[HOWTO] QuickTip: Why are there Smurfs in my YouTube videos?

The other day I noticed that YouTube videos were taking on a bluish tint for some odd reason. I thought it may have been due to a Firefox addon I had installed but it turned out to be a red herring. The problem is a problem with how Flash player version 11.2.202.228 interacts with Nvidia drivers. If I save the video to my hard drive and watch it in VLC I can see it with no problem but it’s a pain to have to save a video just to be able to watch it.

I did some searching and found it’s a common issue and it can affect Flash videos from any site, not just YouTube. (I’ll show it in Firefox since I’m unable to change the setting within Chromium for some reason.) The fix is to right-click on the video, which you can do even before you press the “play” button, and select Settings from the context menu. You’ll want to clear the checkbox that says Enable hardware acceleration. Then click close and reload the page. When you play it again you’ll find the normal colors again and the smurfs will be banished. At least until the bug becomes a recurrence.

Thanks to the folks at my-guides.net for publishing the workaround for this. The video I used for this post is the latest video from The Piano Guys, an incredible group of folks from Utah. If you’re not familiar with them you should go check out some of their now 35 videos they’ve created. These guys blow me away with their creativity.

[RESOLVED] Can someone help diagnose my Plymouth bootsplash issue?

Update 27 Nov 9:40a ET: I found a solution to my issue on the Linux Mint Forums. It turns out the instructions I read on the KDE-Looks page for Kmint seem to be missing some important steps. I’ve added them at the bottom of this post.

Update 28 Apr 2012: Stupid me just realized I had used a placeholder for the name of the file you need for Kmint but never actually went back and replaced it with the file name. Sorry about the confusion.

I got tired of the scrolling text boot on my LMDE laptop and installed Plymouth, but it’s looking pretty funky to me. I had been using the Kmint Plymouth bootsplash theme but it’s showing up as blank except for the progress bar on the bottom left of the screen and distro information (that isn’t even completely accurate) on the lower right. I switched to the solar theme from the package plymouth-themes-all but the same thing happened. I shot this video to show what I’m getting.

Sorry about the video quality and the lack of audio, but that’s what I got on my Samsung Restore (on Virgin Mobile). As the video shows I get the progress bar at the lower left corner, and other than the progressing bar I get the Debian version info on the lower right but nothing else until my Ksplash kicks in. Does anyone know what I may be doing wrong? If anyone needs more info just ask in the comments and I’ll add it to the post.

Oops! After posting this I remembered I took some screenshots that may help show the issue.  These two pics show the Kmint Plymouth theme.

I got it resolved, and here are the steps I hadn’t known about:

Install instructions

1) Install plymouth

sudo apt-get install plymouth plymouth-drm

2) Download and untar file for LifeInTheGrey’s Plymouth theme from  his original post on this Linux Mint Forums thread.

Download the attached zip file and expand it to /usr/share/plymouth/themes/

3) Set the theme

sudo plymouth-set-default-theme lmde

4) Modify grub to see the splash

gksudo gedit /etc/default/grub

Change:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet"
to
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

5) Update initramfs and grub

sudo update-initramfs -u && sudo update-grub

Bam, you’re good to go! 

You may need to restart a couple of times to get the changes registered. It took me two reboots to see the bootsplash. I’m changing my Plymouth theme one more time to get the Kmint theme enabled and I’ll snag a screenshot to show how it looks for me.  Here’s my Plymouth with a modified Kmint. I added a background while trying to get the issue resolved so it will look different from what’s on your system.

I’m not sure why I can’t get the statusbar, so I’ll have to dig some more. Here’s the lmde Plymouth theme, complete with the statusbar. I’ll be using it as my reference as I try to ID my last issues with the Kmint them. I will be passing my findings along to hellokitten, the dev of the Kmint theme.

Yoooouge thanks to LifeInTheGrey for the missing info.

