2018 - 2019 Brix and Raspberry Pi SUMMARY plus Android as Laptop
22th Mar 2019
BRIX
I have been suffering badly from on-going Peripheral Neuropathy, which affects almost every aspect of my life. I[m probably fortunate in that it is not caused by diabetes (I've avoided that so far), but the neurologists and spinal neurosurgeon cannot find a way to alleviate it, so I am relying on my own concoction of Diazepam and Paracetamol. Of course, that has its own particular nasty side effects - so I've been neglecting the blogs even more.
My apologies to the people who read this blog particularly, and who have emailed wondering why I haven't been updating stuff on Plasma 5 particularly.
I hope this latest update - and the next one about my theming using Kvantum to overcome the 'FLAT-look' Breeze theme that I hate, will make up for it a little.
The top couple (most recent) of entries in this post show Kvantum themed widgets, with rounded 3D buttons etc. Please excuse the garish RED highlights. I was feeling playful for a change.
21st Mar 2019 - UPDATE
BRIX
I found a utility called Kvantum Manager amongst the stuff I installed when I was trying to install Kvantum Theme stuff for Plsma 5. And I decided to test a few of the available tweaks.
The screen captures below is not the look I was aiming for – but it certainly brightens the whole look of the Breeze theme lol.
21st Mar 2019
BRIX
I hate the flat ‘Breeze’ themes in Plasma 5. I have hated the flat non-3D look since it first came out, and today I discovered that others feel the same way. A couple of years ago, while I wasn’t using Plasma 5, somebody decided to do something about it, and the good news is that they developed a series of ‘widget’ themes, rather than complete desktop themes.
In fact this led me to discover that there were other themes with a little 3D in them, but by then I had hunted down and installed ‘Kvantum’ It doesn;t make a huge difference to Breeze Dark at first glance, then you notice little things like the highlighted buttons when they are selected, and the 3D indicators, like the one showing that I am in my HOME folder in Dolphin.
The look carries through to pop up selection dialogs and other things. It just makes the entire Plasma 5 experience nicer for me.
The screen shot above shows what I mean. The Button Bar is in 3D with Menubar and Preview shown in blue because they are selected. And on the left, the Home folder selector is in a subtle 3D as well. It took me a while to realise that even the scroll bars have a subtle 3D effect.
It would be nice if Kubuntu offered this as a standard theme for those of us who dislike ‘Flat’ themes.
Overall, I’m very, very happy with this discovery and I wish I had investigated the idea sooner.
19th Mar 2019
Raspberry Pi
Yesterday I reverted the Pi to the old LASER power adapter after I started to get low power warnings again. It was lying on the bench, and I happened to check the specs on the back. I realised that while I had known it was labelled 2.4A on the sockets, I thought that was the total, and it split that between two sockets for an output of 1.2A each. Hence purchasing the Comsol from Australia post.
It turns out the LASER is labelled as 5V 4.8A, allowing me 2.4A for the Pi and 2.4A for the SSD. Nice!. So I’m back to that for power and I have no more low power warnings. I’ll swap the Comsol to a phone and tablet power board and bring one of my 2.4A Samsung adapters to the Pi power board to power an external drive, should I need to.
Other than that the Pi ran without a glitch for the whole day.
7th Mar 2019
BRIX
There are times I consider getting a computer with something like an i5 or i7 processor and perhaps 16GB RAM. Then I usually sit back and take a good look at what I actually do with my computers on a day to day basis.
The reality is that since my 2004 hit and run injuries that more or less destroyed my fairly successful work life, most of my computer usage had been geared to building a replacement business, and the painfully slow discovery that injecting tens of thousands of dollars into something I am incapable of marketing is a waste of time.
I have all the computers, tools and equipment here to create a nice steady income. But each time I came close to actually achieving that, something has stepped in and clobbered it.
2010 – cyclone Ului
2011 – brain injuries and a golden staph infection of the heart (and heart valve replacement surgery)
2017 – more brain injuries and much more serious golden staph infection (leading surgery to
replace the aortic root and including major surgery to clean up the mitral curtain)
2013-2018 Regular procedures to remove bowel polyps
2014- current
Prostate issues
In addition there are spinal injuries going back to 1999 that are only recently being investigated fully after being ‘glossed over’ by the health system (both doctors and hospitals) for almost twenty years. Actually some of the spinal problems go back to 1986, when I was told it was likely the injuries would put me in a wheelchair by about 1995!
