I have a fun new phone finally and ran into a snag trying to get things into an arrangement where stuff on my desktop and on my phone sync.

Google’s Android essentialy skips the problem of syncing software for the desktop by syncing with their Internet based services. With the wide range of software that can sync from the desktop computer up to their services, it’s a pretty safe strategy. Even on Linux there are readily available solutions.

To integrate Google Contacts and Calendar, I did have to add a couple packages to my openSUSE installation:


zypper install akonadi-googledata
zypper install libgcal0


But it still didn’t work- it kept saying I had an invalid password. Happily, I came across this thread which guided me through the openSUSE-specific change I had to make to the proxy settings. I wonder if anything else has been affected by this setting.

Anyway- it looks like it’s working, although I still don’t see my calendar, so there’s more to do there.

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I spent a bit of time early this morning trying to get my scanner working. My previous instructions on getting it to work didn’t seem to be doing the trick. I played with a lot of settings in conf files all over the place before finding reference online to the Scanner component in YAST, the openSUSE configuration tool.

Boy do I feel dumb.

A couple clicks later I was up and running.

I was also pleased to learn about a KDE app, Skanlite which is much more pleasant to use than XSane (although I have nothing against what XSane can do).

As I’ve started using KDE (alright- the KDE Software Compilation), one thing I’ve run into is that all the dialogs seem to default to certain folders. I ascribe to David Allen’s Getting Things Done and have tried to create a desktop environment that reinforces those habits. So I don’t use the ‘Documents’ folder. As it turns out if I had just deleted the folder the Documents path would have reverted to the home folder (supposedly).

But the better way is to adjust the paths the system looks for. You can find them under System Settings > About Me > Paths. That cleared up some of my problems. Say what you want about having too many options- it’s nice that there’s a nice UI to change those options.

For the longest time I’ve been getting this error dialog when I log in:


Error activating XKB configuration.
It can happen under various circumstances:
- a bug in libxklavier library
- a bug in X server (xkbcomp, xmodmap utilities)
- X server with incompatible libxkbfile implementation

If you report this situation as a bug, please include:
- The result of xprop -root | grep XKB
- The result of gconftool-2 -R /desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard/kbd


Nothing bad happens (I think). Just annoying. I have the layout set to USA Macintosh and the keyboard model as MacBook/MacBook Pro. If I set it to Apple Laptop it works without the error. But- I have a MacBook Pro. Through trial and error I changed the layout to plain USA and now have no errors with MacBook/MacBook Pro selected. Yay.

For others with similar issues- this thread may be enlightening.

It may seem odd on a ‘Use 100% of the Time’ blog but occasionally I have to use other OSes to check for browser compatibility. Maybe someday I can even throw that out, but in the mean time, this chore is necessary but usually only once every week or two.

When I fired up VirtualBox it wouldn’t run- no doubt due to changes I’ve made. And the kernel module wouldn’t compile. I spent a long time working on this. I had identical versions of kernel-default and kernel-source installed. For whatever reason linux-kernel-headers has a different version (this is apparently normal and was a red herring).

I would get lots of errors like warning: "KERNEL_VERSION" is not defined and cc1: error: include/linux/autoconf.h: No such file or directory

After a long time searching and installing, uninstalling, reinstalling packages, I finally found this thread http://www.pubbs.net/opensuse/200909/84336/ which got me on the right track.

1. Install kernel-sys

That’s it. I was suddenly able to compile etc. Yay!

Way back when I was starting out as a web designer we used technology from RealNetworks to do some things that were, at the time, pretty amazing. But they quickly got left behind. To the point that the other day when I was attending a webinar, I realized I haven’t had RealPlayer installed for years.

I made an attempt to get it- it wasn’t in openSUSE at all- not even in the openSUSE Build Service. Not even for the open source Helix Player. But I downloaded the raw installer from their site.

