Linux Mint KDE is Dead. Plasma 5 killed it.

One of the things I have enjoyed about Linux since I got my first copy on 3.5 inch Floppy Disk is that it can be configured to suit almost anybody's taste.  And my favourite desktop environment is KDE because it has always allowed me a wonderful flexibility in configuring my desktop to suit my work habits.

One of the greatest features of Linux has been the ability to have multiple work spaces (desktops), something that is beginning to find its way into Windows after about 20 years.  It is like having a collection of monitors on a single computer, so it is easy to have different desktops for separate tasks.   Something the KDE 'Plasma' desktop management has allowed us to do is have a different desktop wallpaper on each work space.  Not only that, but on different work spaces on different monitors.

That might sound a little like overkill, but having different wallpapers means I can tell at a glance which work space I am on by simply looking at the wallpaper.  Or I could until today!

I installed the latest Mint 18 KDE which uses Plasma 5.  And discovered that it is broken.  Not only is Plasma 5 broken, but the development team do not plan to fix the most important problem.  This is not a Mint team problem, it is a KDE Plasma problem.  So many things were wrong with Plasma 5 when I booted after the installation that I was shocked.  For a start, the interface is ugly.  Secondly it didn't work properly on my two monitor system.  And it will not allow me to set a separate work space wallpaper.  The drop down menu would not allow me to resize it, something that is simple to do in KDE 4.x.

A little hunting around on Google shows that people have been pleading with the team developing Plasma 5 to fix this issue and that the team has put it in the too hard basket.  They have simply broken something that worked perfectly and given us junk.  And not only junk.  It is ugly junk!

So if you currently use Mint 17.x KDE and are thinking about the move to Mint 18 KDE, all I can suggest is DON'T.

Download the Mint 18 Sarah KDE ISO, make a bootable USB and run it from there while you check out all the horrible new failures.  Try simple things like making a separate wallpaper on each desktop.  Check the ghastly things it can do to your fonts and menu system.  And look at the ugly window decorations.  If you use Activities, try switching activities on the activity pager and see if your monitors flicker like crazy.

If you are very lucky and the basics work, you'l just be missing the nice useful things like different wallpapers.  Despite the Plasma team saying they will not fix the broken wallpaper problem, there's a possibility they might eventually.  If they don;t - well - it simply means KDE as we know it, it dead...

ImageMagick collages

One of my pet projects is combining bash scripts with some graphic masks to create these using Imagemagick.

Linux Mint Ubuntu FB Messenger App

Sometimes all I need is an easier way to type in Facebook Messenger than to use my phone.  If I am on the computer I can open my Facebook page, but then I am distracted by all the stuff happening there.  And there doesn;t seem to be a decent Facebook Messenger App for the LINUX desktop that actually works.

The simple way around it is to open www.messenger.com in a browser, then tear off the tab and move it to another desktop.  But I found another option that suits me better.

Most of us have a few browsers installed.  And I sometimes have a standalone browser that can be run from a folder.  Something light and quick.  Something like https://www.palemoon.org/

What I did was downloaded palemoon, opened www.messenger.com, logged in and set that to my home page.

Then as I am in Mint KDE, I resized the window and positioned it where I want it, then right clicked the Title Bar and chose  More Actions > Special Application Settings.

In there I checked the boxes for Position and Size and set both to 'Apply Initially'.
A few other tweaks in 'VIEW' got rid of the various tool bars and the status bar, making a nice clean Facebook Messenger App with very little effort.

And I should be able to just copy my PaleMoon folder to another computer and it 'Should' be ready to use there also.

Last, I dragged the    palemoon.bin file from the folder created when I extracted the Palemoon download file to my panel and changed the settings to show the FB Messenger Icon.

Somtething I noticed is that I am getting the message notification sounds even if this is on another work space.  So that's nice.

Now when I click the icon it already has my login details saved and is the size, shape and position I want.   And it does not interfere with my normal browsers!  Obviously I blurred the details.  But this is how it looks.

