Tag: KDE

Review of freshly installed Fedora 36 KDE Plasma Desktop part 2 – System Settings

This is the part 2 of the Fedora 36 KDE Plasma Desktop review – Review of freshly installed Fedora 36 KDE Plasma Desktop (KDE GUI)
In part 2 the only the System Settings of KDE Plasma are presented – the central place to configure and tweak the KDE Plasma – the graphical desktop environment with customizable layouts and panels, virtual desktops and sophisticated widgets. Some of the settings require administrative account and whenever it is required the Plasma platform shows a authentication dialog to escalate privileges.
It worth mentioning the KDE Platform versions in Fedora 36:

  • KDE Plasma version: 5.24.3
  • KDE Frameworks version: 5.91.0
  • QT version: 5.15.3

The System Settings reflects the above versions and the functionality they incorporate.
The main components are:

  • Appearance
  • Workspace
    • Workspace Behavior
    • Windows Management
    • Shortcuts
    • Startup and Shutdown
    • Search
  • Personalization
    • Notifications
    • Users
    • Reginal Settings
    • Accessibility
    • Applications
    • KDE Wallet
    • Online Accounts
    • User Feedback
  • Network
    • Connections
    • Settings
  • Hardware
    • Input Devices
    • Display and Monitor
    • Audio
    • Power Management
    • Bluetooth
    • Color Corrections
    • KDE Connect
    • Printers
    • Removable Storage
    • Thunderbolt
  • System Administration
    • About this System
    • software Update

System Settings may alse be started from the console with

myuser@mydesktop ~ $ systemsettings

Here are the System Setting screenshots:

SCREENSHOT 1) Click on System Settings to launch the “System Settings” program. View and edit KDE and some Linux system settings.

main menu
Main Menu – Favorites

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Review of freshly installed Fedora 36 KDE Plasma Desktop (KDE GUI)

After the tutorial of how to install Fedora 36 KDE Plasma Desktop this tutorial is mainly to see what to expect from a freshly installed Fedora 36 KDE Plasma Desktop – the look and feel of the new KDE GUI (version 5.24.3 of KDE Plasma). The Fedora 36 KDE Plasma Desktop is part of Fedora spins – https://spins.fedoraproject.org/kde/
Here you can find how to Install Fedora 36 KDE Plasma Desktop (KDE GUI). Here it worth mentioning the included versions of KDE software for Fedora 36:

  • KDE Plasma version: 5.24.3
  • KDE Frameworks version: 5.91.0
  • QT version: 5.15.3

The idea of this article is just to see what to expect from Fedora 36 KDE Plasma – the look and feel of the GUI, the default installed programs and their look and how to do some basic steps with them, it is included also screenshots of the KDE settings program. Here you’ll find more than 200 screenshots and not so many texts we do not want to turn this review of many texts and version information and 3 meaningless screenshots, which you could not see anything for the user interface because these days it is the primary goal of a Desktop system. You can expect more of this kind of review in the future.
This article is the first part of reviewing the Fedora 36 KDE Plasma. The second article contains KDE System Settings screenshots and it is coming soon.

Summary of the screenshots

  • Logging
  • KDE Plasma Overview with Panel Toolbox
  • Fedora KDE main menu
  • Plasma Widgets
  • Activities
  • Install/Update applications with Discover
  • Install applications with dnfdragora
  • review of multiple installed GUI applications and games.
  • Dolphin – the KDE File Manager

Fedora 36 KDE Plasma screenshots

SCREENSHOT 1) Fedora (5.17.5-300.fc36.x86_64) 36 (KDE Plasma)

main menu
grub entry boot

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Change file association in KDE Plasma (5.24) – open PNG with different default application

Changing the default file association in modern KDE Plasma Desktop under any Linux Distribution is pretty easy. Here are couple of screenshots how easy is to change the default file association to open a PNG file with different application. Sometimes the default application to open a file may not be convenient for the user or just the Linux Distribution did not change it when installing a new application.
For example, in the sample workstation, the PNG file is meant to be open with the KDE KolourPaint, which is good for simple image manipulation, but not to view multiple images in a series.

SCREENSHOT 1) Launch KDE Plasma System Settings

main menu
Application Launcher Settings System Settings

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xdg and autostart in Linux X server regardless the desktop environment

There is a tool xdg, which manages application integration with the different GUI Desktops in the Linux world. One of the features it offers is to autostart an application when the X window system starts and it is perfectly normal to have a bunch of running programs that cannot be found in the Windowing manager settings like KDE System Settings -> Autostart, GNOME Tweak tool and Autostart and so on.

xdg offers autostart of Linux appilcations mainly Desktop when the GUI windowing system starts

There two main paths to look for entries to autostart:

  1. /etc/xdg/autostart – called system-wide and most of the application will place files when they are installed.
  2. [user’s home]/.config/autostart – user’s applications to start when the user logs in .

With xdg autostart feature the user can explain himself why the Windowing systems like KDE or GNOME start tens of applications (not exactly related to the base GUI windowing system).

