Ubuntu
Compile and install Digikam 8.1 on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish)
Digikam is an incredibly powerful media management tool that integrates a great collection of powerful media processing projects into a single, fairly nice and moderately intuitive user interface. The problem is that it make use of SO many projects and libraries that installation is quite fragile and most distributions are many years out of date – that is a typical sudo apt install digikam
will yield version 4.5 while release is (as of this writing) 8.1.
In particular, this newer version has face detection that runs LOCALLY – not on Google or Facebook’s servers – meaning you don’t have to trade your personal photos and all the data implicit in them to a data broker to make use of such a useful tool. Sure, Google once bought and then improved Picasa Desktop which gave you this function, but then they realized this was cutting into their data harvesting business and discontinued Picasa and tried to convince people to let them look at all their pictures with Google Photos, which is massively creepy. We really, really need to make personal data a toxic asset, such an intolerable liability that any company that holds any personal data has negative value. But until then, use FOSS software on your own hardware where ever possible.
You can compile the latest version on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish), though not exactly painlessly, or you can install the flatpak appimage easily. I hate flatpaks with a passion (appimage is much better, it is self-contained, though still breaks the integration value of having a program installed on your computer just because library maintenance is tedious and devs can’t be bothered), so I went through the exercise and found what appears to be stable success with the following procedure which yielded a fully featured digikam with zero dependency errors or warnings and all features enabled using MariaDB as a backend.
Updating Ubuntu from 20.04 to 21.10 (or any other major update too) will (as typical) break a ton of stuff. For “reasons” the updater uninstalls all sorts of things like MariaDB and many of the dependencies. Generally, as libraries change versions, recompiling is required. This is so easy with FreeBSD ports…
Install and configure MariaDB
sudo apt update sudo apt install mariadb-server sudo mysql_secure_installation
The secure options are all good, accept them unless you know better.
Start the server (if it isn’t)
sudo systemctl start mariadb.service sudo systemctl enable mariadb --now sudo systemctl status mariadb.service
Do some really basic config:
sudo nano /etc/mysql/mariadb.conf.d/50-server.cnf
and set:
character-set-server = utf8mb4 collation-server = utf8mb4_general_ci default_storage_engine = InnoDB
Switch to mariadb and create an admin user account and (I’d suggest) one for digikam as below. It seems this has to be done before the first connect and can’t be fixed after. You’ll probably want to use a different ‘user’ than I did, but feel free.
sudo mariadb CREATE USER 'gessel'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password'; GRANT ALL ON *.* TO 'gessel'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password'; CREATE DATABASE digikam; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON digikam.* TO 'gessel'@'localhost'; FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
should correctly create the correct user – though check the instructions tab on the database connection options pane for any changes if you’re following these instructions for install of a later version. You will need the socket location to connect to the database so before exit;
run:
mysqladmin -u admin -p version
Should yield something like:
Enter password: mysqladmin Ver 9.1 Distrib 10.3.25-MariaDB, for debian-linux-gnu on x86_64 Copyright (c) 2000, 2018, Oracle, MariaDB Corporation Ab and others. Server version 10.3.25-MariaDB-0ubuntu0.20.04.1 Protocol version 10 Connection Localhost via UNIX socket UNIX socket /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock Uptime: 5 hours 26 min 6 sec Threads: 29 Questions: 6322899 Slow queries: 0 Opens: 108 Flush tables: 1 Open tables: 74 Queries per second avg: 323.157
And note the value for UNIX socket
, you’re going to need that later: /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
– yours might vary.
Install digiKam Dependencies
Updates 2021-10-30 🎃
- Updated to libx264-163 and libx265-199
- Added libopencv-dev dependency
- Version change from 7.2.0 to 7.3.0
Updates 2022-02-01 🧧
- Installing on Ubuntu 21.10 “impish”
- Version change to 7.5.0 (note camelcase used for file name now, “
digiKam
” not “digikam
“) - Problem with
libopencv-dev
required selecting a #sudo aptitude install
solution to get past alibilmbase-dev but it is not installable
error.
