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This post is now available on Peng’s new Tux + Me blog. You can find it at http://bostonpeng.wordpress.com/2011/11/06/holy-crap-what-happened-to-my-fonts/
If you came to this site form a link on another site please let the site you came from know that the post has been moved. Thank you.
I was going to save my links for one more day, but there’s one that I want to post today for everyone. And no, it’s not about the malware that Windows users are having to deal with.
Before I close this post, I have to share one more thing. It’s April Fools Day and while Nanci and I aren’t doing anything with the blog to “celebrate” the day, there are some really nice gags out there. Stefano Forenza is compiling a list of the Linux-based gags he finds so if you want to find a single place to see most of them Stefano’s blog is the place you want to be.
I’m not posting anything about the Conficker worm (other than a link to Panji Nushantara’s article) that has info that Windows users reallyshould have known about by now) for two major reasons. This blog deals with GNU/Linux, specifically Ubuntu Linux. It’s not that I don’t really give a rat’s bum about Windows (I really don’t), it’s that this isn’t the place Windows users should be looking for info like that. Besides, if you run Windows you have a responsibility to make sure you have all the security patches. Uuser with unpatched Windows systems have reasons to worry. If you’ve kept your patches up-to-date (or don’t run Windows) you have little (if anything) to worry about.
That’s a lid, folks. See you tomorrow, and don’t take any wooden nickels, ok?
As I posted last week, Nvidia came out with beta drivers for the older Nvidia graphics cards that hopefully would fix the issues we’re currently experiencing with Ubuntu Intrepid, but that we should hold off until Alberto Milone, the developer of EnvyNG, was able to create packages of the new drivers. Early this morning I got notices from the Intrepid Changes list that Alberto’s packages were accepted.
There are now 71.86.07 and 96.43.09 drivers available in the intrepid-proposed repository and if you’re running *ubuntu 8.10 and need the 97 or 96 drivers please help test them. To enable them go to System > Administration > Software Sources > Updates and make sure you have the Pre-released updates (intrepid-proposed) box checked, then run an update and snag the updated drivers for your system. (CLI instructions for enabling the repo is available on the Ubuntu Wiki.) If you’re like me and got the drivers directly from Nvidia you’ll need to go into Synaptic, select the drivers, then force the version to the one intrepid-proposed. That will show an earlier version than what you’re using, but it’s also the one we need tested.
Once you have the drivers updated (or downgraded if you had the Nvidia beta drivers) then restart your system and see what happens. Chances are good that it will work for you, but whether they do or not please post a comment on this Launchpad bug, along with which driver you’re using, so they can get an idea of whether or not the bugs have truly been fixed for a majority of the testers.
Alberto’s also packaged a new version of nvidia-settings (i.e. Nvidia’s control panel) that hopefully fixed a bug that can cause major segfault crashes. if you can try the new version on intrepid-proposed please provide some feedback on this bug report.
Once you’ve installed the newer versions from intrepid-proposed you can go ahead and disable that repo unless you want to help test updates for other apps.
The new drivers work well enough for me that I’m able to run Compiz, so long as I don’t try to enable the rotating cube effect in CompizConfig Settings Manager. I’m still having some trouble with invisible fonts in WINE, but it looks like that may in fact be due to a different Nvidia regression that affects KDE3 apps (but not KDE4) but also WINE. I’ve subscribed to that bug so I can get updates on the work to munch the bug.
You can get some additional information on Alberto’s call for testing on his blog.
Somehow in the past week I went from having apps I could use with no trouble to not being able to see squat in WINE windows. I made a thread on the Ubuntu Forums about the issue yesterday but haven’t gotten a request so I’m throwing the query out here as well as you can see in the screenshots I included with the post.
This is what I get when I try to run
winecfg. As you can see there’s no text, not even the text on the tabs themselves, so it’s impossible for me to set anything. I can’t even set the version of Windows used because I can’t see which version is which.
I tried blowing away both WINE and CrossOver Pro to try to undo any changes I had made, and I’ve tried several different themes, all to no avail. When I try a program called Gentibus CD (formerly known as VistaCD), which worked fine in CrossOver a few days ago, it’s now so borked I can’t even load my old cd database so I can try to import it into a Linux-native app.
I’m at my wits end. I don’t even know at what point things screwed the pooch although I’ve tried enough things that I should have rolled them back by now if it were something I had done. Does anyone have any ideas what I’m missing?