There is a security problem here, which is sometimes installing a package will place an autostart file there because the maintainer decided it is important but the package might be just a dependency and the next time the user logs in unwanted program might execute and open ports!

For example, Rygel is an open-source UPnP/DLNA MediaServer and it might be installed as a dependency but it places an autostart file, which starts a UPnP/DLNA server and exports the /home/[user’s directory]/Videos, /home/[user’s directory]/Pictures and more to the local network. Another example is with the GNOME index system tracker and the tracker-store, which may easily eat the RAM, disk, CPU, battery on a system without GNOME but with a different GUI!

Here is what a typical Ubuntu 18.04 system might autostart

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Review of freshly installed Fedora 31 KDE Plasma Desktop (KDE GUI)

After the tutorial of Install Fedora 31 KDE Plasma Desktop this tutorial is mainly to see what to expect from a freshly installed Fedora 31 KDE Plasma Desktop – the look and feel of the new KDE GUI (version 5.13.5 of KDE Plasma).
Here you can find how to Install Fedora 31 KDE Plasma Desktop (KDE GUI). Here it worth mentioning the included versions of KDE software for Fedora 31:
The Fedora 29 KDE Plasma Desktop comes with

  • KDE Plasma version: 5.16.5
  • KDE Frameworks version: 5.61.0
  • QT version: 5.12.5

The idea of this tutorial is just to see what to expect from Fedora 31 KDE Plasma – the look and feel of the GUI, the default installed programs and their look and how to do some basic steps with them, it is included also screenshots of the KDE settings program. Here you’ll find more than 200 screenshots and not so many texts we do not want to turn this review of many texts and version information and 3 meaningless screenshots, which you could not see anything for the user interface because these days it is the primary goal of a Desktop system. You can expect more of this kind of review in the future.
It may be interesting to compare with the Fedora 29 review – Review of freshly installed Fedora 29 KDE Plasma Desktop (KDE GUI)

SCREENSHOT 1) Fedora (5.3.7-301.fc31.x86_64) 31 (Thirty One)

main menu
grub entry boot

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Install Fedora 31 KDE Plasma Desktop (KDE GUI)

This tutorial will show you the simple steps of installing a modern Linux Distribution Fedora 31 KDE Plasma Desktop with KDE for the user graphical interface. First, we present the basic steps for installing the Operating system in addition to your present operating systems (here we have two: Windows 10) and then you can see some screenshots of the installed system and the look and feel of it. We have another tutorial showing more screenshots of the installed and working Fedora 31 (Gnome and KDE plasma) – so you can decide which of them to try first – coming soon.

The Fedora 31 KDE Plasma Desktop comes with

  • Xorg X server – 1.20.5 XWayland is used by default
  • linux kernel – 5.3.7
  • KDE Plasma version: 5.16.5
  • KDE Frameworks version: 5.61.0
  • QT version: 5.12.5

The installation process is very similar to the old Install Fedora 27 KDE Plasma Desktop and Install Fedora 29 KDE Plasma Desktop (KDE GUI). Our system is relatively new – Asus X399 with AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and NVIDIA 1080 TI and the setup loaded successfully and there were no problems till the end.

We used the following ISO for the installation process:

https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/31/Spins/x86_64/iso/Fedora-KDE-Live-x86_64-31-1.9.iso

It is a LIVE image so you can try it before installing it. The easiest way is just to download the image and burn it to a DVD disk and then follow the installation below:

SCREENSHOT 1) Here is our “UEFI BIOS->Boot->Boot Override” and in most modern motherboard you can choose to override the default boot devices.

Choose the “UEFI: HL-DT-STDVDRAM…” to boot and install Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 31 with UEFI support. You should do this, because most of the new hardware like video cards would not work properly without beeing in UEFI mode.

main menu
Boot from DVD/USB Installation

Keep on reading!

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Gentoo kde-frameworks/kdewebkit failed compilation with Qt5WebKit could not be found because dependency is required

Updating the KDE Plasma Desktop in our Gentoo workstations this time failed with 

CMake Error at /usr/share/cmake/Modules/CMakeFindDependencyMacro.cmake:48 (find_package):
  Found package configuration file:

    /usr/lib64/cmake/Qt5WebKit/Qt5WebKitConfig.cmake

  but it set Qt5WebKit_FOUND to FALSE so package "Qt5WebKit" is considered to
  be NOT FOUND.  Reason given by package:

  Qt5WebKit could not be found because dependency is required to have exact
  version 5.11.x.

It was strange because the previous emerge included the QT upgrade from old 5.11.2 to 5.12.1 and this dependency should have been resolved properly before:

emerge -vau $(qlist -IC|grep dev-qt|sort|uniq)

But apparently despite that the emerge built all QT libraries in dependency order the “dev-qt/qtwebkit” was built against the old QT libraries. And this is what is saying the above error!