4th Mar 2019
BRIX
Kubuntu 18.10 is gradually settling down and now seems to be as stable as Mint 19 with Plasma was.
At today’s date Plasma is at 5.15.2 with a corresponding KDE Frameworks at 5.54.0 and QT Version 5.11.1. My Kernel is currently Version 4.18.0-15 Generic.
The long delays on shutdown seem to be fixed and I can simply choose shutdown from the menu and let the system do its 27 second countdown to shutdown.
Boot still occasionally gives a screen with no panels or even once in a while, a black screen with just the KDE logo, but usually it comes up ok.
My autostart printer test (to keep the nozzles clear) generally announces itself via espeak, and usually prints the small test image – but once in a while it prints with no announcement, or it might announce the printer test, but not print anything.
These are small glitches though, and overall I have the most up to date replacement for Mint KDE that I could hops for.
It is a little sad to be leaving Linux Mint behind, but if I want to continue using Plasma – I think Kubuntu is my best root.
19th Feb 2019
BRIX
Today, the lag in scrolling to change Activities seems to be less intrusive. I’m not sure if it is things I have messed with or just the natural progression of improvements with updates in the Non-LTS Kubuntu 18.1.
Sometimes having all the latest stuff is great, but at times it is nice to have the security of an LTS release. A good reason to have two good roots, in my case, one containing Mint 19 with Plasma 5, and the other with Kubuntu 18.10.
For the moment Kubuntu 18.10 is back to behaving itself nicely and most of the time even the Printer Test on startup is working again.
Occasionally Plasma does not display the screen correctly on boot, with either a black screen, or a locked screen with wallpaper, but no panels and no ability to right click and get a menu.
On those occasions, so far, CTRL+ALT+Backspace gives me an exit screen to choose a Reboot, or if it doesn;t, CTRL+ALT+T either gives me a terminal (to use command line shutdown) or seems to kickstart the reboot process.
16th Feb 2019
BRIX
Kubuntu with Plasma 5.15 is still going through the laggy thing when changing Activities, especially on MouseWheel scroll either scrolling on the desktop OR the Activities Pager.
I changed the keyboard command for switching Activities to META + right arrow and META+Left Arrow to walk through left or right, and There’s less lag, although it takes a little longer then it used to for screen refresh. That sort of suggests the origin of the problem – but not knowing why doesn’t suggest a ‘reason’, nor a solution. I should add that it is NOT caused by different wallpapers. They are all optimised ‘small’ and hadn’t been changed in a long time. Changing them made NO difference, so I changed them back again.
I just now turned off the settings to keep history for each activity and also cleared the history – see if that makes a difference.
A few hours later and lag is not as bad as it was. Still not ‘perfect’ like before the upgrade to 5.15, but ok. I changed the mouse batteries (NiMh) but I’m not certain whether that has made any further difference to what killing history did.
The occasional hang still happens when a disk daemon I can;t remember which one it is) fires up if I have messed with Dolphing and its relationship to mounted external drives. I think it happens sometimes if I have ‘safely remove’d a couple of external drives, then closed Dolphin immediately before shutting down – to try to prevent the long wait sometimes on shutdown. It might be better to just let it do its own thing.
Another occasional cause of hanging for a while is when the xapian index starts, but this is usually only once or twice in a day.
14th Feb 2019
BRIX
Kubuntu with Plasma 5.15 is going through some of the little glitches we are used to with non LTS releases. Probably the most annoying for me at the moment is that it has chenged from almost imperceptible change between Activities when scrolling on either the desktop, or the Activity pager, to a hesitation between changes that means sometimes I have to move the scroll wheel two or three times before the desktop changes. It is as if Plasma is still waiting for an input.
Everything else is working well. As I mentioned previously, the Video Wallpaper plugin is pretty well useless, but fortunately for now, the Shantz-xwinwrap .deb package still works perfectly. I looked at a couple of methods to select video wallpaper, but I think my simple Zenity scripts added to the panel work perfectly. You need zenity (sudo apt-get install zenity) Here’s one example:
#!/bin/bash
if ps -e | grep xwinwrap
then
killall xwinwrap
sleep 1
exit
fi
#if
#zenity --question --title="Video Wallpaper" --text="Click 'Yes' button and choose the movie from the file selection."