Updates 2023-09-29 🥮
- Installing on Ubuntu Ubuntu 22.04 “Jammy Jellyfish”
- Version change to 8.1.0 (note camelcase used for file name now, “digiKam” not “digikam”)
- libjasper4 → libjasper7
- version 8 migrated to QT6
- libx264-163 → libx264-164
- Qt x11 extras removed with QT6
- libqt5xmlpatterns5-dev replaced with Rajce plugin
- Marble (geolocation) won’t work with QT6 quite yet (as of writing). A patch was pushed 2023-09-24 but hasn’t hit repros.
Digikam has just a few dependencies.… just a few... the below command should install the needed for 7.30 on Ubuntu 21.10. Any other version combination might be different. Things are a bit screwy between QT5 and QT6, apologies if this is mixed up:
sudo aptitude install \ bison \ checkinstall \ devscripts \ doxygen \ extra-cmake-modules \ ffmpeg \ ffmpegthumbnailer \ flex \ graphviz \ help2man \ jasper \ libavcodec-dev \ libavdevice-dev \ libavfilter-dev \ libavformat-dev \ libavutil-dev \ libboost-dev \ libboost-graph-dev \ libeigen3-dev \ libexiv2-dev \ libgphoto2-dev \ libjasper-dev \ libjasper-runtime \ libjasper7 \ libjpeg-dev \ libkf5akonadicontact-dev \ libkf5calendarcore-dev \ libkf5contacts-dev \ libkf5doctools-dev \ libkf5filemetadata-dev \ libkf5kipi-dev \ libkf5notifications-dev \ libkf5notifyconfig-dev \ libkf5sane-dev \ libkf5solid-dev \ libkf5threadweaver-dev \ libkf5xmlgui-dev \ liblcms2-dev \ liblensfun-dev \ liblqr-1-0-dev \ libmagick++-6.q16-dev \ libmagick++-6.q16hdri-dev \ libmagickcore-dev \ libmarble-dev \ libqt5networkauth5-dev \ libqt5xmlpatterns5-dev \ libqt6core5compat6-dev \ libqt6opengl6-dev \ libqt6openglwidgets6 \ libqt6sql6-mysql \ libqt6svg6-dev \ libqt6networkauth6-dev \ qt6-webengine-dev \ libqt6webview6 \ qt6-webview-dev \ libqtav-dev \ libqtwebkit-dev \ libswscale-dev \ libtiff-dev \ libusb-1.0-0-dev \ libx264-164 \ libx264-dev \ libx265-199 \ libx265-dev \ libxml2-dev \ libxslt1-dev \ marble \ pkg-kde-tools \ qt6-base-dev \ qt6-base-dev-tools \ qt6-multimedia-dev \ qt6-webengine-dev \ libopencv-dev \ qt6-webengine-dev-tools
Compile Digikam
Switch to your projects directory (~/projects
, say) and get the source, cross your fingers, and go to town. The make -j4
command will take a while to compile everything. There are two basic mechanisms for getting the source code: wget
the taball or git pull
the repository.
Download the tarball
Check the latest version at https://download.kde.org/stable/digikam/ It was 7.3.0, but is now 8.1.0 and will, certainly change again. This is currently a 255.3 MB download (!). Note the csclub mirror below has 8.0.0.
wget https://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/kde/Attic/digikam/8.0.0/digiKam-8.0.0.tar.xz tar -xvf digiKam-8.0.0.tar.xz cd digiKam-0.0.0.tar.xz
git pull the repository
Git uses branches/tags so check the pull down list of latest branches and tags at the top left, below the many, many branches is the tag list at https://invent.kde.org/graphics/digikam/-/tree/v8.1.0 , latest on top, and currently 8.1.0. This is currently a 1.4 GB git pull (!!).
