Tag: glitch

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Ubuntu: USB keyboard not working after powerdown, powerup

I’m affected by Bug #48773, which, if I understand it correctly, means that my Nforce2 motherboard’s BIOS (the latest, FN45S00W from Shuttle) doesn’t treat the shutdown signal like it should, leaving all USB devices powered on. Windows (XP) isn’t affected or maybe it has a workaround – possibly something similar to the one presented over at Launchpad and Kernel Bug Tracker.

My setup doesn’t have annoyingly bright lights, but I do have one particularly troublesome issue related to this problem: my USB keyboard doesn’t seem to be able to wake up when I turn the power back on. I have to unplug and replug it in order to resurrect it. There is a weird performace issue in Windows when I hook it up into the PS2 port with an adapter, so I’d rather keep it plugged in as a USB device. But I may have to reconsider, since an official fix for the issue is considered unlikely.

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Solved: Ekiga (Ubuntu): Registration Failed: Forbidden (Rekisteröityminen epäonnistui: Estetty)

It looks like they’ve really screwed up the account management over at Ekiga.net: I was allowed to create an ID with a password using special characters, but then the Ekiga client failed to log in with it (giving me the error message I titled this entry with) and I couldn’t even log in at the website.

After requesting my password via e-mail (at the login website) as if I had forgotten it, I got an email not with the password but with a URL which, when clicked, gave me a new password. The new one was a measely five characters long; is that how insecure they expect them to be? Well I changed it to yet another one, still 20 characters long but this time containing only numbers and letters, and it seems to have solved the issue: I’m now able to login with the client.

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Ubuntu: can't drag windows between workspaces in Workspace Switcher

Looks like I’ve run into Bug #15069. What’s strange is that, I’m pretty sure I remember that prior to activating the Extra settings (with the default setup after installing Ubuntu), I did have some of the fancy stuff that’s apparently provided by compiz, such as the simple Viewport Switcher (or Desktop Wall), but now I have to go back all the way down to None to make dragging windows work. Either the default setup uses some clever hack which was lost when I turned on Extra visual effects, or my memory is failing. There’s a Workarounds utility in compizconfig settings manager, which would seem like a fitting place for a fix for the issue, but there’s none at the moment.

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Solved: jerky picture with live MythTV (non-free ATI drivers)

I had a problem with the live (Watching) TV picture stuttering badly in MythTV. The recordings worked just fine when played back with Totem, so the problem was not with the signal but with MythTV’s playback.

The solution for me turned out to be uninstalling the non-free binary drivers for my ATI Radeon display adapter. I had installed them right after installing Ubuntu, but after uninstalling them I can now safely say that it was a mistake installing them in the first place.

Apart from Miro now playing back FLVs with the colors all wrong, I’ve had no problems, MythTV no longer suffers from jerkyness and I get to enjoy all the nice desktop effects which didn’t work either with the proprietary drivers.

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Solved: Ubuntu: Miro 1.1.1 crashing on start

This one was pretty easy, as the working solution for me was available directly from Miro Forums. After shutting Miro down (or rather, after it has shut itself down), do:

cd ~
rm -rf .miro
rm -rf .gconf/apps/miro
sudo apt-get remove sun-java6-plugin

Obviously, this is not a good solution if you need to use Java on the web. For me it’s not a problem, since I like to have the Java plugin disabled anyway, for security and speed.

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Notes and a workaround: Firefox 2.0.0.11 (Ubuntu) Segfaults at restart, & Stylish problem with userstyles not being applied

I began migrating my Firefox extensions from Windows to Ubuntu by installing Extension List Dumper in Windows’ Firefox, and then working my way through the list generated by it in Ubuntu. However, at some point I discovered that Stylish‘s userstyles were no longer being applied, and that Firefox could no longer restart itself using the Restart button which becomes available after installing an extension.

What’s worse, using the command-line to start Firefox I discovered that it did attempt to restart when told to, but it only resulted in a Segmentation fault.

I initially suspected that there was some sort of a conflict between the beautiful NASA Night Launch theme and Stylish, but after starting with a new, clean profile and installing extensions one by one instead of en masse, I finally traced the problem back to Colorzilla, one of my favorite extensions. Without it, everything seems to be working, and with it, Firefox segfaults two, sometimes three times in a row before finally restarting. So the workaround to the problems listed in the title is to uninstall Colorzilla.

The problematic version of Colorzilla I was using was the one currently available from Mozilla’s Add-ons page, 1.0. A new Beta version is available from Colorzilla’s official home page, which also mentions problems with Ubuntu and FC5, and suggests a solution which, if it works, should allow you to keep using the non-Beta version of Colorzilla. I haven’t tested either of these solutions.

I haven’t come across these issues with Colorzilla under Windows.

When tracking down this problem, the Restart Firefox extension turned out to be quite handy.

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Solved: Ubuntu, Acer AL707 and “Input not supported”

After installing Ubuntu 7.10 I could see it was still suffering from the annoying little bug all previous versions have: instead of the neat splash screen during booting, all I got was the LCD’s warning sign saying “Input not supported”.

After finding rest of the shiny new OS very likeable I decided to solve this problem at last. It was safe to proceed on this bold assumption that I could, because in all Ubuntu installations I’ve done the problem has not manifested itself until the first booting into the freshly-installed system. That is to say, the live CD does not have this problem, but displays the splash with no problems, so I knew there must be a way to make it work.

There was a helpful link on the Ubuntu Forums on how to fix a faulty splash screen. In the end, it was simply a matter of finding the right display mode -describing parameters for a couple of config files. As for the parameters, I initially tried to find them from the live CD, but apparently it’s using a different system from the one used by an installed Ubuntu (GRUB), so this path turned out to be harder than a simple trial and error.

First I tried a full-blown 1280×1024 pixels with 16.8M colors, which is the display mode that the desktop starts in and works just fine, but that didn’t work – which I probably could have guessed from the fact that the other config file, usplash.conf, already had this resolution.

Then I thought about the way Windows XP boots on this system: the logo looks a bit crude, as if with a lower resolution and color depth than on the desktop. So I tried 800×600 with a modest 256 colors – and already on the way down Ubuntu now displayed the splash screen! The reboot revealed final success: the splash screen now works.

To be short but exact, what I did to make it work was:

  1. sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
    so that at the very end of the first kernel line, after “splash” , I added
     vga=771
    – this corresponds to the SVGA mode of 800×600 pixels with 256 colors.
  2. sudo gedit /etc/usplash.conf
    so that
    xres=800
    yres=600
  3. sudo update-initramfs -u -k `uname -r`