Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr

Onwards and upwards. So far I don't have too much to complain about on this upgrade. I mean, normally I would still be trying to fix graphics drivers stuff from the console at this point and nowhere near posting a meandering, semi-coherent word thing to this sorely neglected word thing database. But here I am.

Flashplugin-installer was an annoyance, as usual. Some combination of apt-get purge'ing it, deleting the .debs from the package cache, and reinstalling fixed it, as usual.

The current Chromium build is not playing nice with the i915 video driver on my Lenovo T500 (Intel GM45 // Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller.) Specifically, in KDE with compositing enabled when I minimize then restore it isn't drawing the whole window. It works OK with compositing disabled. Chrome works fine with compositing enabled and disabled.

The worst thing I've found in this release is a KDE thing and not an Ubuntu thing and it's called Baloo. From what I have gathered it's the spiritual successor (in all ways, really—not a good thing) to the old file indexer (or, file, contacts, mail, etc. indexer, I guess…) called Nepomuk. My experience with Nepomuk was always that I disabled it as quickly as I could because it seemed to have an uncanny ability to consume as much cpu, disk io, and memory as possible and generally made my computer unusable for anything not related to indexing files, contacts, and other miscellaneous whatever. Baloo appears to follow in Nepomuk's fine tradition of resource annihilation except that there isn't a simple 'disable this nonsense' checkbox, which is fantastic (/sarcasm.) I ended up doing some of the stuff mentioned in this gentoo forums thread. Specifically:

  • added my home directory to the excluded list
  • renamed and symlinked the baloo_file_extractor and baloo_file_cleaner binaries, i.e.:
sudo mv /usr/bin/baloo_file_extractor /usr/bin/baloo_file_extractor.orig
sudo ln -s /bin/true /usr/bin/baloo_file_extractor
sudo mv /usr/bin/baloo_file_cleaner /usr/bin/baloo_file_cleaner.orig
sudo ln -s /bin/true /usr/bin/baloo_file_cleaner

Hope you enjoyed this post and/or found it useful. See you again in another 3 years.