There was an issue in the v7.3.0 tag that caused built to fail that was fixed in current, so building “stable” isn’t always the best choice for stability.
git clone -b v8.1.0 https://invent.kde.org/graphics/digikam cd digikam
Then follow the same steps:
./bootstrap.linux cd build make -j4 sudo su make install/fast
Compiling might take 15-30 minutes depending on CPU. Adjust -jx
to optimize build times, the normal rule of thumb is that x=# of cores or cores+1, YMMV, 4 is a reasonable number if you aren’t confident or interested in experimenting.
The ./bootstrap.linux result should be as below; if it indicates a something is missing then double check dependencies. If you’ve never compiled anything before, you might need to install cmake and and some other basics not in the apt install
list above:
-- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- digiKam 7.2.0 dependencies results <https://www.digikam.org> -- -- MySQL Database Support will be compiled.. YES (optional) -- MySQL Internal Support will be compiled.. YES (optional) -- DBUS Support will be compiled............ YES (optional) -- App. Style Support will be compiled...... YES (optional) -- QWebEngine Support will be compiled...... YES (optional) -- libboostgraph found...................... YES -- libexiv2 found........................... YES -- libexpat found........................... YES -- libjpeg found............................ YES -- libkde found............................. YES -- liblcms found............................ YES -- libopencv found.......................... YES -- libpng found............................. YES -- libpthread found......................... YES -- libqt found.............................. YES -- libtiff found............................ YES -- bison found.............................. YES (optional) -- doxygen found............................ YES (optional) -- ccache found............................. YES (optional) -- flex found............................... YES (optional) -- libakonadicontact found.................. YES (optional) -- libmagick++ found........................ YES (optional) -- libeigen3 found.......................... YES (optional) -- libgphoto2 found......................... YES (optional) -- libjasper found.......................... YES (optional) -- libkcalendarcore found................... YES (optional) -- libkfilemetadata found................... YES (optional) -- libkiconthemes found..................... YES (optional) -- libkio found............................. YES (optional) -- libknotifications found.................. YES (optional) -- libknotifyconfig found................... YES (optional) -- libksane found........................... YES (optional) -- liblensfun found......................... YES (optional) -- liblqr-1 found........................... YES (optional) -- libmarble found.......................... YES (optional) -- libqtav found............................ YES (optional) -- libthreadweaver found.................... YES (optional) -- libxml2 found............................ YES (optional) -- libxslt found............................ YES (optional) -- libx265 found............................ YES (optional) -- OpenGL found............................. YES (optional) -- libqtxmlpatterns found................... YES (optional) -- digiKam can be compiled.................. YES -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Launch and configure Digikam
(if you’re still root, exit root before launching # digikam
)
The Configuration options are pretty basic, but note that to configure the Digikam back end you’ll need to use that MariaDB socket value you got before and the user you created like so UNIX_SOCKET=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
:
On the first run, it will download about 350mb of code for the face recognition engine. Hey – maybe a bit heavy, but you’re not giving the Google or Apple free lookie looks at all your personal pictures. Also, if all this is a bit much (and, Frankly, it is) I’d consider Digikam one of the few applications that makes the whole flatpak thing seem somewhat justified. Maybe.
Some advice on tuning:
I recommend mysqltuner highly, then maybe check this out (or just leave it default, default works well).
