.  I decided to try an old favourite - Mint XFCE.
And I am pleased to say I am very happy with it.  Sure there are things KDE does better.  But many of the things KDE used to do better, are so much slower these days.  It is no good having some fancy compositing tweaks, then sacrificing all your responsiveness for cutesy stuff.

If KDE ever gets Plasma 5 to the sale level of useability as Plasma 4, maybe I will go back.  In the mean time, I am enjoyiing tweaking XFCE.

And all the things like my desktop Video Wallpapers?

Well, they don;t work full screen like they did on Plasma 5.  But they do work nicely in an oval window.   So I can still have a video playing through a port hole on my desktop, and if I want to click on desktop icons I just place them around the port hole.

I'm sure I'll remember the fix to show icons on full screen video.

BIGGEST Waves Ever!!! 4 Days Living At Sea

I found this on YouTube.
Made me a bit homesick for living aboard...

Lenovo M93p Tiny PC

For a lot of my computing life between about 1990 to 2007 I was heavily involved in IBM computers after working for them and with them in the 80s.

My computers here leftover from my businesses are mostly IMB Lenovo, the a small scattering of Compaq and an old Acer 5315 laptop I acquired for one of my yachts.

A few years ago I wanted something affordable with USB 3 ports, so I acquired the Gigabyte Brix, with its quad core Celeron and 4 x USB 3 ports.  For quite a while I've wanted a second small form factor computer to supplement the Brix should anything happen to it.  I looked at the various Intel NUC boxes, but they were all pretty pricey.

This year, while my son was visiting he saw some Lenovo M93p Tiny computers advertised on eBay for a little under $200 including post.  They are all about 4 years old and ex-lease.  We ordered one each.

The Lenovo Tiny is a little under 200mm each side and about 40mm thick.  My M93p has an Intel Haswell  i5-4590T  CPU with a clock speed of 2GHz and Turbo of 3GHz.  There was an option of a 4570T, ut despite being consoderably faster at clock and turbo speeds, it is only 2 cores, and it has a considerably slower GPU.

For my use, especially with lots of video and graphics editing, I thought the 4 cores and faster graphics performance was the best decision.

It came with a 128GB SSD installed, and once it arrived I hooked up the original Brix 500GB SATA HDD through a USB port.  While I was messing around deciding which operating system i was going to use, I discovered GRUB had picked up the old operating systems I'd had on the Brix before I bought the 500GB Crucial SSD for it.

So in between tests of a few Linux operating systems, I could boot the old drive and run lots of my old stuff.  I tried Elementary OS HERA (the latest release) and while it is pretty and fast, I soon realised why I stopped using it.  It is simply too inflexible.

I tried a new one called Peppermint.  It was awful.  After checking out those fast operating systems, and in between, booting into my old Kubuntu and Mint systems with Plasma 15 and 16 on them, I realised how much I like the snappy response of some of the light weight desktops.

One that I had not used in a long time, but I had liked a lot in the old days, was XFCE.  I downloaded Mint 19.2 FCE and booted from a live USB 2 thumb drive.  It was great, so I installed it.  I had forgotten how easy it is to configure.  I soon had it set up almost as nice as Plasma, and even had my video desktop wallpaper (all the shell scripts were on my old HDD).

A bonus is that the 4 core i5 4590T processor is quite fast enough for running 2160p (4k) videos in webm format.  It looks incredible on the $500  Big W -  EKO brand UHD TV.

The Lenovo M93p Tiny has a couple of interesting little tricks.  One is that if you set it up properly, one of the USB 3 ports is specially designed to turn the computer ON using the Keyboard.  Leaving the computer plugged in after shutting down, a simple ALT + p  on the keyboard will turn the computer ON for you.  The correct USB 3 port has a tiny emblem of a keyboard next to it. (The middle USB port next to the VGA port).

There is another neat thing available if you are leaving the computer plugged in.  On the front face, one of the USB ports is Yellow instead of the usual Blue for USB 3.

The Yellow port (on the Right) stays LIVE.  You can plug a Phone or other USB powered device, to charge it.