A little follow up.  The palemoon Messenger thing is working great.   It is the best way I have found to use FaceBook Messenger on a Linux desktop.  All notifications and stickers are working and it is actually better to use than using messenger on my phone or tables and far better than trying to use it inside my FB page.

I think I discovered the reason some of the FB Messenger Apps for Linux Desktop haven't been working.  I followed some basic python instructions to make a very simple App using Python 3 and Qt5.  And there was a package I needed that was not included in PyQt5 by default.

I ended up writing a simple browser to do the same thing as the PaleMoon idea above using PyQt5, and it worked more or less, but without sound notifications and every now and again it simply locked.  I couldn't find the missing libraries for this App either, which on my Mint 17 KDE simply hangs,  https://messengerfordesktop.com/ 

So for now, the solution above is simple, works really well and seems pretty well bulletproof.

I will do a few simple tweaks and update.  I can't see any reason PaleMoon can't be used to provide an up to date Skype interface too.

UPDATE !!!
I found another couple of advantages to using PaleMoon to run as as FaceBook Messenger App.
The most important one is that it is possible to use CTRL + and CTRL -  or CTRL and mousewheel to scroll the size of the messenger.  Not a big deal unless as I am right now, you are using the TV across the room as a computer monitor.

Slimjet Browser and Searching GOOGLE with No Personalized results

One of the problems with designing websites for people has always been getting their pages to rank well on search engines.  After 35 years of creating web sites I've mostly got that figured out.

But it is still necessary to test the pages we design to see how well they are listing.  And the most popular search engine is still Google.  And Google has a design feature which uses your past searches to optimize your current search.

Now, the easiest ways to stop this are probably to log out of Google  each time I want to test and search from there, or to go into Private Mode on my browser.

Another way is to add a new browser in settings and make sure the drop down box for search engines is enabled,  There's a neat little piece of code that can be added to the end of the URL to turn off Personalized Search Results.

http://www.google.com/search?pws=0&q=%s

Now, I use Flashpeak Slimjet as my default browser, and I make use of Speed Dial a lot in various browsers.
Simply entering the above URL in any Speed Dial in any browser will allow me to immediately open a Google Search page with the Personalized results turned OFF.

That means my results should be based on a 'clean' search with no bias towards my previous search history.

Mint KDE sequential desktop wallpaper

One of the nice things about KDE is that it has some neat functions built in, and one of the best is the ability to set a different image on each desktop and if you want, each activity.

Among the options is a desktop slideshow.  Not that is a nice touch, but the KDE developers hard coded the slideshow to show images form any selected folder only in RANDOM order.  And not all of us want a random slideshow.

Fortunately there is a way to get a sequential slideshow happening and the way to get around this is shown at:
http://peterlevi.com/variety/2014/05/variety-and-kde/

NOTE !!!
This method is ONLY needed if you DO NOT want random images.
KDE Default Desktop Settings and choose 'Slideshow' works perfectly for random images.  No need to do all this stuff.

I take photos and often want to show a sequence of zoom shots, so I use the method below.

So the basics are Install variety:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:peterlevi/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install variety variety-slideshow

Then run variety and set your preferences.  I just added the folders I want to use and turned off a lot of background downloads I don't want.  And I set the timer on the slideshow.

I made sure I have it set to start variety when the computer starts.

Once that is done, open your 'Default Desktop Settings' and choose:
Wallpaper > Image
Then choose Add Folder, and browse to:
Pictures > variety-wallpaper

click on the image in that folder.  It will be called something like:
wallpaper-kde.jpg  but will have a number in it.

Click OPEN, then click OK

It 'should' be working now.

After that, to change the images shown, open variety and change the folder you are using there.

NOTE !!!
You can still use Default Desktop Settings to go back to a normal single image at any time.  To get back to your slideshow just open the wallpaper-kde-xxx.jpg again using the steps above.

Of course, this will leave variety running all the time even when you are not actually 'showing' the slideshow.

I'll have to look at how variety can be switched on and off at will and add that here.

UPDATE
Two things I discovered.
When I restart my computer KDE will default to a generic single image wallpaper.  I must restart variety and go through the image selection steps for each session.