#then
# RECTANGLE
#nice -n 15
xwinwrap -ni -o 1.0 -fs -s -st -sp -b -nf -g 1920x1080-0+0 -- mplayer -loop 0 -shuffle -wid WID -nosound -aspect 16:10 "`zenity --filename=../VidWall/* --file-selection --file-filter=""*.*" "`"
exit
fi
To use it I obviously made it executable, then dragged it to a panel.
The screen captures show the steps involved. To choose an item I can either select the item and click OK, or just double click the item. If you make another script and remove the ‘nosound’ tag, you can use it to play a relaxation video as wallpaper with the relaxing music.
First, click the icon where you dragged the
script to the panel..
Next, select a folder with a suitable
video. Double click the folder or
click OK.
Now, just double click the video or
Select it and click OK.
I chose a video with tropical rain
forest (in the rain).
11th Feb 2019
BRIX
Checked ‘Discover’ Software Centre before I shut down tonight and there were 88 updates available. I installed them and found that Plasma has now been updated from 5.14.90 (Beta) to Plasma 5.15.
11th Feb 2019 FOLLOW UP - PM
MyRebublic connection was running around 94/8mbps without VPN, but around 93/27mbps WITH the VPN until just after 4pm, when the Internet dropped out completely. Speedtest.Net site was unavailable whilst connected to VPN, so I disconnected and MyRepublic was offline and Speedtest.Net was unavailable without VPN also.
After a few tries I managed to get a speed test of with NO VPN and I’m about to reconnect VPN and try again.
Ok, speed WITH VPN is back again to 92.77/28.24mbps.
I don;t know if MyRepublic had me offline trying to fix the connection – but obviously it didn;t work. No VPN uploads are still lopwer than 10mbps, WITH VPN uploads are acceptable at close enough to 30mbps.
I just ran speed tests on a variety of test sites (with my VPN connected) and all varied around (+/-) 90/30mbps, so it seems pretty consistent.
11th Feb 2019 FOLLOW UP
The Video Wallpaper plugin for Plasma 5 might look useful – but it is a resource hog at the moment. After switching between Video Wallpaper and Image a few times, PlasmaShell had a memory footprint of over 878,000K, compared with a normal Max of around 190,000K. PlasmaShell appears not to be freeing memory after Video Wallpaper is turned OFF.
Using Xwinwrap on the other hand, adds about 42,000K of memory overhead to run mplayer, but makes NO DIFFERENCE to PlasmaShell at all. Using KillXwinWrap releases the memory used by mplayer, but has no effect at all on the memory used by PlasmaShell.
Now I just need to find the way to uninstall the Video Wallpaper plugin.
Hmmm – looks like removing it is NOT an option :-( Oh well, I’ll just have to remember not to mess with it.
11th Feb 2019
I just found the Video Wallpaper plugin for Plasma 5 and installed it. It runs on individual Activities in much the same way as XwinWrap used to run on individual desktops. I haven’t seen an option to run it sticky on All Activities yet, but that’s ok.
Selecting videos is a bit clunky compared to using XwinWrap and Zenity, or even XwinWrap scripts directly from a Folder View Icon in the Panel – But at least it affords a decent option in case XwinWrap is ever unavailable, or no longer works (perhaps when Wayland is default?).
For now it is a welcome tweak for those who like video wallpaper.
10th February 2019
BRIX
Booted this morning and there were NO PANELS. Eventually got a CTRL ALT Backspace to work and chose REBOOT.
Got two side panels. Did CTRL ALT T for a terminal (to shut doen) and had no window decorations either. Added a launcher to the bottom of the left panel and shutdown from there.
Third Boot was normal – everything working. I should add that the system is still running XRENDER as GL2 and GL3.1 are too unstable on the BRIX.
9th February 2019
BRIX
My Republic speeds today are still around 90/10 wth NO VPN and around 90/30 WITH PIA-VPN.
This afternoon I upgraded Plasma on Kubuntu 18.10 from Plasma 5.14.4 to Plasma 5.14.9 (which is the Plasma 5.15 BETA), just to play with the latest stuff.
After rebooting the upgrade, I could not do a reboot from the Panel K-Menu and had to reboot from the Terminal Command Line.
I also checked Zenity and XwinWrap, and both worked, Brother Printer Test worked from the icon, but NOT frm the Autostart Options.
