KDElinux on Surface Pro

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1

So I had great success using KDElinux on my main computers, and the problem with it losing Firewall after a main Update seems to be solved, because it is booting now with Firewall ENABLED and saving the settings.

The problem of ‘losing’ CUPS entirely seems to have gone away, so I no longer have to Start CUP every boot after a main Update, however It is not saving my root user. When I start CUPS I have to add a - then the name of the machine after my username.

And once I am logged into CUPS, the Printers have been lost again.
I have to do a ‘Find Printers’ every time I have done an Update.

The above problems are on ALL my computers. The following is specific to my Surface Pro 3 tablet.

I am getting a warning that my 300MB EFI partition is out of space (0 Bytes remaining).

  1. Do I still need an EFI partition?
    I needed one to install neon, and when I replaced neon with KDElinux, I didn;t remove the EFI partition.

The other Surface Pro specific problem is that this Surface Pro has a 256GB SSD.
After the first Install I had 239GB usable space remaining.
After this morning’s Update I have 214GB usable space remaining.
At this rate I will soon be below the 100GB total space I can safely use on the drive.

I cannot find where, in Settings, I can limit the number of backup ‘base’ system images that KDElinux keeps. The documentation explains how to mess with /etc to fix something after a rollback, but nothing there seems to say how to limit the retained base images to, say the one I am using and the last two previous ones.

Other than that, and the battery was only lasting about 1/3 the time that it did under neon on this Surface Pro (LESS than 1 hour at the the first few tests) the Surface Pro works pretty well running KDElinux. At the moment after today’s Update the battery has dropped from showing 100% and 6 hours remaining, to 94% and 5 hours remaining in the 10 minutes I’ve been typing since the word ‘Other’ in this paragraph.
And lost another 30 minutes by the time I finished that line above. I have the power profile set as low as it can go.

So, I already had Bluetooth OFF (it defaults to On).
I just remembered I learned to run Neon at below 50% Screen Brightness. I’ve turned KDElinux down to 35% brightness to see what happens. Time Remaining is back to 5 hours.
This running test is just in case someone else wants to know if KDElinux works on old MS hardware like the Surface Pro tablet, because there are wquite a few Surface laptops also available in the used market.

The only thing I can think of that I haven’t yet tested is the detachable keyboard.
OK, Screen rotation works perfectly with the keyboard, and with it detached.
But !!
With the Keyboard/cover removed:

The Surface Pro 3 shows a Login Screen, with the words ‘Virtual Keyboard’ and a little icon.

  1. Tapping on the Space where the password goes does nothing.
  2. Tapping on, or long pressing the Virtual Keyboard words/icon also does nothing.
  3. Screen Rotation works to swap into Portrait Mode.

With the Keyboard/Cover attached:

  1. The Surface Pro shows a Login Screen and everything works as it should.
  2. With the Keyboard/Cover in normal position, the Screen is locked in Landscape Mode, as it should be.
  3. With the Keyboard/Cover folded behind the Tablet, Rotating the Tablet to Portrait Mode sends the thing into a confused state where it changes form landscape to portrait and back again every few seconds.

I am fully aware that KDElinux is (I think) still in either Alpha or maybe Beta now, and thet nobody else is likely to be using it on a Tablet. But there are tablets out there than are suitable for Linux, and this size tablet was running KDE-neon with Plasma 6.something perfectly.
And while I wrote that the Time remaining has risen to 5 hours 21 mins at 35% screen brightness.
BTW, I am indoors, but it is daylight at 1400 in here, and sunny outside. The screen is easilyt brighter at 35% than I run some of my Android tablets/phones.
And now time remaing has risen top 5hrs 40 mins remaining. Which is probably better than I recall seeing it under neon!
So battery Life might also be excellent on things like MacBooks!

Those are the only issues I’ve discovered so far, and while they persist there’s not a lot of point testing KDElinux further on the Surface Pro Tablet . .

