Showing posts with label Linux Mint. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Linux Mint. Show all posts

Friday, April 22, 2022

Linux Mint Cinnamon problem and fix

 I recently installed and used a Python program, internetarchive.  Somewhere along the line of installing it with pip, the Python setup on my machine got changed, not in a good way.  Lots of Python programs are apparently very sensitive to Python version numbers.  

The symptom was that sound stopped working on my system (except in Zoom, which evidently handles its own sound subsystem).  Then, sound menu wouldn't come up.  Then the Cinnamon system settings control centre, cinnamon-settings, wouldn't come up. It generated an error saying that it couldn't find "requests."   At another time, it couldn't find "urllib3".  

Cut a long story short, running

sudo apt reinstall requests urllib3

fixed the problem.



Wednesday, June 03, 2020

The demise of gksudo from Ubuntu-based distributions and what to do about it

I gather that there were good security-related reasons for discontinuing gksudo. But it's quite inconvenient not having it, for example when you are adding new items to the Linux Mint main menu (using menulibre, for example).

Here's what I do:
  • install ssh-askpass

  • add this line
    SUDO_ASKPASS=/usr/bin/ssh-askpass
    to the file
    /etc/environment
  • Then, in menu or batch commands that you want to pop-up a graphical p/w prompt, say
    sudo -A <command>

Thursday, February 06, 2020

Automounting google-drive-ocamlfuse: getting Google Drive to appear as a Linux folder

This is well documented elsewhere, but just for clarity, here are my settings, that work. I.e., the Google drive appears automatically mounted after a fresh boot.

1. Install google-drive-ocamlfuse

2. Line in /etc/fstab (all one line):
gdfuse#default  /home/dom/GoogleDriveUofA    fuse    uid=1000,gid=1000,allow_other,user,_netdev     0       0

3. Contents of executable /usr/bin/gdfuse
#!/bin/bash
su dom -l -c "google-drive-ocamlfuse -label $1 $*"
exit 0

Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Linux Mint 19.1 Cinnamon and display flickering

When I upgraded to Linux Mint 19.1 with Cinnamon, I encountered a problem that my screen flickered immediately after logging in.  Others encountered the same problem (here).
I found that the solution proposed there, i.e., to delete the line
CLUTTER_PAINT=disable-clipped-redraws:disable-culling
from the file
/etc/environment
worked for me.  Logging out and back in after that change gave me a stable display.

Monday, July 09, 2018

Tweaking the Thinkpad's TrackPoint settings in Linux Mint 19

With the update to Linux Mint 19 Cinnamon, the sliders controlling the trackpoint's accelleration and speed on my Thinkpad T560 and T500 don't work any more.  I expect it will get fixed soon.  Meanwhile, as root I  can manually edit the parameters in the filesin the directory
  • /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/serio2
The above directory is found by
  • find /sys/devices/platform/i8042 -name name | xargs grep -Fl TrackPoint | sed 's/\/input\/input[0-9]*\/name$//'
Settings are reset at reboot.  :-(

I like sensitivity 125 and speed 80 on the T560; 190 and 90, inertia 10, on the T500.

Update


I found this solution (X1 parameters) that automates everything and survives reboot :-)

Another update, March 2020

Lalufu at github said,
You can also use xinput to modify the libinput values directly:
Run xinput to show the pointers the system knows about. If you have a ThinkPad you should see something along the lines of TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint or similar.
xinput --set-prop "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint" "libinput Accel Speed" -0.5
will modify the pointer speed. Play around with the value to see what you like. If you want this to survive a reboot you can stick this in .bash_profile.

Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Del latitude xinput settings

See https://askubuntu.com/questions/688270/mouse-speed-too-fast

Put the following commands in a file (foobar.sh), make the file executable (chmod +x foobar.sh), and then run it.

#!/bin/sh
xinput --set-prop "AlpsPS/2 ALPS DualPoint Stick" "Device Accel Constant Deceleration" 8
xinput --set-prop "AlpsPS/2 ALPS DualPoint Stick" "Device Accel Velocity Scaling" .8
xinput --set-prop "AlpsPS/2 ALPS DualPoint Stick" "Device Accel Adaptive Deceleration" 8


You can run this command on startup from the Startup Applications menu.

Monday, May 15, 2017

IBUS bug fix ... again (sigh!)

Further to https://cikitsa.blogspot.ca/2012/01/ibus-bug-fix.html, I found the same bug cropping up in Linux Mint 18.1, with IBUS 1.15.11.

Some applications don't like IBUS + m17n, and certain input mim files. For example, LibreOffice and JabRef.  Trying to type "ācārya" will give the result is "ācāry a". And in other strings, some letters are inverted: "is" becomes "si" and so forth.

Here's the fix.

Create a file called, say ibus-setting.sh with the following one-line content:
export IBUS_ENABLE_SYNC_MODE=0
Copy the file ibus-setting.sh to the directory /etc/profile.d/, like this:
sudo cp ibus-setting.sh /etc/profile.d
Make the file executable, like this:
sudo chmod +x /etc/profile.d/ibus-setting.sh
Logout and login again.

Phew!

This fixes the behaviour of IBUS + m17n with most applications, including LibreOffice and Java applications like JabRef.  However, some applications compiled with QT5 still have problems.  So, for example, you have to use the version of TeXStudio that is compiled with QT4, not QT5. [Update September 2018: QT5 now works fine with Ibus, so one can use the QT5 version of TeXstudio with no problem.]

Friday, December 11, 2015

Linux Mint swapfile

Getting the swap file working in Linux Mint.  Using LVM

sudo /sbin/mkswap /dev/mapper/foobar [e.g., mint--vg-swap_1]
sudo swapon -a

Thursday, August 07, 2014

Linux Mint 17, Cinnamon, Firefox 31 = freeze

I've been very happy with Linux Mint 17, and the Cinnamon GUI.
Except for the occasional system freezes.  This happened usually when I was swapping between windows (alt+tab), and required a re-login.

I've spent some time looking around the web and trying to diagnose the problem.  I've found one change that seems to have cleared up the problem, and I am not aware that anyone else has mentioned it yet.  I've uninstalled Firefox (31), and replaced it with Google Chrome.  I haven't had a freeze since doing that.  Fingers crossed.