Lumina Comes out of the Box in Bad Shape

[JustAnother]

I'm running gentoo on an old hp laptop (ZD7010) 32 bit machine. Xfce works well. I decided to give Lumina a try - the handbook shows what appears to be a very nice system.

But alas, when I run start-lumina-desktop, I get a real mess. I'm posting this here because there is a possibility that some simple gentoo config issue may be causing this.

-> The log file says there are lots of "can't find" issues.
-> The Lumina screen comes up but most of the items described in the handbook don't appear, making it hard to adjust anything.
-> The widgets that do show up seem to be fallback defaults, as if the desired settings aren't being found.
-> I have an LVDS laptop screen and a external VGA output that goes to a KVM switch. The idea is to show the laptop output on my main monitor via the KVM switch.
Lumina keeps setting up the VGA output as a continuation of the laptop output, putting all the widgets in the wrong place.
This makes the system unusable, and there does not appear to be a Lumina config setting to clone one output to another. This may be a Lumina issue.

Where should I start with this? I can post the rather long log file if anyone asks.

Here here is in my opinion a larger issue. Desktop managers are complicated beasts that need to connect themselves to all kinds of config files, config directories, various libraries, etc. Why don't the people who write these things, and lots of other things, just acknowledge this and create a sniffer program that checks all this connectivity in advance, which flushes out a lot of bugs and saves the casual user from these seemingly hopeless failed installations? More than likely some simple glitch is behind my problem.

[eccerr0r]

I don't use lumina but if you could post some of the "can't find" issues, perhaps someone could point where each file should have come from... Pastebin is your friend, and having missing files could explain a lot of issues.

Having a selfcheck would probably have to come from the DE developers themselves. Sounds like a good idea but such a test suite probably would be quite complicated on its own... This especially is the case with lumina as it doesn't use the standardized dbus that itself can be used to look for component communication errors.
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Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

[Tony0945]

Please pastebin the log and state which ebuild you are using, i.e. portage tree or overlay, and which version.
And output of "emerge -pv lumina"

[JustAnother]

Thanks for your quick interest in this.

I posted the logs in pastebin:

https://pastebin.com/4PSnncNs

I'll post the emerge output next.

[JustAnother]

[Tony0945]

[JustAnother]

I ran the emerge cmd, and the results are in

https://pastebin.com/v7nwSvV1

Things are better, but a lot of preference menu items are still missing. I can't find the monitor setup part, which didn't work before.

Thanks

[Tony0945]

1. Right click the workspace.
2. Mouse over "Applications" "Settings"
3. Click on "Lumina Screen Configuration"

It doesn't do anything for me, but I'm accessing it over "XMing" from Windows XP right now.

[JustAnother]

I found the monitor config section.

But my same problem remains. The monitor config widget shows LVDS-1 and VGA1, which are the laptop screen and external VGA output. But there is no way to tell VGA1 to be a clone of LVDS-1. The only checkbox I have is Set To Primary. The screen I need to use shows nothing, except sometimes widgets show up there vs. the LVDS-1 screen. The mouse will however move across both screens.

Either some checkboxes are missing or there is no way to configure the screens into a usable form, at least in my case. There are manual versions of these settings in the config files. I'll monkey around with those in a while.

I also noticed another problem at one point. There is a little HP icon that shows up in the system tray. Apparently that little HP process was taking up 95% of the CPU, making Lumina very very slow. But it only happened once.

This whole scenario underscores what I was saying above about having a sniffer program, which is just a script that checks the infrastructure cohesion, and operates the software set in a skeletal mode, possibly at multiple levels. It's kind of like taking delivery of a new car. First you start it in park and adjust the seats, test the turn signals, play with the radio, etc. Then you drive it around the parking lot to get the feel of the pedals. Then you take it out on the local roads and get the feel of the car. Then you take it on the freeway and punch it. What you don't want to do is just hit the starter then mash the gas pedal. I've seen that movie.

Anyway, the log files still show numerous problems which appear to be of the infrastructure cohesion form. If there anything I can do to fix this? I can take this to Lumina at this point.

This issue of sniffer apps and software brittleness actually is much more of a universal issue. It shows up in web site design among other places.

Thanks

[Tony0945]

Can't help you with multi-monitor. I'm running Lumina-only on a Kaveri with an ancient 4:3 LCD monitor. I'm running Lumina as an option on an Athlon II with a modern monitor but driven by an old onboard chip.

Wouldn't you use xrandr to support two monitors? I have no experience.

By all means, go to the Lumina forum with your log and come back here with what you found. I'm interested and I'm sure someone else is too.
Not shrugging you off, but it does sound like internal Lumina problems rather than Gentoo. OTOH, if there is more installation setup, I'd like to know and surely the Gentoo Lumina dev does also.

[JustAnother]

I got the two monitors to show the same output.

Here is the new ~/.config/lumina-desktop/lunina-xconfig.conf:

[MonitorSettings]
LVDS-1\geometry=@Rect(0 0 1440 900)
LVDS-1\isprimary=true
VGA-1\geometry=@Rect(<0> 0 1440 900)
VGA-1\isprimary=false
lastActive=LVDS-1, VGA-1

The <0> was 1440, I changed it to 0 to tell both screens to show the same section. It seems to work. The problem is that there is no widget to make this change.

The cmdline instrumentation indicates that lumina calls xrandr with the screen settiings.

That little fire icon at lower left brings up a big empty space. The search bar is at the top, then a big open space, then Browse Files, which does nothing but leave up a watch cursor. No file manager comes up.

So I got part of the way there.

[charles17]

You might try lumina-1.3.0_p1 which is in pull #5002.