Updated 3 November 3:30 pm EST: It looks like an Nvidia regression is causing the issue. In fact now that I think about it the issues started after installing the beta drivers. Now that I have it narrowed down I guess I can reboot and use the onboard Intel graphic subsystem to get the apps installed and set up in Crossover Pro. Then I can switch back to my normal Nvidia setup to get most of my tasks done. Although hopefully now that we know it’s aregression we can get the bug squashed before too much longer. I’ll keep posting updates as I get them.
RESOLVED 6 November 7:30 am: Thanks to comment #144, from Peter Remmers, on Launchpad bug #251107 I was able to get this issue resolved. It turns out there is an entry on the WINE FAQ that I completely missed on several passes through the page.
6.18. Using wine over remote X11 sessions and No text or damaged text displayed
Please make sure not have added any fonts to wine. Font conflicts can sometimes cause a similar issue. If a fresh wine prefix.(A copy of wine that nothing has been done to yet) Is having this problem. Try setting following in registry
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\X11 Driver] "ClientSideWithRender"="N"Place above in text file and it can be inserted into registry by “regedit settings.txt”.
This was report as been required of OS X on the 1 Dec 2007. This may change. Please apply only as required.
What I did was simply place the text file, which I called settings.txt, into ~/.wine/drive_c and in Terminal run
env WINEPREFIX="/home/[YourUsername]/.wine" regedit settings.txt
Updated 9 Dec: You should use your username to identify the location of your home folder. I don’t think your system would have a clue as to the location of my /home directory, unless you also have a user named Peng. My bad.
I’m not sure if I needed to run the env WINEPREFIX="/home/peng/.wine" but I did just to make sure it would run. The response I got was simply
:~$
which means it ran the command with no problems. Since I have CrossOver Linux Pro installed on this box I used Applications > CrossOver > Run a Windows Command. Then I clicked the Browse button, set the filetype to All files (*), located the file (which I had copied into ~/.cxoffice/win98/drive_c just to make it easier for me), selected settings.txt and clicked Open. I edited the command to put regedit in the front and clicked Run. (The dialog box was widened to show you the entire command I ran.)
Now I have full use of both the WINE configuration window and my Windows apps under CrossOver Linux Pro.
Thanks to everyone who helped diagnose and resolve my issue. And Peter? I owe you a brew. 
[Updated to reflect Alberto Milone's advise on the matter. Please read the entire post, including what Alberto says, before installing the new driver. -Peng]
When I checked my email this morning I saw that Nvidia has released a beta version of their 96.43.09 legacy drivers. After following the instructions that Takahani posted on the Launchpad bug about it I finally have Nvidia drivers working again.
- Download NVIDIA-Linux-x86-96.43.09-pkg1.run (or the other one if you’re running a 64 bit system) to your home folder (/home/simon/ for me)
- switch to pty1 (CTRL+ALT+F1)
- log in
- sudo service kdm stop (will kill X server) (or gdm if you are running gnome)
- sudo sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-96.43.09-pkg1.run
- say yes to everything (will compile nvidia kernel module)
- sudo reboot now (reboot now !!)And that should be enough, login and check that “glxinfo | grep direct” says “YES”
Sure enough, I ran the grep and this is what I got
And yes, despite the fact that my computer still calls itself Icebox-Hardy, that’s with Ubuntu Intrepid running.
I did find that with Compix enabled I was getting white sections where my Screenlets were running, but I was able to get things fixed by following the instructions in this post on the nV News Forums.
I was able to get Compiz running and even use my desktop cube/sphere, but I changed a setting and it broke. Unfortunately I didn’t check things at each step so I don’t know which setting borked things, but Takahani said there’s an override that I can run to get Compiz working properly again, and as soon as I find ut what it is I’ll post it as an update to this post. In the meantime I’m back to Xcompmgr so I can use AWN. It’s getting so bloody close, but still no cigar.
Do you need the Nvidia 71 legacy driver? Good news: Nvidia release a beta for their 71.86.07 driver that you can give a try.
Updated 3:47pm: Alberto Milone, the developer of Envy, strongly recommends waiting until they come out into the -proposed repo, which should be fairly soon. Woops! I hadn’t seen his advice before I installed the new driver. I guess we’ll see what issues need to be dealt with downstream.
as of the date this was written
Now that I’ve had a day to work with Intrepid other than to figure out what some bugs are, I kind of like it. There are a few things I need to track down but on the whole it’s working pretty well, although truth be told I think they rolled out the Release Candidate a little early. Supposedly a Release Candidate is supposedly saying “We’ve taken care of all of the really big bugs and while there may be a few things that we may need to fix we’re confident that the program is ready to rock for users of all sill levels.” That is unless they want to take a page from Mozilla’s playbook and label some bugs as WONTFIX until after the new version is officially released.