I’ll be interested to see if the Virtual Keyboard thing can be solved easily. That opens up the possibility of exploring using the table to actually ‘do stuff’.
I had written than it would be nice if the Battery Usage can be dropped to about the same as it is with neon. - It seems that was simply a brightness setting that needed top be looked at. That will likely apply to installing KDElinux on other Tablets and on various laptops like MacBooks.

So, the Virtual Keyboard thing is the main bit that needs to be fixed before I can test it further on a MS hardware Tablet.

2

I’m actually surprised the firewall is still enabled after an update, because we haven’t fixed the underlying bug :slightly_smiling_face:

We have hopefully made some progress though, and a potential fix is pending review. If that works and we release it, it will fix the lost printers after update.

Yes - KDE Linux uses the EFI partition to store UKIs (Unified Kernel Images), and this means that it needs a bigger EFI partition than most distros do.

Each UKI is about 250 MB, so at a minimum you need over 500 MB for a workable system (you need two of them so that you can upgrade without deleting the running one).

The installer on a fresh system defaults to 4 GB, though that is slightly overkill. 2 GB should be comfortable.

Your 300 MB EFI partition from Neon isn’t going to be workable. If it’s not too painful, I would suggest reinstalling and choosing “Erase Disk” in the installer so that you get the default 4 GB.

If there is already an EFI partition on the disk, the installer tries to reuse it. However, I’d say it’s a bug in the installer config if we allow the reuse of a partition that’s impossibly small.

You can’t change this from the Settings. You can do it with config files if you really need to. However, are you sure the default behaviour wouldn’t work for you? (I mean as far as space on the main partition goes - the EFI partition is a separate problem.)

Normally there will be no more than 4 images in place (the one you are using and the three previous ones).

And these are all things that work fine on Neon?

If so then we should maybe we are missing the relevant drivers from KDE Linux.

3

They did. I tested two Surface Pro 3s. I tested neon on one Tablet through an alpha iso I got my hands on and then through all the betas of Plasma 6. I sent in a report that screen rotation portrait-landscape and back didn’t work, and sent in a suggestiuon for a simple fix. I don;t know if the KDE team used that suggestion or another, but I saw a few short mentions of the issue, then next beta it was working.
I ran Mint Cinnamon as a comparison on the other Surface Pro.

When I KDElinux was offered as beta I decided to swap KDElinux onto my spare Lenovo Tiny (an m93p) and keep neon on my M900 Lenovo Tiny.
Currently I boot the m93p with KDElinux, then open the M900 running neon in a window on desktop 6 on the m93p.

That’s why the firewall thing was important. having the firewall work all the time is critical to just about anything that needs access to ports.

I was involved in computers from 1971 until I retired due to, well, having people called to say goodbye at my bedside. So while I may now be 'past it, and in my 70s, I still like messing around with ‘some’ new stuff.
I started using KDE with something called Mandrake, then helped a little with testing PCLinuxOS and MEPIS among others.
So there’s a reason I like being involved in a small way with seeing how far KDE/Plasma has come.

I understand there are still flaws in the immutable idea that are obstacles to say, new Linux users. I also understand that will change a lot when more useful stuff finds its way into Flatpacks and AppImages.
I’m just exploring some of the ‘fringe’ uses. Like people who have old Surface Pros lying around. If I had a MacBook I would be exploring that too.

So I hope my posts are never seen as complaints. I simply offer ideas for ‘what I found to be missing or not working’, and occasionally suggesting short term workarounds.

Some of the relies and suggestions related to my posts or replies, have been very useful . .

4

Your constructive posts are very welcome and useful! Thanks for testing out KDE Linux on different hardware.

Particularly, when you have a machine where Plasma on another distro works well, but KDE Linux doesn’t, then it suggests we might be able to improve things by adding drivers.

If you have time, it would be great to get a bug report (follow the links from here, report it in Invent, and like it says ignore the scary red banner). In the report, mention - (a) what doesn’t work, (b) the fact that it does work on Neon, (c) the hardware spec shown by inxi -ezxx.

