The bug appears as:

1. Start virt-manager.
2. Connect to a KVM host server using connection “Remote tunnel over SSH” with hypervisor “QEMU/KVM”.
3. Double-click on a VM to open a VNC connection to console.
4. The error message “Error bringing up domain details: invalid argument in virDomainGetXMLDesc” appears, and no VNC session opens.

The problem is with the latest version of virt-manager, 0.7.0. To work around it I’ve repackaged virt-manager 0.6.1 from jaunty with the fake version “0.7.1~really0.6.1-1ubuntu4″. Packages for i386 and amd64 are now in my APT repository.

Also, KPackageKit ignores my “dpkg --set-selections“, forcing me to do this. Thanks, KPackageKit, for ignoring the standard! Otherwise I could install the jaunty package and mark it on hold.

Jaunty has been my Windows Vista. I wish I had never upgraded, and waited instead for Karmic. For anyone using Intel video (I use a Dell Vostro 1500 with an onboard Intel GM965/GL960), Jaunty and KDE4 was a terrible experience. Compared to Hardy and KDE3, video performance was dramatically worse. When playing videos frames would drop, 3D acceleration was slower, everything showed more tearing effects, and most KDE4 apps showed graphics corruption in various rarely-updated areas such as the icon toolbar in Kontact.

I had already discovered the video issues when I wrote my last upgrade post, but hadn’t yet realised the extend of the wireless issues. I have two cards in my laptop:

tyler@baal:~$ lspci | grep -i network
0c:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG [Golan] Network Connection (rev 02)
0d:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5001 Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01)

Under Jaunty, the Intel card caused kernel panics on shutdown. So I blacklisted the driver and used the Atheros card, only to discover problems with both the ath_pci and ath5k drivers. The former doesn’t work with network manager, and with the latter the card would sometimes fail in a state requiring full hardware reset, meaning powering the laptop off and on again. This would happen on bootup too, causing me to sometimes reboot several times to make wireless work. It is not good to begin the workday filled with frustration and rage.

I did my best to mitigate the issues under Jaunty, including using the latest KDE backports from the Kubuntu PPA. But the only real solution to my video problems was to upgrade to the latest kernel, X, and intel video drivers. I use Ubuntu because I want reasonably recent packages but without the headache of running true alpha / bleeding-edge releases. Replacing all the critical parts of the distro seemed like the wrong way to go. So I suffered and waited for the day Karmic came out.

The 9.10 release notes cover a number of known issues. What strikes me about the known issues is how few of them affect me. Many are related to the netbook remix, or specific to recent netbooks with proprietary hardware. Support for the general case of mostly Intel hardware released 1-2 years ago is all there.

Upgrading from Jaunty to Karmic was just a matter of doing what the GUI prompted me to do. This wasn’t like jumping from KDE 3 to 4, so I didn’t remove any dotfiles or reformat. I just made my usual backup and then did the upgrade. I had a problem and had to stop the upgrade during the post-download, configuration part, so I ran dpkg --configure -a in a terminal and everything finished just fine.

What went wrong:

Synaptics touchpad tap suppression (syndaemon) stopped working. This is an artifact of upgrading from Jaunty, where to use syndaemon you have to enable SHMConfig in xorg.conf and then run syndaemon as syndaemon -S -d -t -i 1. On upgrading to karmic, set SHMConfig to false, restart X, and call syndaemon without -S (the switch doesn’t exist anymore anyway). I just removed my xorg.conf altogether, since X doesn’t seem to need it.

ath_pci, the madwifi Atheros wireless driver, is gone. I use this for aircrack and kismet. It is likely that I can either compile it or use the ath or ath5k drivers for the same thing, but I haven’t had time to test this.

openvpn with knetworkmanager still doesn’t work, at least with certificates that don’t have a passphrase. So far, openvpn doesn’t even start. From syslog:

Nov  1 13:51:32 baal NetworkManager:   nm_vpn_connection_connect_cb(): VPN connection 'company vpn' failed to connect: 'No VPN secrets!'.

