Focal Testing of Kubuntu 20.04 LTS

[jlittle]

I *NEVER* activate an Internet connection when I do an install.

Neither do I, but... I suspect it's a habit I learned more than a decade and a half ago, when downloads were much slower and much less reliable. I was stung a couple of times with screwed up installs from something going wrong with the downloading. I seem to remember that one was caused by disconnections, and the other was due to something at the mirror I was using.

I imagine that like the installer says, updating as part of the install would save time. But if something goes wrong I want to see the error messages, and if the updating is occurring behind the flashy installer GUI, it's possible I won't get to see them.

[NoWorries]

I've always activated the internet connection and never had a problem with installs. (I just screw things up later)

Like you, I always activate my internet connection during the install and have not had any trouble. I must confess that I am connected to my router by Ethernet, and the router is connected to a fibre termination on the wall in my study.

Even when I do an install with no Ethernet but Wireless, I set up the wireless connection during the install. I have noticed that the installation downloads quite a few packages before it is finished.

[Radcliff]

Off-line

We also disconnect Internet for a fresh install, the desktop setup is made before enabling Internet.
No need to run live CD for Focal daily builds.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

For Windows, full setup is made off-line, we don't even touch check for update after. A source of noise there.

[jglen490]

In my opinion, the security risk for having an active internet connection open during an install, is no different from any other internet connected activity.

I may have deliberately not connected once or twice during the 25+ years that I've installed and upgraded Linux and BSD distros. The time it took to install a complete Linux/BSD is no different, and security exposure is no different. Your system is hitting the same repos - which are either trustworthy or not trustworthy.

While it's true that I've dropped internet connections from time to time, but - again in my opinion - those were not related to the actual install/upgrade.

I've had some bad downloads of ISOs, bad that's just the way it goes, and those become apparent pretty quickly.

[Don B. Cilly]

Failure reports 3 and 4:
I tried the toram - which I can't help but call tattycoram - option :·)
It seems to like it as much as the original Tattycoram liked people calling her that...

I tried to let it stew a while before installing. Not much change.
Even with the Updates icon in place, wait time at "Disk setup" went from five to four mintues.
I still think having an update-system-hog at two minutes after boot is rather... well... particularly on an installer... but... oh well.

It complained about mounted partitions. (it specifically said "copying ISO to RAM... done, at boot).
Then it said, application is in use on partition (sdc2 I presume, the ISO is there, even though it's in RAM)... I don't plan on letting it touch that partition anyway...
It was KSysguard. I closed it. It let me do Disk Setup.

Gets to Installing... just as before, Detecting filesystems, 100%, the "Kubuntu is nice", "You'll love it", Get on the bus" splash screens cycle happily, but after 20 minutes it's still "detecting filesystems, 100%".
Are you sure you want to quit the installer? Yes please. Do it again... No, you have to reboot, you used the tattycoram option, I don't like you.

So I reboot, retry the install, don't open KSysguard, allow it to format my already formatted partition, try to avoid anything that might confuse it.
Same result.

I'll try
- Downloading and checksumming the ISO again.
- Put it on a different disk.
and see what it does.

[Don B. Cilly]

I managed to install it.
It "only" took some 45 minutes. From a RAM-mounted ISO to an SSD, on a quad-core 2GHz processor. In the words of an English queen of pure German blood, "We are not amused".
Considering also that it was a minimal installation, with no pre-downloading of updates.

I don't know whether it was re-downloading the ISO, putting it on a separate disk, or letting it unmount all partitions. I guess the last one.
Which of course I could do because it was on a separate disk and I only trusted the RAM-mounting so far.

Anyway, I'll check it out and report any ... and other things :·)

[Don B. Cilly]

Played with it a bit. It seems exceptionally well-behaved :·)
It didn't do the xapian-cripple thing at boot.
Maybe because I did the updates myself... it got 4 MB of updates total
Well, it was a daily-build and I only got it last night...

I copied my Neon /home to it, installed some essentials, so far it looks... tip-top

[Don B. Cilly]

So I played with it a little more.
It looks rock solid, everything - admittedly not a lot, I didn't really install much stuff on it - worked perfectly.
I didn't notice any xapian index system freezes, kwin did not crash - which on 18.04 it tended to do for the first few runs, and then settle down - once.
Nvidia driver, it got the 430.50 at installation, no issues.
Even Baloo did not rear its fat head at all. Very smooth.

I almost decided to install all my stuff on it and start to use it at my main OS... except I'm kind of crazy, so I cannot have something called "Focal Fossa" running as an everyday tool

[GreyGeek]

That's my evaluation as well. I was planning to wait until it went gold next March, but it is running so good I'll probably install it before New Year. My first Kubuntu was 9.04, which I installed in the last of January or 09, was rock solid and gave me no problems. Ditto for 14.04. So was 18.04. Seems to be a pattern!

[NoWorries]

It is now 4 months to the release of Focal.

I am continuing to find this distribution very stable and have no hesitation to use it as my production system.

As I use the Pre-release updates with additional repositories for the latest kernel and plasma, I get:

	5 Months to go	4 Months to go
KDE Plasma Version	5.17.3	5.17.4
KDE Frameworks Version	5.64.0	5.65.0
QT Version	5.12.5	5.12.5
Kernel Version	5.4.0-6-generic	5.4.0-9-generic

As you can see, Focal LTS is advancing on all major fronts with the exception of the QT Version. This table only highlights the major developments, but I am very happy with the progress being made in other areas such as VLC, LibreOffice, Gimp and Kdenlive. As I use the improved features in these applications regularly, it is the main reason I always use the latest distribution.