5

That’s interesting because I saw the comment to someone about ~/Home/.snapshots and discovered that I had about folders in there going back into last month. The disk analyzer said they totaled half a Terror-Bite!
If KDElinux on the Surface Pro starts that caper, a 256GB drive won;t be happy for very long :wink:

On the Lenovo I had a play with the config file for that dead fish thing. ‘Snapper’ I dumped some of the backups completely and reduced things like the hourly and daily backup numbers.
This morning a check of .snapshots shows only 18 folders, and the earliest is now 4th October.
Apparently this Snapper thing is pretty dynamic. So I’ll look further into how it works and see if I can sort out a good config file for the Surface Pro.
I can of course turn Snapper OFF, or I can trim it to perhaps a single snapshot per day.
What I haven

t found in Snapper Docs, is how to give it a maximum number of, Damn! It just hit me! I’ve been out of tech work far too long.
There’s a setting in the config that I sawe, which I think sets limits on Disk space used and how much to leave free.
Back to the ‘Doc Files’.

I fell asleep in front of the computer some time this morning, searching the .snapshots folders looking for where the installed printers fil;es might be. But no luck so far, ao they must be somewhere in /root. Probably under /etc/cups or something - and I already tried copying that at boot, and failed.
So while someone has fixed things so cups now starts. It still doesn;t remember configuration and installed printers.

Ok, I guess I should start treating this less like a discussion forum, and reinstate my KDE Invent account. It was apparently killed off because after Plasma 6 was working nobody saw me for a while.

In the meantime, I’ve had the chance to pass on some of my test findings.

Thanks

6

Most KDE tools give misleading results when looking at the size of snapshots. For example, if I have a 1GB file in my home dir, and I have 10 snapshots all containing the same version of that file, then the tool will show 11GB of usage, when really only 1GB of space on disk is used (or maybe a bit less, because of compression).

We’re working on how to make this better in Filelight.

However, it is indeed worth thinking about the Snapper config if you have a lot of frequently-changing data in boot.

So you take a copy of /etc/cups from a working install, and copy that back and it still doesn’t work? Hmm :frowning: What if you reboot (without updating) after doing that? Or log out and log back in?

7

I haven’t tried copying /etc/cups across when KDElinux is working, probably because, well it is working.

Reboot without Updating - BEFORE over writing /etc/cups:
As an example, Printing was working fine last night, and I had just booted the system prior to reading this.
I opened LibreOffice and grabbed a document from the Recent Files list.
Clicked Print, and it opened a preview of the document I want to print, and the name of the Printer installed with all the usual options.
Plus the Paper and Print Quality is still at the settings I set after the last sizeable Update. From memory something like 3 or 4 GB.

Since I hadn’t seen any ‘logical reason’ to copy /etc/cups back over itself on a system that is working fine (i.e. has NOT been Updated), and as a tech it still doesn;t sound logical to me - but just for the sake of following your suggestion.

The system is working fine (has NOT been Updated, so has NOT lost either cups startup OR the Installed Printers and Config.

So:
Or log out and log back in:
I did NOT save a copy of cups because, well it was working and so was the previous copy I saved when I did it last week.

Opened /etc as Admin and copied currrent working /cups to my ‘Fixes’ area
Opened Konsole
Ran:
bash
then:
sudo cp -f -r ~/0-Fixes-KDE-Linux/Config-Files-to-copy-after-software-updates/cups /etc/cups

Opened /etc and checked cups is still there.
cups folder says: Created 12/10/26, Modified 08/12/26, Accessed 12/10/26
random files check inside all say: Created 12/10/26, Modified 08/12/26, Accessed 12/10/26
So that bit looks about right since I think I last had to Manually Install printers after an Update about Thursday.

So now I will Open LibreOffice again and see if I still have my Printer
Actually, just in case LibreOffice has something cached because I’m still logged in, I’ll open a PDF in Okular.
And Okular is showing my Printer - so I did a Test Print

So I’ll close Apps, again in case anything of print settings is cached, then moving through following your suggestion, I’ll Log Out the Log in.
And probably have to run the next bit in a following Reply if I lose Edit somehow.
EDIT - Follow on:

I’ve just logged Out and back In
Opened a Recent Document in LibreOffice
File > Print again shows my correct Printer
Firefox localhost:631 then Admin > Manage Printers shows the Printer installed on this computer and one on another computer on the same network.