I did promise you more info on a couple of things that I needed to fix, so let’s look at that those. The biggest, most glaring bug is the fact that they included X.Org 7.4, the newest stable version of the open source implementation of the X Window System. The only problem is that there’s a known issue in that the proprietary legacy video drivers from Nvidia are simply not compatible with X.Org 7.4. What this means in English is that you will lose your 3D acceleration as well as any eye candy that depends on it, like Compiz-Fusion. This isn’t a problem that users, or Ubuntu devs themselves, can fix. Nvidia has to write new drivers for it, and I’m assured that they know about the issue and are supposedly on the case. The problem really occurs for those using older video cards, and we’re at the unfortunate point where we may end up having to upgrade our video cards before too long. I just hope I can find a decent PCI video card since my old comp doesn’t support AGP or PCI-Express. And before anyone says I need a newer computer I’ll as you this Are you going to buy it for me? I’m disabled and a new computer isn’t anywhere near my budget, even with avoiding the Microsoft tax.
Not entirely. While I can’t enable even Normal Desktop Effects I did find a way to run Avant Window Navigator (AWN) even without 3D acceleration. While I was doing some hunting yesterday I came across a program called xcompmgr that can handle the compositing that AWN requires even if your video drivers can’t handle 3D acceleration. It not only gives the compositing that AWN requires it also let me use my Google Gadgets Sidebar again without a box around my undocked WeatherBug Sidebar Gadget. The ArchLinux wiki has some nice info on it, and all you need to do is to simply install it with
sudo apt-get install xcompmgr
Then simply run it from your Terminal (or Alt-F2). You can even add it to your Startup Programs under System > Preferences > Sessions, although I recommend that rather just using xcompmgr to launch it you use
xcompmgr -c -C
which, according to the xcompmgr parameters, will avoid drawing shadows on dock/panel windows and put fuzzy shadows on everything else. There is gcompmgr, a GNOME GUI that lets you set the xcompmgr parameters without the command line. Unfortunately you won’t want to use the download from SourceForge since it’s an RPM file for Red Hat Linux rather than a DEB package or source code. Instead use the link in this post. That will give you a .tar.gz file that when extracted will give you a DEB that can be installed.
This bugged the living hell out of me. It’s almost like Nautilus, the default file manager for GNOME wasn’t installed anymore, but it turns out the explanation is easy and the fix is pretty easy, too. It seems the issue is that something’s getting installed after Nautilus and is hijacking the file association. The first thing I saw was a case of F-spot getting launched when you tried to access a mounted partition via the Places menu. But the longer I looked the more relevant bugs I discovered. I ended up finding Bug #260492 – Opening a directory using an application change associations incorrectly. It has also been reported upstream so that the GNOME devs and it looks like they’ve fixed it so it may just have to make it’s way into Ubuntu. Until it does the issue is easily resolved by following jojo’s instructions:
Simple workaround
Right click -> Open with -> custom command -> nautilus
repeat for all folders
now should open folders from Places in Nautilus
You shouldn’t have to repeat it for all folders, but I was able to launch mounted partitions and bookmarks from the Places menu and have it open in the right app after changing the Open With preference only once. You can also select File Browser from the list of applications in the top part of that window and it will open your folders, etc. in Nautilus. If you have the PCMan File Manager installed and want to use Nautilus do not select Open Folder. This will open your partition/bookmark in PCMan.
The other rather major glitch I discovered is that something happened to my ability to sync my PDA. It turns out that the current version of gnome-pilot is borked thanks to some changes in HAL (Launchpad bug – upstream bug). For now the workaround is to kill HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) with
sudo /etc/init.d/hal stop
and then restart the gpiloted daemon on the panel. Big thanks to froghopper for providing the diagnosis and workaround. Hopefully we’ll have this resolved before Intrepid is officially released in four days.
As I mentioned before, Nautilus now supports tabbed browsing like web browsers do. Ctrl-T opens a new tab, and you can drag files between tabs for copying and moving. Unfortunately there’s no option to always show the tab bar that I’m able to see, and if you have one window with tabs and one window without tabs it seems that closing the window without tabs will close a tab in the other window, but I haven’t taken the time to confirm this behavior.
