Posts Tagged ‘debian’


Debian: Method rred has died unexpectedly!

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

Getting this error in Debian when running apt-get update?

E: Method rred has died unexpectedly! 
E: Sub-process rred received a segmentation fault.

Update like this:

apt-get update -o Acquire::PDiffs=false

Have fun!

Google Chrome (alpha) – fastest browser for Debian

Friday, July 10th, 2009

I’ve just tested Google Chrome for Linux on my Debian machine.
It has a nice theming feature, currently apparently suitable and used for making Chrome look native. That is, out of the box includes Chrome’s default theme, and the GTK theme which uses GTK buttons where possible, and uses the theme colors for Chrome-style widgets. On the screenshot, you can see how it looks with Debian-colored Clearlooks. Also, here’s a shot of the default theme.
(Update 5:51PM, CET: I didn’t figure out there’s a way to actually turn off the system window borders. There is. Wooo! Chrome is awesome.)
Most of the UI is GTK based – menus, configuration options, etc.
Dragging tabs around works nicely, just as under Windows; even transparency, if you have a compositing window manager such as Compiz. (Hint: KWin and Metacity also include compositing; I’m not sure where to turn it on for Metacity in the GUI, but it has a command line option “-c”.)

Google’s warning: Unless you’re a developer and can suffer crashes, as well as able to suffer lack of privacy features, don’t download and use this. It’s a developer’s preview only.
But seeing how great this browser already became (being significantly faster feeling than Iceweasel/Firefox on Linux, at least the 3.0 series) I’m getting great, great vibes for this browser’s future on GNU/Linux.

Opera and Croatian locale on GNU/Linux

Monday, April 20th, 2009

Imate problema s preglednikom Opera dok ste na Ubuntu, Debian ili na drugoj GNU/Linux distribuciji?
Simptomi su stisnut “mali” tekst, problemi s web stranicama koje nemate na drugim OSovima i browserima i accountima, ili problemi sa zaokruživanjem u Javascriptu.
Problem, a i lijek, je jednostavan.

Problem je u tome što ste si postavili hrvatski jezik. Najlakše rješenje je postaviti OS natrag na engleski jezik. Tehničko objašnjenje slijedi u nastavku na engleskom jeziku.

~~~~~~~~~~

After a short explanation for Croatian users, here’s what the fuss is all about. If you set your locale to Croatian (set your environment variable LANG to value “hr_HR.UTF-8″) you’ll experience issues such as:

  • condensed text with incorrect line spacing (demo: Wikipedia)
  • incorrect Javascript rounding (demo)
  • problem possibly occuring only on a single account, but cleaning most configs doesn’t help

Solutions (pick one):

  • set your locale to English through the GUI
  • set the environment variable LANG to en_US.UTF-8 or just en_US
  • set the environment variable LC_NUMERIC to en_US.UTF-8 or just en_US

Some demo pics:

Wrong rendering: locale set to Croatian

Correct rendering: locale set to English; setting LC_NUMERIC is sufficient

(Yes, they were taken on different accounts. Yes, I have tested in case )

Reproducing:

  • Launch terminal
  • Install Croatian locale. Under Debian, install package locales and then, as root, dpkg-reconfigure locales and mark hr_HR.UTF-8; there’s no need to set it as system default afterwards
  • Run Opera as regular user from Terminal: LANG=hr_HR.UTF-8 opera
  • Visit one of these URLs:
    • http://drupal.org/node/333967 (text invisible)
    • http://daiwai.de/test/jsdecimals.html (rounding to 28 instead of 28.45)
    • http://en.wikipedia.org/ (text extremely condensed)

Where does this bug apply (at least):

  • Opera 9.64 build 2480 from official repositories
  • Debian GNU/Linux
  • Applies to both statically and dynamically linked builds

What this bug IS related to:

  • your locale being set to hr_HR[.UTF-8]
  • probably setting LC_NUMERIC to hr_HR[.UTF-8] is sufficient

What this bug is NOT related to:

  • scim-qtimm – similar bug was occuring few years ago to users who had scim-qtimm installed under Ubuntu 6.06
  • your Opera GUI language

Backspace on Firefox on Ubuntu and Iceweasel on Debian

Sunday, April 5th, 2009

A friend pointed this out to me:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.backspace_action

In short, if you’re a GNU/Linux user of Firefox (e.g. Firefox on Ubuntu and Iceweasel on Debian) you may want to get backspace to actually go back one page, like many browsers do (did?):

  1. In addressbar, type about:config
  2. If asked, confirm you want to change settings
  3. In search, type browser.backspace_action
  4. Set the value of browser.backspace_action to 0 (that is zero, not letter O) Zero is Windows default and makes pressing backspace go back in history; One is old Linux default and scrolls page up; Two is new Linux default and, like any other integer, simply unmaps the backspace key.

Now, enjoy pressing backspace to go back!

Image source