Variety can be started and stopped using terminal commands:

variety      

Entered on its own will start it - then I select the image as described above.

killall variety

Will stop it, and should leave the last used image, but might return to a default wallpaper image.

Mouse Right Click context menu delay in browser in Mint 17.3 KDE

Recently I noticed that when I tried to right click on  something and use the pop up  menu some odd things were happening.

1 - The menu would not appear until I moved the mouse cursor into the area where the menu should appear.
2 - Once the menu did appear, some menu items did not show the hover selector as the mouse was moved over them
3 - If I held the Right mouse button and moved the mouse, a coloured line (green) was drawn a couple of inches away from the position of the cursor.

But it did not happen all the time.  There seemed to be a random element to it.

I tried a few Google searches using different combinations of words, but got all sorts of other things that were nothing to do with the problem.  Then I realised it was only happening in my Slimjet and some other Chrome based browsers  but not in Firefox or Cyberfox.

I looked at the settings in my computers and found that on one of them I had a setting configured in two browsers that was not configured in the other computer.

In my Slimjet browser I opened Settings then scrolled almost to the bottom and found System.
There are two 'Checkbox' items there.  The second one is 'Use hardware acceleration when available'.
It was not checked on the computer that was behaving well, but it was checked on the problem computer.
I unchecked it, restarted the browser and everything is now perfect.

I have no idea how or why I had enabled hardware acceleration in a browser - but I am writing it here so when I do something that dumb again I will find it easily using Google  :-)

Chromium was fixed more or less the same way and I suppose this should work for most Chrome based browsers.

It is nice to have a fully working context menu again with no lag.  It is possible turning on Hardware Acceleration on some graphics card setting could cause a similar problem, but this fixed the browser menu problem and the whole browser is responding better.

Synaptic and others - Font Size in KDE

Something I had forgotten about is that opening some non KDE programs in a KDE desktop leaves me with tiny fonts that don't seem to respond to changes in 'Fonts' in the KDE Settings menu.

One of the most used programs where this is annoying is Synaptic Package Manager and there are numerous threads about it, not one of which provided a solution that worked.

The problem is most annoying on a High Resolution display so here's what I did for my own screen.

MENU > System Settings > Application Appearance >
then:
Style > QtCurve  (This was suggested as a fix but didn't work on its own.  There's nothing about Fonts in its Configuration option.

Fonts > Force DPI: 150  (96 is the default)
So now this makes all my KDE stuff too big and I choose 'Adjust All Fonts', > Size > and pick something smaller.

Pick a size and check some KDE programs and see the font sizes, then open Synaptic and LibreOffice and check them.

It comes down to a balancing act because LibreOffice and Synaptic use a slightly different method to display.

So far this has been the ONLY simple way I have found to balance the appearance between KDE and soem Non-KDE Programs.

Slimjet Browser won't run - Segmentation Fault

The two web browsers I use most are FlashPeak-Slimjet http://www.slimjet.com/en/dlpage.php  (based on Chromium)
and Cyberfox (based on Mozilla).

I use those because they are much faster and better featured for my purposes than Chrome or Firefox, but once in a while they can do strange things,  Like many things in Linux though, the solution is sometimes very simple.

Today Slimjet refused to boot,  When I tried opening it from a terminal it came back with a 'segmentation fault'.  That usually means a corruption in the configuration, and as it happened, the last thing I did before it died was write some weird changes to the program.  But it can happen sometimes when you just change the wrong thing in settings.

The fix in this case was just to rename the 'slimjet' folder in the hidden '.config' folder in my home directory.  I called it 'slimjet-old'  then I tried starting slimjet again.  It ran, and when it ran, it created a new folder in /.config called 'slimjet'.

I opened the 'slimjet' folder and the 'slimjet-old' folder, then copied the folder called 'Default' from the 'slimjet-old' folder to the new 'slimjet' one.

Doing that restored things like my speed dial and bookmarks.