[HOWTO] How to fix the broken spellchecker in LMDE’s LibreOffice

I’m using LibreOffice’s word processor to work on some translations for an open source project and I noticed that the spelling and grammar checker checker tool didn’t seem to work. I looked through all of the LibreOffice packages available for Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) and couldn’t see what package I was missing so I did a Google search and saw mentions on several sites (sorry, I can’t find the sites in my history) about separate spell checkers not being installed.

This seemed odd, because I am able to check the spelling in other apps, from Chromium to even Dolphin, KDE’s file manager. I fired up my software manager again and saw that neither aspell nor hunspell were installed so I installed aspell and sure enough, the spelling and grammar checker in LibreOffice was finally working.

It turns out this is a frequent issue, and I suspect it shows up on other distros as well. I definitely saw it reported on Ubuntu and the Ubuntu-based flavors of Linux Mint. I was finally able to find Bug #836475: Spell checking does not work in LibreOffice and I posted a comment about the apparent missing dependency.

Get past the On The Media splash screen in Chromium

One of my favorite NPR programs in On The Media (OTM), a show that looks at how media covers and reacts to events in our world. Unfortunately for users of the Chromium (and Google’s Chrome) browser they added a splash screen to offer their listeners to give to help support OTM. I say unfortunately because Chromium has gotten stuck on the splash screen. After contacting OTM about the problem I discovered that the problem is that cookies aren’t being set properly, and have found a solution for the problem.

The problem is that Chromium isn’t seeing the cookies that OTM is trying to set, as you can see in the image on the left. It sees the cookie for player.vimeo.com, but not the four cookies from onthemedia.org, as seen in the cookie info window from Firefox (on the right of the image). To fix that we have to create filter to allow cookies from onthemedia.org. Click on the cookie icon in the omnibar and select Manage cookie blocking… A new tab will open with the cookie management section of your content settings. Scroll to the bottom of the window and create a filter as shown below.

In the text box type [*.]onthemedia.com, with Allow selected in the listbox on the right. Simply press Enter on your keyboard and the new filter will be created. Go back to the tab with the OTM site and refresh the tab. Now you can click the OTM splash screen’s CONTINUE TO OTM WITHOUT PLEDGING button and go to the OTM home page.

I have filed Issue 85713: Cookies from onthemedia.org are not recognized on the Chromium bug tracker to try and get this bug fixed for future releases.

Chromium Daily works again

If you’re like me and use the daily builds of the Chromium browser you undoubtedly discovered that several sites, including Gmail and the issue tracking section of the Google Code project hosting site, flat out refused to load. At first I thought it was due to Issue 40221: Incessant “Page unresponsive” errors in latest published build (Win, Mac, Linux), but it turns out that was a Chrome issue, not a Chromium issue, and Chromium users were referred to Issue 43042: Latest Ubuntu chromium-browser broke Gmail and news.google.com. The problem in a nutshell is that build 46027 of version 5.0.393.0 broke something important and was unable to render pages. I also found Issue 43013: [regression] Chromium 5.0.393.0 will not load http://www.google.com, that displayed the same misbehavior.

While we were waiting for the fix to come down the pipeline some of us rolled back to version 5.0.391.0~svn20100428r45775 while some of us switched to the ‘dev’ build channel, which combines the joy of testing code without the possibilities of brand new untested code committing sexual crimes against canines. Either choice is better than what some of us consider the barely acceptable option (at best) of switching back to Firefox.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the daily PPA to see when an update was available, especially since yesterday I wouldn’t help notice that it was being reported that version Chromium 5.0.395.0 (Developer Build 46223) Ubuntu was resolving the issues from  build 46027 although newer builds on the PPA were failing. All day yesterday I was waiting for i386 packages for build 46539 to build, wondering if it was supposed to take over 3 hours for the packages to build. This morning the updates were ready for me to install and I’m very happy to say that I’m finally back to using current nightly builds of the Chromium browser without problems on any sites I’ve tried. Gmail works, Google News works, the Chromium issue tracking site works, and even Twitter works.

I am running Chromium daily builds on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx, but I have a few issues to track down before I post my thoughts on it. I will say it’s working fairly well, but a couple of instances are being a royal PITA. I want to say they’re fixed, or at least identified better, before I post my review of the upgrade.