[MeMyself]

I love the sound of the input in relation to 20.04! As someone who finally dumped Win10 and went full time Kubuntu, I'm excited to get to 20.04. I'm currently running 19.10 and love it. If I were to get brave and try upgrading is there a command line that I can use as I did for the move to 19.10? My one reservation as someone who loves running Beta and testing - is I have one program running in WINE that I'd be concerned about messing up. It had no problems with the upgrades to 19.04 or to 19.10, nor with the WINE upgrades to the weekly RC.

[jlittle]

A word of warning... a new Ubuntu-based release, early in the release process, will start not much different from the previous release. I imagine the repo is cloned, then the release devs set to work. A big, breaking, change can land at any time. I recall a Kubuntu that became unstable only about a week before the release date (at least on my hardware).

Thanks to the trail blazing work of the KDE Neon folks I'm not expecting KDE problems at any time in 20.04, but upstream in Ubuntu who knows. Running both as many do here keeps a foot in both camps, but keeping both up to date can be a chore.

[GreyGeek]

After Snowhog tipped my cow I went ahead and installed Focal this afternoon.
I used Guidus to burn a Persistent LiveUSB and booted it. I chose the run from RAM option.
The first attempt crashed because the install sequence jumped over the part asking the user's info and it couldn't create the first user account.
I rebooted, re-ran from RAM and this time chose to connect my wifi and include updates, and this time it didn't bypass the user info, so that problem could have been my shakey clicks. The install finished without problems in about 20 minutes and I rebooted. (Don, I have an 8 core i7 CPU with 16 GB of RAM). Oh, it automatically detected my Nividia GT 650M chip and installed the Nvidia 390 driver.

[FONT=monospace][COLOR=#000000]$ systemd-analyze[/COLOR]
Startup finished in 2.960s (kernel) + 8.753s (userspace) = 11.714s  
graphical.target reached after 8.175s in userspace
[/FONT]

I have a working desktop in 12 seconds from a cold boot (I'm using BTRFS).

There are some nits here and there with Focal, but nothing serious or a show stopper.
Apparmor is throwing a ton of "DENIED" messages relating to dbus, but nothing seems to be actually affected.

BTRFS does not use the swap file but the installer included "/swap" in the /etc/fstab file. It created some error messages that dmesg displayed. I put a "#" in front of that line and the error msgs stopped.

I installed openjdk-11 and then installed Minecraft. Ran beautifully. Very fast (150-250 fps without Optifine).

I installed WINE, WINEQT, winetricks, but NOT playonlinux. Then right moused on SE-0980-setup.exe (space engine 0.98) from Dolphin and selected Q4Wine as the install tool. Installed without problems and runs beautifully.
BibleAnalyzer_5.2 installed and ran nicely on 18.04 but has dependency problems on 20.04.
Sagemath from the repository installed perfectly.
OBS (Open Broadcast Studio 24.06), from the repository, runs nicely, giving me high quality at 60 fps.

The first time I used Kubuntu was in the first week of Febuarary of 2009, when I installed 9.04 Alpha. It never gave me any serious problems. Subsequent updates generally increased usibility and decreased deficiencies.

Focal is giving me a good start.

[Radcliff]

20200108 /AMDGPU /Kernel 5.3 Is Gone With The Wind

For LVM encrypted (20200107) after enabling Proposed (116 packages), all sorts of stability issues. Will retry sooner or later...

20200108 BTRFS no swap

-In Synaptic, over the last few weeks pattern (5.3.24 + 5.4.0-9), we were not always able to remove the lowest Kernel unless we compile a third one. A message says to fix broken package(s). Does not seem to be the case, Synaptic refuses deletion (image,headers,modules) and sees no such thing, nor this cmd line 'sudo apt-get --fix-broken install'. OK next morning.

@jlittle, thanks for replying,

-We still have the GUFW shortcut issue (plasma error) when we open it the first time and pin it to the taskbar after. From search in Kmenu: pin it or open it and pin it is the same ball game.

-We also have a second plasma error on our AMD mobo with the Driver Manager shortcut. On top, the app never collects information = no end loop scanning process, stays red.

In both cases, add to favorites and from there, pin to task manager removes the plasma error = opens normally.

Plasma errors:

Unable to run the command specified. The file or folder python3 does not exist

Unable to run the command specified. The file or folder kcm_driver_manager.desktop does not exist

inxi -G
Graphics:
Device-1: AMD Raven Ridge [Radeon Vega Series / Radeon Vega Mobile Series] 
driver: amdgpu v: kernel 
Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.6 driver: amdgpu FAILED: ati 
unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,vesa resolution: 1920x1080~60Hz 
OpenGL: renderer: AMD RAVEN (DRM 3.36.0 5.5.0-050500rc5-generic LLVM 9.0.1) 
v: 4.5 Mesa 19.3.1

For Kernel 5.5-rc5: glmark2 Score: 2849
For Kernel 5.4: glmark2 Score: 2824

@MeMyself, don't come and cry over:

-19.10 to 20.04 SED Method

sudo sed -i 's/eoan/focal/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

sudo apt update && sudo apt -y dist-upgrade

Intermittent Solution: https://www.reddit.com/r/Kubuntu/com...r_not_working/

[MeMyself]

@MeMyself, don't come and cry over:

-19.10 to 20.04 SED Method

sudo sed -i 's/eoan/focal/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

sudo apt update && sudo apt -y dist-upgrade

Intermittent Solution: https://www.reddit.com/r/Kubuntu/com...r_not_working/

@Radcliff not sure where you see me crying about anything - I asked a simple question - one that did not need a sarcastic response