When LibreOffice decides to not work

I did a distro upgrade of my openSUSE 12.1 (zypper dup) and ran into a fatal error when tryong to launch any LibreOffice app,

The application cannot be started.
[context="shared"] caught unexpected exception!

I had one of those WTF moments until I Googled and found out that you only need to delete the .libreoffice/ hidden directory in your $HOME to resolve it. Now I can get back being a happy typist!

Screen Lock in LXDE

After using LXDE on my work computer for over a month now, I can only say, wow! But some things I took for granted like locking the screen using keystrokes when I was on GNOME doesn't work out of the box.

To enable screen lock using keystrokes on LXDE, edit the ~/.config/openbox/lxde-rc.xml file and put in the following:

<keybind key="C-A-l">
     <action name="Execute">
           <command>xscreensaver-command -lock</command>
     </action>     

Log off and on and you will be able to lock the screen with Ctrl-Alt-L

Of XFCE and HDMI

Of late I have been a great enthusiast and user of lighter DEs such as LXDE and XFCE. On the computers that I work on, it's either LXDE (work computers) or XFCE (home and personal machines). While the sexy GNOME 3 or KDE 4x gets all the attention, I generally find that the newer DEs seem to have "lost it" i.e. too much fluff rather than substance.

Somehow, the GNOME and UNITY folks are dead set on making everything a tablet UI and the KDE people are just too happy to have more things to click on.

Pretty is good, but it just gets in the way. When was the last time flying and wobbly windows made anyone type faster?

Perhaps my choice is a sign of age; to me a desktop should be like a desktop with its panels, toolbars etc. Besides, on my Lenovo notebook, XFCE or LXDE actually gives me more battery time, a quieter and cooler notebook to work on. And I can still get all my usual GTK or Qt apps with a yum or zypper away.

HDMI output is crucial for me as I often watch the latest episodes of American Guy or Supernatural on the big TV. The wife is a great fan of the latter and with a computer, it's always easier to have support for Chinese subs.

XFCE on openSUSE 12.1 doesn't do HDMI audio by default sadly. The video comes out a little "stretched" and can be solved easily via the XFCE Setting Manager's Display Applet. To enable sound output, install the PulseAudio Volume Control (pavucontrol), select the Configuration Tab and choose HDMI output.

And now back to Peter Griffin....

SUSE Studio updated to include openSUSE 12.1

Concurrent with the launch of openSUSE 12.1, SUSE Studio has included an option to include openSUSE 12.1 as a base OS. 

The one click upgrade of existing images/appliances are not there yet at this time. An awesome achievement.

Check it out at http://blog.susestudio.com/2011/11/opensuse-121-in-suse-studio.html

openSUSE Map

Geeko lovers, add yourself to the openSUSE Map (http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Map)

You will need a Novell (registration is free) and if you already have a Novell account and have not validated your email address, you will need to edit your profile, enter your email address and then validate it.

extundelete

An interesting tool that can be used to to undelete files/dirs in ext3/ext4 filesystems. For its website :

extundelete is a utility that can recover deleted files from an ext3 or ext4 partition. The ext3 file system is the most common file system when using Linux, and ext4 is its successor. extundelete uses the information stored in the partition's journal to attempt to recover a file that has been deleted from the partition. There is no guarantee that any particular file will be able to be undeleted, so always try to have a good backup system in place, or at least put one in place after recovering your files!

Get it at http://extundelete.sourceforge.net/

Or for openSUSE users you can add this repo:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/dkukawka/openSUSE_Factory/

Java Plugin for Firefox in Fedora 15 64-bit

Due to a personal preference, I still feel that the Oracle/SUN JRE is superior to OpenJDK.

It is a pain to enable Oracle/Sun JRE plugin for Firefox in Fedora 15; they just force you to do their OpenJDK and IcedTea for browser. For some sites, unfortunately, these FOSS variants just won't work .

To enable the "real" JRE support for FF, just create a symbolic link of the plugin lib from $JAVA_HOME to /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins e.g. :

ln -s $JAVA_HOME/lib/amd64/default/libnpjp2.so /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins

Ensure that your JAVA_HOME variable is defined.