Chromium getting you down? I finally found out what’s sexually assaulted the poor pooch

I’ve been enjoying the new Radiance theme that was created for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx and I’ve been meaning to post the way to get the new theme and scrollbars in the Chromium web browser. I was even going to mention that adding the scrollbars extension finally fixes the missing stepper issue in Chromium, which is great news to those who disagree with the Chromium devs who feel there’s little or no need for steppers in the GNU/Linux versions. (I too think they’re dead wrong on that matter, regardless of whether or not other OSes have them.)

But for the last several days I couldn’t help noticing that Chromium has wanted been crashing so often that I could hardly do a bloody thing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to open a link, no matter whether the link started in my browser, my Twitter app or even my email/RSS app. It would be click… CRASH! It’s gotten to the point where I’ve considered doing some of my browsing in Epiphany or Opera just to be able to use URI’s without crashing every few minutes. Or less.

I hate to admit this but I’d gotten really bad about not checking my email and news feeds in Evolution lately. I’d read my email online, but I just wouldn’t make the time to fire up Evo and look at the messages that came in through it. If I had I would have see Tuesday’s post on Jorge’s Stompbox entitled Sad chromium tabs got you down?

Just a warning that the chrome-ubuntu-theme scrollbar extension has been causing crashes for people. Mike Basinger reported the bug here but it appears to be triggering a webkit bug.

Disabling the extension fixes the crashes for me.

While I hate losing my themes scrollbars and the setters that went with them I have to say that simply disabling the extension removed the issue on my system. I didn’t even need to restart Chromium, which is a damned nice things since my ability to recover crashed tabs isn’t exactly reliable.

Yooouge thanks to Jorge Castro for discovering and publishing the workaround. I definitely owe you a bewskie or two. At least.

Does Chrome or Chromium get extra long on some sites?

A week or so ago I noticed that the Chromium browser would suddenly resize itself and get much longer than my desktop size. I reported Issue 31126: Chromium resizes the window without warning or user action, which ended up being a regression of an old bug. It also turned out to be a duplicate of Issue 30995: window resizes vertically when scrolling in a long page. But I saw some fantastic news yesterday on Issue 30995. Jamin.Thorns posted comment 46.

Bug fixed in Chromium 4.0.283.0  

I ran a sudo apt-get update and sure enough, the problem is gone! If you’re having this problem you can get a recent build and if you’re running Ubuntu you can use the Chromium Daily Builds PPA. While using that PPA could expose you to new bugs and regressions like the one that prompted my bug report, but it will also get you the latest fixes. Just make sure you are running Chromium version 4.0.283.0 or later and you’ll be free from this glitch.

The great news is that with this fix in place, as well as the extensions that are now even easier to install, Chromium is now an even better option for people who don’t want to run Firefox or Opera. It’s definitely better than the current version of Epiphany that’s available in Ubuntu 9.10. Now if only we can get a version of the StumbleUpon extension that works reliably on Chromium and I’ll be one happy penguinista. While it works for some users I can’t seem to get it working without having to jump through hoops to rate a page I’m on and I really wish I could give thumbs up to some of the web pages I visit. Although I’ve seen that if I have the SU toolbar active on one tab the next tab I open will also have the bar so it may work better than I realize.

Peng’s links for Thursday, 17 December

Sorry about not posting a links post last week (or two). I’m going to include some of the links I found because they’re still beneficial even a week (or two) after they were published.