In addition there are some pretty apparent changes in Evolution 2.24.1 (Novell’s Evolution page). The first is in the way the statusbar shows the progress as you check you various email accounts and RSS/ATOM subscriptions. It used to be that if you had a ton of RSS feeds (like I do) the statusbar would get filled with individual status notifications. Now they combine all of the RSS/ATOM statuses into a single notification.
That’s much easier to deal with! Unfortunately they also changed the dialog for marking messages read when you’re doing it on a folder with subfolders. 
It used to be just a button to mark just the current folder read and a button to mark the current folder and subfolders read. If you wanted to cancel the operation completely you just closed out the dialog completely. My one complaint about the new dialog is that I’m used to the current and subfolders button used to be on the right rather on the left and I have to learn to select the middle button. It’s a minor thing, but it’s still annoying to me. 
Plus it seems I may have to recreate my Search Folders because the folders I created for unread messages and messages to blog now show zarro messages even though there are in fact messages in each folder.
One of the things I saw in the Intrepid Intro that I looked forward to is the Totem BBC Plugin. To use it just fire up Totem, then go to Edit > Plugins and make sure it’s enabled. Then go to the Playlist dropdown and select BBC. What you’ll get once the playlist is downloaded and parsed is a rather Jabba-sized selection of media from the BBC that you can enjoy, broken down into eight groups. Unfortunately it doesn’t include some of the live streaming feeds that I can enjoy in the Radio Screenlet, but it could be a great way to enjoy some of your favorite Beeb programs like All Things Considered.
Ubuntu Intrepid also brings us the ability to start a Guest Session for those times when you need to let a bud borrow your comp to check their email without the hassle of having to create a new user (the new Guest Session doesn’t allow any changes or even saving files to the system), Dell’s DKMS that will automatically build new kernels allowing the devs to roll out new kernels even faster to fix kernel bugs, as well as updates to Sun’s Java OpenJDK, ClamAV, SpamAssasin and Apache’s Tomcat. You can check out all of the new goodies in Intrepid at the Introduction to Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex.
Just remember, until it’s officially released on Thursday what is available is a Release Candidate and is still a testing version. There are still some things to get fixed, and hopefully they’ll get fixed in the next 4 days. But other than the issues I mention at the top of this post I definitely recommend Intrepid, even though in all honesty it’s going to be more like the upgrade to Gutsy than the relatively painless upgrade to Hardy.
Woops! I forgot to include a screenie of my desktop after I tweaked things and got AWN working again.
—
*S.O.L. – “Sorry, Out of Luck”, or as my stepdad would put it “Shjt Out of Luck”
Since I’m making the move to Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex in order to try to chase down some issues in the Mac4Lin 1.0 RC under Intrepid I thought I’d go ahead and write a post as I go through the upgrade. My system hardware hasn’t changed since I moved to Hardy, and there’s a picture on the right of what my desktop looks like (with some details in the AWN Terminal) as I get ready to run the update.
I thought about installing Intrepid on a virtual machine so I could test it with Mac4Lin without risking any issues to my current set up, but I decided against that. I used to have a virtual machine set up back when I was dual booting with Windows XP, but I uninstalled the virtual machine software when I kicked Windows out and don’t want to take the time to get everything set back up right now. I did run through Caspar Clemens Mierau’s pre-update todo list that I mentioned yesterday and made one final check of the release notes to make sure there was nothing I needed to address before starting the update. I had already seen that the logout applet is changed for Intrepid, although it’s not being changed automatically during the update (yet), but other than that I saw no last-minute gotchas. I had already run the network update check and cleaned out things I didn’t use anymore so with a final morning email check, PDA sync and final system backup I was ready to rock. I also disabled my autologin so I could see the login screen for Intrepid, although I decided to keep my current Mac4Lin settings to see if anything breaks during the upgrade.
I’d already run the Intrepid beta LiveCD (actually a daily build DVD from 2 October, the same day the beta came out) so I knew that while the GRUB splash screen hasn’t changed there are new login sounds that have grown on me since I first mentioned them almost a month ago. I also knew the default desktop wallpaper is much prettier in Intrepid, ditching the animal-centric wallpaper of old for a more stylized one, although I’m now seeing that it’s changed in the last week to an image I’m not thrilled with so I’d better snag it while it’s still in reach. Or perhaps I may simply lock the version of ubuntu-wallpapers to 0.27, which is the one I prefer.
