So, while being busy doing other stuff and therefore postponing actually getting rid of this buggy Mint version of Linux Mint 10 KDE (which is basically 100% Kubuntu minus Canonical goodness and instead tons of additional bugs and Mint branding everywhere), I was getting pretty bitchy about the totally fucked up search in my Firefox 4 installation.

This Mint-branded partner search crap is everywhere and not so easy to get rid of. The actual search bar was easy enough – manage the search providers, delete Google from the list, then search for new providers with “google search english” as keywords. Reinstall, and that part’s taken care of.

Then there’s the deal with the “Mint Enhancement” add-on crap that can be deleted for everyone by just doing a,

$ sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/firefox-4.0/extensions/mint-search-enhancer@linuxmint.com

Easy peasy, but might need to be done again after an update. At least until replacing the OS itself with Kubuntu.

The more tricky part is fixing the address bar type-to-search feature which on Mint 10 KDE results in awful Mint-branded results in what appears to be Thai. Leaves me hungry for veggies, rice, nuts and coconut milk, but not satisfied with my results. The language part is the easy one. It seems the Mint branding fucks up the preferences’ lang setting, which is specified as [chrome://global/locale/intl.properties] – clearly supposed to be an instruction to fetch the system’s locale and use that, except it obviously doesn’t work. Go to Preferences > Content > Languages and fix it manually.

Left is the annoying Mint branding itself which apart from being ugly removes all the usual Google search options, modifiers, and Google account links at the top. The problem can’t be fixed by visiting about:config or anything like that. The problem lies deeper, as a mangled system-wide Firefox search engine XML configuration file. Go to a console and type:

$ sudo nano /usr/lib/firefox-addons/searchplugins/en-US/google.xml

Remove everything in it (ctrl+K deletes an entire line) and paste this text in it:

<SearchPlugin xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<ShortName>Google</ShortName>
<Description>Google Search</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<Image width="16" height="16">data:image/x-icon;base64,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</Image>
<Url type="application/x-suggestions+json" method="GET" template="http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?output=firefox&amp;client=firefox&amp;qu={searchTerms}"/>
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/search">
  <Param name="hl" value="en"/>
  <Param name="q" value="{searchTerms}"/>
</Url>
</SearchPlugin>

If you prefer search results in your native language, you would want to not include the <Param name=”hl” value=”en”/> line which tells Google that, “Yes, I know I’m currently in Denmark, but I still want to see search results in English, please!”

Once again, an update might want to mess with this file. Keep a link to this post just in case

Restart Firefox and enjoy not being kicked in the teeth by Mint any longer.

Annoying as hell. The default behavior in Linux when holding down Alt and clicking a window is to start a drag movement. This conflicts with certain tools in Photoshop when running under WINE.

Quick fix is to change the movement combo key that Linux acts on for moving windows from Alt to the Win, or Meta, key.

In KDE: System Settings > Window Behavior > Window Behavior > Window Actions > Modifier key dropdown.

This thing was driving me crazy. I actually thought I had broken my laptop. Thing is, my laptop had been asleep, and going to bed, I thought I’d just check my mail and stuff before turning in, so I grabbed my lappie and took it with me under the covers.

Opening it and pressing space to wake it, I somehow managed to bang it pretty hard with my knee at the same time. The laptop didn’t wake up, but rather ended in some kind of limbo state between sleeping and waking up. I waited for abit to see if it was just the harddrive safe-locking due to the bump, but it never came back up, and I couldn’t go to a regular TTY either.

I ended up having to hard-reboot it, but when it entered KDE, there was no network anymore. Knetworkmanager just said, when hovered, “Network management disabled”, and clicking it, I just got a small context-like menu with “Unmanaged” written in it. Opening a konsole window, and doing ifconfig showed no eth0 device nor any wlan0 device.