8th February 2019
BRIX
MyRepublic speeds have been flaky since about 21st January. Often as lower than 60/10 with NO VPN and around 60/25 WITH the VPN.
Eventually I got 90/30 WITH the PIA-VPN this evening, but speeds with NO VPN are about 90/10
7th February 2019
BRIX
I think I found the culprit that was creating the annoying screen lock when I switched the TV from USB3 (BRIX) to USB@ (Pi 3B+) or DVI and back again.
NOTE: Search for lock in the Application Menu, and check the settings there !!
Even though the lock screen was disabled in the other power settings, it was still active in a dedicated ‘Screen Locking’ setting.
Disable by removing the check mark in ‘Lock Screen After’, then Apply, then OK.
I also tried Compositing set to GL 2 and GL 3,1 yesterday to get the nice ‘Blur’ effect on menus and panels that Plasma 5.13 onwards has. It was a beautiful effect, but sadly it causes conflicts after a while with the BRIX internal intel Graphics, so I swapped Compositingback to Xrender.
Here’s the system load with Chromium (multiple tabs open), LibreOffice, SMplayer and Spectacle running:
4th February 2019
BRIX
I switched boot on the Brix to Kubuntu 18.10 again yesterday to see if it had been updated to Plasma 5.14 yet. It has, and I also found out why my xWinWrap video wallpapers had stopped working. You’d reckon after years of writing Bash scripts, I would get the shebang right, but for some reason I must have started typing !#/bin/bash instead of #!/bin/bash in my script headers.
I don;t know why this worked in Mint 17.3 and Mint 19.1, but it certainly didn;t in Kubuntu.
So I spent all of yesterday and part of today fixing most of the scripts I have written since my last brain injury in May 2017,
Luckily I had only written about a hundred bash scripts since then, but unfortunately many of them had the error. I can only assume that since I have had to constantly correct everything I type since the injury, I just hadn;t noticed. It is a sort of brain injury dyslexia I think. I often hit a key combiination iin the wrong order these days, so I will type tehse instead of these or the instead of the. And obviously !#/bin/bash instead of #!/bin/bash.
Anyway, I am aware of it now, so hopefully I won’t do it as much and I will remember to check the script headers from now on.
As for KUBUNTU 18.10
Plasma 5.14 seems to be working well, and smoothly. So far it has been shutting down in a few seconds, rather than hangin for up to a minute the way Plasma 5.12 was on Mint 19.1. That could change however, but for now it looks promising.
A lot of other apps are newer. Gimp is at 2.10 instead of 2.8, however that means a lot of my customisation is gone. I also have to try to remember what I did with font sizes and appearances for GTK apps in Plasma in Mint.
Because a lot of panel icons disappeared when I switched in Dual Boot from Mint to Kubuntu, I have made a Custom Icon folder in /home so that is less likely to be an issue in future. But I have kept Mint 19.1 Plasma available for now and will periodically update it.
MyRepublic and PIA-VPN
I have had slow NBN on MyRepublic for about a week. Downloads were about 50mbps even without the VPN and uploads were variable, but pretty bad. I managed to get it fixed yesterday.
Now even with PIA-VPN I am consistently getting about 90mbps DOWN and about 30mbps UP
The Fix was:
Switch the modem
OFF
Unplug the NTD power cable (the white one with the black end that looks a bit like a network connector)from the battery backup to the NTD)
Wait 30 seconds
Turn the modem
ON
PLUG the NTD Power Cable back IN
When the computer shows network all connected:
Run a
SpeedTest with NO VPN
If speed is below 90/30 – repeat previous steps
Test again until speed is
at least 90/30 with NO VPN
Once speed is around 90/30 –
Run SpeedTest WITH VPN
If speed WITH VPN is close enough to 90/30 all is good
I
f speed is below 80/25 – Do
ALL Steps AGAIN until speed with VPN is close enough to 90/30
It took me several goes before I got a good line. So far it has held 2 days and speeds WITH VPN are still about 90/30
29th January 2019
BRIX
The BRIX is still giving me problems with Power Management. If I use the Raspberry Pi on HDMI 2, the BRIX on HDMI 3 goes into screen lock after only a few minutes and I have to unlock it with my password.