Even if it did work, the dialog doesn’t even have a tab for manually setting up routes. Since when is the equivalent Gnome app more configurable than its KDE counterpart?

Ozone, the default KDE window theme, doesn’t use colour to denote the active window. Instead it uses stripes to the right of the text in the title bar. Some people say that compositing window managers and transparency are supposed to make this a non-issue, but they are wrong. I expect my active window to have a blue window border, and the others to be grey. To fix this, open the Control Centre. Go to “Appearance”, then the “Windows” side bar. Under the “Window Decoration” tab, choose “Ozone”. Under the “Decoration Options” area, uncheck “Blend title bar colours with window contents”.

What went right:

kernel mode setting is awesome! This currently works only for those of us that use Intel video, which is perhaps a small reward for suffering through Jaunty. Switching between X and virtual terminals is fast and seamless. The console has a gorgeous high-res mode at boot-time. I haven’t seen the screen flicker once since GRUB booted the kernel, from X startup to the KDM greeter to Plasma startup.

Booting is very fast. On my laptop I see KDM within 15 seconds of the kernel loading. I have a usable desktop 15 seconds after that. I’m sure more things are starting in the background, but they don’t seem to slow down my login process.

Xorg just figures everything out. I no longer have an xorg.conf and all my hardware works. Plus xrandr now has a large virtual area by default:

tyler@baal:~$ xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1680 x 1050, maximum 8192 x 8192

This should work just fine with multi-monitor setups.

Google Earth and Kwin with compositing work at the same time. So far I’ve had no issue with any 3D apps running together, and they are all about 3 times as fast as they were under Jaunty.

qtcurve, the new KDE/GTK appearance integration engine. This replaced the deprecated gtk-qt engine which had all kinds of drawing errors especially with firefox. Qtcurve uses your “general” font setting from KDE in GTK apps, and generally makes GTK apps look like KDE ones. Unfortunately it is broken out of the box. The solution is to install the “kcm-gtk” package, and then use Control Centre to edit your “general” font setting. Set it to something else and then back again, or put this in ~/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals:

[General]
XftHintStyle=hintmedium
font=DejaVu Sans,8,-1,5,50,0,0,0,0,0

Wireshark never looked so pretty.

Firefox 3.5, which really is as fast as you’ve heard. KDE users, give up and use the default theme. All the “hack it to look like KDE” themes just don’t work as well as the one the developers themselves test against.

Plasma is stable. This isn’t a surprise as I’ve been running 4.3.2 from the PPA under Jaunty. Since Karmic is stable I’m not going to use the PPA for bleeding edge KDE releases anymore (until another juicy feature gets released, no doubt).

fish, the Kioslave for file transfer over SSH, is fast once again. It no longer generates notifications for normal browsing activity, either, which was extremely irritating under Jaunty.

knetworkmanager works once again. It was more than a little annoying to use Gnome’s network manager.

They finally got it right with Amarok 2.2. iPod support seems complete, the GUI is configurable (why does the playlist default to the right pane?), the collection scanner is much faster than Amarok 1.4, and it hasn’t crashed yet.

Karmic has been added to the repository.

kdelibs5-dev: Conflicts: kdelibs4-dev but 4:3.5.10.dfsg.1-1ubuntu8 is to be installed

I’m sure I could have resolved this, but I decided to test the hardy package before spending any more effort. The package installed without complaint, and the binary runs. I’ve added the amd64 and i386 packages from hardy-backports to the repo for jaunty.

I’m sad to see kregexpeditor go, as it is the only decent means of visualising complex regular expressions. It is apparently orphaned upstream, with no plans to port it to KDE 4.

I waited 4 months after the release of jaunty, so the problems should be either documented or resolved, and the release notes didn’t mention anything that seemed too serious. So I decided to give it a test.