Ok, it is about 8 hours later because I got a support call out. (why do we get more support calls AFTER we retire?)

I’ve shut the computer down, then rebooted - still without doing an Update.
localhost:631 still goes into cups and clicking Admin > Manage Printers still shows both the local printer AND the printer on the other computer.

Opening another different Document still shows an accurate Preview with all printer settings working.

So that should comprehensively answer your question about:

fairly comprehensively. I’m still not sure what copying a copy of the working /etc/cups over the top of the working /etc/cups was supposed to do, because they can only be the exact same file overwriting each other.

All the big 4 to 7GB Updates seem to have slowed for now - but I expect that may change tomorrow and Wednesday with the imminent 6.8 due ~14th
I’ll pl;ay around some more when the next biggy comes down.

In the mean time, after another shutdown and reboot again, Firewall fired up enabled and with rules in place on the KDElinux machine and also cups came up with everything working.

However the firewall has decided it doesn’t know how to allow 192.168.0.57 to pass anything in either direction for some reason. It was working perfectly. Now it says:
Error enabling firewall: An error occurred in command ‘setStatus’: problem running ufw-init ERROR: Could not find a profile matching ‘192.168.0.57’
BUT, asking ip address in Konsole is still returning 192.168.0.57 as it has been for weeks.

I HATE COMPUTERS - But I love the way KDElinux is working for most things when it works.

Ok, that was a very long Reply to a Question. Before it veered into the gravel

8

Sorry, no, that isn’t what I was suggesting. Copying it over itself on a working system will indeed do nothing :slight_smile:

What I meant was:

  • When the printers are configured, copy the contents of /etc/cups somewhere safe
  • After an upgrade which removes the printers config, copy those files back into /etc/cups

But I think you were trying to do that, and it didn’t work? That’s what made me wonder if, after copying the files back, you need to do a reboot (without an update) or a logout/login.

9

Aha, I had indeed already done that which is why I was baffled. And yes, I had already logged out and back in, and rebooted numerous times and combinations.
Once upon a time when I was young and silly I used to do this stuff for a living. Now after 49 years after I stopped playing with the horrible things and started getting serious about them - just as I am beginning to understand them, I think I’ve dropped about half my marbles somewhere !!

So it was worth the copying, logging and booting again - just to have another, and probably younger pair of eyes on the method and confirm it was on the right track originally.

And if it works next time (‘if’ it breaks again after a big system update), at least I now have a step by step possible fix documented. And if it is happening again, it will be here for someone to try without all the trial and error. :smiley:

Thanks heaps.

10

Thank you for your testing work, @RossDv8. The Surface Pro is a lovely piece of engineering (except for non-replaceable battery and repairability), and it would be great if KDE Linux worked well on it. I’m currently using Kubuntu with the Surface kernel, with fairly good success.

11

Next day and Back again for another round! - But first a request. Do we have Moderators on here as we used to do in most discussion forums?

This has grown from what should have been a short reply by me to a question asked about a comment I made at the start of something I asked about the Surface pro and KDE-Linux, KDElinux, whatever we are calling it now - to a whole BOOK !

Is it possible to quote the original comment about KDElinux working fine except for the Firewall thing and the CUPs thing, into a new Topic, just in case some of this stuff ends up useful for some poor devil stuck in the same loop?

In the meantime:
This morning there was a 4GB system Update, so I checked CUPS and Firewall first.
Both were exactly as I left them when I shutdown last night.
Cups opening and had its printers and Firewall was Enabled and had all its rules.

So I ran Update in Discover and after the dust settled,
I did a Log Out and back In again.
Checked localhost:631 - and Cups opened fine.
Checked Admin > Manage Printers - Empty

Checked Firewall and it was DISABLED

Got out of there and did a Shutdown - Reboot
Same checks and result.