The solution is really simple just rebuild the dev-qt/qtwebkit

root@srv ~ # emerge -va dev-qt/qtwebkit

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild   R    ] dev-qt/qtwebkit-5.212.0_pre20180120:5/5.212::gentoo  USE="X geolocation hyphen jit multimedia opengl printsupport qml -gles2 -gstreamer -nsplugin 
-orientation -webp" 0 KiB

Total: 1 package (1 reinstall), Size of downloads: 0 KiB

Would you like to merge these packages? [Yes/No] yes

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Review of freshly installed Fedora 29 KDE Plasma Desktop (KDE GUI)

After the tutorial of Install Fedora 29 KDE Plasma Desktop this tutorial is mainly to see what to expect from a freshly installed Fedora 29 KDE Plasma Desktop – the look and feel of the new KDE GUI (version 5.13.5 of KDE Plasma).
Here you can find how to Install Fedora 29 KDE Plasma Desktop. Here it worth mentioning the included versions of KDE software for Fedora 29:
The Fedora 29 KDE Plasma Desktop comes with

  • KDE Plasma version: 5.13.5
  • KDE Frameworks version: 5.50.0
  • QT version: 5.11.1

The idea of this tutorial is just to see what to expect from Fedora 29 KDE Plasma – the look and feel of the GUI, the default installed programs and their look and how to do some basic steps with them, it is included also screenshots of the KDE settings program. Here you’ll find more than 140 screenshots and not so many texts we do not want to turn this review of many texts and version information and 3 meaningless screenshots, which you cannot see anything for the user interface because these days is the primary goal of a Desktop system. You can expect more of this kind of reviews in the future…

SCREENSHOT 1) Grub2 – Fedora 29 is selected by default.

The other Operating systems are Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

main menu
Grub2 – Fedora 29 selected

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Install Fedora 29 KDE Plasma Desktop (KDE GUI)

This tutorial will show you the simple steps of installing a modern Linux Distribution Fedora 29 KDE Plasma Desktop with KDE for the user graphical interface. First we present the basic steps for installing the Operating system in addition to your present operating systems (here we have two: Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16) and then you can see some screenshots of the installed system and the look and feel of it. We have another tutorials showing more screenshots of the installed and working Fedora 29 (Gnome and KDE plasma) – so you can decide which of them to try first – coming soon.

The Fedora 29 KDE Plasma Desktop comes with

  • Xorg X server – 1.20.1
  • linux kernel – 4.18.16
  • KDE Plasma version: 5.13.5
  • KDE Frameworks version: 5.50.0
  • QT version: 5.11.1

The installation process is very similar to the old Install Fedora 27 KDE Plasma Desktop. Our system was pretty new – Asus X399 with AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and NVIDIA 1080 TI and the setup loaded successfully and there were no problems till the end.

We used the following ISO for the installation process:

https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/29/Spins/x86_64/iso/Fedora-KDE-Live-x86_64-29-1.2.iso

It is a LIVE image so you can try it before installing. The easiest way is just to download the image and burn it to a DVD disk and then follow the installation below:

SCREENSHOT 1) Here is our “UEFI BIOS->Boot->Boot Override” and in most modern motherboard you can choose to override the default boot devices.

Choose the “UEFI: HL-DT-STDVDRAM…” to boot and install Fedora KDE 29 with UEFI support. You should do this, because most of the new hardware like video cards would not work properly without beeing in UEFI mode.

main menu
Boot from DVD/USB Installation

Keep on reading!

Pages: Page 1, Page 2, Page 3

Gentoo update tips when updating packages with blocks and masked files

It’s not so rear to have

blocks or masked files

when using Gentoo emerge system, but it is not complex and in most cases it is easy to resolve

To summarize it up at the beginning and then we are going to show you other articles using these advises here where you’ll see what are the steps we took to resolve the conflicts and masked packages:

  • Use verbose,verbose-conflicts and backtrack with emerge
  • Remove only big GUI packages, which have really big dependency graph like office suites or development IDEs
  • Remove obsolete packages – you do not need them, they can just make problems when updating, because emerge will take into consideration their requirements and dependencies and your update could be impossible!
  • Do not update everything with one line, you could update only the base libraries like QT, which are very important for the Linux GUI in general
  • Include explicitly packages, which block our updates in the emerge line! You could specify packages with the versions.
  • use tools like “equery” (part of app-portage/gentoolkit) for checking dependencies and/or which packages depend on the queried package. You can use it with specific version for the package. “qlist” (part of app-portage/portage-utils) also is a handful tool.
  • Sometimes when updating a group or a package with big dependency graph it is much easier to drop the -“u” update argument and to rebuild some packages with the updates.
  • In rear cases you can use “–nodeps” when updating or installing a new package (we do not need and show this one here!)
  • Do NOT rebuild the entire system with “emerge -v world” every time when you rebuild glibc, gcc, it is not mandatory to do it to have a healthy system.
  • Add or remove USE flags if needed – emerge will show you information about it. Use package.use, package.mask, package.unmask and so on.
  • use qlist to update/re(build) to pull currently installed packages with some name or category (categories) 
    emerge -v $(qlist -IC|grep <NAME>)

    and for update just add “u” to “-v”:

    emerge -vu $(qlist -IC|grep <NAME>)

Keep on reading!