I mostly notice it if I switch the TV input from HDMI 3 (BRIX) to HDMI 2 (Raspberry Pi 3B+). I can’t recall it happening recently when swapping inputs to DVI to watch TV although after the amount of fiddling with settings today it could start happening.
The problem is that on boot the system tray icon Battery and Brightness is showing Power Management as ENABLED on boot or reboot. ALL editable power settings are DISABLED, but booting simply switches it back on.
28th January 2019
Android
I’ve been messing with the old problems of using one of my Android tablets as a replacement for a laptop when I am travelling. Despite the earlier Raspberry Pi sucesses with the 12V 15 inch TV, it is more suited to the yacht. After losing both Volcano and Shepherd Moons to cyclones Ului and Debbie, and with my health preventing any chance for now, of getting Pacemaker back into the water, I’m back to looking at what I can realistically use in the Toyota Hiace and future replacements.
The main limiting factor of the HiAce is electricity. Since I acquired some robust second hand roof racks from the wreckers, I can at least consider some options for roof mounted solar panels. I got the roof racks mainly to make a mount point for a simple awning to cover the side door when it is either very hot, or when it is raining. Because I still have a number oi old 65 Watt and 35 Watt solar panels lying around leftover from the Trimaran’s array, and I have successfully repaired and tested one of them, I could consider mounting one or two on the roof rack. Two 65W panels could easily be joined by stainless bolts along the long sides, then a simple piece of angle could be used across the short ends to join those. A piece of angle down each of the outer long sides could then be used to actually mount the panels to the roof racks.
My experiences with cheap MPPT power controllers have been pretty negative and for the number of times I will actually need ‘house power’ in the van, I suspect that a blocking diode on each panel and a PWM controller on the unit should do ok. I will have to look at the correct way to wire two panels, but in the past for PWM I have just run all the panels in parallel, and in Series for MPPT.
I should look at the pros and cons of having a separate PWM controller for each panel, since PWM controllers are cheap.
I know that MPPT is far more efficient, and may as well check current MPPT prices.
So back to the Android thing.
The Galaxy Tab 2 has been shut down WPS Office this morning, started Google (Chrome, I think) and tried to connect to the Internet. This happened a few times this morning while I was typing and testing my old Belkin bluetooth keyboard again. I was trying to work out what was happening, and realised this happened in May last year, almost causing me to have a head on collision with a semi trailer!
On that occasion however, the App concerned was not WPS Office, but the SYGIC navigation App that I was using to find my way to a destination about 350 kilometres away. One moment I was travelling happily towards my destination, then suddenly the navigation display was replaced by what looked like the Google web page, before a pop up message that there was ‘No Internet Connection’.
I was well aware that there was no bloody Internet connection – I was miles away from home by then and had WiFi turned OFF! I started messing with the screen trying to get navigation back again and succeeded. A little further down the road and it happened again. A bit more messing around trying to reach over and bring up the task manager and kill the Google App (which was still trying to connect to the net) then select SYGIC so I had my navigation information again, and I was moving onto the wrong side of the road with a truck coming around the bend ahead of me.
Luckily I spent years as a long distance driver so I am used to checking the road ahead whilst only taking my eyes off briefly, but if I had lingered more than a few moments, and had I been inexperienced enough to misjudge epeeds and the distance to the next bend, I would have strayed into the path of a B-Double.
My response to that was to simply stop using SYGIC and the Galaxy Tab 2 for the rest of that trip.
After I got back, I set up SYGIC on one of my old 10 inch Motorola XOOM tablets (I still have a couple lying around) and have tested them. I like the Xoom because it uses a 12Volt power input, which is ideal for use in the Van and it uses a much older version of Android. That of course, means less security, but again, because I am almost never using it for Internet access, that’s not much of a problem, and so far they have not tried to connect to the net whilst I am navigating. That suggests to me that the problem is related to either the Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 tablet, OR the version of Android that it is running, OR Google itself.
Play Store is set to ONLY update on WiFi and NOT to notify me of new updates. I will go through all Play Store and tablet settings to see if I can find the cause.
At least I am more comfortable knowing it is not the SYGIC App that is doing this. However, I might consider buying an Apple Ipad 9.7 while they are still only about $500 for the 128GB version!
9th Jan 2019
BRIX
One more nice thing about the Brix at the moment is that the Opera Web Browser has come up with a few surprises. I hadn’t used it in a long while, and I installed it yesterday out of cutiosity. Og all the browsers I have tried this year, it is the best of the lot when it comes to saving a web page as a PDF. Not only that, but it seems faster and smoother reading pdf files than any of the pdf readers.