• Stephan Peijnik: How to copy partitions under GNU/Linux the easy way. I may not be the only one hoping to find a new hard drive under the Chrismukkuh tree next week, and you may need a way to transfer your data off a dying drive, or even just a smaller one, to a new one. Stephan has a very easy way to accomplish the task. And he has the added benefit of spelling his name the right way. Just ask my son Stephen.
• Launchpad News: Getting the most from bug mail. Filing bugs is an important part of being a member of he open source community, but sometimes the follow up emails may not seem to be giving you much value for your time. The Launchpad team has some information that may help you make the most of your bug reporting work while taking up less time out of your busy days.
• Chromium Blog: Extensions beta launched, with over 300 extensions! I know this post is just over a week ago, but if you don’t know that there is an official home for extensions for Google’s Chrome browser and its open source sibling Chromium then you should definitely check out this post. It’s not as easy to surf as Mozilla’s addon site but they have a lot of very helpful extensions to help you use Chrome or Chromium as your new default web browser. To make things even better, Google Chrome for Linux is now available for beta testing.
• Panji Nushantara: How To Use Google Public DNS or OpenDNS in Ubuntu 9.10. If you find that your ISP’s Domain Name System lookups are slower than you find on other systems you can try a pair of public DNS services. Panji makes it easy with step-by-step instructions and screenshots.
• Rick Spencer: And Do it Begins. We can no longer say that there are no malware threats to Ubuntu users. Luckily the news isn’t nearly as bad as you may think from that last sentence. Kees Cook follows up on Rick’s article with a very simple bit of advice: “As quickly pointed out by Rick, don’t install random software that isn’t in the official distribution archive unless you really know what you’re doing (and copy/pasting commands from a website doesn’t count). You’re just asking to be made part of a botnet.” You’re damned Skippy, Kees.
• Juanje Ojeda: Is GNOME 3.0 for users or developers? GNOME Shell is being mentioned as one of the cooler things in the upcoming 3.0 release of the GNOME desktop environment but Juanje looks at the important question of who are the new features designed for?
• Andrew Cowie: Get your icons back. Have you lost the icons on your dialog buttons? Some people prefer a plain text look to their buttons but some don’t. Andrew has information on on why it changed and how to get them back if you prefer seeing them.
• The Fridge: LoCo Directory. The official Ubuntu Local Community (LoCo) Directory is now online! If you’re a part of a LoCo make sure your information is accurate, and if you’re able please help get it translated so even more people can make use of it.
• Launchpad news: Showing the number of affected users. Launchpad has long allowed you to say if a particular bug affects you, but you can now see how many of your fellow users have been bitten by the same bug. That is one nice feature they’ve added.
• Martin Owens: Anime Boston: First Goal Reached. Back on the third I included a link to Danny Piccirillo’s article about efforts to get Ubuntu represented at Anime Boston. Martin has some very good news for us about the plans.
• Robert Ancell: The demise of the function key. If you’re like me you often use function keys to do things without having to wade through menu after menu to do something. Unfortunately many keyboards are re-purposing those very keys, if they include them at all. That’s not just bad news for users, it’s bad for developers as well.
• Tom Dryer: Setting up Ubuntu 9.10. Tom has finally gotten Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala on his system and he shares some tricks he used to get it to run better. He’s also got screenshots of a damned nice theme that he uses.

I hope you’re all getting things ready for Chrismukkuh. Rather than add to the holiday post I wrote last Saturday Nanci and I have been adding some vids to her stickied holiday video post. If you’re still looking for some great holiday wallpaper you should check out the offerings over at blirk.net. You can also check out the posts in the Delicious December 2009 Screenshot Thread over on the Ubuntu Forums. And speaking of Chrismukkuh posts, I have one more link to share with you all before I hit Publish:

• Collin Pruitt: Christmas Online. Collin has some sites to help you make the most of your holiday. And if you’re more of an anti-Chrismukkuh person you should definitely check out the official YouTube channel for Foamy the Squirrel and all the folks over at iLL WiLL PrEss.

Epiphany, take a seat. Chromium, you’re up.