Lots of these very small computers are available at the moment as they come off lease from big corporate environments,

Display is via one VGA port, and two 'Display Port' sockets.  You need to buy a DPI to HDMI adapter cable to use this computer with HDMI, but they are only a few dollars.

The display on a 55 inch UHD TV is fantastic. 

My Pi 4B TIMELINE from September 2019 Purchase to late November

2019 Tue Nov 19th – Pi 4B
I found an annoying problem with the Pi 4B when using external USB Hard Drives with the splitter cable to an external power supply.  Reboot fails.  So rebooting involves cycling the power switch after checking that there is no LED activity.

Got around that by running the power end of the splitter into the second USB 2 port, and the only drive that doesn’t like it is the 3TB Toshiba.  But it just has the occasional head click.  It goes a bit crazy if it is plugged into the un-powered hub though and anything else is plugged in – even a microSD card in an adapter.

I also got curious about Manjaro Linux Raspberry Pi XFCE edition.  It is really nice – BUT – it only finds the 2.4GHz WiFi.  I can manually add the 5GHz connecton, but it only shows in Hidden connections, and it FAILS to connect.

If this is ever fixed though, it will be worth watching, because while web browser video is pretty crappy in it, (possibly because of the slow connection) the audio from the Analog jack is far superior to that from Raspbian.

For now, I am back with booting from microSD and running Raspbian on the SSD, with some XFCE stuff installed from the Raspbian repo.  Included in that ‘stuff’ is a rather nice XFCE4 ‘Curves’ theme for window decorations, menus etc.

Something else running from the SSD has achieved is that at last there are no lockups on Chromium etc., and no freezing windows on the desktop where access to all tittie bar functions and dragging/resizing is lost.

2019 Mon Nov 4th – Pi 4B   
The Pi 4B is running perfecty at the moment with the SSD, but booting from the microSD.  Once I had edited fstab to set the /boot on the microsd card, I think the system should have no real problems.  Power is coming nicely via the LASER dual USB adapter and using the splitter cable plugged into both ports, which, I hope is providing a good 3Amps from combining the 2 x 2.4Amp USB ports.
I also have a splitter cable on the 3YB external drive when I use it, but so far the other available external drives seem ok getting power from the Pi 4 USB ports and a non-powered hub, albeit only one drive at a time.
The biggest annoyance is the Logitech k400r keyboard, which has become very, very sensitive to positioning, and if I use it on the aluminium framed collapsible table, shielding.

Other than that, the Pi4B is a perfect little desktop computer, except for, as usual, the not beng able to print problem.


2019 Sun Oct 27th – Pi 4B   
I had some issues with running the Pi 4 on SSD.  I found I had forgotten to edit etcfstab to point /boot to the microSD card.  That is necessary to make sure firmware and kernel updates are applied to the ‘active’ /boot partition, which until the Pi 4 firmware is updated to allow boot from SSD, is on the microSD.

When I had edited fstab and tried to reboot, it failed to boot again.  I tried it a number of times with command line and with GUI, but all failed.

It turned out that I had swapped the SSD directly into the USB 3 port where the USB 3 hub had been previously (origiinally the SSD was plugged into the hub).  After much messing around I had a lightbulb moment and plugged the hub back in, then the SSD into the hub and away we went, everything normal.
I can;t see any logical reason for this.  And there are issues with having some other drives accessing the hub.  But as long as it is working I can live with work-arounds.  For now, all that matters is that the Pi 4 has been turbo charged.  Everything is smoother and faster running on SSD :-)

No more freezes when scrolling Chromium pages.  Lots of other ‘lag’ annoyances are gone.

Another noticeable experience was overclocking the Pi 4.  As mentioned earlier, I tried various combinations of overclock settings, but for day to day use, including editing in GIMP and other programs, it was simply not worth the extra heat generated nor the glitches that happened.
Setting up a decent swap file seems to alleviate some processor and RAM intense situations, but the big performance difference did not come from overclocking.  It came from setting up the SSD.