This got me abit nervous, because I hadn’t done any updates or configuration either, so there was no reason to think that this was a configuration issue. I started worrying if the bump had either dislodged some wire or my cards from their socket(s) so that I no longer had physical access to the cards. Doing an lspci did however show both my wired and wireless cards present.

Puzzled, I tried modprobing pretty much any module that seemed to fit, but to no avail. I then tried booting up a live cd, and lo and behold, both cards where there and network connectivity was doing fine.

I then scoured Google, tried dumping the udev fixed “routes” for the cards which just resulted in them reappearing just as before, but still nothing in ifconfig, and still nothing in knetworkmanager. I eventually figured out what had happened, after reading a suggestion from someone that the network manager had been left in some garbled state preventing it from coming back up. The suggested fix was to

rm /var/lib/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.state

and reboot.

This didn’t help, but reading on, it seemed that the way the network manager handles the computer being suspended, is to enter exactly such a state where the network management daemon is suspended, and then eventually resumed and returned to active once the computer is resumed again. Seeing as how my laptop never resumed after being suspended, this pretty much fit the bill.

The trick is to send a wake command to the network manager daemon:

dbus-send --system --dest=org.freedesktop.NetworkManager /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.wake

It’s not very cool that not waking from sleep results in this bug, and I don’t understand the logic behind keeping this state over a reboot in the first place. Being suspended and never coming back up is hardly something that happens very rarely (think battery running out).

But good to know what the deal is, so that it can be fixed accordingly

I was shocked tonight to find that the Ubiquity installer in Ubuntu is still unable to properly install to fakeraid software RAID setups, such as my own Intel ICH10-based rig. Not that the alternate CDs do any better, they just completely fail to see the array.

I wanted to install Linux on my second desktop computer, and I’ve been pretty happy about Linux Mint, so at first I thought about dropping that one on it. Earlier this month I re-installed my server/HTPC box, and opted for Mint, as here, too, Ubuntu wouldn’t install properly. Which I find rather weird, considering the fact that Mint is pretty much Ubuntu with sugar on top.

But then I started thinking that it had been awhile since the Lynx appeared, and that it was about time for a new release, the Maverick one, scheduled for the 10th this month. So I found the beta 2 of Kubuntu Lynx and popped it in. Wouldn’t boot to the desktop, just restarted the machine. Found a daily build instead and tried with that. Same thing. Frustrated, I went about other business.

This night I thought I might try installing again, using 10.04 as base and doing a distribution upgrade to 10.10 beta afterwards. The 10.04 live CD manages to boot properly, and it does detect my ICH10R array, though I’ve not had any success in the past actually getting it to install to it properly. I thought maybe if I’d succeed in doing the upgrade inside the live environment, and then install afterwards, I might get 10.10 installed from the get-go. Maybe this is just a wholly retarded idea in the first place, but in any case, the upgrade process would hang shortly after having downloaded half a gig of packages, and so it was a failed attempt.

I decided instead to give 10.04 yet another try at installing on my fakeraid. The first issue you’re facing here, is that Ubiquity crashes when it tries to format your partitions. It’s quite sad, and amazing to see that even after having updated the packages first (which would include Ubiquity), six months since the release this issue has not been fixed. Of course, if you know your way around the console, you can quickly format your partitions yourself, but you can’t tell Ubiquity not to mkswap your swap partition, so it’ll still crash unless you choose to have no swap partition.

After doing that, you do get to see your drives being filled with Linux goodness, but sadly, the installer will still crash in the end, being unable to install grub on /dev/sda. Three things wrong here: First, it shouldn’t go on /dev/sda, it should go on the raid array, /dev/mapper/isw_something. Second, the default in Ubiquity is /dev/sda, even though there is not /dev/sda targeted, and this default is hidden under the “Advanced options” button just before starting the installation. Third, I had pressed this button and explicitly selected my raid device instead, but apparently that had been ignored. Sigh.