Then I slipped into bash and Ran:
sudo cp -f ~/0-Fixes-KDE-Linux/Config-Files-to-copy-after-software-updates/ufw/ufw.conf /etc/ufw/ufw.conf

then:
sudo cp -f -r ~/0-Fixes-KDE-Linux/Config-Files-to-copy-after-software-updates/cups /etc/cups

Repeated the Log Out - Log In things again with no result for Cups
(Cups runs but printers still missing) But firewall was now Enabled, however the Rules have to be recreated. Well, I can just tag the rules commands on the end of the script I use to copy the ufw.conf the commands added to the script run to reinstate them.

So Copying the /etc/cups to a backup folder (after the printers are set up) ensures Cups runs when accessiing localhost:631, BUT does not copy across the cups configuration that saves the printers.
And I’ve completely forgotten where that lives because I’ve been using systems where I’ve never lost that config once it was set. Basically set and forget until I need to do it manually ‘once’ to fix something.

Pretty much the same goes for ufw. I can’t recall losing my firewall configuration after an update.
Although - and I should have realised this. I’ve always had to fix both Cups and Firewall (or iptables when I was using those whenever I had a major update to the /root partition, like going from Mint 6 to Mint 7 or one version of neon to another once we were out of beta.

And that’s what seems to be happening here. It is like the /root partition of KDElinux is being replaced as if we’re going from neon Testing to neon user.
Except that it is happening every day sometimes, rarely several times in one day.

Still - there’s got to be a way.

I don’t think pullinga copy of /etc/cups out of neon (running the same printers would achieve anything more than just reusing /etc/cups from the current working setup in KDElinux.
I just need to track down:

  1. where cups keeps its actual ‘current PRINTERS’ config

  2. where ufw keeps its ‘current rules’

I know I know them -but old age is making me sloppy!

12

Sounds like it, yes. I’ll see what I can figure out next time I update.

The whole of /usr is (intentionally) replaced on every system update.

The whole of /usr/share/factory/etc is essentially copied into /etc on every system update. That’s unintentional - or at least part of it is. Files in /etc that have been modified by the user should be preserved, but they aren’t because of bug https://invent.kde.org/kde-linux/etc-factory/-/work_items/4 .

13

Thanks. I suggested something that might make the Surface Pro 3 rotate the screen automatically rather than having to do it manually in Settings when I was trying Plasma Beta on Kubuntu AND neon a couple of years ago and the KDE team had it running by the next point release. It worked flawlessly for all this time without the Surface kernel, and I was holding off waiting for the ordinary kernels to improve battery Life.

I still have two Surface Pro 3s with the MS Keyboard/Covers so I was able to compare Kubuntu and neon side by side. Somewhere there’s a blog about that year or two or whatever it was.

I’ve been buried in messing about with this KDElinux thing about losing Cups (comes and goes) and also about losing Firewall (also comes and goes) because reinstalling my printers every day during the times when Plasma 6.8, and now Plasme 6.9 has become annoying.

I’ve got only two things I’m concerned about with KDElinux on the Surface Pro initially.

  1. That growing file issue - which someone suggested a day or two is actually a phantom reading in Dolphin.
  2. I’m having a cow of a time getting KRDC to pick up any of my other computers running KRDC
    I’m sick of using the other VNC offerings. NoMachine’s FREE version was the best there was until they decided to drop it and go back to Subscription Only.
    KRDC has been working great between KDElinux and KDE-neon systems. On the odd occasional Firewall decides to play nice.

I was still consider installing the Surface Kernel - for the supposedly awesome battery life. But my early results with KDElinux have seen more than double the battery life I was getting (that’s not saying much though). But I’m not sure if it can be made to work with KDElinux, and I’m too old to get that far into stuff.

14

I did an update, saw that my printer had disappeared (as we expect for now), and readded it.

