14.04 LTS on a Celeron N3150

[rjvbertin]

Hi,

I want to stick to my KDE4 desktop a while longer, and 14.04 while I'm at it, but also just got a new "netbook" built around an Intel Celeron N3150 (not even a Broadcom WiFi chipset, yay! :)).

My first impressions are with an external that has 14.04 with a self-built 4.5.2 kernel (configuration taken from the lts-xenial kernel), plus the lts-wily XOrg, Mesa and VAAPI/VDPAU packages.

For some curious reason, glxinfo detects OpenGL 1.3 (as one would expect), but setting KDE4's desktop effects to use that version causes a failure and revert to XRender. OpenGL 1.2 works fine though. I've used the same external disk to boot an HP laptop with a 6th gen i3 with its more recent HD520 graphics (Skylake vs. Brasswell), and AFAIK the same i915 driver does support OpenGL 1.3 in the desktop effects there, at least when preliminary_hardware_support is activated (via grub, so that's also the case on the Celeron).

Any ideas what is going on here?

[user1397]

Probably some sort of conflict or version requirement of OpenGL by KDE4. I've gotta say, Plasma 5 is pretty damn close to KDE 4, have you tried it yet?

[rjvbertin]

I need to do some more testing, but it seems I got a lemon. The system went to sleep when I was occupied elsewhere, and now it appears to get stuck somewhere in the POST, before the screen even activates. I had 2 unexpected system freezes before that which left no trace in the logs, so I guess my first occupation will be to kick some after-sales butts ...

[user1397]

Darn, well good luck mate :)

[mörgæs]

Don't expect old software like 14.04 to work on an N3150 and don't complain to the sales people before you have tried a fresh install of 16.04.

[X-RED_Tech]

Don't expect old software like 14.04 to work on an N3150 and don't complain to the sales people before you have tried a fresh install of 16.04.

A big +1
I know that by experience. Even the now almost end of life 15.10 made a difference in some installations I had to do.

[rjvbertin]

This is not the same 14.04 as the one shipped originally. It uses a backported XOrg and Mesa from "Wily", and a very recent kernel. It works fine on even more recent hardware.

[mörgæs]

The fact that your 14.04 contains some packages from new releases is not the same as the entire system being new. A chain is as strong as its weakest link.

Sorry, can't help you more here. I don't think you will find many users able to give advice on the modified 14.04.

[rjvbertin]

Oh, I'm not saying it is. And I'd be happy is Ubuntu or someone provided lts-xenial XOrg and Mesa packages, provided those are indeed newer than the lts-wily versions.

Anyway, it's not really an issue. OpenGL is good enough for the few desktop effects I actually use as well as for the other things that use OpenGL (Qt 5 apps for instance). We'll see how things go with the hardware issue. If it turns out everything works fine with my current install, so much the better. If it turns out I'll want to upgrade sooner rather than later, so much the better too :)

[rjvbertin]

I've gotta say, Plasma 5 is pretty damn close to KDE 4, have you tried it yet?

It's slowly getting to a point where most of the features from KDE4 I've been missing are back in, but it still evolves way too quickly to my taste. There's a reason I use LTS releases: I value stability, and have really started to appreciate the possibility of doing occasional updates to my desktop environment myself (cf. ppa:rjvbertin/kde-git).

Allows me to focus on doing "real work" instead of spending time applying updates and cleaning up after them. One of those things was getting the rendering bugs out of QtCurve/Qt5, so at least now I can use a decent-looking (and not overly-spacey) theme with Qt5/KF5 apps too ;)