System on Chip Computing at home

I'm an oldie.  I'm also lucky that i was exposed to computers in my working life around 45 years ago and began writing some programs for large companies in 1976.  While I was never particularly interested in computers for fun, since I have left the industry i am beginning to actually enjoy the things.  And one of the things I now appreciate is the changes I have seen.

In 1980 I still had a TRS80 computer next to my bed, so that when I woke in the middle of the night with the solution to a programming problem floating around in my dreams I could immediately get it onto disk.

That was then.  Now we have mobile phones with more power than any of the computers I used.  And I had the luxury of returning to a UNIX derivative for my every day computing in 1998, after years of putting up with things like Microsoft systems, which have never really worked.  I'm still waiting for Microsoft to create a multi-tasking operating system.  They had it when they were in a joint venture with IBM working on OS/2, but dumped multi-tasking for some reason and brought out Windows 95.

The thing that has annoyed me a lot though is desktop computing.  I have no need of super powered computers for my work.  My requirements are a large display, another display because I like working with two screens, decent storage and enough power to render videos in a sensible time.  And although I don't play games on the computer I do use it for watching video and playing music.

Quite a while ago I began messing with System on Chip computing, outside of tablets and phones.  Initially I played with the PcDuino, but while it had some great innovations there was no library that allowed direct access to the power of the onboard graphics.

Then my son introduced me to the Raspberry Pi.  The Pi fails against the PcDuino with regard to NAND memory and Flash RAM (the Pi 3 now has 1GB of RAM on board but no NAND and does almost everything from the microSD card).  But what it does have is something called OMXplayer.

OMXplayer directly accesses the hardware decoding on board graphics chip of the Pi and allows beautiful smooth HD video at 720p and 'pseudo' 1080p or better.  Something that is just not possible on these small SOC machines using software decoding.

Within the limits imposed on the Raspberry Pi 3B by the small amount of RAM and running the entire system from a micro SD card, it is rather a powerful little computer.  While rendering a video is not great, it can be done on small videos.  It just takes some time and you need to set up a decent swap file first.

But day to day work like using the web, office programs, processing images in imagemagick, editing pictures using GIMP.  These sorts of things all work well and quickly.

And arguably the best use for the raspberry Pi around the home is plugged into a decent TV and stereo, then used to either play multimedia content from an eternal drive or streaming content from the net.  KODI is perfect for this, especially once you learn how to use KODI plug ins.

Back to the desktop.  There is a new generation of desktop computers appearing based on the System On Chip model.  These are more powerful than things like the raspberry Pi and are built with a different purpose in mind.

One that comes to mind is the Mac Mini, which when I saw one, wasn't quite as mini as I had thought.  It looks about 30mm high and about 200mm each side.  But the idea is right.  My last two desktop computers were about 300mm wide by about 400mm deep and 100mm high.  The mac Mini made them look huge.  I looked at it as a possible replacement for my now ageing Compaq.

But among my requirements a couple of things stand out.  Lots of USB 3.0 ports, and the ability to run two displays.  Also I need to move up from 4GB RAM to 8GB RAM.  I do a lot of graphics and I need to have pluggable storage more than I need large internal storage.  As a former technician I also do a lot of parts replacement.  The Mac doesn;t really allow that.  And the Mac is relatively expensive.  I always have a maximum budget of between $350 and $400 for a replacement computer each three years.  This year I stretched it to over four years and with increased software requirements I'm pushing the limits.

So there I was wondering what to do net when I discovered the Gigabyte BRIX.  For years I used Gigabyte main boards and other components to either build or repair customers' computers.  Now I found a box about the height of the Mac Mini, with similar specs, and only a little more than 100mm by 100mm and about 35mm high.

It not only has outputs for two displays and a 64 bit Celeron quad core processor, but it has 8GB RAM.  And to top it off, there are four USB 3.0 ports.  Something I could not find anywhere on desktop computers under $700.  Plus it has built in Wireleless and Bluetooth and Gigabit Ethernet.  so just about everything I needed in one compact box.

The Celeron processor is only the 1.6GHz model, but it runs up to 2.08GHz when needed.  And it is only $364 including delivery.