I ran the command line installer. I wasn’t able to get the plug-in working and rather than leaving it on my system, I decided to get rid of it. The next day, downloads of supported media types were still showing a RealPlayer icon. Looking online I didn’t find any clues, nor could I figure out any switches I could run on the installer to remove the installation. Finally I poked around in the files it installed. Within the RealPlayer it installed to was a postinst folder with a number files like uninstall_icon_resource.sh. I ran all the ‘remove’ and ‘uninstall’ scripts and am now back in business, RealPlayer free.

There are two real desktop environments for Linux: KDE and GNOME. Yes XFCE and others, I’m completely leaving you out. There are always people that defy convention or want to try something out there. I love BeOS and Haiku but I doubt I will ever push it as a viable option.

Having more than one desktop environment is stupid. It stems from KDE starting out with the QT framework which was not open source. That is why GNOME started. But QT long ago changed licenses and now there’s no “this one is more open” element of the debate. What has changed is that GNOME is completely dominant. I program for neither so I can’t speak to how easy one is over the other. But in general, industry has backed GNOME. I think that stems from the aforementioned open/closed dynamic that used to exist. Companies backed the more open one and gradually that made that an easier and easier choice because of so much investment in it. I think there was more of a push to get GNOME “business-ready” with usability work too.

Up till about a month ago, I would have said that KDE should be scrapped. I have always preferred GNOME. I have even have a Ximian hat. I am not one who thinks that Linux needs choices within it. I think Linux is the choice. It shouldn’t be the first choice in a gauntlet of other important decisions. That’s why distros have default setups instead of asking users to choose every single app they want to use. It’s crazy! Then there’s our community’s most precious resource: developer time. For every duplication that exists between apps we lose time that we could have spent making something new and wonderful, or refining what we had. Example: GTK engines for GNOME. That’s what draws the buttons and widgets you see in GNOME apps. Why are there so many engines? I don’t mean themes (don’t get me started), but the engines- I have about 10 installed! That’s 10 projects, who knows how many developers, that are duplicating what’s been done. Maybe pruning a bit, adding on a bit. But primarily duplicating.

In a project as huge as a desktop environment, the duplication is staggering. Underlying services, APIs, those little apps no one would ever write except as part of a desktop environment. So instead of having two desktops- why not just have one? The problem is that there’s no common base code there. You’d have one environment ‘win’ and the other have to rewrite apps if they wanted to integrate. And let’s face it, no developer that I know would just say “You’re right, that app is better so I’ll stop working on mine.” So my hope for a GNOME-KDE wedding seem hopeless. So barring that I want one of them to just go away. :) Since I’m a GNOME user, naturally I’d prefer that KDE went away.

However, I installed KDE 4.3 and really liked it. Not loved I think. But I really liked it. Enough that I’ve been using it for several days now. In an effort to clear it up in my own mind, I’m going to see if I can compare some things about the two- things that really matter:

And does anyone else see a KDE/Europe, GNOME/Elsewhere slant to this debate?

I want to recognize and congratulate Back in Time and any other app that go to the trouble of making both a KDE and GNOME front end for their app. We shouldn’t need to do that. Again, it’s a waste of resources. But thank you.

For me, I’m still a GNOME user. I really like what I see in KDE, but I will be working for ways to improve GNOME. I see it as not just a frontrunner but the right direction for Linux to become mainstream. But I will not seek KDE’s destruction. Power users can and maybe should use it. At the least it’s valuable as an option, or even a target. GNOME should be as cool but it shouldn’t sacrifice usability to get there. I wish the two would work harder to integrate so that if you’re running one, the apps from the other are skinned well.

Since switching from Ubuntu to openSUSE, I have been unable to suspend my Macbook Pro. This may seem like a big problem. But really, I just work from my desk in my office. So really it was just annoying.

Closing the laptop or manually suspending correctly suspend the computer, but when I try to wake it up, the screen is just black and the machine is non-responsive. I found this post and decided to try it.

