MX-21 KDE/plasma beta 2 feedback thread

[siamhie]

Installed b2 today but haven't played around with it too much. (wow does it ever boot fast compared to 19.4)

One thing I was delighted to see was Quickshot but it's not installed.

"Could not find the program '/usr/bin/mxfb-quickshot'"

I copied over the one from my Fluxbox install.

you'll want to install mxfb-accessories. (note to self, update mx-fluxbox metapackage).

Done. Now I can run my custom tint2 panel I created in Fluxbox that has shortcuts to various tools I use including the quickshot button.

[computerworm01001]

Hello all,I send all my love to dolphin_oracle, Adrian, SwampRabbit, and all the rest of the MX developers.

A good bug report is showing love :)

Hello, Adrian. I'm glad you see it that way, and thank you for reading and responding to my findings.

7. When using autologin, it logs in once, then after a few seconds logs out and logs in again. I found another post on this thread where an MX dev explained that X restarts because of a special MX fix for making the SDDM power buttons work in SysVinit, and that most people should barely see a flash. And when I login manually, I don't notice X restarting at all. I only see it when I use autologin.

I tried that multiple times, I can't replicate the issue. I think we removed the SDDM fix so that should not play a role. Do you have Beta2 or updated Beta1 to Beta2?

I installed directly from the beta2 iso, no upgrade.

8. Autologin doesn't work when laptop is not plugged in - computer goes to sleep before having a chance to login

That's another thing I don't see. Also seems like a bug in itself if the computer goes to sleep before the log in. Do you have a timezone issue on that computer? Is it set up on the wrong timezone or localtime?

I have my home time zone set in MX Date & Time, and my hardware clock is set in UTC mode. But I don't think it's a time issue, because when I say autologin isn't working, I'm referring to SDDM autologin, where SDDM logs you in on boot without you having to enter your password. I'm not referring to timed booting with rtcwake, although I do use that concurrently with SDDM autologin to record TV shows while I'm asleep. But rtcwake is working perfectly regardless of my laptop being attached to/detached from wall power, because every night I put my computer in S5, and when I wake up I find it in S3. So rtcwake did its job. It's SDDM that's dropping the ball. Or perhaps some kernel or other low-level power management that's goofing. Because as soon as I wake the computer from sleep by moving the mouse or the lid, SDDM immediately does autologin. And I have my Plasma power settings properly configured to make the machine stay awake, ignore lid closed, etc. So once I'm logged into Plasma, those settings should take over. The problem is making sure my computer gets all the way there without my intervention. For now, my solution is to keep the computer plugged in always. But I don't want to always do that because it wastes electricity to have it plugged in drawing power when I'm asleep.

10. This is not specifically a KDE bug, but it is an MX beta2 bug; I tried the new Job Scheduler app, and I got these strange errors when I attempted to save my crontab edits, and for the record, I double checked my crontab syntax, and there was nothing wrong with it, so I don't know why the errors are raised:

Might be a Job Scheduler issue, but I could not replicate this either, I successfully created a user task. Do you have errors only when you do root tasks? Also what's the string exactly?

I think I figured this out, and I don't think it's a bug after all. You see, when I wanted to use job scheduler to edit the root crontab, I had to use "mx-pkexec job-scheduler" in the terminal because there's no app menu entry for launching Job Scheduler as root. So I had a terminal open on the other side of my screen outputting messages from Job Scheduler in real time. I did it again today, observing more closely, and the message

Code: Select all

CronTime::CronTime Invalid Week Format: ""

outputs whenever I leave a field empty in the Time box, so that's just a normal behavior. Likewise , the message

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CronTime::CronTime Invalid Item count: #

(# is a placeholder for any number) merely denotes how many fields are currently empty in the Time box. And I think that

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CronTime::CronTime Invalid Minute Format: "*/"

just means that I haven't added a number after the slash yet. So I think that there is nothing wrong with the Job Scheduler

11. This may or may not tie in with the previous error, but the root crontab doesn't work. I know my syntax is correct because I entered the same commands in my personal user crontab (appending doas to the beginning, of course) and it works perfectly. So there's something wrong with the root crontab, and I don't know what it is.

Just tried, switched to root in Job Scheduler added the command to execute every other minute (a test command) saved, and the command executed without issue, again, what is the command?

