Linux on Blogarious

Xfce4 4.20 upgrade issue on font size

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

With the recent upgrade of Xfce4 4.20, I was facing the font size issue on my laptop. I am using icewm . And the upgrade causes my fonts become too small. But some applications are too big, like Brave and FreeFileSync. I spent some time to fix this. And this is my final solution,

Allow xfsettingsd at startup,

xfsettingsd --daemon -D

And use xfce4-appearance-settings, at the Fonts > DPI, enable Custom and set the value to 120 as in .Xresources . The effect is immediate. This solves the font size for all applications.

Logitech M590 mouse and Linux 6.11.4

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Due to the recent upgrade of Linux kernel to 6.11.4, my bluetooth mouse (Logitech M590) cannot connect. I tried many times, and sometimes I can connect, but most of the time it fails. There were several related posts: here and here.

Since my storage doesn’t have enough space to install Linux LTS, I can only wait for the fix from Linux. While waiting for the fix, I remembered that M590 allows to use a USB receiver. As a result, I installed ltunify package and now it works. The only drawback is that one of my USB ports is occupied.

Arch Linux kernel and NVidia recent bugs

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I was facing frequent freeze of the laptop recently. The discussion can be found here.

Basically, there are two issues, one is the Linux kernel, and the other is the NVidia driver update.

Linux kernel causes some Oops in the kernel, probably related, I don’t know. The result is that I can’t shutdown my laptop because it cannot unmount /home and /tmp. To resolve this, I upgraded the Linux kernel to 6.7.8, and added zswap.enabled=0 and numa=off as the kernel parameter, in GRUB. I am not sure which one is the actual action that solve the issue.

Arch Linux Xorg failed to run

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Today I updated the packages, then rebooted, then the machine got stuck at

[Started] Accounts Service

Seriously, I have had no issues with my laptop recently. And this makes me nervous. It will be troublesome if I have to boot into the Arch Linux LiveUSB. But luckily, searched online, and someone mentioned to change to another TTY with Ctrl+Alt+F2.

Wheew. I still can log in with the command-line. And then I noticed that, the issue must be NVidia driver related.

Android playing iOS MOV video

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I am using an Android phone, specifically Vivo. I found that when I play the MOV video transferred from iOS, only sound is able to be played properly but the picture is not showing.

None of the solutions from the Internet helped me to solve my problem. After trial and error, I found that the MOV file can be converted to MP4 format using ffmpeg with some parameters. Eg,

fmpeg -i input.MOV -c:v libx264 -c:a aac -vf "scale=720:1280,fps=29" -ac 1 -x264opts "ref=0:cabac=0:b_pyramid=0:bframes=0" -profile:v baseline -pix_fmt yuv420p output.mp4

Based on my experience, the most crucial parameter is “-pix_fmt yuv420p”, so the MP4 video is 8-bit depth.

Switching from Openbox to IceWM

Sun, 19 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Bye-bye Openbox, welcome IceWM.

Due to the recent upgrade of glib2 on Arch Linux, it crashes my Openbox when I am running Wine or Proton. Downgrade to 2.74.6 is not a solution, because Nemo, Caja, Nautilus are using 2.76.0.

As a result, I have to find an alternative. From Wikipedia, I found that LXDE can be configured with other window manager rather than Openbox, eg Fluxbox, IceWM, or Xfwm.

I tried Xfwm, but it fails to run. Probably needs extra configuration, but I didn’t continue trying. I tried Fluxbox long time ago, can’t remember the feature. Then I found that, compare to Openbox, IceWM is still in development. Hence I decided to try IceWM.

Migrate to SSD

Sat, 16 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In my previous post, I mentioned I have boot issue. Then I asked in Arch Linux BBS, and I got some useful advice from other users. As a result, I contacted a computer shop in my town, in order to get a hard drive (HDD). However, the shop doesn’t have 7200 rpm HDD. Then he suggested SSD to me, which is 1T storage. The SSD now is much cheaper comparing to two years ago.

Med: Experimental feature

Thu, 07 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I just tested with my new experimental feature for Med (Linux Memory Editor) on Sea Dogs, i.e. Custom Scan.

Sea Dogs is very difficult to do memory editing, as the values are stored in string. Luckily someone wrote a superb guide on how to do memory editing, which can be found here.

But the problem is that, the guide is written for CE (Cheat Engine). Unfortunately, CE is for either Windows or Mac. And to cheat in Sea Dogs, need to use “Group Search” feature of CE. WTF is Group Search?

LightDM background image

Sun, 20 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Recently my old laptop, due to some unknown configuration, it shows a background image in the LightDM login. It is annoying, and it is user specific. Meaning, if I choose another user, the background image will be changed to black background.

Searched for the solution on Internet, most of links are about gsettings, or edit the image in /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf. But none of the related to my issue.

Finally, I found the solution. The problem is not LightDM itself, but related to AccountsService.

Patch Wine and supports both 64-bit and 32-bit

Tue, 08 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We can build Wine that supports both 64-bit and 32-bit.

The below shows the example that involves patch of a specific Wine version. Sometimes official or latest Wine just doesn’t work. And the patches can be found in the bug report attachment.