First I made a complete backup with rsync to an external USB2 harddrive (partitioned ext3). I partition my harddrive with separate root (/) and home (/home) partitions, so in the event of a reinstall I don’t have to restore my data from backup. So the second thing I did was to copy /, excluding /home, to /home/root.old/. I’ll keep this backup for a few months so I can compare config files and copy over whatever I’ve forgotten, like udev rules, apache configs, etc. You’d be surprised what stuff you changed in /etc a year ago and then forgot about. Finally, I cloned just the dotfiles in /home/tyler to /home/tyler.old. I expected KDE 4 to mangle all my settings, so just to be safe I kept a backup.

Then I upgraded, following the instructions. When the upgrade was done and I rebooted, everything was totally screwed up. The icon for the KDE menu had become a left-arrow, various hotkeys were remapped, customised application toolbars were screwed up, and the KDE menu hierarchy was a mess. To be fair, I tend to be hard on the menus and toolbars.

OK, log out, remove all the dotfiles in /home/tyler, and log in again. This should give me a default KDE 4 desktop and application environment. I can copy individual dotfiles back later. Nope, icons still borked. I expected this to happen (skipping a release, moving to KDE 4), so I reinstalled 9.04 directly as a fresh install. As usual, I selected manual partitioning, reused and reformatted the root partition, and reused /home without formatting. I also left /home/tyler with no dotfiles, again to make the transition easier.

After the install, things were much better. KDE 4′s desktop (Plasma) was happy, icons were normal, and I didn’t have 16 months of installed cruft all over the /usr/local tree (sometimes I compile from source, typically network hacking tools). I copied back dotfiles for firefox; wireshark; and the kde apps kontact, kmail, kabc, korganizer, kopete, and amarok; and a few others. I avoided copying anything with “event” and “ui” in it, as I wanted to try the new default UI settings.

Since then I’ve enabled the PPA for KDE updates and am now using KDE 4.3 (stock jaunty only offers 4.2.2).

What went wrong:

Intel video is totally borked. Seriously, if you are using Intel video, stay on intrepid or wait for karmic. The warning in the release notes is not worded strongly enough. DO NOT USE JAUNTY AND INTEL VIDEO. I’m using a GM965 chipset, which is partially functional. Google Earth and Kwin compositing don’t get along at all, and all OpenGL and video operations perform significantly worse under jaunty. There are random graphics corruption issues in KDE apps, but mousing over most of them causes them to redraw. Two months to go, and I’m seriously considering the karmic beta. Some help is available, but I’m not willing to add to my problems by running an unsupported kernel.

Kontact/Korganizer pops up an annoying dialog whenever you select a contact with more than one email address. This is a known issue in 4.2.2, and it prompted me to move to 4.3.

Kopete has inexplicably renamed all instances of “MSN Messenger”, including the variables in its rc files, to “WLM Messenger”. So after upgrading from Kopete for KDE 3, enable the “WLM Messenger” plugin, and then change a bunch of things:

1. ~/.kde/share/config/kopeterc, replace all instances of “MSNProtocol” with “WlmProtocol”.
2. ~/.kde/share/apps/kopete/contactlist.xml, replace all instances of “MSNProtocol” with “WlmProtocol”.
3. ~/.kde/share/apps/kopete/, rename directory “msnpictures” to “wlmpictures”
4. (If using the History plugin) ~/.kde/share/apps/kopete/logs/, rename directory “MSNProtocol” to “WlmProtocol”
5. (If using the OTR plugin) ~/.kde/share/apps/kopete_otr/privkeys, replace all instances of “MSN Messenger” with “WLM Messenger”
6. (If using the OTR plugin) ~/.kde/share/apps/kopete_otr/fingerprints, replace all instances of “MSN Messenger” with “WLM Messenger”

I really appreciate all the hard work done by the KDE developers. But I have a very special kick in the nuts for whoever did this. Please, either enable backwards compatibility, or write an upgrade script! If you must change the cosmetic name of an option, do so in the user interface. But don’t arbitrarily change variable and directory names! Some of us have existing configurations that we’d like to have continue working, thank you.