Add a file /etc/pm/config.d/modules (I didn’t have a file there) and place in it:

SUSPEND_MODULES=”button uhci_hcd”
HIBERNATE_METHOD={userspace,kernel} # selects the suspend method.
S2RAM_OPTS=”-f -p -m” # options that are passed to s2ram.

I was a little surprised- it worked. Make sure those comments are all on the same line.

For a couple of weeks, instead of seeing thumbnails in my Nautilus folders, I just see the default “Still Loading” icon. This is very annoying to me. Searching around people just suggest deleting the folder where thumbnails are cached.

If you need to debug Nautilus, like if it continues to have trouble creating thumbnails, look into the debug log options on this page. This didn’t help me very much- the thumbnailers don’t seem to output but you may find something useful with that log file.

If that’s happening to you, do these things:

1. First try the simple solution- F5 which tells Nautilus to refresh. Sometimes it just hasn’t displayed the thumbnail it has ready for you. If that doesn’t work, continue to step 2.
2. In a terminal, run rm -rf ~/.thumbnails
3. Now run killall nautilus

When Nautilus restarts, it will begin creating thumbnails right away.

What I noticed is that when I opened a folder with lots of files, the thumbnailing would proceed quickly whenever you do the last two steps in my list above (clearing the thumbnail cache and restarting nautilus). A visual way of debugging is to then look for the first file that is trying to create a thumbnail and is not succeeding. For me it’s stopping on creating a thumbnail for an html file. gconf, the GNOME Configuration Editor, tells me when I search (Edit > Find) for ‘html’ that those thumbnails are handled by gnome-web-photo from the openSUSE-11.1-OSS repository. You can, in gconf, just disable that thumbnailer and restart Nautilus again.

But I want html thumbnails! Must have them! So I get the command that is being run from gconf and run it directly in the terminal like this:

gnome-web-photo --mode=thumbnail --size=256 records.html ~/Desktop/records.png

with this result:


(gnome-web-photo:16037): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: cannot register existing type `GtkMozEmbed'

** (gnome-web-photo:16037): CRITICAL **: void gtk_moz_embed_realize(GtkWidget*): assertion `GTK_IS_MOZ_EMBED(widget)' failed


I’ll figure it out eventually. I’m betting it’s because I’m using Firefox 3.5 from the mozilla repository on the openSUSE Build Service and I see that I have three separate versions of xulrunner installer. I don’t know for sure but I believe xulrunner provides the files this is choking on. Again, I could be wrong.

Keep in mind that you may also be hitting a ceiling on how much space your thumbnails are taking up. People have tons of files, photos, documents, movies and once these each have a thumbnail, it’s possible to overwhelm the 512 MB that GNOME sets aside for use by the thumbnailers. It may be enough, but if you have a big hard drive, you can up the limit like this:

1. Open gconf and search for ‘thumbnail’
2. In the search results select ‘/desktop/gnome/thumbnail_cache’
3. In that node there are two options, maximum_age and maximum_size. maximum_size’s tip says “Maximum size of the thumbnail cache, in megabytes. Set to -1 to disable cleaning.” and maximum_age’s says “Maximum age for thumbnails in the cache, in days. Set to -1 to disable cleaning.”. I set them both to -1 but I’m guessing I will change maximum_age to something else since otherwise I will likely have stale thumbnails which is still a bit annoying.
4. In a terminal, run rm -rf ~/.thumbnails
5. Now run killall nautilus

For some reason, lately I’ve noticed that Nautilus (which is the GNOME file manager and is the part of your Linux system that draws the desktop in GNOME) isn’t keeping up with picture thumbnails. An easy temporary fix is to press F5 which will refresh the desktop.

I realized it was not a problem generating the thumbnail because if you navigate in a Nautilus window to /home/username/Desktop the thumbnails show up. The only clues I saw about the bug are from a couple years ago and claim the bug’s been fixed- so maybe it’s a new one or maybe it’s back.