So, faced with failure once more, I then went looking for 10.10 progress again, and lo and behold, the release candidate was ready for download. Burned it, and booted it. The all too familiar reboot. Damn! I thought maybe if I could just get it to boot in some kind of safemode, I’d be set for an install which might prove more stable than this. I F6′ed at the boot splash and disabled acpi, apic, and lapic, and was finally able to boot the darn thing. As it turns out, it seems there’s a regression in the 2.6.35-rc3 kernel concerning ACPI, so hopefully this will be fixed soon.

One thing that was immediately apparent in the 10.10 live installer, is that it has another issue that 10.04 had also. The network isn’t brought up automatically. I have to sudo dhclient eth0 it up myself. Anyway, again I have a Ubiquity that recognizes my array. This time, however, it didn’t crash when formatting. And the placement of the boot loader is no longer hidden under advanced settings, though it still wrongfully suggests installing it on sda rather than the array. And what do you know? It actually manages to install grub!

I actually got all cheerful for a moment there, until I actually rebooted the thing. Sure, I got a GRUB menu, but first of all: where’s the entry for Windows in that list? Gone. Second of all: once you boot, you’ll just get a blinking cursor for awhile until it barfs with an “ALERT! /dev/mapper/isw_something does not exist” greeting.

Thanks. So apparently it takes six months to get halfway there. To where we get a boot loader and a grub menu. Next up, in 11.04 must be that Ubiquity actually manages to update initramfs with the proper modules, so that we can actually boot the damn thing. For any of you wondering what to do next, you simply have open up a console when the installer finishes and before rebooting, and do the obligatory:

sudo chroot /target
sudo echo dm-raid4-5 >> /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
sudo echo dm-raid4-5 >> /etc/modules
sudo update-initramfs -u

That’s all there is to it. I cannot believe we’re at this state, 9 days before release. Scratch that, I actually can, because I felt the exact same way just before 10.04 was to be released. I mean, even the kernel is a release candidate, and it will panic on certain ACPI setups. Version 10.10 on the 10th. No way in hell that date is going to be changed, and then we have RTM and pressed copies of the installation CDs with these showstopping bugs.

I’m all for cutting-edge software, but seriously, I think the Mint guys are on to something good with their new Debian rolling upgrades project. These fixed releases haven’t been good for awhile, and even if KDE4 has been progressively stabilizing, there’s still way too much beta tester feeling going on here. All feature development should be halted until the major bugs have been ironed out. Just for the sake of it, consider apps like Amarok and Kontact which are pretty much too buggy to use. And in Kontact’s case, even dangerous to use. I mean, bugs that cause IMAP mail to be re-dated to [NOW] when managed, or contact books to be deleted when clicking Cancel in a properties sheet? Those are okay on nightly developer builds, but not in production software that is at the same time receiving feature updates.

Weird that this isn’t a standard configuration setting, and very weird that you need to install extra software to enable you to do this. Anyway, here’s how:

sudo apt-get install numlockx

or “emerge” or “urpmi” or “yum-yum” or whatever’s your flavor

Then, in system settings, go to Autostart, click Add Script, and in the dialog window type in the path to the numlockx program, probably /usr/bin/numlockx

That’s it It’s not a toggle thing, so a subsequent login won’t turn it off again

Oh, so you’ve come here for a solution, have you? A solution to the ever-grouping taskbar items in KDE4? To the fact that seemingly the new plasmoid-based taskbar has no short or long term memory?

People ask this question a lot on the net, “How do I avoid programs grouping on the task bar?”. And, apparently, they always seem get the answer, “Right-click the program on the task bar, select ‘Do Not Allow This Program to Be Grouped’”.

Yeah… That’s great… I mean, it would be, if this actually survived a logout. Don’t you agree?

Well, mate, I’m sorry, I don’t have the answer! But if you find out, please come back here and post what you found! You might think of this post as a sort of reversed tip. I tease you, you bring the solution. Sorry But, if you find the answer, you might help someone else, too, so please do so!