Tuning a database is application and computer specific, there’s no one size fits any, certainly not all, and it may change as your database grows. There are far more expert and complete tuning guides available, but here’s what I do:
Pre-Tuning Data Collection
Tuning at the most basic involves instrumenting the database to log problems, running it for a while, then parsing the performance logs for useful hints. The mysqltuner.pl script is far more expert at than I’ll ever be, so I pretty much just trust it. You have to modify your mysqld.cnf file to enable performance data collection (which, BTW, slows down operation, so undo this later) which, for MariaDB, means adding a few lines:
sudo nano /etc/mysql/mariadb.conf.d/50-server.cnf # enable performance schema to allow optimization, but ironically hit performance, so disable after tuning. # in the [mysqld] section insert performance_schema=ON performance-schema-instrument='stage/%=ON' performance-schema-consumer-events-stages-current=ON performance-schema-consumer-events-stages-history=ON performance-schema-consumer-events-stages-history-long=ON
Follow the instructions for installing mysqltuner.pl at https://github.com/major/MySQLTuner-perl#downloadinstallation
I rather like this guide’s helpful instructions for putting the script in /usr/local/sbin/ so it is in the execution path:
sudo wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/major/MySQLTuner-perl/master/mysqltuner.pl -O /usr/local/sbin/mysqltuner.pl sudo chmod 700 /usr/local/sbin/mysqltuner.pl sudo mysqltuner.pl
Then restart with sudo service mariadb restart
then go about your business with digikam – make sure you rack up some real hours to gather useful data on your performance. Things like ingesting a large collection should generate useful data. I’d suggest doing disk tuning first because that’s hardware not load dependent.
Disk tuning
Databases tend to hammer storage and SSDs, especially SLC/enterprise SSDs, massively improve DB performance over spinning disks – unless you have a massive array of really good rotating drives. I’m running this DB on one spinning disk, so performance is very MEH. MySQL and MariaDB make some assumptions about disk performance which is used to scale some pretty important parameters for write caching. You can meaningfully improve on the defaults by testing your disk with a great linux utility called “fio”.
sudo apt install fio fio --randrepeat=1 --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --gtod_reduce=1 --name=test --filename=test --bs=4k --iodepth=64 --size=4G --readwrite=randrw --rwmixread=75
This will take a while and will give some very detailed information about the performance of your disk subsystem, the key parameters being average and max write IOPS. I typically create a # performance tuning
section at the end of my [mysqld]
section and before [embedded]
and I’ll put these values in as, say: (your IOPS values will be different):
# performance tuning innodb_io_capacity = 170 innodb_io_capacity_max = 286
and sudo service mariadb restart
Using mysqltuner.pl
After you’ve collected some data, there may be a list of tuning options.
sudo nano /etc/mysql/mariadb.conf.d/50-server.cnf
Mine currently look like this, but they’ll change as the database stabilizes and my usage patterns change.
# performance tuning innodb_io_capacity = 170 innodb_io_capacity_max = 286 innodb_stats_on_metadata = 0 innodb_buffer_pool_size = 4G innodb_log_file_size = 512M innodb_buffer_pool_instances = 4 skip_name_resolve = 1 query_cache_size = 0 query_cache_type = 0 query_cache_limit = 2M max_connections = 175 join_buffer_size = 4M tmp_table_size = 24M max_heap_table_size = 24M innodb_buffer_pool_size = 4G max_allowed_packet = 128M
and
sudo service mariadb restart
Note max_allowed_packet = 128M
comes from this guide. I trust it, but it isn’t a mysqltuner suggestion.
Update Waterfox with the new PPA on Mint 19.1
The Waterfox PPA changed recently. The following let me update from 56.2.8 to 56.2.10 (between which the old PPA was removed).
First remove the old hawkeye PPA from your sources list, then:
echo "deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/hawkeye116477:/waterfox/xUbuntu_18.04/ /" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list wget -nv https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/hawkeye116477:/waterfox/xUbuntu_18.04/Release.key -O Release.key sudo apt-key add - < Release.key sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade
Note Ubuntu 18.04 = Mint 19/19.1 the 18.10 deb fails.
Successful connect to WPA2 with Linux Mint 17
I found myself having odd problems connecting to WPA2 encrypted wireless networks with a new laptop. There must be more elegant solutions to this problem, but this worked for me. The problem was that I couldn’t connect to a nearby hotspot secured with WPA2 whether I used the default config tool for mint, Wicd Network Manager, or the command line. Errors were either “bad password” or the more detailed errors below.