Gigabyte Brix BACE-3150 and Mint KDE

I work my computers pretty hard and after about three years I usually find something is dying. If it isn't the hard disk or DVD drive it's generally something else that has finally worn out. My current Compaq 1040 is more than four years old and has been a problem for quite a while. I'm not well off any more and the budget limits me to between $300 - $400 Aussie dollars. I also find having a laptop on the desk and trying to use it with a dual monitor setup is a real pain – so when I could not put the inevitable off any more, I bought a low end Brix.

The first thing I noticed about the Gigabyte Brix BACE-3150 was that it felt heavier than I expected for such a small computer. The second thing was that, well, it is a small computer. At not much more than 100mm by 100mm square and about 50mm high it can be placed just about anywhere on a desk or a shelf.  It also comes with a bracket and screw to allow it to be mounted on the back of most LED television sets.

There are lots of unboxing videos and various reviews about the Brix on Youtube and on Google. They all give details about the number and type of ports and the specs of the processor. But my needs are specific.

I always buy low end processors. I don't play computer games. I browse the web, play music and music videos, write simple programs (usually BASH scripts), and do a lot of photo editing and a little video editing. Much of the last two are either from the command line or using scripts I have customised for my own requirements. And of course there's the usual hack work. I design some web sites for businesses and maintain some blogs and do the usual word processing and spreadsheeting. I also only buy cheap computers.

One of the first things I need in a computer is that it will easily run Linux. Currently for my distribution of choice I've returned to Mint KDE, so I unpacked the Brix, plugged in the power adapter, a HDMI TV and a USB stick with a bootable Mint 17.3 KDE, plus my wireless mouse and keyboard.

I turned it on and a few moments later I had a working copy of Mint KDE on my screen. I entered the password for the on board Wireless to connect to my Internet and everything worked. So I double clicked the install icon and manually partitioned the hard drive the way I like it.

It was about this time I remembered reading somewhere that a reviewer of one model of the Brix had some dramas getting the UEFI stuff in BIOS sorted. Sadly I didn;t have the chance to explore the BIOS and UEFI stuff. The Brix BACE-3150 just accepted Mint KDE and everything worked.

The only drivers I had to install were for my collection of Brother printers. Fortunately Brother has a special section for Linux drivers on their web site which is kept up to date. Mint KDE just found everything else. I had to install a few programs and extras that asre not in the standard installation but for most users even that would not be needed.

The Brix was replacing a Compaq 1040 with an AMD E-350 1.6GHz dual core processor with a 500GB hard drive and 4GB RAM. The Brix BACE 3150 has a quad core Celeron processor that idles at 1.6GHz but automatically runs up to 2.08GHz on demand. Mine was ordered with a 500GB hard drive but I ordered 8GB RAM because I noticed on the AMD 64 bit processor I was very often pushing the system into the top of the available 4GB and flowing over into swap.

With the Brix, the quad core seems to prevent that somehow. I have no idea why, but running the same tasks on the same OS distro and version I haven't even got above the first 4GB RAM.

Something that stands out immediately is video performance however, The AMD system has a far better graphics benchmark score than the Intel system in the Brix. But that is on paper. In reality running the high performance tests on the jellyfish video at various bitrates using both Smplayer and VLC the Brix was still playing smoothly when the AMD started the stop start motion thing.

Streaming HD movies in full screen on a 50 inch TV was perfect on the Brix in KODI and I would recommend KODI and a few add-ons for regular video sessions. Teaming the USB 3 ports on the Brix with USB 3 hard drives and memory sticks worked great too.

Youtube video always depends largely on how heavy the Internet traffic is at that time, but again running the Brix and the Compaq at the same time left the Brix ahead in this area too. I must admit I was using Flashpeak Slimjet as my browser on both computers and a wired connection to the router on the compaq, while the Brix had the advantage of its internal wireless to connect to the router.

In summing up. The Gigabyte Brix was on ebay for $364 including delivery from pclivecomputers in Oakleigh, Vic. They will sell you the basic barebones Brix so you can choose the processor you need and add the bits you want, or you can simply choose an option to suit your budget as I did.