After readding it, I checked for recently modified files in /etc and found:

$ sudo find /etc -type f -mmin -10
/etc/cups/ppd/MFC-J4540DW.ppd.O
/etc/cups/ppd/MFC-J4540DW.ppd
/etc/cups/printers.conf
/etc/cups/subscriptions.conf
/etc/printcap

So perhaps that /etc/printcap is the missing piece that doesn’t get restored by copying back your good version of /etc/cups.

There’s no /usr/share/factory/etc/printcap, so it’s not a file that gets directly overwritten by the update, but it looks like something may update its contents when other CUPS files change.

15

Ross,

Kubuntu 26.04 on my SurfacePro 4 (7.0.0-38 kernel) doesn’t seem to offer touch-screen support. System Settings shows neither a touchscreen nor a drawing tablet. Also, though Display Settings offers an auto-rotate function, it doesn’t work. These are both essential to my primary use case: as a music tablet. Hence the need for the Surface kernel. I’m pleasantly surprised that you’ve had success without it.

My installation log notes suggest that these functions also require software beyond the Surface kernel – something called iptsd. It’s been finicky; I have to boot with the keyboard/cover attached to complete login, even though there’s an on-screen keyboard. Then I can remove the keyboard/cover and use tablet features. So, not quite full tablet functionality.

I don’t plan to try beta KDE Linux on it – for me, that’s limited to VM testing on my desktop system. Again, I’m grateful for your efforts.

Cheers,

Steve

16

Hi Steve, that’s weird, because while the plasma 6 early Beta stuff was happening, I ran KDE-neon on a Surface Pro 3 with 8GB/256GB, and Kubuntu on the Surface Pro 3 with 4GB/64GB, as well as Mint Cinnamon (can’t remember which release without firing it up) and I had Touch working fine on all three.
The only thing I remember not working on either of them was Auto screen rotation did not work on either of the KDE instances, neon or Kubuntu - however it DID work perfectly on Mint Cinnamon.

All three picked up Touch without me having to do anything manually.
Both KDE instances (one on each tabpel) offered screen rotation as a Manual toggle (from memory - it was early beta).

I submitted a suggestion to use the same thing Mint was using for Auto Screen Rotation. There’s a short mention that it needed to be fixed and by the next point release of Beta it was working perfectly in neon. I stopped using Kubuntu around then decause I had decided neon was a better fit for me. I know they are basically the same thing, but it was neon I was enjoying the accidentalk Alpha - then the beta tests on and Kubuntu was lagging a fair way behind.

Plus, I was impressed that I was welcomed back into KDE stuff again after years away (My old logiin and password were active after an awful lot of years). And, that the KDE team notonly didn’t simply dismiss odd people like me suggesting something, even for an unusual bit of hardware. but someone actually had it working by next point release.

It was like working with the Mepis, PCLOS and KDE guys again in the early 2000s.
I still have no idea whether they used my suggestion, opr wrote somethign specific. All I know was within a week or two it worked.

Something I’ll say about the Surface pro that you may may not know - is that the Surface Pro can be quite happy to boot and run on a ‘Persistent’ Live USB stick. - ‘Sometimes’.

This was one of my last posts about it I think:

I had been using mkusb to make my LiveISOs with Persistent read/write storage.

Reading that blog there’s a lot that is not included. I onstly wrote it because thge blog had been there for years and I wanted somewhere to keep a record of my successes and failures with the Surface.

So a few tings that I think are NOT there:
I still never got Ventoy working on the Surface. Probably my fault though.
I ‘DID’ get Kubuntu working using mkusb, and I still have a 674GB thumb drive that boots Kubuntu.
I completely customised Mint 21.3, but I can;t remember if it used Cinnamon or FrankenMint. FrankenMint was Linux Mint, with as much GTK stuff as possible stripped and replaced by QT, then with a ‘Hot Swap’ added so I could switch (live) between XfceQT, and Plasma by tapping one icon in the panel. None of this stupid Log Out/Log in rubbish.

And yes, I know there’s an LXQt desktop already, but it wouldn’t work for the Plasma hotSwitch thing - and souped up Xfce worked perfectly with my scripts.

