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The "Linux questions (and other stuff)" thread

I do know it ain't KDE as a new user account and reinstalling my theme appears to work. but on my main user account, it just gives me the mouse cursor.


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nickdalzell said:
i have never changed kernels so don't plan to start now, thanks. i just settled on a KDE theme until i can simply use a different wifi card vs the in-built one. though it is odd how it seems to work (out of box) but soon as you get online, lockup. i've never heard of the internet locking something up solid, either the wifi works or it doesn't in my experience.

i kept the last distro as a dual boot and will later test the other wifi adapter 'dongle' i use for such situations where the wifi isn't detected, as it's a linux wifi adapter.
Click to expand...
To clarify, the whole computer locks up? Also, what wireless card is it?
 
no this time it's KDE that's freezing. if i so much as log out (did it to me again when i rebooted after an update) and try to login again, i get the KDE panel, desktop and the like, and a few seconds later, i can move the mouse, but nothing happens aside that. i can't click, open apps, or launch the K Menu. it also does this with the wifi off. same laptop though. this bug doesn't seem to affect Gnome or Unity though. deleting and adding back the affected user fixes it though.

If i CTRL-ALT-F2 and go to a CLI, and then head back to the main window (tty7 i think runs X) it's just a blank background with mouse cursor. i can still move the mouse. it's like Kwin is crashing. all i know is something must be getting corrupted when i log out, like the profile for KDE.

The other bug dealt with any other distro, including Ubuntu based distros. you could use them, but soon as you'd connect to the internet via wifi, about the time it said 'connected' it would hard freeze, lockup entirely, couldn't move mouse or anything. you'd have to full-reset by holding power down and force-boot it.

According to lspci, the Toshiba i'm running this all on has a RTL8188 WIFI card
 
Nick - I don't use KDE or Unbuntu, but if creating a new user fixes KDE then it's *very* likely something in your main user's KDE config file is corrupted or somehow borked. Simple fix would be login as the new user, copy/paste the new user's config file to the main user's /home, then chown the file to the main user. Rename the main user's old cofig file. Logoff/login as the main user and you should be golden.

Worth a try...if it fails, you can still login as the new user you created.
 
until i can discover the cause (in a proper logout/shutdown nothing should be getting corrupted at all) i'm not shutting this laptop down. i'll hibernate at least. As for the WiFi, i'll just use those distros on another box.


The updates i did to get Netflix working. it needed an updated libnss library before the newest Google Chrome would work with Netflix (they finally got native support!). i was also hoping that the update (which included a number of updates for KDE itself) would fix whatever 'bug' i'm dealing with. i find it a bit of a coincidence though that it freezes right around the point that KDE's little startup tune would go off. other sounds seem to work fine though, but i could see this being an issue at startup perhaps. Unity and Gnome have no startup sounds at login.

Here's the situation with a fresh KDE install (no themes)

You get the KDM login screen, and the default wallpaper. you enter your user and password, and you get that splash screen showing icons such as hard disk, speaker, etc, (animated). soon as the giant KDE logo is displayed in that screen, the animation should slowly fade out and then you get your desktop. on mine, that animation plays to the last frame and during the fade it freezes mid-way. i never get the panel, my mouse works, but nothing happens when i click or right click. if i go to another terminal and come back, the wallpaper is gone, and i am looking at a blank screen with the mouse cursor which seems the only response.

If i use that other virtual terminal to reboot, and then select 'KDE Plasma (Failsafe)' it will work fine, and opens a terminal. i can issue commands to launch KDE apps or the web browser, but the window decorations/controls (menu bar, minimize, maximize, close) are missing, and all apps load on the upper left and can't be moved around or resized. they appear to work however.

EDIT: tried logging out (but not rebooting) and logged in again. BAM! desktop freeze and only mouse cursor responds. i then, for the heck of it, tried this in another terminal

Code: 
sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

and rebooted, and logged in again. voila, desktop works fine now. before i had installed KDE this way:

Code: 
sudo apt-get install kde-standard

i don't get it. perhaps some 'thing' was missing in the base and installing the full Kubuntu package fixed it? i'm also getting notifications again, they had ceased when this issue started.