As with any system variation mileage may vary, my errors look like:
wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-STARTED wlan0: SME: Trying to authenticate with 68:72:51:00:26:26 (SSID='WA-bullet' freq=2462 MHz) wlan0: Trying to associate with 68:72:51:00:26:26 (SSID='WA-bullet' freq=2462 MHz) wlan0: Associated with 68:72:51:00:26:26 wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-DISCONNECTED bssid=68:72:51:00:26:26 reason=3 locally_generated=1
and my system config is reported as:
# lspci -vv |grep -i wireless 3e:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless 7260 (rev 6b) Subsystem: Intel Corporation Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 # uname -a Linux dgzb 3.16.0-38-generic #52~14.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Fri May 8 09:43:57 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
I found useful commands for manually setting up a wpa_supplicant.conf
file here, and for disabling 802.11n here. The combination was needed to get things working.
The following successfully connects to a WPA2-secured network:
$ sudo su $ iw dev ... Interface [interfacename] (typically wlan0, assumed below) $ iw wlan0 scan ... SSID: [ssid] ... RSN: (if present means the network is secured with WPA2) $ wpa_passphrase [ssid] >> /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf ...type in the passphrase for network [ssid] and hit enter... $ sh -c 'modprobe -r iwlwifi && modprobe iwlwifi 11n_disable=1' $ wpa_supplicant -i wlan0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
(should show CTRL-EVENT-CONNECTED
)
(open a new terminal leaving the connection open, ending the command disconnects)
$ sudo su $ dhclient wlan0
(should be connected now)
RIP WUXGA
What happened to 1920×1200 laptop displays? Why are all new laptops regressing to 1920×1080? That’s the most asinine, disappointing regression since the end of commercial supersonic transport. It is so sad to be living in a world that is moving backwards at an ever accelerating pace.
My first transportable computer was a Mac Portable with a 640×480 screen and I lived with that through a couple of generations. Eventually I got a Dell with 1440×900 pixels and could actually do some real work on it. About 10 years ago I got a Dell M70 with 1900×1200 pixels on a 15.4″ screen and found an acceptable resolution for portable work. Little did I know that the era from about 2000-2010 would be the apex of laptop technology. It is all downhill from here.
Once I looked forward to a bright future with 17″ displays sporting about the same generally usable pixel pitch (about 147 pixels per inch). If the world had continued to advance technically, if the now retired SR71 wasn’t still the fastest, highest flying plane ever built, if the now retired Concorde wasn’t the only commercial supersonic aircraft, if the retirement of the space shuttle didn’t herald the end of US’s manned space flight capability, if we weren’t living on the burnt out ruins of our former capabilities watching our technical competency spiral down the toilet, we’d have WQXGA (2560×1600) 17.4″ laptops right now. Maybe even QXGA 15.4″ options for those of us with good eyes.
But we don’t. We have bizarre stupid Vaio VGN-AW11M/H with kid friendly 104 PPI displays sporting useless 1680×945 pixels on an 18.4″ screen. That’s a pixel pitch straight out of 1990. Thanks for nothing.
Nobody even makes a reasonably sized laptop with a 15.4″ screen with more than 1920×1080 pixels any more (the only WUXGA laptop I can find at any size is the oversized kidz pitch 17″ macbook pro). I’m going to have to stick with my W500, or buy used ones for the rest of my life. Laptop makers – there’s no way I’m going to regress to a less productive smaller pixel count. That’s just stupid. Pull your heads out and give us pixels. The only thing that really matters for productivity is pixels. More pixels=better. Less pixels=worse. Don’t bother releasing a new laptop if it is worse. If you’ve lost the competency, just pack it up.
Apple: the 264 PPI pitch of the 3rd gen ipad is pretty good. If you build a 15.4″ macbook pro with that pitch in QFHD (3840×2160) pixels instead of the bizarrely large type kid’s book useless 1440×900 pixel resolution the current 15″ macbook pro is crippled by, I would actually buy one to run Ubuntu on. And maybe even have a bit of hope for the future.
(I’d suggest refraining from buying a laptop until 2013: ivy bridge will make 1920×1080 laptops as quaint as those 640×480 displays from 1990: the era from 2010-2013 may be known as the dark ages of laptops.)