Kubuntu

In mid June, my laptop hard disk died. Suddenly, there was a flurry of disk I/O wait, then applications started to report errors trying to write anything.

With a 500GB 2.5" laptop disk lying around that was used for backup, I replaced the dead disk with this one.

I had an Ubuntu Server 14.04 CD lying around, and therefore did not bother to download Kubuntu 14.04.

My laptop's home directory is backed up daily via ssh to the server. So my data was safe.

If you upgraded your Kubuntu KDE Desktop from 12.04 (precise pangolin) to 14.04 (trusty tahr), and tried to connect your laptop to a projector, you will be, like me, frustrated with the default "Monitor and Display" settings that pops up. You can't unify outputs easily.

To overcome this, install the kde-workspace-randr package. It will provide you with an icon in the system tray where you can unify the outputs and change each's resolution more easily.

Do it using the following command, or use your favorite software installation program:

After upgrading my laptop from Kubuntu 12.04 LTS to 14.04 LTS, I noticed that the laptop runs hotter than usual.

Upon investigating further, I found that PackageKit was the process that was consuming lots of CPU and memory.

For example, here is a sample output from htop, showing packagekitd maxing out one core, and eating up almost a quarter of the laptop's RAM:

I previously wrote about reducing CPU usage for Firefox by disabling Firebug. Later, I wrote on disabling the YSlow extension also reducing CPU usage.

Now, the laptop is able to exceed 4 hours of battery time under Kubuntu Linux 12.04:

Four hours, seven minutes:

09:37:27 localhost pm-utils: Power source switched to battery, Battery: discharging, A/C adapter: off-line

Update: 2017-Nov-19: See the last section for automated installation and upgrading, which is now possible.

To read my RSS feeds, I use Tiny Tiny RSS, which worked fine until 21 Feb 2014.

On 22 Feb 2014, Ubuntu pushed Firefox 27, Tiny Tiny RSS stopped working, with a Javascript error. After logging in, there would be a pop up error referring to getCookie and tracing to prototype.js.

To solve this, I went back to the ESR (Extended Support Release). This was quite a few steps, so I am documenting them here.