Another question: it seems i get notifications about a dozen or more 'security' updates every day, and it's making me do daily updates. correct me if i'm wrong but aren't 20+ security patches worse than Windows? or is Ubuntu that full of holes?
 
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Glad you cured KDE.
As for all the updates, Linux is not less secure and therefore needing more patches than Windows. It's just that the main Linux distros are very conscientious about finding every possible hole, patching every possible hole found and doing it immediately. It should make you feel warm and fuzzy that Linux developers are so on the ball.
 
actually it concerns me. Windows Vista got updates every other day at most, but Ubuntu is constantly throwing notices within hours of the last, and every single Security update requires a system reboot (something i also associated with Windows). so many security updates in such short intervals does lead me wondering what holes it is patching or if Linux isn't as secure as the fans let on...

I was under the impression that *nix had no such holes to patch!
 
Huh... I am running Mint KDE (17, which is what, Ubuntu 14.04?), and I don't have such a big problem with updates.

I mean, I get update notices, maybe one every other week, but the Mint update engine tells me what each update is for and I have no worries.

Now that I think about it... there were a couple major vulnerabilities announced this past six months, one of which took several patches to get right.

This is Linux we are taking about, though-- if it were an MS vulnerability, no updates would have been issued until six months or longer after the exploit made it into the wild.
 
ALL software has holes and bugs to patch. NO software is ever totally perfected, except maybe for some small, simple programs.

That said, Linux absolutely is far more secure than Windows, largely because it IS so thoroughly tested and constantly patched for security. For example, the vast majority of financial and 3-letter government institutions run Linux servers precisely because of the years of proven, superior security and reliability. When you hear of such institutions being accessed or something like the Target hacks, the breach is always by compromising Windows workstations. Installing keyloggers to steal passwords, viruses that send data to Russian hackers, whatever. Such activities are nearly impossible in Linux.

As far as rebooting for security fixes, I've never used Unbuntu and won't for reasons I won't go into here, but in about 14 years using Linux I don't know if I'd need all the fingers on one hand to count the reboots I've needed to apply security updates - with, of course, the exception of updated kernels. Are you sure you didn't mean logoff/login?
 
all i know is last night it installed some 43+ security updates, and required a restart to finish. today it's telling me 3 or more are needed and again, it will require 430MB plus and need another reboot to finish.

I have said it before, 'this isn't how it worked in Windows'

I'm not angry, or unsatisfied, i mean, my system works fine. but that's a ton of disk space to use, tons of bandwidth wasted, and again losing my place to reboot. i'll correct my earlier statement. it's WORSE than windows. not only does it seem notoriously insecure, needing some dozen or so patches within HOURS, but constantly rebooting to finish and eating disk space will wear thin awfully quick. and who knows what will be broken by these 'updates' if experience with Android means anything.

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What you're saying makes no sense to me from my long experience. I've never seen or heard of a Linux distro getting that many updates, and updates requiring reboots should be extremely rare, 99.9% of the time to update the kernel. Updates breaking anything have also been extremely rare for me.

If Unbunti is such a problem why not try something else? Maybe Mint or Fedora. CentOS is ultra-stable and has extended support that lasts years. Fedora 21 has just been released and reviews have been very good. I can't stand KDE and I'm not a Gnome 3 fan either but there's plenty of alternatives. My box runs Fedora 20 with the Cinnamon desktop and while it's a little Windows-like for my taste it is easy to use and rock-stable.

Point is, you don't have to put up with Unbuntu's update mania or KDE glitches. You have lotsa choices.
 
Ubuntu is the only distro fully supported by Valve. if you use Steam or play games, you'd understand. OpenSUSE doesn't seem capable of playing Portal 2 or most Steam games--missing MESA libs. overall i prefer OpenSUSE myself. but those games not working are deal breakers. Ubuntu also supports native Netflix playback. other distros need some WINE/Moonlight trick that no longer works. then there's the issue with Wifi hard-locking one laptop. only Ubuntu seems functional on it.