The BRIX at 5th January 2019 Mint 19.1 Plasma 5.12.7
Plasma and GTK stuff – Dolphin (KDE File Manager and Konsole Terminal ABOVE
LibreOffice (GTK Office Suite) and Calendar App (KDE Panel Widget) BELOW
5th January 2019
BRIX
At last I have a fairly consistent theme to my GTK 2 and 3 programs and my Plasma programs. I have found a rather nice colour scheme for the Plasma stuff, but having things like DarkTable, Geeqie, GIMP and LibreOffice all looking different was honestly, quite horrible.
After years of not liking Breeze Dark, I still didn;t like it until as I wrote on New Year’s Day, I found Wonton Soup in the Colors section of Themes. Now that I am used to, and actually ‘like’ the dark theming, I played around with some of the GTK options. Now that Plasma has reached 5.12.7, the GTK themes are all nice and consistent, and there is in fact, a Breeze Dark for both of them.
Except that I don;t have the subtleties of Wonton Soup shading in GTK – I can now swap between Plasma and GTK programs and at least feel like I am in the one operating system.
Window Decoration is currently Arc OSX Dark Transparent, with Borders set to Huge (perfect on my 50 inch monitor) and my base Workspace Theme is ‘RossD-Mysty02’ a rather lovely collection of transparencies stolen from various places and saved as a theme.
I must learn how to back that theme up for future installs. Although at present it automatically shows on a new Plasma installation, from components that seem to be in /home somewhere.
The next post (ABOVE) shows how it looks at the moment:
3rd January 2019 PM
On the BRIX I have downloaded and installed Kubuntu 18.10, into SDA1 (where I had Mint 17.3 KDE) which gave me Plasma 5.13.5, then I installed the purge backports utility, purged the backport repos, and installed backports again.
Then I did an update and a dist-upgrade. Now I have Kubuntu 18.10 with Plasma 5.14 in SDA1 for testing. I have installed most of the software I like to use, but I still can;t get PIA VPN working (I did remember to install OpenVPN – so it is not that).
Anyway, I have the very latest Plasma to experiment with. I suppose it is like when I was running Mint 17.3 KDE and had various distributions installed in SDA7 where I could switch to them and test Plasma 5.
I have not been able to get xwinwrap running in Kubuntu 18.1 yet, and have not installed KIM into Dolphin. Everything else seems ok though and none of my normal packages seem broken by the dist-upgrade. Sometimes things like Chromium and LibreOffice think too much has changed and break themselves.
The Raspberry Pi update
I had a bit of a win with the Pi 3B+ tonight. With the Pi powered from the 2.4A port on the Aust Post adamper and the SSD for the Pi powered by the 1A port on the Aust Post adapter, I plugged a 3TB USB 3 hard drive into the splitter cable, with the Data line plugged into a USB 2 port on the Pi, and the power line UNPLUGGED. Ran a 1hr 30min 1080p video perfectly in great HD resolution in full screen KODI, with no sign of any low power warnings.
So I’m rather pleased with that result.
3rd January 2018
The PI 3B+
I booted the Pi 3B+ today to check what might have caused the problem yesterday. On boot I had a familiar looking error loop, so I switched power off and rearranged my power leads again. Back to 1 x 2.4A USB (for powering the Pi) in the Aust Post adapter and 1 x 1.2A USB to power the SSD) in the Laser adapter. I left the second Laser port free.
A reboot came up error free and everything worked fine, so I shut down and changed to:
1 x 2.4A USB to power the Pi and 1 x 1A USB to power the SSD – BOTH in the Aust Post (3.4A total) power adapter.
This booted and ran perfectly and I have been typing in LibreOffice and reading the news in Chromium without any sign of low power.
At the moment the Aist Post adapter is sending sufficient power from the 2.4A USB outlet to the Pi 3B+ to run it including powering the wireless keyboard donger, and enough from the 1A outlet to power the SSD.
I still have the extra Y-Splitter plugged into a 1.2A outlet on the Laser adapter to run a USB 3 HDD if I plug it in, but at some time I will have to see what happens if I try running an external drive from the Pi without a splitter.