As I write this I have the SSD plugged into the USB 3 hub and power only from the USB 3 port on the Pi, plus a 3TB external HDD also plugged into the USB 3 hub.  However the 3TB drive is powered via a USB splitter cable with the red end going to a 2A phone charger.  This is currently working nicely.
The only problem is that the k400r Logiteck keyboard/trackpad doesn;t quite get enough signal unless fairly precisely positioned in relation to the donger.

2019 Fri Oct 25th – Pi 4B   
The I finally got around to setting up the Pi 4 to boot from a microSD to the SSD.
It was a little fiddly, because I decided not to mess with cmdline.txt on the 128GB Samsung EVO Plus, and just keep that for a backup.  I copied my home/pi folder to a spare drive justin case.  And tried a few ways to setup the SSD and a 16GB microSD to boot it.  All failed.  Eventually I used this bloke’s method, which worked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rglzPdsvYg

And this link for text instructions – but it does NOT like the PIA VPN turned ON  in Chromium.

https://www.youtube.com/redirect?v=2rglzPdsvYg&event=video_description&redir_token=lXNFyDl4_UKAMTynzlazQzS1MOx8MTU3MjA3NDI0NUAxNTcxOTg3ODQ1&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.element14.com%2Fcommunity%2Fcommunity%2Fraspberry-pi%2Fblog%2F2019%2F08%2F30%2Fquick-sd-to-ssd-on-the-pi-4

For now at least, the Pi 4 is booting form the microSD and running on the SSD and seems to be satisfactory.


2019 Wed Oct 23th – Pi 4B 
The Pi 4 sometimes gets a little laggy with the 128GB Samsung EVO Plus microSD card.  I scrounged an old 16GB Sandisk card and am considering setting it up to boot and run the SSD again.  Just haven’t got around to it yet.  Other than that, the Pi 4 overall is great and it still feels nicer to use as a day to day computer than the Brix or any of the bigger systems.


2019 Sun Oct 12th – Pi 4B   
The Pi 4 is still running nicely with the LASER charger using the splitter cable in both USB outlets for 5V 4.8A total.
I also ran overclocked again for a while, but a few things seemed a little flaky., so I dropped back to standard speed, then I re-enabled the 64bit kernel again, just for the hell of it.
The only thing that ‘seems’ to be different is an occasional glitch where Chromium seems to lock for a few seconds sometimes before allowing scrolling.  This could be due to th placement of the Logitech receiver for the wireless K400 keyboard, but it only seems to happen with Chromium so far.  For example it is not happening in LibreOffice.
There is a 64 bit version of Chromium for the Pi, but I think I will stick with things as they are for now.

In other news, I did eventually get around to trying two power banks hooked up with the splitter cable to power the Pi 4.  It booted, but the power banks had been sitting for a long, long time in the van and were not fully charged.  So one dropped pretty low and I swapped back to powering the Pi form the LASER charger.
The other thing I have done is added reboot to my script (and menu item) for doing a dist-upgrade on the Pi.  Just have to remember to sut down any programs before running it.  Although usually I run it before I start ‘doing stuff’.

I tweaked some stuff in Smplayer, and rediscovered Ctrl+u (opens a dialog to paste a URL and play from there).  It is nicer to use than SMtube and is playing stuff very well.



2019 Tue Oct 8th – Pi 4B   
This morning I had a ‘why didn;t I think if this before?’ moment.  I was thinking back over the boot/reboot problem when a Pi 4 USB 3 port has an attached  powered USB 3 hub, or an externally powered (through a Y-cable) USB 3 hard drive plugged into a non-powered USB 3 hub.

And I picked up one of the old LASER brand adapters I was using on the Pi 3B+.  It has 2 x 2.4A USB sockets.  BUT !!  I notived the ‘total output’ is 4.8A and 5V.

So in went one of the Y-cables, with both the male ends into sockets on the LASER adapter.  And I plugged a USB-C charging cable into the female socket of the Y-cable and booted the Pi.

So my Pi 4 is running off a 4.8A adapter.  The possible problem is that if I run a couple of power hungry USB 3 external drives in the Pi USB ports, I might pull more than the 3 Amps the Pi 4 is probably rated for.  Which should fry the Pi 4 power circuit.

Oh well, it will be interesting to see.  But for now, all is working well.


