KDE

Kubuntu 16.04 GUI Audio Controls not working

neanderslob, , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

 

I just upgraded to Kubuntu 16.04 beta and ran into a frustrating situation. My audio controls weren’t working; I tried my volume buttons, mute button and the little icon at the bottom (which happened to be highlighted in red).

RedIcon

When I went into Audio Volume Settings, all tabs had their own little version of “No _____ Detected”

nodetected

So what to do?

After some troubleshooting with the fantastic help of “clivejo” in the #kubuntu freenode channel, it was finally determined that the settings that I carried over from my previous version of Kubuntu were causing the problem.  Here’s how I solved it:

  1. Remove directory ~/.config/.pulse/
  2. Remove directory ~/.configh/.kmixrc
  3. Do this for all user accounts that have been carried over (these configurations are user-specific)
  4. If the issue persists, reinstall pulseaudio: sudo apt-get install --reinstall pulseaudio

With these four steps, you should regain control over your life again (or at least your audio).

Update:

You may find that the above temporarily solves the problem but upon the next bootup, it’s the same issue all over again.  (That was the case with me.)  Apparently there was another file somewhere in ~/.config/ left over from 14.04 that was screwing everything up.  (Seemed it clashed with Plasma’s autologin and pulse audio got pinched in the middle.)  Anyway, I just removed ~/.config/ entirely and started fresh.  If that’s not an option for you, remove each file one by one and see which one’s the culprit.  I just didn’t have the patience for that.

Update part 2:

The files that were causing trouble in my ~/.config/ were:

  1. ~/.config/akonadi/agentsrc
  2. ~/.config/akonadi/akonadiconnectionrc
  3. ~/.config/akonadi/akonadiserverrc

 

Kubuntu 16.04 GUI Audio Controls not working

Editing KDE Desktop Themes

neanderslob, , , , Leave a comment

Today, I was looking to rebrand the KDE desktop with my own flair.  I read this very good tutorial at techbase.kde.org.  However, there were a few subtleties that I found it lacking with regard to editing the brand.svg file, as well as any other icon in a theme’s library.

A little background:

Theme data can be found in one of two key directories:

  1. /usr/share/kde4/apps/desktoptheme/
  2. ~/.kde/share/apps/desktoptheme/

There are a couple other files that can be found here and there (for example, Ubuntu declares their own default branding for the Air theme in /usr/share/kubuntu-default-settings/kde4-profile/default/share/apps/desktoptheme/) but most themes reside in one of those two directories above.

To create one’s own theme, I recommend finding something close to what you want to create in KDE’s theme library, then access its files in one of the directories above.  Virtually all of the theme’s graphics are contained in some sort of .svg file.

The tricky stuff:

The particular element that I wanted to edit is the little bit of branding in the upper right-hand corner of the application launcher menu as depicted below.  However this procedure applies to just about all aesthetic edits in the theme. androbit

Now the particular theme that I happened to be editing was called “Androbit.”  But this principle should work for all themes (maybe with some minor variation).

  1. To edit the icon, I navigated to the file /home/sam/.local/share/Trash/files/Androbit/widgets/branding.svg.  The file for this in pretty much all themes seems to be branding.svg or branding.svgz.
  2. An svg is a vector image.  The go-to open source tool to edit one of these is Inkscape.  Don’t open it in Gimp or alike because, while gimp can open vector graphics it will save them as bitmaps which is no good for what we’re doing.  So, open it in Inkscape.
  3. Once you’re in inkscape, you’ll need to grab some key info from the existing icon that’s necessary to properly insert your brand object into the theme.
    1. Select the item and right click on it and select “Object Properties”.ObjectProperties
    2. Within the “Object Properties” window, you will find two text strings: “Id” and “Label”.  Write down both strings; you’ll need them in a couple steps.ObjectPropertiesWindow
  4. Now, go ahead and delete the original bit of branding and put your own in its place.YourBranding
  5. Now, to make this text show up, we have to convert it to a path.  This step is a bit odd and I can’t tell if it’s a glitch with Inkscape or if it’s meant to be that way but in either case, here we go.  Note: if it’s just an image that you put in, you won’t need to do this step.
    1. Select the text object you just wrote in.Test
    2. Next, go up to path and select “Object to Path.” ToPath
    3. There, now the text will show up in the theme (only took me a couple hours to figure that out).
  6. Now, remember that text string from step 2?  Good, you’ll need them.  Right click on your new object and select “Object Properties.”  (Just like before)
  7. Then write in the two text strings for “Id” and “Label.”new object properties
  8. Now save the file and that’s it.  Your new branding should be in your application launcher menu.
Editing KDE Desktop Themes