Amarok 2 still has poor iPod support, and crashes frequently. I have joined the hordes that downgraded to Amarok 1.4. I am now much happier. Configuring the iPod in Amarok 1.4 is easy:

1. sudo apt-get install pmount
2. append your iPod devices to /etc/pmount.allow (first and second USB devices for me, just in case I plugin a drive or stick at the same time):

   /dev/sdb1
   /dev/sdb2
   /dev/sdc1
   /dev/sdc2

3. sudo dpkg-statoverride --update --add root root 4755 /usr/bin/eject
4. In Amarok, set iPod pre-connect command to “pmount /dev/disk/by-label/IPODLABEL ipod” where “IPODLABEL” is the filesystem label of your device. You could use /dev/sdb2 here, but that changes if you plug in anything else.
5. In Amarok, set iPod post-disconnect command to “pumount %m; eject /dev/disk/by-label/IPODLABEL”

Step 3 means any normal user can eject devices, which isn’t an issue on desktops. Anybody know what happened to the “kdeeject” command?

apt-get/KPackageKit/Synaptic now install packages in the “Recommended” line by default. This is a really dumb idea, at least until all the mainstream packages are updated. Why do I get exim installed if I just want smartmontools? I would like to be able to check my harddrive temperature without installing a mail server, thank you. Create /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99no-install-recommends with the contents:

APT::Install-Recommends "false";

Unfortunately, it seems some of the metapackages such as ubuntu-restricted-extras have switched from using “Depends” (the correct behaviour) to “Recommends”. Thanks, guys! Now we’re damned if we do, and damned if we don’t.

kregexpeditor is gone, and no replacement exists. I mourn.

knetworkmanager has been replaced by the abundantly inferior “Network Management” plasmoid. Although you can reinstall it, it doesn’t work with openvpn and its functionality has been reduced (it doesn’t display new connections automatically, for instance. I’ve installed network-manager-gnome and network-manager-openvpn in the interim. However, openvpn won’t work until you edit /etc/dbus-1/system.d/nm-openvpn-service.conf and add the following to the “busconfig” stanza:

<policy user="at_console">
        <allow own="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.openvpn"/>
        <allow send_destination="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.openvpn"/>
</policy>

Intel 3945 wireless is unstable. I guess it always was, but knetworkmanager had a habit of restarting the card. Now it’s just screwed. I’ve got a second wireless card, an Atheros AR242x chipset, which I’ve long used for injecting wireless packets to crack WEP networks. That works just fine. I imagine I’ll revisit this issue once I have to upgrade my wife’s laptop, which only has an Intel 3945. Or I’ll buy a £10 Atheros and replace it.

Plasma crashes sometimes. But it restarts immediately, without losing anything. It did this the first time I logged in after a fresh install, which is not a strong selling point for using KDE 4 or Jaunty. If you have issues with this, delete ~/.kde/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc and ~/.kde/share/config/plasma-appletsrc, or edit them and fix geometry lines that cannot fit on your screen or that use floating-point numbers.

What went right:

Suspend and resume work flawlessly. Perhaps this is because I no longer use the Intel wireless card, but I’ve had no problems at all and I’ve resumed at least 30 times since upgrading. This is the first time it has ever been stable on any laptop I use (mostly Dells using Intel or ATI video, and Intel wireless).

KDE 4 is shiny, shiny, shiny. Also a little slower, but that could be the Intel video issue. I love Kwin compositing, especially the exposé-like zooming out by application or by desktop. I hardly use the desktop pager now. The plasmoids (desktop widgets) are great. I see it is going to be hot tomorrow, and that it will rain on Thursday.

New KDE apps are no longer infested with an abundance of the letter K. Rock on, Plasma! Rock on, Dolphin. At last, sanity!

khexedit has been replaced by Okteta. It is better. Install it.

Webcam support on amd64 works better. My webcam used to freeze after 5-10 seconds. Now it works with Cheese and Skype.

The KDE games packages have shiny new Egyptian themes. They look very good, and many have polished new features.

Overall, I’m happy with KDE 4, but I’m not sure the Intel video issues are worth it. I’ll wait for Karmic, and then we’ll really have to evaluate if we are to move to that release internally. Unlike the rest of hardy, the Kubuntu packages go unmaintained this October, so we have little choice if we want to stay with KDE. Which is something we’re considering.