2019 Mon Oct 7th – Pi 4B   
I got a bit more stuff sorted on the Pi 4.  I installed pulseaudio and pavucontrol, so now I have an easy way to get some decent volume from the stereo system when in is plugged in to the Anal Log socket.  I’m still messing with Network Settings because my firewall on the BRIX is preventing me accessing it as usual.  I had hoped to allow printing from the Pi throught he BRIX to the Brother printer.  The Pi sees Lesley’s HP WiFi printer upstairs.  I’ll have to print a test page to that and if it works, I might consider spending the $40 or so just to have one for the Pi that doesn’t need configuring.

Most other stuff is working nicely now and I am finding I rarely turn the BRIX on excet to print a test page for keeping the inkjet nozzles clear.

The Pi, for now, is working perfectly well as a day to day computer.

2019 Sat Oct 5th – Pi 4B   
The Pi 4 is working nicely with the 128GB Samsung EVO Plus microSD.  It feels at least as good as the Pi 3B+with the SSD.  I also got the 3TB Toshiba external drive working nicely on the non-powered USN 3 hub plugged into a USB 3 port.  The other USB 3 port is powering the wireless receiver for the Logitech keyboard/trackpad.

Since the 3TB drive is now working (previously it didn’t seem to get enough power to boot from the USB 3 port) I have enabled sound to the Analog socket and plugged in the amplified speakers so I can use the Pi 4 as my main media centres instead of the BRIX.

At this point it is performing most tasks better than the BRIX, even though I have removed the overclock settings.

2019 Thurs Oct 3trd – Pi 4B  -   
It has been an interesting week.  I tried all sorts of overclock settings and lots of other stuff.  I even had the Pi running on the experimental 64 bit kernel.  And I wrote and modified more bash scripts and desktop files.  Thereare still glitches, like one of my Panels disappearing regularly, but for the most part I am getting the wrinkles ironed out.

The biggest change is that Samsung 128GB EVO plus microSD cards have dropped to $36.75, so I am now running that instead of the 64GB Sandisk Extreme.  With heaps of programs installed and quite a lot of files, I have over 90GB of free space still.

2019 Thurs Sept 26th – Pi 4B  -  UPDATE  HDMI SETTINGS
After much stuffing around with config.txt and other stuff, I finally got the 55inch EKO TV and the Pi 4B screen co-operating :-)
The setting was not in the TV menu under Picture (where all the other display settings seem to be).
It was in the TV Menu under    System > Aspect Mode
I changed it from 16:9  to  ‘Just Scan’
Problem fixed !!!

2019 Thurs Sept 26th – Pi 4B
The Pi 4 was running very well with the overclock settings until I tried to use GIMP to Unsharp a 6MB jpeg.  It just did a reboot as soon as I selected Filters > Enhance > Sharpen (Unsharp).  So I tried a 1MB jpeg, and the same thing happened.  I mentioned it on the Raspberry Pi forum and several others tried it for the same result.  We tested a heap of overclock settings and eventually one of the members worked out that it was a combination of voltage and frequency.  Today I’ve got it working perfectly at a CPU frequency of 1800MHz and GPU of 600MHZ, with the over_voltage dropped from 4 to 2.

I also have a folder on the desktop containing shell scripts to start Chromium using the ytdl_server to open with either VLC or omxplayer to extract an play YouTube PLUS one to start Chromium behind the TOR network.

2019 Mon Sept 17th – Pi 4B-UPDATE
The Bluetooth Keyboard works – sort of, but does not pair automatically, so this is something to investigate.  For the moment though, the WiFi keyboard is working ok.
I wonder if it will get a bit dodgy again later.
If it does, maybe I should drop the Overclock speed from 2GHz to 1750GHz ?