That’s why I was excited to try KDE;inux. It is the nearest thing to running a Persistent Live USB on a desktop computer.

Sadly it won’t run on a Ventoy USB stick and I could not get it working on a mkusn stick the one time I tried either.
So there’s my Surface Pro stuff.
Currently I’ve got KDElinux installed on the 8GB/256GB Surface Pro 3.
I’ve been more interested in seeing ‘when’ this thing about losing printers and Firewall rules is fixed (after today’s 3.1GB KDElinux 2026-2026-10-13 02:54 Update I still had my Printer AND the Firewall booted Active - but seems to have lost its rules.
So I’ll see what happens when we get something more like a 7GB Update again, although with previous updates down to 3GB those things have sometimes been lost.

Sorry this turned into a book.
just thought you might like to know that during Plasma 6 Beta using mkusb to create a persistent bootable USN stick worked fine as long as the USB stick was no bigger than 64GB.
That gave me ~45GB of Persistent space to write to on the USB Stick (although I avoided using it) plus access to the 256GB partition built into the Surface Pro (Because my OS was live in the USB3 port) and I also found I could reliably use a 512GB Sandisk Ultra MicroUSB card in the slot on the back of the Surface Pro.
For a total of about &)) GB Space.
Following usual storage rules (never fill more than 50% of total Digital RAM storage space) I had somewhere 'fairly close to half a Terabyte read/write if I wanted to skate close to the thinner part of the pond.

You might fins some useful stuff in the Surface Pro posts on that Blog. I don;t really remember how much or what I wrote there. I tend to use it as a sort of ‘What was I thinking’ scratch pad. Occasionally someone finds in online and gets some use out of it.

I’d better get off this thread again. I must learn to stop writing my replies as ‘Books’ :frowning:

Here we go again!
I just found the bit where I wrote about the KDE team fixing Autorotate of the Screen:

RossD

17

Back again with a KDElinux on the Surface Pro 3 Update.

I’ve been busy with the other computers but I finally got back to the Surface Pro 3, and since it has been a while I decided to run Discover > Update and see what happens.
I got locked in a thing where the updates all ran EXCEPT the KDElinux Update.
It gave me a message saying a Pending Update will be installed after the system restarts, and the Update listing disappeared after a while.

After a while I rebooted, and the KDElinux Update was again showing. I tried Update All again, and got the message that it would be installed after restart.
This time I did a Shutdown, waited a while then booted.

And I got the same thing. AND each time I checked the ‘date’ and the last digits in the file name to be sure it was the SAME Update trying to install. It was !

I left it a few hours and tried again, several times.
I only have a couple of hundred GiB Free showing on the drive, so perhaps it is a really big Update file?

Other than not being able to Update, the old Surface Pro 3 is buttery smooth and instantly responsive.
The Surface has an Intel i5 processor, which chews power, so it’s only good for a few hours away from a charger.
The tablet being 12 years old and showing ~88% battery health probably doesn’t help.

As far as KDE-Linux goes though, it is performing better than either Kubuntu or KDE-neon did so far.

The ONLY other problem so far is getting it to find either my Lenovo with neon or my Lenovo running KDE-Linux. Both are ‘Tiny’ form factor desktops.
It worked seamlessly with both of those computers when they were running Mint Cinnamon and KDE-neon respectively.

They both access each other seamlessly using KRDC and the built-in Remote Desktop Server.
The Surface ignores attempts so far. All 3 are running i5 Procs.

Now all I want is a KDE-Linux phone . . .

18

Another small glitch in KDE-Linux on the Surface Pro 3

Trying to install a KDE-Linux Update file and Discover Updates was showing:
[x] KDE Linux
202610151428
and a message that it would be installed following a Restart.

Restarting and checking Discover Updates I now get:
[x] KDE Linux > Protocol Error
202610151428

Rebooting several times does not clear this Error in Discover.
There is No Message or Info about what ‘Protocol error’ means or how to fix it . .