Unfortunately, the Intel 945G graphics processor can’t reliably handle 720p @24 frames video. I tested with a downloaded copy of Sita Sings the Blues, and it dropped frames as the animated fireworks exploded during the title sequence. It was fine with most of the rest of the film. Still, it means I’m likely to stick to upscaled 480p video. Which is far better for my bandwidth usage.

Naturally, I ran into some problems setting it up.

First, I discovered that Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid amd64 won’t run on this hardware. The kernel panics as soon as you boot the Live CD. Ubuntu 9.04 beta works, and of course i386 is fine. Benchmarks of the Atom 330 suggest that the 32-bit kernel is actually faster on this CPU for integer operations, so I just went with 32-bit. Since I wanted to use this as the family Skype device, that was probably the better choice anyway.

The biggest reason I bought a Shuttle X27D was because it has a DVI port that I could connect to my TV. I have a Panasonic TX-37LZD70 37″ LCD HDTV which is capable of up to 1080p video (1920×1080) when using an HDMI input. I connected them via a DVI-to-HDMI adaptor (it’s just a difference in pinout, and lack of an audio signal). Unfortunately Ubuntu booted in 720p mode (1280×720 50 Hz). xrandr reported a variety of other modes available, but none of them worked with my TV except for 640×480.

media@gozer:~$ xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1280 x 720, maximum 1680 x 1050
VGA disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
TMDS-1 connected 1280x720+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 697mm x 392mm
   1280x720       50.0 +   60.0*
   1680x1050      60.0
   1600x1024      60.2
   1400x1050      60.0
   1280x1024      60.0
   1440x900       59.9
   1280x960       60.0
   1360x768       59.8
   1152x864       60.0
   1024x768       60.0
   800x600        60.3     56.2
   640x480        59.9

I started playing with xrandr, and eventually discovered that the TV isn’t giving complete resolution information in the EDID it offers digitally.

media@gozer:~$ xrandr --prop
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1280 x 720, maximum 1680 x 1050
VGA disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
TMDS-1 connected 1280x720+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 697mm x 392mm
        EDID_DATA:
                00ffffffffffff0034a92ac149040000
                2f110103800000780adaffa3584aa229
                17494b00000001010101010101010101
                010101010101011d00bc52d01e20b828
                5540b9882100001e011d007251d01e20
                6e285500b9882100001e000000fc0050
                414e41534f4e49432d54560a000000fd
                00173d0f440f000a2020202020200187
                0203207250938414051f102012031102
                16071506012309070166030c00200080
                011d80d0721c1620102c2580b9882100
                009e8c0ad090204031200c405500b988
                21000018011d8018711c1620582c2500
                b9882100009e8c0ad08a20e02d10103e
                9600b98821000018023a80d072382d40
                102c4580b98821000018000000000050

Decoding this by hand revealed that the TV is only announcing 1280×720 graphics modes. Some DVD players are willing to try to force graphics modes they don’t know will work, but a PC wisely does not do this without manual intervention.

By this point I’d learned a lot about setting display modes in X and tried creating modes myself, using gtf and cvt.

xrandr --newmode "1920x1080_50.00" 141.50 1920 2032 2232 2544 1080 1083 1088 1114 -hsync +vsync
xrandr --addmode TMDS-1 1920x1080_50.00
xrandr --output TMDS-1 --mode "1920x1080_50.00"

This didn’t work because the mode I was trying to create was too large for the maximum listed by xrandr. It turns out that this isn’t a hard setting, but is calculated when X starts based on the maximum resolution of the available displays. It is the size of the frame buffer X uses for the total display area of all displays. Anyone having to set up dual monitors usually has to increase this in order to have two displays side by side. So I modified /etc/X11/xorg.conf and restarted X.