As I mentioned in my earlier post on using Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala the Epiphany devs stopped supporting the Gecko rendering engine and switched to exclusively supporting the WebKit engine. While I understand their decision, I don’t think Epiphany/WebKit is quite ready for prime time, although I was willing to continue using it as my default browser. As I used Epiphany/WebKit I was left with the feeling that there are too many things about Epiphany/WebKit that simply pisses me off too much to let it remain as my default web browser. Among the issues that left me banging my head against a brick wall are

• Epiphany-extensions-more is uninstallable in karmic (Launchpad bug #452845). That leaves the third-party extensions needing to be manually installed, but there’s no guarantee that they will work, because…
• Add-ons need to be rewritten to work with the WebKit engine. That leaves some of my MustHave extensions broken, including Middle Click Tab Close, New Blank Tab, Window Icon, AWN Favicon, and Video Downloader.
• Opening links in a new tab can be completely impossible, especially in Gmail but not necessarily on other Google sites (LP bug #272808). To add insult to injury, if you click on a link on an offending site it opens the link in a window so small as to be completely useless without resizing it. (screenshots available in my comment on that bug).
• Login information is no longer saved (LP bug #483566). This leaves you having to manually enter login information to sites you’ve visited many times before, even with Epiphany/karmic, and had the temerity to log out or the site automatically times out your session.
• If you click a link to download an archive or a software package Epiphany complains that the file could damage your system and offers to let you download it instead, presenting you with options to “save as…” and “download” (LP bug #151787). In addition, right clicking on an image and selecting to save it results in a dialog complaining that Epiphany has no idea what application to open the file in. This may be the same issue, but I can’t find another bug that fits it better.
• Epiphany refuses to recognize apturl links as an authorized method of installing software (LP bug #235128).
• There’s no way to get favicons, the icons provided by web servers to visually identify the website you’re on (LP bug #355755). While some users like not having favicons on their browser tabs many of us so want it.
• Closing a tab with a form, with fields filled out or not, will get you a dialog warning that there are unsaved form elements (LP bug #21597).
• While we finally have a working spell checker, the UI sucks. There’s no way to easily tell the browser to always check your spelling, leaving you to manually right-click to make sure the spell checker is on for a text field. To make matters worse, once it’s enabled you have to manually right-click and tell Epiphany to Check Document Now to move to the next typo. Talk about a pain in the rump.
• If you find a typo with the spell checker and select the correct spelling, the typo is removed but the correct spelling isn’t inserted in its place (LP bug #460450).

That’s not even an exhaustive list of the things in Epiphany/karmic that makes me go “Grrrrr!” As much as I liked using Epiphany/Gecko under Ubuntu 9.04 it’s simply pissing me off too much to use it as my default browser any longer, so I switched to Chromium. While Chromium isn’t perfect, and there are things that don’t work quite as well as I’d like it to, it definitely works better than Epiphany/WebKit. And thanks to the Ubuntu Chromium Daily Builds Team’s PPA I get updates to Chromium on a daily basis so I can see fixes almost as soon as they’re released. The biggest PITA bug that I’m waiting to get fixed is one I posted, Issue 28517: Can’t import bookmarks from Epiphany. Until it’s fixed I’ve added a link to my Epiphany bookmarks file on my Bookmarks Bar so I can get at it easily when I need it. I’m also unable to add words to my spell check dictionary for some odd reason, but at least when I select a correct spelling the error gets corrected and not just wiped out.

While you can use extensions in Chromium the devs haven’t opened the extensions gallery, you can find some installable extensions at the Google Chrome Extensions site. Among the extensions I already have installed are

• AdBlock+ 1.1.9.9 – It doesn’t work as transparently as Firefox’s AdBlock+ works, and I can’t seem to able to block ads in Gmail, but hopefully that will change before too long. I just saw the AntiADS extension and it seems working better than AdBlock+.
• Bookmarklets Manager 3.2.0 – A great way to add and use bookmarklets, although several of my search bookmarklets don’t want to work. It may be due to Issue 2238: Add search engine dialog doesn’t allow “{” (open curly brace); can interfere with javascript.
• New Tabs Always Last 0.1 – Sometimes I just don’t want a new tab opened next to the active tab, like 90% of the time I click a link on my custom start page. This extension brings the behavior I want, and I can always disable it if I want new tabs opened next to my active tab and not at the far right of my tab bar.
• Tabs to the front 0.1 – Like it says on the tin, because I hate having to manually select a tab I just opened from a link.
• YouTube Downloader 1.1 – While not as feature rich as the Firefox Video DownloadHelper extension in that I can’t download my local television news videos or MLB highlight videos, it does bring one killer feature to the table: Easy to find buttons to select which version of the video you want to download, as shown in the image on the right (click the image for the full size image in a new window).