Any thoughts?
In Dolphin under Devices > KDELinux, the Internal Storage of the Surface Pro is still showing around 220GB free (218.7GB), so there should be plenty of room for the Update file.

This problem has been persistent over the last week.

19

Try disabling delta updates then updating:

run0 systemctl disable --now kde-linux-sysupdated.socket
updatectl vacuum
updatectl update

After updating to the latest build, it should be ok to reenable delta updates:

run0 systemctl enable --now kde-linux-sysupdated.socket

These problems aren’t specific to your hardware - many users experienced the same. It should be better for most people going forward now we have switched the update servers to a different infrastructure.

20

Thanks for the suggestions. None of that worked.
The ESP ?? partition (/sda1) where /boot lives is only 300MB, and the KDE-linux.efi file in /boot/EFI/Linux is taking up 239 MB of that.
Apparently trying to run updatectl update is making that 300MB EFI (or whatever it thinks it is) unhappy because I am constantly getting messages about 'running out of space in the 300MB partition when trying to update.

Initially before the Terminal decided to stop working the progress bar showed about 33% , then stopped for an hour before I got the low disk space warning.

That was, of course, after running the vacuum command a couple of times just to be sure that ‘nothing to vacuum’ was not a joke.

Life might have been easier if there was some way to manually partition the disk space and stick all the KDE-linux images into one partition, but I suppose that defeats the purpose.

Still, looking at this Lenovo ‘Tiny’ system I am typing on, in KDE Partition Mangler I have:

Partition Type Mount Point Label Partition Name Size Used
1.82TB (/dev/sda)
unallocated unknown 1.00MiB —
/dev/sda1 FAT32 /boot ESP 4.0GiB 963.55MiB
/dev/sda2 Btrfs / KDELinux KDELinux 1.82TiB 166.40GiB 963.55MiB

The Surface Pro shows:

Partition Type Mount Point Label Partition Name Size Used
238.47GiB (/dev/sda)
unallocated unknown 1.00MiB —
/dev/sda1 FAT32 /boot ESP 300.00MiB 248.95MiB
/dev/sda2 Btrfs / KDELinux KDELinux 238.00GiB 17.61GiB
unallocated unknown 184.32MiB —

** That last line was me trying to use KDE Partition Mangler to do something I used to get away with using Gparted . .

When I installed KDELinux it warned me not to try to manually partition the drive (because it would break things).
I have the same warning on my screen again suggesting that I have:
“Low Disk Space
Your 300.0MiB Internal Drive (sda1) partition is running out of space; 0MiB of space remaining (0%).”

I can try to do a fresh install (of a later release of the ISO) and install that, but unless it will allow me to create a bigger sda1, I can see a repeat of the problem happening.
I would like /dev/sda1 FAT32 /boot ESP 300.00MiB
to sratr out at about 10GiB and see what happens, but that’s not going to happen unless I can try to manually partition the drive for a fresh install.

Also, I have no idea what an ESP partition is !! I’m more used to seeing an EFI partition.

Oh well, I guess I can always do a fresh install of neon. I know that works perfectly with the Surface Pro. I’m just hoping to eventually have the whole fleet running the same make of car . .

In the meantime it has been interesting to see just what works and what doesn’t.
KDE-neon is still the complete ready to run OS that is dead easy and can be recommended for a complete novice.

KDELinux is much more sophisticated, even though I have to redo all my Firewall rules (yes, I know - run the script) and reinstall all my printers every time there’s a large Update.
At the moment it would be ridiculous to suggest it to anyone not completely comfortable with Linux, unless they are the type that thinks doing an Arch install and maintenance (the ‘old’ Arch) is a fun way to spend a couple of hours a day.

Plan for now.

  1. Download the latest KDE-Linux and see if I can manually partition the drive and install, to check if that solves the Update problem.
  2. if that fails, reinstall KDE-neon and try again when KDE-Linux can cope with small drives.

Again, thanks for the suggestions. There ‘will’ be a solution and it will almost certainly be something stupidly simple.