However, the root crontab is definitely malfunctioning, and it doesn't matter what commands I enter. Ones I've tried include rtcwake, pm-suspend, fstrim, and they don't function under root crontab. They function perfectly under my user crontab (with doas tacked on front). Something else changed about it today that I find odd. Just yesterday when I was editing the root crontab in the terminal, the crontab file looked like this:

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# Edit this file to introduce tasks to be run by cron.
# 
# Each task to run has to be defined through a single line
# indicating with different fields when the task will be run
# and what command to run for the task
# 
# To define the time you can provide concrete values for
# minute (m), hour (h), day of month (dom), month (mon),
# and day of week (dow) or use '*' in these fields (for 'any').
# 
# Notice that tasks will be started based on the cron's system
# daemon's notion of time and timezones.
# 
# Output of the crontab jobs (including errors) is sent through
# email to the user the crontab file belongs to (unless redirected).
# 
# For example, you can run a backup of all your user accounts
# at 5 a.m every week with:
# 0 5 * * 1 tar -zcf /var/backups/home.tgz /home/
# 
# For more information see the manual pages of crontab(5) and cron(8)
# 
# m h dom mon dow command

Today when I opened it, it looked like this:

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# Home
HOME=/root
# Path
PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/root/bin
# Shell
SHELL=/bin/bash

What is that and how did it happen? I'm truly at a loss for what to do now, except to go to doas.conf and just set passwordless for my user any root commands I want to automate and enter them in my user crontab with doas at the beginning of each line. But it would probably be better and more secure to just be able to use the root crontab for root stuff. Or should I maybe just reinstall the cron daemon and use the --purge option?

Again, I thank you very kindly for your helping me, and for the good work you and your colleagues do with MX Linux!

[Adrian]

I'm not sure PATH really helps in crontab, you probably have to use the full address, I would use "/bin/tar" not "tar"

[bigboppercole]

I tried installing nvidia drivers with the MX installer which did not help with either.

What happened? Did you get error messages? Your QSI shows that the Nvidia driver 460 was installed, so the driver installation probably succeeded.

Yes, the driver install succeeded. The only error was needing to blacklist the nouvou driver, as is normal with this setup.

If you search the forum you'll find posts about how some laptop manufacturers hard-wire the HDMI port to the Nvidia GPU's bus, and as yours is a bumblebee/optimus system that GPU won't be in use by default. These posts also tell how to work around that so the HDMI port can also be used by the default Intel integrated GPU. That's also explained here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bumble ... VIDIA_chip.

Bumblebee did not get installed. At the end of the install it showed:

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You can use the new PRIMUS driver built in to the nvidia drivers.
Use "nvidia-run-mx" followed by your application command to use the nvidia graphics

I installed all the Primus stuff, which did install Bumblebee. Followed some of the instructions on the link. Now I can't even open the Nvidia settings, it just flickers in the task manager for a few seconds and dies.

As a troubleshooting measure open a terminal and run

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optirun kcmshell5 kcm_kscreen

with the TV connected and see if it's detected. If it is, then that's what the situation is: HDMI wired to Nvidia's bus. It wouldn't be an MX issue but a hardware design "feature."

Before installing Bumblebee this failed. Tried it using "nvidia-run-mx" instead of "optirun", and the settings window came up, but did not show a second monitor. The TV did show in the Nvidia settings window, but would not let me do anything with it, and now Nvidia settings won't open.
When I plug in the TV, the window

ksnip_20210923-213713.png

pops up asking what to do with the external monitor, but nothing happens when choosing any of the options.

Al

[SwampRabbit]

Al,

I think there is a disconnect, its not Jay's fault, I think with MX-21 bumblebee usage is being depreciated for the new setup which its to use nvidia-run-mx rather than the whole old way most people are used to.

Bumblebee did not get installed. At the end of the install it showed:

Code: Select all

You can use the new PRIMUS driver built in to the nvidia drivers.
Use "nvidia-run-mx" followed by your application command to use the nvidia graphics

I installed all the Primus stuff, which did install Bumblebee. Followed some of the instructions on the link. Now I can't even open the Nvidia settings, it just flickers in the task manager for a few seconds and dies.

Notice it says

"You can use the new PRIMUS driver built in to the nvidia drivers."
AND
"Use "nvidia-run-mx" followed by your application command to use the nvidia graphics"

I think once you got that output you were good to go, obviously using the above then at that point.
Doing all the that other stuff probably broke the setup.

@dolphin_oracle is that correct?

I think we need to get a grasp on this new way of doing things and probably figure out how to handle the common optimus issues like external displays.