There’s also one killer feature to Chrome’s add-ons. You don’t need to close Chrome to get the benefits of an extension. Yep, you can use a new extension as soon as it’s installed. The same goes for enabling/disabling an add-on. I seem to remember hearing that other browsers can do that (I know Epiphany can), but Chrome/Chromium kicks Firefox’s tail on this count.

There are a couple of other bugs that may keep some users from switching to Chromium full-time. The first is that Chromium doesn’t seem to know how to open PDF files (Chromium issue 19587). I can’t open PDF’s in Epiphany either, so downloading PDF files is one more thing I keep Firefox around for. I also can’t drag a URI from Chromium to the desktop (issue 24210) to remind me to get back to the page. If you’ve created a bookmark on your desktop with another browser Chromium can’t open it either (issue 27339).

If you’re unhappy with Firefox and Epiphany and are looking for a browser that can make it easier to surf the web you should definitely look into Chromium. You may find that it’s just what the doctor ordered.

Peng’s links for Sunday, 22 November

• Sense Hofstede: Ubuntu Bug Control starts mentoring. Reporting bugs is an important part of using open source software so they can get squashed and in time others won’t have to deal with them. Of course there are already a lot of bugs reported, with many of them unconfirmed. Any user can help simply by triaging bugs to confirm the bug and the package it’s in. Sense has some very easy info on how to help with triaging.
• Stefano Forenza: Ubuntu One Music Store. You read that right, Canonical wants to include a way to buy music within next spring’s Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Linx. Stefano also has a follow-up post with answers to some questions that came up in his original post. Welcome back, Stefano!
• Aaron Toponce: Debian – The Universal Operating System. While Debian (the foundation for the Ubuntu family of GNU/Linux operating systems) isn’t perfect, is is pretty powerful, not to mention flexible as hell. Aaron gives us a great overview of Debian. Even I didn’t realize Debian was so good.
• Stefano Forenza: No more Gimp for you little Joe. Stefano mentioned it before, but it’s been confirmed. Gimp will no longer be part of the default installation of Ubuntu, although they are keeping F-Spot for image editing. In all honesty I have to admit that the Gimp doesn’t have the best UI, but I use it regularly. I tried F-Spot before, and with some versions I couldn’t get the damned thing open, while in others I was just so overwhelmed trying to figure out how to use it I shut it down and opened my image up in the Gimp. Luckily you can install Gimp easily, so you won’t have to jump through too many hoops. We’ll have to wait and see if in-place upgrading to 10.04 deletes Gimp. If it does I’m going to be one ticked off penguin.
• Danielle Madeley: Why Telepathy is not like libpurple. Some people think Telepathy, Ubuntu 9.10′s default messaging client, is like Pidgin, the client so many of us have come to love over the years. Danielle shows that they are two very different apps. Thanks for the clarification, Danielle, even though I still prefer to use Pidgin.
• Maia Kozheva: UI Rant: Computer Janitor. Thank the diety I’m not the only one who thinks Computer Janitor has one of the fugliest interfaces I’ve ever seen. Dude, we’ve gotta get this fixed and soon if we want people to use it.
• Anirudh Acharya: Chrome OS: First Impressions… Artem Nosulchik and Stefano Forenza have both written nice articles on the newly announced Google ChromeOS, but the developer of Mac4Lin gave it a spin and shares his thoughts, as well as some screenshots.
• Christoph Langher: Secure and unique passwords with PwdHash for Chromium. I asked for help with an add-on for Chrom[e|ium], but Christoph has found a Chrom[e|ium] version of a Firefox add-on that he is damned glad to find.

To those who live in the States I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving. But be careful when selecting your bird. I hear they’re fighting back this year.