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Friday 17 February 2012

Flash Error #2046 definitive fix for linux users

By aldeby on Friday 17 February 2012, 00:10

Flash plugin Error #2046 seems to be quite a nasty one.

There is a plethora of tutorials out there claiming to fix it with various methods.

There is consensus among license issues when there is an incorrect system date (differing from the actual date of +/- 5 years or more). The fix is as simple as ensuring your system date to be up-to-date (set it to automatically sync with timeservers).

Apart from this possible solution there are several other suggestions with a mixed feedback and which proved to be ineffective to me. Therefore I ended up trying to debug this issue by myself.

The quick answer is: remove the space in *all* profile directories path in /home/{user}/.mozilla/firefox/ for example change

/home/{user}/.mozilla/firefox/{random string}.Default User

into the following makes the trick

/home/{user}/.mozilla/firefox/{random_string}.default

It has been pretty hard to get till there because this bug:

  • applies to selected websites only (for instance youtube and websites using flowplayer work well by default)
  • applies to all versions of the flash plugin
  • applies to all browsers you may have installed on your system (yes, the directory is related to mozilla firefox, however renaming the folder also fixes flash in Chrome, Chromium, Opera, etc.)
  • applies also if your active profile is another one!

Should you have the following two profiles /home/{user}/.mozilla/firefox/daddy.Linux Box /home/{user}/.mozilla/firefox/mummy.linuxbox and "mummy.linuxbox" be the the active one, still it has problems with flash because of "daddy.Linux Box" being there!

This experience further proves closed source software (flash) not being superior in quality to open source one.

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Saturday 24 September 2011

Windows 8 boycotts linux

By aldeby on Saturday 24 September 2011, 21:37

Windows 8 certified systems will make it either more difficult or impossible to install alternative operating systems.

M$ is compulsory requiring EFI Secure Boot feature to be enabled, which will prevent competing operating systems to be booted. Disabling this restriction, pardon "feature", will be optional and at the discretion of Firmware manufacturers and OEM (such as Lenovo, HP, Dell, etc.). The extra money and/or benefits M$ will provide OEM in case they abide with its requirements will certainly push these companies to maximize their revenues instead of caring of the 0.1% or less users of Linux.

Read more on this on the Matthew Garret (RedHat) blog: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/5850.html

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Thursday 5 May 2011

M$ fonts (eg Calibri, Cabira) display ugly in linux

By aldeby on Thursday 5 May 2011, 11:13

Following the basic economic principle that you need to innovate in order to create demand and keep selling, Micro$oft has discontinued its support for its former core fonts (Arial, Times, etc.) which were freely available to the whole community (remember ms-ttf-corefonts package?). Since everybody is using copyright restricted Office 2007 and newer fonts (such as Calibri, Cabira), I eventually decided to buy a license to be able to correctly display documents drafted with that also on my linux box. Unfortunately I was really upset about the quality of such a font, it seemed to display really ugly! Eventually I found out that these cleartype fonts had a bitmap version embedded that was displayed at small sizes, thus leading to weird ft letters. To disable this and get correct smoothing at all sizes you have to create a file  in your home directory named (mind the starting dot and do not worry if you are not going to find it anymore after refreshing the folder! It's a hidden file) 
.fonts.conf
and paste this code in it 
<match target="font" >
<edit name="embeddedbitmap" mode="assign">
<bool>false</bool>
</edit>
</match>
Log off and in again for the changes to be implemented.   original: after: further optimization may be achieved decreasing the hinting, however there will always be a big difference between these fonts and the standard and OpenSource DejaVu or Droid ones.

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Sunday 24 April 2011

Mozilla Lightning calendar tasks light gray color

By aldeby on Sunday 24 April 2011, 17:23

As reported also in this old thread in Mozilla Thunderbird Lightning calendar you may find that the tasks listed in the tasks list are all written in low contrast light gray color. This makes the Tasks feature almost unusable. Here is my quick fix.
Default colours of task list row background, when selected but not focussed (grey) and the task's text color (grey) are almost identical. As a result, the new task is virtually invisible (see screenshot below) unless I focus it (blue bg) or select another task. Besides, even after deselecting, task default color grey on white is hardly readable.
This issue can be experienced also in Ubuntu Natty 11.04 with Gnome Ambiance theme and the provided Mozilla Thunderbird 3.1.9 and Lightning 1.0b2 versions. Since newer nightly releases of Lightning are not compatible with the provided version of Thunderbird the only effective workaround is as simple as changing the Gnome windows theme from Ambiance to something else, e.g. Radiance. 
Appearance -> Themes

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