.
2019 Mon Sept 17th – Pi 4B
I might have an alternative solution to the problem I was having with the WiFi keyboard and trackpad.  I realised I have an old Bluetooth keyboard with a built in Track Pad,, that I bought once on ebay.  It had a Lithium Polymer battery in it, that expanded and swelled the case of the keyboard, so I removed the LiPo and hot glued a holder for a 3.7V Li-Ion salvaged from a laptop battery pack.  I have quite a few of these batteries so it makes sense to use one.  Te big battery hanging off the bottom of the little 10 inch tablet sized keyboard makes it a bit difficult to use with a tablet, but for sitting in a chair and controlling the Pi 4B, it should work well.
I typed all the paragraph above on it, so that looks like a win.  Now I need to see if the thing pairs automagically when I turn on the Pi and the keyboard.

Something to remember - :
Fn + c  =  Pair Bluetooth
Trackpad Single Finfer TAP = LEFT Click
Trackpad TWO Finger Tap = RIGHT Click
VLC Player – USE Ctrl + h to toggle to Minimal Interface INSTEAD of Full Screen
Double TAP Speed is set at 550ms = Count ONE ONE  (out of One One Thousand)


Testing the Pi 4B – from 2019 Sept 15th

2019 Mon Sept 16th – Pi 4B
I was impressed yesterday by being able to edit video in Openshot on the Pi 4B and export the file, and to have the playback in VLS in very high resolution (for what was supposed to be a 720p video).  Playback had no ‘apparent’ frame drop, although I imagine there was some.

I also noticed a lot of annoying wireless keyboard and trackpad lag on the Logitech K400r that I use.  I tracked it down to the position of the receiver dongle being out of line of sight from the keyboard, so I plugged it into the unpowered USB 3 Hub that I use for my data storage drives.
That didn’t help much, so I dug around in a parts box and found a 200mm male to female USB cable and ran that from one of the USB 2 ports and hung it somewhere convenient.  That seems to have fixed the problem.

After yesterday’s post I watched a 1080p video that I have watched several times on the Brix.  The resolution was startling, so I watched some other 1080p and supposedly 4k UHD videos (downloaded from YouTube, so converted I think to 1080p.

All were remarkable resolution and although I cannot get quite enough steady bandwidth on the Pi to watch 4k YouTube directly in the browser, I am still surprised.  I might try downloading a native 4k video to an external drive just for testing.


2019 Sun Sept 15th – Pi 4B
I actually wrote up the first experiences with the Pi 4B and Vilross kit on Friday and yesterday – then I stuffed up something trying to get the display to fit my 55 inch UHD Smart TV, and had to burn the Micro SD card after the Pi failed to boot.

Of course re-flashing the Micro SD card deleted the document with all my results from yesterday and I will have to try to make a note here of what I had discovered.

However, I’ve just managed to do an interesting test just now and I’ll write about that before I forget it.
I installed Openshot video editor, and imported a 720p 3 minute  mp4 video, about 30MB in size. I sliced it in a number of places, then exported it, as an mp4 in h264 high res to an external drive on USB3, and the output was saved at about 300MB.  It took 12 minutes, and with the CPU running at 2GHz, the temperature peaked at about 75 deg C a couple of times towards the end, but mostly it hovered around 70 deg C.  Immediately the job finished, the CPU frequency dropped  to 600Mhz and within a minute after finishing, the CPU temp had dropped to 52 deg C and during the next minute it was back idling at 47-50 deg C.

It will be interesting to see if it gets much hotter.  I’m wondering if there’s a simple way to switch the fan between 3.3V where it is running now, and 5V for more cooling, if needed.  For now though, I’m pretty pleased with the result.

Today I also installer Tor and a script to allow me to start Chromium browser with Tor, and I can still start Chromium from the Menu without Tor.  I don’t need Tor, but I like to know I ‘could’ use it if I wanted to.

I also found instructions to set up the Pi to run PIA using OpenVPN – something to do in the near future.  But I couldn’t get it working.
Fortunately PIA has a Browser Extension that works.

I adjusted my GPU/CPU ram split to 364MB and it doesn’t seem to have any adverse effect on the system.  Openshot worked nicely and sat in about 1200MB ram after the split, so I think I will leave it there for now.

2019 Sept 14th – Pi 4B
I got the case installed and Raspbian installed and running.  After messing about a little, the noise from the fan was obvious, so before going further I shut down, swapped the fan power from 5V to 3.3V, then ran some tests including vcgencmd measure_temp under various conditions, then sysbench tests, and I installed stress, and ran that several times.  The results are in another file.  The fan was much quieter but even under stress the yrmp rarely got over 71 deg C.

