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!

Blender won't start windowed when Legacy Fullscreen is enabled in Compiz

Ran into this the other day, with a solution presenting itself on launchpad as usual. This is more of a workaround than a bugfix, but it works perfectly satisfactorily.

Essentially you want to change your Blender launch parameters to something along the lines of:

 blender -w -p 0 0 800 600 

What this does is tell Blender to launch in windowed mode, as well as starting at the bottom left of your screen and at a resolution of 800 by 600. You can then move the window around and resize/fullscreen it as per the norm. For some reason Blender throws a hissy fit and refuses to start windowed when only the "-w" parameter is specified, the additional options seem to force it to work properly.

Assuming you're using Gnome, you can customise your menu entries by going to System > Preferences > Main Menu.

GDM2Setup / Ubuntu Tweak - Unable to change Xsplash Wallpaper

On a couple of fresh Lucid installs so far I've run into this same problem, whereby GDM2setup and/or Ubuntu Tweak are unable to change the wallpaper for Xsplash. This apparently stems from the fact that a directory both programs need to modify does not exist by default in 10.04.

A fix presented itself in the form of the reply from WobblyBob on launchpad here.

Essentially all you need to do is run this command in the terminal:

sudo mkdir /usr/share/images/xsplash

Then attempt to change the wallpaper once again. Hopefully that has fixed it!

Ensure Compiz starts with --loose-binding upon login with a handy script

Previously talked about was the massive perfomance enhancement systems using Nvidia cards and Compiz enjoy when Compiz is started with the '--loose-binding' option. To ensure that this happens properly upon every login i've found that deploying a quick little bash script is easiest.

To create the script:

gedit compiz-start.sh

Copy and pase the following into it

#!/bin/bash

compiz --replace --loose-binding
gtk-window-decorator --replace

Save and close gedit.

Make the script executable: 

 chmod 700 compiz-start.sh

At this point you can test the script using './compiz-start.sh' from your home directory.

To add this script to your list of startup applications: 

In Ubuntu, go to 'System > Preferences > Startup Applications' and add the line:

/home/yourusername/compiz-start.sh

So that it is one of the entries. At this stage, you're done, however, i've found the script works best when combined with the delay script mentioned previously.

So with that, the line to run the compiz script after five seconds would be:

 /home/yourusername/delay.sh 5 "/home/yourusername/compiz-start.sh"

Done!

Make Lucid less irritating - Change buttons from left to right and remove mail icon

Raar! Certain changes in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx have brought on the rage, specifically the buttons being on the left, and that damned mail icon I never use (due to using a webmail client) in the new notification area that cannot be conventionally removed without also removing the volume icon.

So, some quick fixes to copy/paste into the terminal!

Remove the mail icon:

sudo apt-get remove indicator-messages 

Move the window controls to the right-hand side: 

gconftool-2 --set "/apps/metacity/general/button_layout" --type string "menu:minimize,maximize,close"

 That should hopefully soothe the irritation somewhat.

Conky problematic in Lucid? Battery bar appears empty.

After upgrading to 10.04 on my laptop I found that the battery monitor bar was returning an empty bar with no data. Inspection of errors returned by running it in the terminal showed that conky was trying to identify the battery by the wrong portion of the script, specifically:

${battery_bar 7,65 BAT0}

Where it should have been attempting to lookup 'BAT0', it was actually looking up '7,65'. After double checking that the script had been written correctly, I attempted a reinstall from the repositories, to no avail! The solution ended up being just to download the source, compile and install.

Conky source can be found here, download the tarball of the latest version.

To install:

Ensure dependencies have been met:

sudo apt-get install lua5.1 liblua5.1-0-dev libxml2-dev build-essential libcurl4-gnutls-dev libx11-dev libxt-dev libxext6-dbg libxext-dev libxdamage-dev libxft-dev libimlib2-dev libglib2.0-dev

Find the Conky tarball you have downloaded and extract the contents to a convenient location, then navigate to this folder in the terminal.

Then, while in this directory, in the terminal:

 ./configure
make
sudo make install

And you're done! For convenience you could use a program called checkinstall to autobuild a deb, so that it is easier to remove or upgrade conky at a later date.

To do this simply replace 'sudo make install' with 'sudo checkinstall'. Follow the steps and enjoy Conky!

A Guide to Clonezilla - Create a backup image of your computer using a LiveCD or USB Drive

Previously mentioned as being used to completely restore a broken system using partition images was Clonezilla, so it seems like a good idea to post up a short guide for using it!

The First Step: Download the iso from here, you're looking to download the one marked as 'stable iso/zip'. You can then use a program like Infrarecorder (Windows) or K3B (Linux) to burn the iso image to a blank CD. Alternatively, use USB Startup Disk Creator (Ubuntu - System > Administration) or UnetBootin (Windows) to create a bootable USB drive.

The Second Step: Check your bios settings to ensure that your USB or Disk Drive is listed above your HDD in the boot order, else Clonezilla will not initialise upon bootup.

The Third Step: Have your backup medium ready, be it USB Stick or External Drive, but do not plug them in yet. Boot the computer, you should be presented with a menu looking just like the one below:

Rest of the guide after the break:

Link List - Applications

I've added a bunch of links to various applications that I always add to every fresh installation of Ubuntu, mainly so that I actually remember some of the less regularly used ones, but also for anyone that might be interested in having a look at some apps they've perhaps not seen before.