Firestarter Tray Icon Fix / Horrific Botch - Gnome 2.30

A quick warning before I begin. This is the most horrific and longwinded way of fixing the transparency issue with Firestarter in Gnome 2.3 (and Lucid Lynx) that it cannot be considered much more than a dirty and very basic hack.

Firestarter hasn't been maintained for a very long time, however for home usage I find it a preferable application to others, as the active connection and live event updates are simply not available in any other firewall configurator for Linux. So, that said - here is the plan:

1. Download the Firestarter source
2. Modify the images the source uses to conform to the taskbar background
3. Build and install Firestarter with these new images

This destroys the ability of Firestarter to adapt to differing themes you may decide to use other than the one you have compiled it for (as the images it uses no longer have any transparencies), meaning that a theme change also requires the recompilation of Firestarter to look pretty. For those of you that change theme infrequently/never, this will work just fine.

Can't click buttons in Flash/Youtube using Firefox

This happened to me after reverting from the now discontinued Flash 64 bit alpha to running 32 bit Flash via nspluginwrapper. Flash videos would load and play normally, however none of the controls were responsive, and all clicking on them actually did was the focus the window. This meant that if you clicked on a window and held down, you'd then be able to use any keyboard hotkeys to control the video. Incredibly irritating!

A triage solution appears to go along the lines of:

sudo gedit /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/i386/linux/npviewer

Add the following just before the last line of the file:

export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 

Restart the application. In my case this only affected Firefox, whereas Chromium and Opera both still functioned normally without this fix.

In any case, hope that helps - when Flash plays up it can be a bit of a show-stopper.

F-spot won't start, throws errors from Terminal

I don't tend to use F-spot for an awful lot, but upon attempting to launch it recently I found that the computer would have a think, an ultimately take no action. Running the launch command from the terminal yielded the following error: 

Unhandled Exception: Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteSyntaxException: no such table: tags

As it turns out, the solution is simply to remove the config directory for F-spot. This can be achieved by running the following command in the terminal:

rm -rf .config/f-spot

Then start the program over again, hopefully that has solved it!