It only requires reboots for security updates in my case. regular updates don't. but again, this morning, four more security updates were waiting for me. Soon as it's done, it issues a notification saying 'A System Restart is Required' (even the updater UI shows this). that does not sound like logoff/login to me

Unlike you, i do prefer KDE. it's much easier to customize, and it allows me to put my preference for Aqua gloss in their without needing some degree in Linux to do so. Coming from Windows, i actually prefer the familiar UI
 
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How long have you had Kubuntu? this has only been on my Toshiba for a week.
I can only pray the frequency drops over time. I'm running the newest LTS release, too.

I could turn auto updates OFF, and ignore them, or check manually (until I learn enough about Linux to schedule a cron job to do it for me) but since 99% of the time they are security related, what does ignoring them do for me avoiding malware or viruses? I was under the impression Linux is far more secure than Windows, but having this many security patches concerns me and changes my assumption of Linux security. Needing restarts seems Windows-like to me, as i thought some people brag about Linux being up for decades without a restart?
 
I've been using this one about 7 months, maybe 8. I'm on Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS.

Crashdamage was exactly correct - if you follow the security blogs, the sky is falling every day.

OS X updates the least, and Apple has been known in the past to try to suppress the relevance of some security patches that were not unimportant.

Windows updates more often but frankly I think we've all seen that seems related to other Windows components while they're at it. I let my Win7 node go for 2 or 3 weeks - and on reboot it claimed that it was installing over 12k - yeah, over 12,000 - updates.

Meanwhile, Linux is far more secure and you can tune how to do updates about easily as you can Windows.

But - if you follow the security blogs - the sky is falling every day.
 
Again, I have been using Mint 17 KDE, which is a direct fork of Ubuntu, for better than a year. The Netflix thing works on my computer, and so does Steam.

After the initial spate of updates came through on installation, I only see an update maybe once every other week, at intermittent intervals. Usually it's one or two items, but sometimes it's a whole slew, depending on the package being updated and other factors outside of my control.

It is rare that an update requires me to reboot my machine.
 
Wouldn't bug me as much if I didn't have to interrupt what I'm currently doing to restart the system. reboots so often I've not seen since Windows 95.

The Toshiba exists only for basic tasks, but if Mint has support for libmesa (which is required by Portal, Half Life and even Euro Truck Simulator) I might give it a go on my 'gaming' laptop. I've found many distros, including heavy-themed distros such as Pear Linux, missing libmesa. As a result, those games play in some weird inverted mode.
 
ignoring 'security' updates (they won't complete until i restart) isn't a good idea. apparently, whether i choose to believe it or not, Ubuntu has more holes in it than Microsoft Windows, given the frequency of the blasted things. and i'm not in a situation where i can reboot right away. i often leave my machine going for days. is it a good idea to leave a machine full of holes open for a few days before i can find a convenient time to restart?

I was sold on Linux on two counts that i really liked. 1) no reboots to update or install software or drivers, and 2) being safer and more secure than Windows.

apparently i was wrong on both counts, or they were speaking about servers. I need a distro that is safer, has libmesa support for games, doesn't need a college degree to set up, and doesn't have so many gosh darn security holes to plug. more importantly, no need to restart. the frequency of security updates, their size, and the need to restart don't help my confidence. in fact, they leave me feeling vulnerable to malware.
 
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i doubt it. it's a default install. i've changed nothing other than installing KDE. However it does seem to pull in dozens of very large security updates, and when they're done installing, a notification saying 'System Restart Required' comes up both on the update tool, as well as the system tray. I am unsure how i could have 'borked' anything with standard install procedure. all i know is that the updates are hours, not days, or weeks, apart.

I have downloaded Mint 17, so we'll see. but given that it's pretty much based on Ubuntu, i think the updates will still come in at their rapid pace.
 
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