Fun with Buster / KDE over XFCE on Stretch

It's one thing to be able to install an alpha edition of Debian and it's another for it to be usable. But that's part of the whole process for an alpha edition of something.

But because running a Debian alpha is so much of a challenge, I can't do it with a rotated screen like I am attempting to do with my pc4, because I can't guarantee it will be possible to rotate the display with the video configuration of that computer. Therefore the screen has to be in regular landscape orientation and that means I have to find somewhere to have the display that it will fit within the footprint of my desk with the other screens, because at the moment it is vertical to save space.

The other issues with Alpha3 are also significant, and the ones that I have noticed the most so far are in the install process, whereby attempting to install KDE or LXQt as the desktop environment result in a system that will not boot up to that environment. Instead, you get a shell login screen, and you have to type in startx to bring up the desktop environment. XFCE is fine, so my next move will be to try putting KDE over the top of XFCE.

Trying that on serverpc running stretch has turned out to be an issue because, as was my previous experience just putting the breeze logon screen and sddm as the logon manager onto my Debian/XFCE computers (going into XFCE after logon), hibernation has become flaky. Since hibernation is reliable on mainpc running a clean install of KDE on stretch, serverpc's reinstallation from scratch with Debian/KDE is the obvious next move, and fortunately it isn't as time consuming as reinstalling mainpc because serverpc doesn't run a lot of stuff. On the Buster computer this issue won't exist because it won't be expected to hibernate anyhow.

After installing Buster again on pc4, with XFCE as the default desktop environment, I then attempted to install LXQT over the top of it. However, after configuring sddm (the default window manager for LXQt and KDE) as the display manager, the desktop failed to start and I was left with the command shell logon. This is basically a repeat of the issue when installing either KDE or LXQt as the windowing environment during the install. If you type startx then it will start up, apparently in lightdm, which indicates there is some sort of issue with sddm.

At the moment that is what I am left with, but then that is one reason it is an alpha, so I imagine there is probably already work happening to resolve these issues.

serverpc is still having issues after resuming from hibernation, the issues are that one screen fails to load the background and both screens fail to load the panels. So I am going to try setting up a new user profile, fortunately these panels don't have a lot of customisation. bedroompc has had x11vnc put onto it to replace Krfb because the latter can't handle a two homed computer (one with two network interfaces, the wireless and cable) and it picked the wrong interface to bind to so I couldn't remote to it with Remmina. So I have installed the latest version of x11vnc from  debian testing so it will be reliable and I can remote to that to write this blog because I am having problems with my internet again so this is written on a tethered connection on my phone. The cable is set up for internal network use only so that I can run VNC over it, and the internet connection for that computer is made using its internal wireless adapter, either to my wireless access point in the house, or to a tethered phone. So it will be a lot easier to use bedroompc for this than pc4 because I don't need to keep switching one of the KVMs over to pc4.

Life with KDE [5]: Install on Debian over XFCE

So I haven't written too much on this blog for a couple of weeks. Now I am writing about KDE because I have decided which computers will have it and which won't. serverpc gets it installed because it is fast and has 16 GB of memory, and mediapc will be the one that doesn't because it only has 4 GB, this is the one that will stay on XFCE for now and at least have working MTP which KDE doesn't do very well at the moment.

So for serverpc instead of installing Debian 9.5 from scratch (a big deal having to reinstall at the best of times, though with my systems configuration with a separate system drive, nowhere near as big a deal as reinstalling Windows) I decided just to install kde-full package on top of XFCE, using Synaptic to find the package and it's quite a big download, nearly 900 packages of dependencies in all, something like 2.5 GB.

At the same time I am changing screens around yet again because the most optimum use of screens is a key issue and serverpc really needs two screens to make the best use of it, one portrait and one landscape. And with another screen added on for pc4 and pc4's screen getting added to mediapc it can all work, because mediapc doesn't need both of the screens it currently has so one of those can go to serverpc with minimal work, just changing a few cables around.

Anyway back to that KDE overinstall. Synaptic had some problem with a missing package so I just did it in a terminal with apt install kde-full and away it went. You will get a popup screen asking which display manager you want to use, lightdm or sddm. This is because XFCE on Debian by default uses lightdm, and KDE uses sddm. So of course I chose sddm. Now the only real issue is the command that I use to rotate the logon screen is in the lightdm config file and doesn't apply to sddm. However as you only have to type in the password it is only a small thing. 