Since I have the LiveDVD from 2 October and even though some of the files have changed since I got the iso I decided to not upgrade via update-manager -d and use my LiveDVD to update. In the past I’ve managed to insert a LiveCD and got a dialog offering to run an upgrade, but it may not work yet with Intrepid DVDs. I did see a script called cdromupgrade so I opened a Terminal window, navigated to the disk with cd /media/cdrom0 and launched the script with http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/upgrading. Survey said…
tar: ./dists/stable/main/dist-upgrader/binary-all//intrepid.tar.gz: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
Could not find the upgrade application in the archive, exiting
Okay, so that won’t work. To make sure I wasn’t looking at any problems I didn’t have with the 2 October DVD build I ended up grabbing a new disk image so I could check a LiveCD based on the packages a dist-upgrade would use. The worst part was waiting, for about an hour, for the new iso to download. Son of a gun, when I closed the drive with the disk in the tray in preparation of booting from it to check my system with the updated LiveDVD I was presented with a dialog box.
That’s what I had expected from the older disk. I clicked on the Run upgrade button, entered in my admin password, and started the process. 
The Distribution Upgrade window popped up, and a dialog came up asking if I wanted to include the latest updates from the ‘net (sorry, I didn’t grab a screenshot of it), and I said yes. It did take a little longer, but my system was up to date by the time the process was done and my system rebooted. I had already disabled the PPAs in my repo list so nothing would get updated using those repos. I got a warning about the fact that drivers for my older Nvidia card were missing, something I suspected would be coming from the release notes (I need to fix links in recent posts to point to this version of the notes, which I really wished I had seen again sooner), but I took the update anyway figuring I’d get some drivers for it through Envy if nothing else worked, not having understood quite what the continuing issue was since the recent links I had seen to Intrepid release notes were a much shorter page. I figured I may end up losing some Desktop Effects until I got working drivers but that’s a small issue. (or so I thought.) I got a listing of apps that would be changed, and I saw that some of AWN looked like it might get removed, but I knew there were packages available for Intrepid so I didn’t worry about it.
After the reboot I did find that my desktop effects were disabled, and the Appearance Preferences gave me some complaints that the GTK+ theme engine isn’t installed, but I had heard that was coming as well. I did get a message about changing the old Quit Applet to the updated Fast User Switch Applet and accepted the change. It now takes up a bit of space with my name, which I intentionally didn’t have on the panel, 
and now instead of getting a dialog popped up it gives me a dropdown menu asking me what I wanted to do. Plus the startup sounds aren’t the ones I prefer, but I’ll see about rolling back to an older version of the sounds later.
There are a couple of things I’ll need to address, but I’ll put them in another post so this one isn’t quite so Jabba-sized. Plus I see there are some updates that may involve my Nvidia drivers so I’m going to close this post with a shot of my desktop, now about a day and a half after making the upgrade and with a panel at the bottom instead of the AWN dock. I’ll start the next post once I get rebooted after taking these upgrades and seeing if I get my Desktop Effects back. There are a few changes in Intrepid that I want to make sure I tell you about. Most are good, but one or two are issues you need to be aware of.
Sunday I blogged about the upcoming EnvyNG for Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron”, and the developer has rolled out an update to Envy Legacy to get things ready for the release of EnvyNG. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been meaning to write about some updates for Envy, that uber tool for installing graphics drivers in Linux, but I keep closing Thunderbird before remembering to write. There’s also a new plugin coming for Java, but you’ll need to use Firefox 3 to get the benefits of it. Read the rest of this entry »
[Updated to include setting up the PDF Printer as the default and to add one more launcher to my dock. And I added a screenie of the updated dock. - Nanci]
[Updated 29 December to finally add that missing for the networks startup and AWN, as well as more info on getting Acrobat Reader 7. - Nanci]
No, I haven’t been listening to a little Dead, although I just fired it up on my computer. Over the weekend I decided I was finally ready to get Windows XP off my computer and go 100% Ubuntu Linux. But it was no where as way as it should have been, and there were several calls to my brother Peng to try to get things working right. But I’m going to do you a favor and let you guys know not only what happened, but also how to deal with what came up so that if you run into problems installing Ubuntu Gutsy you’ll have a better idea of what to do to fix it than I had. Read the rest of this entry »
Do you really need MP3, WMA and AAC files?
See all of the LOLs and FAILs Peng has created for the Cheezburger Network. You can also see them on Peng's site at ICHC.
