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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 - GNU/Linux

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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Thursday 20 October 2011

Global applications menu in XFCE

By aldeby on Thursday 20 October 2011, 15:51 - Visual

Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric has been released, now only featuring the Gnome 3 Shell blob and Ubuntu Unity threat (check what the "zeitgeist" dependency is for).

Luckily Linux is not Ubuntu and therefore other alternative still exist: XFCE (Xubuntu) is a very valid one which is likely to see its user-base vastly increased (at least +2 with Linux Torvalds and Me).

Ubuntu Unity has brilliant underlying ideas, among which the Global Applications Menu integrated in the top toolbar. Luckily, thanks to "aaronlewis1989" this is also available for XFCE 4.8. This is Linux flexibility: being free to keep the best ideas and dump everything not worth it. It's such a pity that someone in Canonical (Ubuntu) is trying to implement the same approach regular monopolistic companies do: forcing costumers to accept a compromise and surrender some right every time a new feature is implemented.

XFCE global app menu sources are available at this page and binaries (x86 32bit) at this page. A new PPA for ubuntu users has also been established here.

If you run a x86_64 (64bit) system you need to compile the source, which is a very easy job by the way!

Install a few dependencies first:

sudo apt-get install synaptic indicator-appmenu appmenu-gtk appmenu-qt appmenu-gtk3 firefox-globalmenu thunderbird-globalmenu xfce4-panel-dev libxfce4util-dev libindicator-dev libwnck-dev libxfconf-0 checkinstall

then unpack the tarball and open a terminal navigate inside the folder (if you have unpacked it in your home type)

cd xfce4-appmenu-plugin

now type

./configure --libexecdir=/usr/lib/xfce4-indicator-plugin/ --prefix=/usr --disable-debug

make

sudo make install
or alternatively
sudo checkinstall --pkgname=xfce4-appmenu-plugin --pkgversion=0.25-beta
then go in the folder binary/x86 and install the package 
dpkg -i xfce4-appmenu-plugin_0.25-beta-1_i386.deb

log out, log in again and right click on your XFCE panel and add the Indicator Appmenu Plugin!

Enjoy your 20px extra vertical real estate!! :D

Should you want to remove it simply use the package manager or type
sudo apt-get remove xfce4-appmenu-plugin

Troubleshooting:

  • Should you run into this error message:
    The required package libxfce4panel-1.0 was not found on your system.
You won't find package "libxfce4panel-1.0" in Ubuntu 11.10, the required files are instead included in package: "xfce4-panel-dev"

  • If you cannot find the Indicator Appmenu Plugin applet among the available panel applets, please ensure you have typed:
 ./configure --libexecdir=/usr/lib/xfce4-indicator-plugin/ --prefix=/usr
rather than simply

./configure

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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 - GNU/Linux

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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Friday 22 April 2011

Tweak disabling touchpad while typing

By aldeby on Friday 22 April 2011, 21:48 - GNOME

GNOME in Mouse settings -> Touchpad tab has a very useful option to disable the touchpad while typing. Despite this being very useful, and since Ubuntu Natty 11.04 less energy hungry*, it may still be annoying since the touchpad may feel not enough responsive in a fast paced work environment. Luckily syndaemon (which is the program providing us with this feature) developers have already tackled this issue by creating option -t. This enables the cursor to move while typing on the keyboard and before the -i milliseconds grace time have expired, however it prevents the touchpad from scrolling or clicking during this time. By enabling this feature you'll find your workflow much more seamless and could easily reach lightning fast the button you're looking for while the grace period expires. In order to have this feature you have to disable the GNOME built feature (untick the feature) and add to 
/etc/rc.local
the following line above "exit 0" 
syndaemon -i 0.8 -t -k -R
You may of course tweak the seconds of grace time -i N.n as you wish! After reboot you may check if your tweak has been effective by typing 
ps aux |grep syndaemon
if you see the above command executed well done! Another way to implement this tweak at a per user level is adding a new row at Gnome's Startup applet running this command at every login 
syndaemon -i 0.8 -t -k -R
* now with the -R option it does not pool the keyboard any more every -i milliseconds, thus leaving the CPU in idle state for longer.

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