I also found a CPU temperature applet and a CPU frequency applet, so I can monitor those without constantly running commands.

I also copied over my scripts for changing the Desktop Wallpaper so now I don’t have to fumble through the Right Click > Desktop Preferences stuff.  I just click an icon on the desktop and cycle through the wallpapers until I stop at the one I want.

RASPBERRY Pi 4 - ( or Why I stopped updating this blog :-)

Seriously, I can't really blame the release of the raspberry Pi 4 for me being slack.  But it does have some bearing on things simply because I have almost stopped using my other computers since the Pi 4 was released.

First, there was a lot of learning to do, because this latest Pi is so much more capable on a day to day level, than any Pi before it.  And then, there was the level of experimenting with stuff to find out just how handy it is, and to try to solve a few little glitches in the way I use the Pi.

I won;t go into the specs and changes that make the Pi 4 what it is, because just about every tech site and blog has covered them.  I ordered the Pi 4 with 4GB RAM, and although that means my Pi was much more expensive than previous Pi models, I could have got the base model for about the same actual dollar price as the earlier ones had I wanted to.

But all up, with the Pi 4 board with 4GB RAM, a decent case with fan and heat sinks, and a 3 Amp power supply, I paid about double what the Pi 3B+ had cost me.  Initially I ran the Pi 4 off a Sandisk 64GB microSD card, then changed to a Samsung EVO Plus 128GB card because it came up on special somewhere very cheap.  But there were a few things that were annoying, and eventually I changed the set up to booting from an old Sandisk Ultra 16GB card that was lying around, and running on my WD 240GB SSD(from the Pi 3B+)  plugged into a USB 3 port.

That works great, does not have the brief lag problems the Pi suffered running off the microSD, and seems faster in some ways than the BRIX that I normall use for day to day stuff.

The UP sides of using the Pi 4 are that at last I have an affordable way to watch 4k video on my 55 inch UHD TV.  And the thing boots up so quickly that I don;t have to wait to start reading news, checking emails etc.

The DOWN sides include the lack of ability to print anything, meaning every time I want to print, I have to boot another computer.  And Audio Volume was so low that I had to install pulseaudio so I could drive the sound from the Analog jack over 100%.  And now I only have Mono audio.  I am not sure it was ever stereo, but I 'think' it was before I installed pulseaudio.

There are a few other little dislikes, but overall, the Pi is my day to day computer until I need to do something serious.

I kept a bit of a diary of my experiences with the Pi 4 from the time I got it, so I will add some of those in the next posts.

NETFLIX in CHROME on Kubuntu with PIA VPN

Playing NETFLIX in CHROME on Kubuntu with PIA VPN

There is a well known issue with trying to access NETFLIX using the above combination.  In fact it seems that NETFLIX blocks access through many VPNs.  However I have only tested this using Private Internet Access.

At 15th May, 2019, I discovered that I can get around the problem by taking the following steps:

1 - right click the PIA icon in the Panel and DISCONNECT from PIA

2 - Log IN to NETFLIX

3 - Start playing a movie

That's it  :-)


4 - Once you finish watching the movie, simply RECONNECT to a VPN server.

Actually, you can reconnect to your VPN while the movie is playing, but movies seem to stop once the buffer fills.  However, disconnecting and reconnecting again will start the movie again from where it stopped.

NOTE:
The NETFLIX movie stopped after about 15 minutes when I reconnected to an Aussie VPN server, but all the time I have been writing this, after reconnecting to a USA VPN server - it is still playing.

I will need to experiment some more.  And I will update this.  And as I got to 'this' the movie stopped again.  Disconnecting the VPN - hitting Play - and Reconnecting to the VPN  is getting me about 10 minutes of movie each time until the buffer does a refill.

The obvious solution is to simply disconnect from the VPN to use NETFLIX.  But this does mean if I need to do something secure - like banking - I can use the VPN for a while to do that and then disconnect to continue NETFLIX.