Download a patch from Wine bug report, and download the source code. Extract the source

tar xJf wine-4.2.tar.xz
patch -u -p1 < ../swshader_ivb.patch

To build Wine that can work on both 64-bit and 32-bit, we can follow this.

NVIDIA with Nouveau and Wine

Sun, 01 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I updated my old laptop HP Pavilion dv3 (2238tx) recently, which was bought in year 2010, installed with Arch Linux.

Because of Linux kernel version, the NVIDIA driver is not officially supported by Arch Linux (detail).

There are two options to resolve this: install (i) Nouveau or (ii) NVIDIA driver from AUR. The former is open source, the latter is closed source from NVIDIA official site. Furthermore, using the latter theoretically allows the usage of CUDA, which is important if I am using it to do some neural networks training.

Chinese (and CJK) fonts

Sun, 21 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I am using Arch Linux, and recently I found that my fonts are little different after upgrade.

In DBeaver, the monospace font shows this:

This causes the monospace doesn’t follow the same width. And I found that, the default “Monospace” doesn’t use DejaVu Sans Mono anymore after the recent upgrade.

After looking some solutions, I tried edit ~/.conf/fontconfig/fonts.conf according to this this one.

[code lang=text] monospace DejaVu Sans Mono [/code]

Script to notify myself

Wed, 15 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Sharing a simple script I recently used. Because recent development, I need to run a build command which needs about 2-3 minutes. I run it in the background so that I can continue my other work.

But switching the window in order to check whether the build is completed, it is frustrating. To make it easy, I wrote the following script,

[code lang=bash] #!/bin/bash

notify-send -t 1500 -i applications-utilities “$@” aplay /usr/share/orage/sounds/Knock.wav &> /dev/null [/code]

Med (Linux Memory Editor) 3.0

Sun, 18 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Med (Linux Memory Editor) 3.0 released.

Recently I did a great revamp. Remove most of the old code which was not rightly designed. And previously I wrote a ByteManager, which I guess it causes a lot of trouble and crash, together with the memory value locking using multi-threading.

As a result, I spent some times to do a revamp. Remove the ByteManager and use the shared_ptr instead. Because C++ doesn’t have garbage collection. It is hardly for this application to manage the dynamically allocated memory, because the scanned address needs to be hold awhile, or stored for saving, or hold for editing. By using shared_ptr, the memory will be freed automatically when it has no reference.

NVidia and hibernation issue, partially solved

Wed, 08 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In my previous post, I mentioned about NVidia and xcompmgr, it is not true reason that causes the Chrome not updating the display.

The root cause is partially found. The issue is caused by the optimus laptop (dual graphic card, NVidia with Intel). In unknown conditions, resume from hibernation will cause the Intel graphic card doesn’t work properly. This can be checked by running “glxgears” after resume. You will see the OpenGL fails to refresh on the display.

NVidia and probably xcompmgr

Sat, 23 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I have a Dell Vostro 5459 with Arch Linux. Previously, whenever I do a hibernation, and resume will produce a black screen, which I can do nothing.

Then I believed that one of the NVidia updates fixed this issue.

However, very soon later, I faced another issue is, resuming from hibernation causes Chromium with freeze content, or the content doesn’t redraw. This not only happen to Chromium, but also Opera and SMPlayer. I thought it is caused by NVidia. Tried a lot of solution, search nothing from Internet. I also installed “bbswitch”, nothing solved.

Prayer Clock GTK3

Sat, 01 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

My first open source project, Prayer Clock, I moved from SourceForge to GitHub recently. Yeah! Everyone should git!!!

And today I just made some changes, and updated to GTK3.

[gallery ids=“1757,1758” type=“rectangular”]

With GTK 3, I removed the title bar. But not yet successfully moving the menu bar to the icon like Evince or Nautilus.

I plan to convert the right hand panel to WebKitGtk. But this will not be the priority yet.

Switching display/monitor/screen in Linux

Fri, 26 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Because I am using the Openbox (window manager), and I believe that the laptop Fn+F8 (or whatever combination with Fn) doesn’t work properly on Linux. Because the combination is detected as Super+p (aka Win+p). As a result, I wrote a Perl script to solve the switching display/monitor/screen issue on my laptop.

[code language=“perl”] #!/usr/bin/perl

# This script requires xrandr, and several bash script created by arandr

use strict; use warnings;

AAC audio file and ID3 tag

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I just found that, if I have an AAC audio file (technically M4A), and if I added the ID3 tag 2 (aka ID3v2), then the audio file will failed to be converted by ffmpeg.

It can be either converted to mp3

using DeadBeef audio player, or
remove the ID3v2 tag then convert

So, how to add the metadata like ID3 tag? Use the Kid3 and add the Tag 3 (aka APE tag). This will not affect how ffmpeg to read the file.

Dell Vostro 5459 hibernation

Sat, 11 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In the previous post (1 year ago), I mentioned the hibernation issue. I believed that it was related to the NVidia graphic card. Related forum can be found here.

But these few days, I notice that whenever I shut down the laptop, it will show the systemd messages. Previously, if I did suspend my laptop, then resume, then shut down will show only black blank screen, until the power off. I believe that the graphic card issue is being fixed with the recent update.