My home machine, as I’ve said before, runs Bluewhite64 with KDE4.1.3, it’s basically a bit of a preview of what Kongoni is being built from. My work laptop however runs Kubuntu Intrepid also with KDE4.1.3. Now overall I’m actually quite happy with this kubuntu release, it’s certainly the first one that shows polish even remotely comparable to it’s gnome counterpart so that’s a good thing.
Unfortunately, it has one seriously annoying bug. Selecting and dragging text in firefox is a CPU killer, I know this is neither a firefox nor a kubuntu bug since the problem doesn’t exist on my home machine. It’s something specific to this machine, or this release of Kubuntu.
What happens ? Well select some text and drag it – you don’t even need to drop it anywhere – just letting go of the mouse is enough, the system freezes while the CPU works incredibly hard for several minutes and then finally drops the text (if you didn’t drop it somewhere else, back where it was) before returning to normal.
During this time, the rest of the system is completely unresponsive, you can see the text moving incredibly slowly over the path the mouse followed before finally dropping and then the system recovers. Now just why exactly this is slow I haven’t been able to figure out conclusively – but I have a theory.
This machine, unlike the home machine, has full XRandR1.2 support and really good XRender support, and I think firefox is using XRender to draw the text when it’s being dragged – and I think it’s buggy with the way it does that. It doesn’t happen at home because nvidia’s xrender support sucks so bad that firefox doesn’t even try to use it. But if firefox is using it this badly – it would have been better not to use it at all.
So by my theory, the problem is with firefox on intel graphics cards that support full XRender. By that logic – the problem needs to be fixed either in firefox or in the i915 driver. Since both are FOSS code – this should be doable. Hence my decision to post it here. It would be good to know if anybody has similar problems, and on what video cards – if it’s happening for you on something that doesn’t support XRender then it suggests the problem is confined to firefox, if it happens for you in other apps – it means it’s something at library level in Kubuntu. The most likely combinations are similar hardware but other apps, same apps on different hardware or same apps on same hardware. Getting some feedback on which scenario’s are out there will help track down who to file a bug report with at least.
Today I installed Kubuntu on my new work laptop (have I mentioned that I have taken a new job ? I’m now the new Unix administrator at Intec). The laptop is not a latest and greatest but still a pretty nice buy. Of course Del’s come in all flavors and sizes, this one has an Intel 965 graphics card and about 3Gb of RAM on an 80Gb hard drive.
The only major hurdle was that ubuntu refused to recognize the intel card, turns out that the Xorg driver for it wasn’t installed but even after installing it, it still only detected VESA support – that made it impossible to get dual-display support working well at all (especially since the laptop has a widescreen 1280×800 screen and the LCD external at work does not – it does 1280×1024) it would clone but then half the image on the left screen was cut off at the bottom.
I spent some time in various places on the Ubuntu forums and found no working solution, though I did get a hint that let me get another document that worked. I found a very good howto at Intel Linux Graphics which helped me to get a fully working setup using xrandr rather than xinerama for the dual display. KDE4 works fine on it, though the OpenGL support is flakey (not just in KDE in general), right now XRender based compositing with kwin is working well but I would like to see if I can get the OpenGL to work better (I am guessing that like many Intel cards you can adjust the video memory in the BIOS but I haven’t had a chance to look yet).
One nasty bug was that when I tried to enable OpenGL based compositing it crashed the system, and despite me not being able to click on the “keep this setting” button, it also trashed the settings and I had to remove my .kde4 directory to make it work again.
I do need some windows apps as part of my job, so I loaded virtualbox and stuck windows XP in there, works perfectly (for the limited use I need it for anyway).
Right now it seems that sound isn’t working, but I found some mention of this online so I will look at those pages (it wasn’t important today and I had work to do) later on and report on the results.
Well KDE4.1 is available, and it is a sweet. For a lot of people, this will be the switchover point, the rest of you – KDE4.2 should do it 
I would like to suggest looking at Bruce Byfields excellent review for a good idea of who should be switching yet.
I, I’m sold. Despite the slowness of my NVidia card natively, I can work just fine using XGL. However, I also found that XGL conversely made my KDE3 installation almost unusably slow (ditto KDE3 apps I still use – even though inside KDE4 I can hack-launch them to run on the native screen with a few tweaks).
So I split out XGL to only run for KDE4 for now. To do so I rm’d /etc/X11/xsession.d/98xserver-xgl_start-server
then created a new script in /usr/bin called startkde4-xgl with the following content:
#!/bin/bash
GL_START=/usr/share/xserver-xgl/Xgl-session
XGL_DISPLAY=:1
XGL_OPTS=”-nolisten tcp -fullscreen -br +xinerama”$XGL_START $XGL_DISPLAY $XGL_OPTS –execute /usr/lib/kde4/bin/startkde
Gave it execute permissions and added a session file for it in /usr/share/xsessions.
Please note: These instructions arethe short-version and they are for kubuntu, other distros handle XGL in very different ways.
Either way, it’s great to finally have KDE4.1 final installed – now to go PLAY !
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