Kubuntu 19 with Plasma 5 and pulse-audio-equalizer

2019 April 12th
There were more updates to Kubuntu 19.04 this morning.  About the only problem I have so far is, as mentioned on the last post, that each time there is an update, pulseaudio-gtk is updated and of course, will no longer work.

This is not specific to Kubuntu 19 - it was happening to Jubuntu 18.x updates as well.  But with those I could use the pin command to set the pulseaudio-equlizer to a specific version. But since Kubuntu 19.04 it applies the new version over the pinned / locked / forced version (yep, I have tried pinning, locking and forcing).

The method outlined yesterday of dragging a link to the package onto my panel is working nicely though, and it is almost automatic now, as soon as I have applied updates, to see if clicking the PulseAudio-Equalizer icon loads the equalizer.  If it comes up with the GTK error, I simply click the package icon, enter a password and wait a few seconds.  Then I click the Equalizer icon and so far, it loads the Equalizer every time.

The only other problem I've had so far with Kubuntu 19.04 is that it sometimes forgets the screen dimensions or layout or refresh rate.  But these types of glitches are to be expected and I have not reported them yet as they often only happen once or twice.

All in all, a nice smooth transition to the latest Kubuntu, and a smooth transition away from Linux Mint - albeit, sadly after so many years.

Kubuntu 19.04 BETA

This month the Beta of Kubuntu 19 was released and after a little fiddling with repositories I managed to get it installed over the top of Kubuntu 18.10.
One of the annoyances at the moment is that after spending time getting the equalizer working for PulseAudio, every time there are system updates, the equalizer wants to update.  And every time it updates it is missing the -gtk files to show the equalizer window.

The pulseaudio-equalizer package in the repositories is missing the required files, and although I tried forcing it, and locking it and even pinning it, the package keeps showing up as an update. As soon as it updates, I get the missing equalizer-gtk error.

A little sideways thinking, and I put a copy of the deb file (pulseaudio-equalizer_2.7.0.2-5_webupd8_xenial0_all.deb) somewhere I can't accidentally delete it, then dragged its icon to a spot on a spare panel.
Now after an update, if the equalizer doesn;t load, and I click the menu item and it comes up with the -gtk error, all I have to do is click the icon on the panel and it will load the version that works.

And I have my custom settings for the sound system I use on the BRIX.

I've also got some - but not all - of my GTK apps (like LibreOffice) running a similar dark theme to the Kvantum theme I am using in Plasma 5. I have the ability to turn transparent windows (like the file icon background in Dolphin etc) on or off with a couple of clicks. But by far the thing I like most about Kvantum is that I can have a dark theme with 3D look buttons and a rounded accent to stuff like buttons and menu highlights.
I'll put some screenshots below.

On a final note, I was having some serious flickering of the cursor and a few other graphical glitches. I wasn't sure if there was a problem with screen refresh, or if my LED TV was dying. Then I remembered I had switched the compositor over to GL 3.1 to check the blur effect in Plasma 5.15 since Cosmic.

It turns out that the onboard iNtel graphics on the BRIX aren't quite up to the stress, which surprises me since xrender these days apparently relies on GL to do some of its work. Anyway, swapping back to xrender seems to have alleviated the problem for now.

Plasma 5 with Dolphin Transparent and 3D Dark Transparency on deektop Theme

A few friends asked me for instructions to create the transparent themes I am using now on Plasma 5 Kubuntu 18.10.
All the themes I use are available online, most through Discover.  The exception is Kvantum, which I detailed a couple of posts previously - and it can also be found by googling.

This post is step by step in pictures.  You could choose your own particular mix.

Please note my monitor is a 50 inch LED at 1680x1050, so my font size choice is 14pt :-)

Note DOLPHIN is set to 'Transparent' in the image Below

I selected a couple of GTK programs to use the Kvantum style - but it had little effect.

Oddly though, Openshot Video Editor picked up the full Kvantum theming including the transparent background area.