I ordered on a weekend, there was a public holiday on the Monday, and I still got mine up here in Central Queensland on the following Monday. I suspect had I ordered it Monday morning it might have arrived by Friday.

A couple of weeks into living with the BRIX and there was one annoying problem. The thing doesn't shutdown. When choosing to shutdown, everything seems fine, then it simply reboots. It was not happening initially but after a Linux kernel update it started happening. A bit of googling shows it is not only me with this issue, although it is not clear if it is happening with all processor variations. At any rate, with the Brix BACE-3150 it is happening. Fdor now, the only solution is to be sure to hit the main power switch (at the adapter) as soon as everything seems to have shut off. Otherwise, the light on the Brix comes back on and it reboots.

It is not a huge issue, but it is annoying to have to remember. I have no idea if this happens on any Brix with Windows installed. I can live with it though because everything else so far about the Brix has been a positive experience.

!!!!   N O T E   !!!!    After a couple of Linux updates the shutdown problem seems to have taken a holiday.  Now when it is turned off, the Brix stays off.

Something I will mention on closing is that KODI under Linux Mint suffers the same shutdown problem as KODI under Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi.  If you choose exit, instead of dropping back to Linux, it just hangs the system, often at a black screen.  Choosing Exit often does the same.  So I find the best what to get out of KODI is to choose a reboot, then either work in Linux, or shutdown from Linux.

The other option is to go into KODI System > System and choose to run in Windowed mode, then close the KODI window.

Be sure though to swap KODI back into Full Screen mode while you are running video or it will not play smoothly.

GIMP Bucket Fill colours not changing

I had a problem that has cropped up occasionally before but I never bothered investigating.  I needed to make a multi coloured logo into an all white and an all black logo to be printed on dark and light shirts respectively (screened or DTG in white ink and black ink).

So I converted the logo into a white PNG with a transparent background.  The quickest way to do this is to use:
Image > Mode> Indexed.     That should convert the whole thing to black, then to get my white logo I just use Color> Invert.

But of course, I had to show what it would look like on a coloured background.

When I used the GIMP bucket Fill tool, and selected a nice blue background colour, the fill kept putting the default black BG colour into the transparent area.  Swapping to FG just filled the transparent area with the default white.  Nothing would make the tool fill with the blue I chose.

Then I remembered.  I was working in 'Indexed Mode' which is how I converted the coloured logo to pure white in the first place!

The fix was simple:

Image> Mode> RGB

Then the Bucket Fill tool allwed me to fill the transparent areas with Blue.

The most important NEW FEATURE for Raspberry Pi - backup your SD card

While I agree that the Raspberry Pi is basically a toy computer, that is only because of a few design limitations imposed by the builders sticking to the original low budget ideals.

The greatest of these is the lack of Flash memory and the lack of a swap partition somewhere fast.  Everything is done within the rather slow limits of a micro SD card.  And from time to time the Raspberry Pi will simply lose its ability to work due to corruption of the SD card.

The latest update of the Raspbian 'Jessie' operating system goes a long way to making that easier to live with.  Under Accessories in the Menu is an option called 'SD Card Copier'.

This tool is a little like the Linux 'dd' command, except that it is graphical and semi automatic.  All you need to do is insert a micro SD card in a suitable card reader in one of your USB ports, choose that card as the destination to write to and hit start.

It defaults to choosing an MMC (which generally implies an SD card) so as long as you don;t have another SD or micro SD card attached you are unlikely to make a mess.  The process takes as long as writing a disk image using dd, but you just leave the Pi to do it along and don;t touch anything until you see the job completed popup.

The wonderful thing about this is that I can install a heap of new Add Ons to KODI for example, then backup the whole thing to a spare card.  Or I can do an update or a dist-upgrade and backup to a spare card.  All your current settings including wallpaper, special changes to config files, everythign is mirrored to the copied card.  So if something goes wrong, all you lose is whatever you added or any documents and stuff since the last backup.

It takes away all the guesswork and the worry about possibly corrupting your micro SD card.