Notes
These notes are for Kubuntu 16.04 “Xenial”. They may also apply to Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” KDE version and to Debian.
One reason I’m doing this is because its really time for everyone to start moving to Linux. I understand that we are all accustomed to our non-free operating systems, but it is vital that we at least start acquainting ourselves with free software and make earnest attempts to use it for our daily activities.
While this may involve some sacrifice, such sacrifice is more than worth it. There’s no price that can be put on freedom. The direction that things are going with forced data collection, telemetry, tracking, and what often amounts to embedded malware makes it all the more critical that we take steps immediately to select freedom in our lives.
To use KDE Plasma you just install Kubuntu. Plasma will be the default desktop. Note that if you install either of these you also have the option of installing other desktops such as Gnome, Cinnamon, Xfce, and many others. Other Linux distros also provide an option to install KDE Plasma.
Conversely, if you’re using standard Ubuntu you can install the kubuntu-desktop meta package to get Plasma.
Setup Notes, Ideas, and Issues Related to Setting up a System Running Plasma:
Hard Drive
Active Protection
Enabling hard drive active protection – something that’s essential for laptops with spinning disk drives – is as simple as sudo apt-get install hdapsd and then sudo systemctl start hdapsd.service. More info can be found at archlinux.org’s site.
Hard Disk Power Management
Put a hard drive into standby: sudo hdparm -y /dev/sda
Check the power status: sudo hdparm -C /dev/sda
Set the standby timeout to 20 minutes: sudo hdparm -S 240 /dev/sda
Very nice graphical disk management utility: gnome-disk-utility
Connecting
Connecting to Windows/Samba Shared Drives
Make sure cifs-utils is installed. This page at wiki.samba.org has good information on how to mount a Samba share.
TODO: Setup some type of network-related script that will detect when the laptop is connected to a specific network and have it automatically mount the share. Have it unmount when disconnected from the network.
Too bad there doesn’t seem to be a configuration utility for this in Plasma 🙁
Connecting to other Linux systems
If you have already set up SSH pre-shared key login between Linux systems then you can quite easily connect to the other Linux system by entering the following in the address bar of Dolphin file browser:
fish://hostname
Seriously. Its that simple!
Graphics & Display
For an Nvidia graphics card I went to the Nvidia Driver Download site to lookup the Linux driver version for my Quadro 1000M graphics card, which as of this writing is listed as version 367.44.
I added the Ubuntu Graphics Drivers Team PPA and installed the driver:
sudo apt-get install nvidia-367 nvidia-settings bumblebee-nvidia primus mesa-utils
Then if you run the NVIDIA X Server Settings app it should list detailed information for the Nvidia card.
Read more about Bumblebee.
Fonts
The font installer under Plasma is as of this writing unfortunately buggy and crashes if you try to install system-wide fonts. However fonts can easily be copied directly into /usr/local/share/fonts/”x” where “x” is the first letter of the font name. So, for example, segoeui.ttf would go under /usr/local/share/fonts/s.
Make sure the permissions for fonts are set to 644. It is necessary to run the command fc-cache -fv to rebuild the font cache after manually installing fonts.
See the wiki.debian.org fonts page for more info.
Windows Key
Not having the Win key working is an annoyance. There’s a cool little Open Source utility called ksuperkey which enables the Win key in KDE Plasma to open the start menu.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mehanik/ksuperkey; sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install ksuperkey
Once installed it can be set to autostart in System Settings -> Startup and Shutdown -> Autostart. Due to bug I had to manually create the directory ~/.local/share/applications which is where Plasma apparently tries to store the config file.
Thinkpad Trackpoint configuration
The Trackpoint sensitivity can be set manually with the following:
echo -n 160 |sudo tee /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/sensitivity
128 is the default value and 248 is the maximum value for sensitivity. One laptop I had which seemed to have extremely low sensitivity actually just needed a replacement of the little red rubber Trackpoint cap.
There’s an excellent page at archlinux.org regarding the Trackpoint and Linux. Most importantly, it provides the following custom udev rule which can be used to set the Trackpoint sensitivity and enable the press-to-select function:
/etc/udev/rules.d/10-trackpoint.rules
ACTION==”add”, SUBSYSTEM==”input”, ATTR{name}==”TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint”, ATTR{device/sensitivity}=”160″, ATTR{device/press_to_select}=”0″
To enable press-to-select then change its value from “0” to “1” in the above code.
Sound
To deal with the audio volume from laptop speakers being too low there’s an excellent utility called PulseAudio Volume Control and can be installed with the command sudo apt-get install pavucontrol.
PulseAudio Volume Control actually lets you crank the speaker volume above 100% 🙂
I also installed VLC media player and in its settings under Effects and Filters under the Audio section you can set up custom eq, compressor, and spatializer settings which kind of mimic what you can do under Dolby Audio in Windows. After spending some time tweaking these settings I was able to get excellent sound quality from laptop speakers.
Themes/Look & Feel
With Plasma you get access to excellent commmunity-based themes directly from the configuration panels. There are desktop themes, icon themes, workspace themes, and color themes. These are a way to connect with the global community of digital artists who create and provide this free artwork.
Too much unfamiliarity at once with an interface can be overwhelming. If you want to install icons similar to those in Windows there is a Windows icon set available. Note that the official download link on that page is not working but someone posted a working download link in the comments. When you unzip the download it will create a Windows folder that then needs to be copied to /usr/share/icons.
Apps
Photoshop
Photoshop CC is listed with a “Gold” rating at WineHQ.org. See my page Install Photoshop and other Windows apps and games in Ubuntu for detailed info on installing Photoshop using the very latest Wine.