[bigboppercole]

Al,

I think there is a disconnect, its not Jay's fault, I think with MX-21 bumblebee usage is being depreciated for the new setup which its to use nvidia-run-mx rather than the whole old way most people are used to.

Bumblebee did not get installed. At the end of the install it showed:

Code: Select all

You can use the new PRIMUS driver built in to the nvidia drivers.
Use "nvidia-run-mx" followed by your application command to use the nvidia graphics

I installed all the Primus stuff, which did install Bumblebee. Followed some of the instructions on the link. Now I can't even open the Nvidia settings, it just flickers in the task manager for a few seconds and dies.

Notice it says

"You can use the new PRIMUS driver built in to the nvidia drivers."
AND
"Use "nvidia-run-mx" followed by your application command to use the nvidia graphics"

I think once you got that output you were good to go, obviously using the above then at that point.
Doing all the that other stuff probably broke the setup.

@dolphin_oracle is that correct?

I think we need to get a grasp on this new way of doing things and probably figure out how to handle the common optimus issues like external displays.

I would agree that following the instructions on the link previously provided broke things.
The external display was still not working after the initial install of the Nvidia drivers though, before doing any of the further instructions.
I would also agree that this is not necessarily a MX-21 beta issue, but an issue none the less.
And audio has been non-existent since the initial install.
Once I get home again, I will try installing MX-19.4 just to see how it goes.

Al

[JayM]

That's because I haven't installed MX-21 KDE as I don't intend to ever use Plasma, so I was going by the display manager in MX-19 KDE which now that I think of it using an older version of Plasma. You can add a shortcut to whatever the new Plasma's display manager is to your desktop then open it in a text editor to see what the command is and run it in a terminal with "optirun" in front of it (or whatever the new command is to invoke bumblebee/optimus and use the Nvidia GPU. I also don't have any Nvidia optimus laptops, only one hybrid-graphics laptop with two AMD GPUs in it and my desktop PC.)

[SwampRabbit]

I would agree that following the instructions on the link previously provided broke things.
The external display was still not working after the initial install of the Nvidia drivers though, before doing any of the further instructions.
I would also agree that this is not necessarily a MX-21 beta issue, but an issue none the less.
And audio has been non-existent since the initial install.
Once I get home again, I will try installing MX-19.4 just to see how it goes.

Al

Really appreciate the testing and all! but...

Please remember to bear with us as much as you can.... this is a Beta, people and hours are limited, and not everyone has Nvidia hardware let alone the close same kind of system (like Jay said)

I remember seeing Stevo say he was going to work on updated Nvidia drivers, so it just may be a semi-short waiting game.

I can't recall off the top of my head if the GeForce RTX 2060 Mobile was working under MX-19 AHS or not.
But I can tell you that I have no intent (was pretty much told we weren't either) on updating MX-19 AHS outside of maybe some already staged items going final.... for what that is worth.

The external display like this could be a lot of things, this is a typically an issue with all Optimus laptops, the whole messy breakdowns (buses and junk) of it all are in the forums a few places.
The interwebs is littered with junk about this Nvidia junk doing junk. Its probably just a matter of figuring out what that junk needs configured to post Nvidia driver install.

So first things first, I'd do some hunting for GE75 Raider 10SE + linux or whatever... there is lots of info out there on issues with this Nvidia junk on a per laptop basis out there.

- figure out if anything specific must be done for this laptop and its specific Optimus setup
- verify the Nvidia drivers install fine, this new thingamajig nvidia-run-mx works as it should, then...
- identify the audio issue, which may go away when the first thing is done
- figure out the external display junk

Does it show that it is 12:43AM and I don't want to mess with this junk anymore tonight? Good night all

[computerworm01001]

I'm not sure PATH really helps in crontab, you probably have to use the full address, I would use "/bin/tar" not "tar"

Still doesn't work, but that's OK. The only root commands I really need to automate are rtcwake, pm-suspend, and fstrim. So I'll just modify my doas.conf and run them under my user crontab. It's weird though, because I'm creating the exact same crontab entries in the exact same way that I did in Artix, and my root crontab worked perfectly there . . .

But I've bigger fish to fry right now, like what is with the USB mounting error I cited in my original post? I share my computer with another person, and it is very inconvenient for them to not be able to mount USB flash drives under their user account.

[dolphin_oracle]

But I've bigger fish to fry right now, like what is with the USB mounting error I cited in my original post? I share my computer with another person, and it is very inconvenient for them to not be able to mount USB flash drives under their user account.

is the drive in question still mounted by the first user?