The BRIX
I have enabled the Kubuntu backports repo and although ‘Cosmic’ 18.10 packages are supposed to be appearing by now, they are not. I am still getting ‘Bionic updates. I have done the PURGE of the backports PPA for Kubuntu, but to no avail. That leaves me without the new Plasma 5.13 or 5.14 yet, but Plasma 5.12.7 is working nicely.
I really should install something useful – perhaps the latest Kubuntu – into the partition where I still have Mint 17.3 KDE, since I have at last found a Plasme 5 that is running as well as KDE4 was.
January 1st 2019
The Pi did something strange yesterday after I had installed, then purged KDE and Plasma 5. It was an experiment out of curiosity, but it was very laggy, probably due to the small amount of RAM in the Pi. It was interesting to see that it did work though, and will be more interesting when the Pi eventually had more RAM.
The cursor locked up and nothing happened after that. I had to shut down using the power switch to the powerboard. Next time I boot it I’ll have to investigate.
The Brix now looks rather smart. I changed one of the Application Colour Scheme to ‘Wonton Soup’ (in System Settings > Colours) and tweaked those settings just a little.
It makes thngs like Dolphin look nice because the folders and thumbnails show up better against the darker background than against white. Other programs are similarly improved, especially with the way their menus and toolbar icons look.
27th December 2018
After yesterday’s update/upgrade, the niggly little things that were happening after I previously added the Kubuntu backports repo and did an update, seem to have settled. So it might have been that repo causing the drama.
One thing I can’t fix though, is that after a reboot, the Battery and Brightness indicator in the system tray shows ‘Enable Power Management’ with a tick. And that means if I forget to disable it manually, it logs out after inactivity.
I have Power Management turned OFF everywhere I can think of, but every time I start, or reboot, it is ON in the tray applet.
I’ll have to do some searching. Other than that, things are still excellent and the system is running at least as well as Mint 17.3 KDE.
26th December 2018
I just used update manager to take my Mint 19 XFPE from Mint 19 to Mint 19.1. I noticed something unusual in ksysguard. At the moment I have 8 tabs open in Chromium, plus ksysguard stuck to all Activities and kept on top. And I am typing this in LibreOffice. There are 232 processes running altogether at the moment. And Memory use is at 2.4GB, but CPU use is switching from a high usually about 6% (with occasional spikes to as high as 11% briefly) down to a low of 1% and various levels in between, depending on how much typing I am doing. When I am not typing it mostly just swaps between 1% and 2%. I’ve never seen it so low. This of course, is with Plasma 5 running (showing in Info Centre as Kubuntu 19.1).
I’m about to close a few tabs in Chromium and see what happens.
Ok, I clicked on each of the 7 tabs in turn and scrolled each, one at a time. CPU usage went up to 49% very briefly but as soon as I stopped doing stuff it stepped down in stages to 3% - 1% again. Interesting. Memory remained at 2.4GB. Now I’ll close some tabs. Closing 1 tab did nothing, but closing 2 tabs dropped RAM use to 2.4, then 2.2 GB. Closing another tab (5 are open now,) dropped it to 2.1, then eventually 2.0GB, then after a wait, back up to 2.1GB. I resized the ksysguard windo a little and RAM use went to 34% briefly, so screen paints seem to be responsible for some of the fluctuations.
Now I have all but the speed dial page (home) closed, and Memory use is static at 1.8GB with me still typing in LibreOffice. CPU % is still around 2% - 5%.
And closing Chromium dropped memory usage to about 936MB and CPU use mostly 1% to 4%.
So I’m pretty impressed !!
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 :-)
December 24 2018
Yesterday I added the Kubuntu backports repo to Mint 19 XFPE on the Brix then did an update and upgrade. It has slightly increased the amount of RAM being used by system resources, but if I am lucky it will upgrade Plasma from 5.12.7 to 5.13 as soon as it is ready for release to the Ubuntu repos. There were also a few cosmetic changes to theming, but overall things are still stable and fast.
Other than that, there;’s no real change to the Brix, and the Raspberry Pi continues to behave well except for the odd screen glitch, when it sometimes briefly switches off and on again when mofing the Pi case around. I have not been able to work out of it is a loose cable, or plug, or if it is power / board related.
Whatever it is, it is fleeting and involves no actual disruption at this point, unlike the problem that was happening with the screen going off and on and off etc. when the power supply was inadequate.
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.
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.
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