Dolphin File Manager
There are a few keyboard shortcut customizations that I use for Dolphin: show/hide menu: F9, show/hide toolbar: F8, create new folder: Shift-Ctrl-N (same as Windows File Explorer).
Gimp
Lifehacker.com has a good page How to Make GIMP Work More Like Photoshop which is very helpful.
7zip
Check out p7zip GUI for Linux which is a project someone did to enable 7zip context menus for Dolphin. This is truly excellent!
Foxit Reader
Foxit Reader is available for Linux although I still prefer Okular. You can get it here. If you run the install as root then it will install under /opt and the app will be available to all users.
One extremely annoying thing about Foxit is that if your screen is only displaying part of a page, which is actually normal on most screens like laptops, and you press Page Down, it doesn’t scroll to the remaining part of the page but rather scrolls to the next page, skipping the remainder of the page you had been on.
Another extremely annoying thing is that every time Foxit opens it asks if you want to create an account and setup this connected PDF thing which I never want.
With Okular I like to edit the keyboard shortcuts to be similar to Acrobat: “browse” which is the same as hand tool in Acrobat is the “h” key. “Select text” is “v”. Show menu is F9 and show toolbar is F8.
One thing I don’t like about Okular is that it won’t restore a previous session when it starts up, meaning if you had multiple documents open in tabs you have to re-open each one individually.
Skype
There’s now a 64-bit alpha version of Skype available. Up until now there was only a 32-bit version available which on 64-bit systems required a messy install of a bunch of 32-bit libs.
To install:
sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https curl; curl https://repo.skype.com/data/SKYPE-GPG-KEY | sudo apt-key add -; echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://repo.skype.com/deb stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/skypeforlinux.list; sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install skypeforlinux
Adobe AIR
Just read that Adobe AIR is also available now. Search and you will find.
Adobe Flash Player
News was also out this past week that the Flash Player NPAPI plugin for Firefox, for which development had ceased a few years ago, is being developed again.
Google Earth
Go to the Google Earth website and download the either the 64- or 32-bit .deb (For Debian/Ubuntu). Obviously 64-bit if you have a 64-bit system.
Then: sudo apt-get install lsb-core lsb-invalid-mta lsb-security; dpkg -i google-earth-stable_current_amd64.deb
This is the way to install it as of September 2016. There are a number of other sites with obsolete information.
Copying Your Data to Linux
Probably the two most essential applications with data that I need and use are Thunderbird for e-mail and calendaring, and Firefox for web-browsing. Unfortunately due to a bug in Firefox copying over a profile directory between Windows and Linux does not work. With Firefox its best to start fresh on a new Linux system and let Firefox’s sync feature copy over stuff.
For Thunderbird I found that it is possible to copy the profile folder between Windows and Linux and have it work although I cannot guarantee it.
Firefox and Thunderbird: Improve appearance
Customizing the appearance of the interface of Firefox and Thunderbird requires creating a userChrome.css file in the profile directory.
Here is what I do to improve the appearance of the interface of Firefox and make it look like it does with Windows:
sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer (installs Arial and some other fonts)
in userChrome.css I put:
/* Global UI font */
* { font-size: 12pt !important;
font-family: Arial !important;
}
/* Bookmark font */
#personal-bookmarks .bookmark-item menupopup * {
font-size:12pt !important;
}
/* Bookmark toolbar font */
.toolbarbutton-text {
font-size: 10pt !important;
}
/* Remove Live Bookmark icons */
.bookmark-item[livemark=”true”] > .toolbarbutton-icon {
display:none!important
}
/* Remove bookmark toolbar dropdown arrows */
#PersonalToolbar .toolbarbutton-menu-dropmarker {
display: none !important;
}
And for Thunderbird I use:
/* Global UI font */
* { font-size: 12pt !important;
font-family: Arial !important;
}
You may need to tweak the font sizes according to your display’s resolution.
There are also Firefox themes available which match some of the themes of Plasma including Breeze and Oxygen.
Bugs
In addition to the above mentioned serious bug with the Font Management utility, I found another very severe bug with KDEConnect which is a feature that enables a computer to connect with a mobile device and other computers and share information. It seems like an excellent idea however it caused complete crashing of the desktop session under both Kubuntu and Linux Mint. For this reason I recommend not using it and to be safe even completely uninstalling it with sudo apt-get remove kdeconnect kdeconnect-plasma.
Another serious bug was with KScreen which contains the modules to support multiple monitor support. Even on a laptop with only one screen it was constantly causing error messages in the system log “Primary output changed from…” I also noticed a few times that suddenly the frames around application windows on the desktop would just suddenly disappear making it impossible to move, minimize, or close windows and causing a failure of the desktop session. Not sure how or whether there was another way to remedy the issue I simply uninstalled it with sudo apt-get remove kscreen which resulted in the errors no longer occurring.
I recommend keeping a close eye on your system, especially after installing the system, to make sure everything is behaving well. You can do that by tailing the system log: sudo tail -f /var/log/syslog. Its normal to see occasional messages in there, but keep an eye out for things spewing out a lot of warning or error messages.
Thoughts and Conclusions
So I’m using Plamsa right now writing this and the amazing thing is that I’m actually starting to forget that I’m using Linux. The system is essentially so close to what I’m used to (with Windows) that I don’t even notice a big difference.
There are so many things that are truly excellent about using free software and Linux. I love the fact that there is built-in access to literally thousands of free software packages that can be installed effortlessly via either command-line or graphical package managers. I love that virtually all the software is truly free and Open Source, developed by people with the noblest intentions, and that I don’t have to worry about garbage-y “app spam” which is what you get in the crappy app “stores” in Android (and I’m guessing probably also with Apple).
References & Notes
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