Flickering Screen After Upgrade to Kubuntu 10.04

First of all, I was amazed how smoothly the upgrade went. (K)Ubuntu and I guess other distributions as well have gone quite a far way to become platforms for everybody — with a lot of software but even more tools, helpers and automatic background services — like the nice upgrade service.

There was only one problem I ran into and I want to share the solution.

I am running Kubuntu 10.04 (just upgraded today) on a Lenovo IBM ThinkPad R60 (Yes, one of those with both brands on them ) with an ATI Radeon X1400 graphics device. But since upgraded, my display started flickering — not permanently but unbearable.

The solution that worked for me (at least partially — see below — and this is of cause depending on the graphics device type) was to install the proprietary ATI drivers. I know, it is not a good solution, I do not like to use them neither and if anyone out there is reading this with a better solution in mind, let me know it!!

So what you need to do is  to get your favorite package management tool (e.g. Synaptic or KPackageKit) — just hit Alt+F2 and type “package” and pick KPackageKit from the list (it will ask you for the super user password). Then, search for “fglrx”. In KPackageKit, you will find a result titled “Video driver for the ATI graphics accelerator”, and something below the title like “fglrx – 2:8.723.1-0ubuntu3″ but the version number should not matter. Click the arrow to the right, hit “Apply” and after rebooting, everything should perfectly without any configuration.

Good luck.

Problems noticed so far: The driver causes “Segmentation Fault” error messages, e.g. when trying to open up the display settings. That’s ugly, I know. But you can read in several forum and blog posts, that the support for the former nicely working driver for the ATI X1400 has been discontinued since 10.04, hence, it’s just good luck that the fglrx works somehow — good to know *after* upgrading, right. But still, the flickering was unbearable for me, thus, I accept the issues for now. I will keep my eyes peeled hoping for a proper solution in the future.

Problems With Logitech Communicator STX Webcam on Ubuntu 9.10 & Skype 2.1

Tough two weeks until I got them all play together nicely. Now they do. How come? Why did it take so long? There are many tutorials out there solving the problem by making Skype use Linux for Video version 1 drivers instead of version 2, which it does not seem to like. It boils down to the following lines:

Create a file in /usr/local/bin/skype and insert

#!/bin/bash
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so /usr/bin/skype

finally, make it executable by sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/skype

Use this file to start Skype from now on. Done.

But not for me. Skype refused to eat it: “ERROR: ld.so: object '/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.”

Until I finally found this one here — and **** yes, I searched, read and tried a lot of nice forum entries.

Just to cut a long story short, here is why: all the other solutions work for 32bit Linux only – but hey, I do not have any potential of my laptop to waste – I am running Kubuntu 9.10 64bit. And with a minor tweak, the fix will work for you, too.

Get this. sudo apt-get install lib32v4l-0

And change /usr/local/bin/skype to LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib32/libv4l/v4l1compat.so /usr/bin/skype

Its just about the “32″. **** **!

Thanks Eoin Murphy.

KDE vs. Gnome

Now, my decision is final: KDE rules (though I actually prefer the look of Gnome ).

Simple reason: Gnome does not support drag-and-drop in combination with alt+tab (see bug tracker), but there might be hope with the upcoming Gnome 3.

In more detail: using drag-and-drop together with alt+tab key combination allows to work very efficiently. For example, while ordering my photos, I want to work on one of them — as I do this regularly, Gimp is opened already, but in the background — so what I do using KDE or MS Windows is, I grab the picture, switch to Gimp by using alt+tab and immediately drop the picture without moving the mouse at all – I am quite confident that this is the fastest way of opening a picture for editing. Setting Gimp as default application to open JPEGs would not be a solution in this particular case, because I want pictures to be shown by default. Using “Open With” on a JPEG file for sure is the common approach – but lets compare it:

• Drag-and-drop & alt+tab
  • Actions to be performed: mouse down + key down + key up + mouse up
  • In total: four fast steps
• “Open With” solution (holding mouse down as improvement)
  • Actions to be performed:mouse down + moving to “Open With” + wait for sub-menu to open + move to sub-menu + mouse up
  • In total: two fast, three slow steps