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Monitor         "Configured Monitor"
        Device          "Configured Video Device"
        Subsection "Display"
                Virtual 1920 1080
        Endsubsection
EndSection

Now the new mode worked, but was shifted to the right on my TV. This happened for all the modeline calculations I was able to produce with both gtf and cvt. So I gave up and installed DTDCalculator in my Windows virtual machine. It calculated a different set of modelines which worked perfectly on the first try. I set up modes for 24 Hz, 50 Hz, and 60 Hz.

xrandr --newmode "1920x1080_24.00" 74.25 1920 2558 2602 2750 1080 1084 1089 1125 -HSync +Vsync
xrandr --newmode "1920x1080_50.00" 148.50 1920 2448 2492 2640 1080 1084 1089 1125 -HSync +Vsync
xrandr --newmode "1920x1080_60.00" 148.50 1920 2008 2052 2200 1080 1084 1089 1125 -HSync +Vsync
xrandr --addmode TMDS-1 1920x1080_24.00
xrandr --addmode TMDS-1 1920x1080_50.00
xrandr --addmode TMDS-1 1920x1080_60.00

Now I can switch to any of the new modes, and I have full 1080p video! The last thing I want to do is make this change permanent. There are several ways to do this. The best way is to edit xorg.conf:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Configured Video Device"
        Option "Monitor-TMDS-1" "Configured Monitor"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier      "Configured Monitor"
        ModeLine "1920x1080_60.00" 148.50  1920 2008 2052 2200  1080 1084 1089 1125  -hsync +vsync
        ModeLine "1920x1080_50.00" 148.50  1920 2448 2492 2640  1080 1084 1089 1125  -hsync +vsync
        ModeLine "1920x1080_24.00" 74.25  1920 2558 2602 2750  1080 1084 1089 1125  -hsync +vsync
        Option "PreferredMode" "1920x1080_60.00"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Monitor         "Configured Monitor"
        Device          "Configured Video Device"
        Subsection "Display"
                Virtual 1920 1080
        Endsubsection
EndSection

This sets up the larger virtual frame buffer, creates the new resolutions, and tells X that the display TMDS-1 (the DVI port on this graphics card) should use the settings for “Configured Monitor” (normally only the first detected device will use these).

Another way to do this is to edit either /etc/xprofile or ~/.profile for your user. This is a shell script that is executed as X starts. If you want just your user to have these changes, use the latter. If you want all users including the login greeter to have them, use the former.

#!/bin/bash
# 2009-04-10 tyler - add missing 1080p video modes to DVI output

xrandr --newmode "1920x1080_24.00" 74.25  1920 2558 2602 2750  1080 1084 1089 1125  -HSync +Vsync
xrandr --newmode "1920x1080_50.00" 148.50  1920 2448 2492 2640  1080 1084 1089 1125  -HSync +Vsync
xrandr --newmode "1920x1080_60.00" 148.50  1920 2008 2052 2200  1080 1084 1089 1125  -HSync +Vsync

xrandr --addmode TMDS-1 1920x1080_24.00
xrandr --addmode TMDS-1 1920x1080_50.00
xrandr --addmode TMDS-1 1920x1080_60.00

xrandr --output TMDS-1 --mode "1920x1080_60.00"

If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get back to watching all my favourite shows without commercials.

Just download and install the Jaunty versions of sun-java6-bin, sun-java6-jre, sun-java6-fonts, and sun-java6-plugin. Install them, and remove the old icedtea plugin if you have it:

sudo dpkg -i sun-java6-bin_6-13-1_amd64.deb sun-java6-fonts_6-13-1_all.deb sun-java6-jre_6-13-1_all.deb sun-java6-plugin_6-13-1_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get remove --purge icedtea-gcjwebplugin

Then restart Firefox and Sun java will load natively 64-bit. Check it:

tyler@baal:~$ java -version

java version "1.6.0_13"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_13-b03)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 11.3-b02, mixed mode)

I’ve included them in the repository.

Update 2009-07-16: A more recent version is now available in the hardy-updates repository. I have removed the above copy from my repo. Intrepid users should upgrade to jaunty anyway, but can still download packages directly.