All posts by Zachary

Tricks

Make KDE Plasma Run Faster

So I have been trying to find various ways to speed up the performance of my new GNU/Linux system. I decided to search for KDE speed improvements and came across this YouTube video:

I tried the trick, killing Plasma and rerunning it using the Qt 4.5 rending method. I received a substantial performance increase in my graphics rendering. To do the same on your system, run the following commands first to see if this trick does speed up your performance:

kquitapp plasma-desktop
plasma-desktop -graphicssystem raster

Then, do some widget resizing, use the launcher menu, etc. The easiest one to see the performance increase, like in the video, is to rotate the folder widget. Mine was jerky without this change and very smooth after the fact.

If this did speed up your system, make the following changes to your /usr/share/autostart/plasma-desktop.desktop file so that it runs the raster graphicssystem by default next time you restart Xorg/KDE:

sudo nano /usr/share/autostart/plasma-desktop.desktop

Add the -graphicssystem raster to the current Exec line so that it looks something like this:

Exec=plasma-desktop -graphicssystem raster

That’s it. Now I did read some downsides (possibly more memory usage) in the More 2D in KDE article linked below, however, for my uses, it seems to help more than it hurts. Your mileage may vary.

References:

Dramatically speed up KDE Plasma
Is KDE4 Slow? (forum.kde.org)
More 2D in KDE

Troubleshooting

I have no audio when using Flash

One of the first issues I had with running Kubuntu was that I had no audio while playing Flash based applications.  I had installed a SoundBlaster card in my machine, so I was no longer using the onboard sound as my default device.  I had already setup my default audio device in Multimedia System Settings to my new card, but that did not seem to affect the default device in Flash.

After some searches on the Internet, I came across this thread: Changing default ALSA soundcard in Karmic, now with asoundconf gone.  I found some information that allowed me to update the default device for ALSA, which I had read, Flash uses.  These are the steps that I followed:

1.  You need a listing of your current sound devices.  Open up a root terminal window (sudo bash) and type: “cat /proc/asound/modules”

You should get a short list of your sound devices back:

0 snd_hda_intel
1 snd_usb_audio
2 snd_emu10k1

Please note the number preceeding the device you need to make the default.  In my case, I wanted to use the snd_emu101k1 device.

2.  Next, you need to edit your alsa-base.conf file.  In the terminal window type: “nano /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf”

Hit CTRL+W to search for abnormal in the conf file.  You should now be on this line:

# Prevent abnormal drivers from grabbing index 0

Above this line, add the following, but replace index=2 with the same number you noted above:

#added options to choose sound blaster
options snd_ctxfi index=2
# Prevent abnormal drivers from grabbing index 0

Hit CTRL+O and save the file.  Hit CTRL+X to leave nano.

3.  Now we need to restart the alsa server:

Type: “/sbin/alsa-utils stop” and press Enter.
Type: “alsa force-reload” and press Enter.
Type: “/sbin/alsa-utils start” and press Enter.

4.  Enjoy your sound in your Flash applications!