There are a few extra things that are worth installing: eog and viewnior as image viewers (in this case already installed by me under XFCE), and pcmanfm-qt and thunar as additional file managers. The latter two are improvements for the following reasons: pcmanfm-qt (from LXQt) doesn't have the annoying Dolphin/Thunar behaviour of trying to reconnect network shares that may not be connected (which also affects KDialog). Thunar (which does at least have the option of turning off network drive management, unlike Dolphin) has the bulk renamer built into it, which I have used a lot. But Thunar is already there anyway, being part of the XFCE install. I also like the PopupLauncher widget which I use as a favourites menu instead of the KDE one; partly because repositioning the KDE launcher to the right corner of the taskbar causes it to default to the Leave section of the menu when opened, rather than Favourites. 

What you do have to be aware of though is that you now have more than one session and by default the XFCE one will load, which puts you back into XFCE. This is how you can run more than one desktop environment at a time. It's a little bit weird to see some KDE widgets running under XFCE. If you want to stay in KDE then either you change the default Xsession (the first one in the list) or else remove all of them other than plasma (which is the one for KDE). In previous times I have simply renamed all the others except the one I wanted. This time I chose to change the default xsession away from XFCE, and leave all the files as they were. The command to change the default Xsession in Debian is as follows:

update-alternatives --config x-session-manager

When you run this it gives you a list of, in my case, four options, which were:

0 - the default

1 - startkde, the command to start KDE

2 - startxfce4, the command to start XFCE4, which was the current default

3 - xfce4-session - I have no idea how this is different from startxfce4

There are a few other situations that create more entries. Notably, if you install Kodi, it installs its own session. And of course, if you have more than two window managers, there will be even more. The session files are actually stored in /usr/share/xsessions directory and are .desktop files like the ones that create application launcher / menu entries. So after rebooting, KDE was the default.

mediapc had some issues, among them non working MTP so I reinstalled it with Debian 9.5 expecting to see my experience of other computers when MTP automatically came up after installation. This didn't in fact occur this time and I had to complete the MTP setup manually as shown on this page from the Debian wiki. Basically you just install mtp-tools and jmtpfs, reboot and it works in Thunar as expected. On an Android device there may be a device menu you have to go through to choose the mode; my Nexus defaults to charging and you have to go into Settings -> Connected Devices -> USB (Android 8.1). On the other two devices I tested (Moto and Galaxy J2), this setting cannot be accessed directly from the menu; instead you have to watch for a notification that you are connected via USB and you can change the setting through that. It is not necessary to enable developer mode. As it happens on both of these it defaults to MTP making a setting change unnecessary, unlike the Nexus.

From experience so far with KDE a number of the widgets aren't optimised to save space, and so on my two screen computers, I have three panels: the two along the bottom for tasks and launchers, and a third one on top of the secondary screen for the other stuff, like the disk free space, system load, clock, system tray and notifications etc. I tried having this on the side of a portrait screen but the widgets in some cases won't work on a side panel. So then I have ended up with it on the top of the screen where unforunately it has to be a double height to work with some widgets, but I can get by with that on the secondary display.

Rearranging the screens has now been further extended by adding another screen over the desk for pc4 so it can be used easily again. Otherwise there would be little point in having pc4 at all. To achieve this win10pc has gone down to a single screen in landscape mode (for compatibility with Remmina when remoting to it, which is the way I use it 99% of the time).

HOWTO: Change application font sizes in XFCE

Since I am going to have to keep at least one of my computers running XFCE (it doesn't need remote access) because MTP works better on Debian 9.5/XFCE for now, I needed to look at how to set menu and application font sizes. There is actually not a GUI to do this. There was not an issue with this on serverpc up till now, but changing the display around (rotating) has for some reason shrunk the font sizes on the Whiskers menu and in Gimp which is really annoying. Qgis also has an issue on this computer with tiny check boxes next to layers, which may be affected by similar settings.

It's a bit hard to understand but in the Settings menu if you go into Appearance, then into Fonts, the answer is to set the Custom DPI setting. The default is 96 I think, but in my case I screwed this up to 150, with the default font set to Carlito 9. It's important to note that the default font setting only affects the panel and title bars and other miscellaneous stuff i.e. it does not impact on the menus and other bits of application UIs. In this case adjusting the setting way higher than it already was fixed the issue.

This all seems a bit strange as the small menu and app text only started today and I have never had to adjust this setting before now but that's how it works.