Dolphin File Manager Transparent Background and 3D Theme

23th March 2019
BRIX

I had another small win today with my Kubuntu 18 Desktop.  One of the nice features of the latest Plasma 5 is a blurring effect on translucency in window decorations, menus and panels etc.  My discovery of the Kvantum theme engine has taken this a whole lot further, as seen in yesterday's post, but there was still something missing.
For example I had managed to get the blur effect happening in Plasma 5 some time ago, but found I was getting strange artifacts and horrible display flickering whenever I was using GL 3 or GL 2 to drive the compositor using my inbuilt iNtel graphics on the BRIX.  Xrender was working perfectly for translucency or transparency, but blur needs to be rendered using GL.  I was at a loss.

Here is what Dolphin looks like with 3D buttons and translucency, using kvantum and Xrender compositing:

And this is how Dolphin looks like with 3D buttons and translucency, using kvantum and GL3.1 in compositing:

The blur effect makes it easier to read the text against any light colours in wallpaper (obviously not a worry with this view from my balcony).

After previously trying a failing to find a solution to the screen artifacts and tearing problems for ages, I finally had a reason to explore the various options in the compositor section of System Settings.  I even installed wayland - and that was a serious problem.

Here is what finally worked for me.

System Settings > Display and Monitors > Compositor

Then set the Tearing Prevention to 'Full Screen Repaints'.

Now I have a nice stable desktop again, with all my pretty effects working nicely and videos playing perfectly either Windowed or Full Screen.

I hope this helps anyone with Plasma 5 on a lower end system with an iNtel built in graphics adapter who is having trouble running compositing with GL 3 or 2.

Kubuntu 18, Plasma 5 and Kvantum (3D and Transparency) Themes

22nd March 2019
BRIX

Now that I have my nice 3D Plasma 5 themes and lots more transparency - like the translucent contents window for Dolphin File Manager that I have always wanted, I suppose I should say how I eventually got it all together.

I googled and tried all sorts of things, and tried compiling from source aftrdownloading that from github.  But none of it worked, and the compile kept failing, probably due to missing dependencies.  However I managed to get an oldish version working when I found a PPA,

Then after all that I found an up to date git archive that downloaded AND compiled from here:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/963327/how-to-install-kvantum-in-ubuntu-17-04

Here are the instructions copied from that site - Justin Case I forget the link.
A BIG THANKS to Bruno and Norbert for making this available - I wish I had found it before installed Kvantum via other means!


Copied from the link above:

For Debian / Ubuntu / Linux Mint, there are deb binaries available to download but for a quite old version (Kvantum 0.10.5, released back in October, 2017).

To install the latest Kvantum in Debian, Ubuntu or Linux Mint, you can compile it from source. To do this, follow the steps below.

Install the build dependencies

sudo apt install g++ cmake libx11-dev libxext-dev qtbase5-dev libqt5svg5-dev libqt5x11extras5-dev libqt4-dev qttools5-dev-tools libkf5windowsystem-dev git

Download the latest source

mkdir -p ~/repos/tsujan && cd ~/repos/tsujan
git clone https://github.com/tsujan/Kvantum.git && cd Kvantum
git checkout master

Compile kvantum

cd Kvantum
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make

Install kvantum

sudo make install

Get Qt applications to use kvantum

echo "export QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE=kvantum" >> ~/.profile

After this, logout and log back in. To apply Kvantum system-wide, and not just for your user, you could add export QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE=kvantum in /etc/environment instead of ~/.profile.

To completely uninstall

If you want to uninstall Kvantum installed from source, start by opening a terminal, navigating to the folder where you've extracted (in the build folder from the Kvantum/Kvantum directory if you've followed our instructions) and built the source - e.g. cd ~/repos/tsujan/Kvantum/Kvantum/build, and running this command:

sudo make uninstall

You'll also need to remove the export QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE=kvantum line from your ~/.profilefile. To do this, open ~/.profile with a text editor, e.g. kate:

kate ~/.profile

And remove the QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE=kvantum line from this file, then save it, logout and log back in.

Source: https://www.linuxuprising.com/2018/05/use-custom-themes-for-qt-applications.html with some adaptations of my own.

edited Jan 27 at 9:51

N0rbert

24.3k851115

answered Jan 4 at 8:59

Bruno Finger

19011