The power saving features on the Dell I've been using for a while have been bothering me for a while. Its running Mint 17.1 cinnamon and has always had a few issues with sleep. I tried all sorts of permutations but left on its own the machine always crashed after a while: when going into power saving mode.
I've not totally sorted it: but I have found a parameter to add to the kernel startup which helps quite a bit:
quiet splash acpi_backlight=vendor
You'll probably find using grub customizer the easiest way to test this parameter.
Tuesday, 5 May 2015
Monday, 2 June 2014
In praise of Kobo
Around about 3 years ago I was given a Kobo E Reader by my brother in law as a birthday present (it could have been Xmas but I digress....). The choice was actually mine but he bought it.
I chose Kobo at the time because I wanted to avoid the ever present Kindles and I was worried about Amazon cornering the market in E books with their proprietary formats and readers. I also liked the idea that they were available here in the UK at WH Smiths who have a branch locally and I remembered from my childhood.
As time went by I found I used the Kobo quite a lot although mainly when I was on the train to work. I bought quite a few books from their store and also downloaded some of the classics that were available for free. I kept updating it as new firmware came out and all seemed well.
Around 6 months ago the Kobo started to play up a bit. I found that it would no longer mount as a separate drive when attached via USB to a computer and it seemed a little bit slower. I had backed up my books to a computer and the ones that were bought from the Kobo store were always available via their web portal and online store but I worried that I would lose my content eventually.
So with a heavy heart I contacted their online support people and started a long correspondence aimed at fixing it. Despite our mutual best efforts it appeared that all was lost and the Kobo was going to fail.
Then to my surprise they offered to replace the Kobo for free (apart from some shipping charges to Europe which to be fair were probably in place to stop jokers trying to get something for free). I am now the proud owner of a shiny new replacement Kobo!
So praise be to Kobo. My cynicism was misplaced and it only seems to give praise where its due. If you are in the market for an E reader perhaps this will give you some more confidence to go with the Kobo instead of a Kindle and together we can at least put off yet another monopoly for a while.
I chose Kobo at the time because I wanted to avoid the ever present Kindles and I was worried about Amazon cornering the market in E books with their proprietary formats and readers. I also liked the idea that they were available here in the UK at WH Smiths who have a branch locally and I remembered from my childhood.
As time went by I found I used the Kobo quite a lot although mainly when I was on the train to work. I bought quite a few books from their store and also downloaded some of the classics that were available for free. I kept updating it as new firmware came out and all seemed well.
Around 6 months ago the Kobo started to play up a bit. I found that it would no longer mount as a separate drive when attached via USB to a computer and it seemed a little bit slower. I had backed up my books to a computer and the ones that were bought from the Kobo store were always available via their web portal and online store but I worried that I would lose my content eventually.
So with a heavy heart I contacted their online support people and started a long correspondence aimed at fixing it. Despite our mutual best efforts it appeared that all was lost and the Kobo was going to fail.
Then to my surprise they offered to replace the Kobo for free (apart from some shipping charges to Europe which to be fair were probably in place to stop jokers trying to get something for free). I am now the proud owner of a shiny new replacement Kobo!
So praise be to Kobo. My cynicism was misplaced and it only seems to give praise where its due. If you are in the market for an E reader perhaps this will give you some more confidence to go with the Kobo instead of a Kindle and together we can at least put off yet another monopoly for a while.
Sunday, 23 June 2013
Get an up to date version of Clementine for your Debian based setup
My favourite linux audio player is Clementine.
You can get this in the debian repositories but its a bit out of date: but there is an extra repository which is much more up to date and works a treat with debian, here.
So just update your sources.list and off you go.
You can get this in the debian repositories but its a bit out of date: but there is an extra repository which is much more up to date and works a treat with debian, here.
So just update your sources.list and off you go.
Get an up to date version of XBMC on your debian rig
I am a big fan of the latest version of XBMC : frodo (version 12).
If you are using an Ubuntu based distro then you can get hold of this latest version with no problems.
If, however, you are using a Debian based distro, such as the excellent SolydXK or the also excellent Crunchbang then you are stuck at version 11. Apparently debian did not like some of the non FOSS eliments used in the newer version so its not in their repos. I make no critisism of Debian for that, that is their philosophy and they are entitled to it.
If, you are still after version 12 on a Debian distro: what to do:
Well....head over here
Quite a bit of that page is in German, but fear not, the important bits are in English as well.
I tried to set this up under Crunchbang a little while ago and had no success, but yesterday I tried again with SolydXK and it seemed to work just fine.
This is what I did.....
When I build machines for those very new to linux who need reliability above all I now use MX-15. It uses the stable debian repos by default and yet it has the latest version of XFCE (4.12 at time of writing) powering things.
I recently had a brief forum exchange on using Kodi in MX-15. It turns out if you want to do this: don't enable the debian multimedia repos as they carry an old version of Kodi. I had done this and also given the debian multimedia repos a higher priority: so when I searched in Synaptic for Kodi all it found was the old version.
MX-15 now carries version 16.0 of Kodi in its stable repos, and 16.1 in its testing repos: so you can have the best of both worlds.
If you are using an Ubuntu based distro then you can get hold of this latest version with no problems.
If, however, you are using a Debian based distro, such as the excellent SolydXK or the also excellent Crunchbang then you are stuck at version 11. Apparently debian did not like some of the non FOSS eliments used in the newer version so its not in their repos. I make no critisism of Debian for that, that is their philosophy and they are entitled to it.
If, you are still after version 12 on a Debian distro: what to do:
Well....head over here
Quite a bit of that page is in German, but fear not, the important bits are in English as well.
I tried to set this up under Crunchbang a little while ago and had no success, but yesterday I tried again with SolydXK and it seemed to work just fine.
This is what I did.....
wget http://debian.oppserver.net/gpg-debian.oppserver.net-signing-pubkey.asc -O - | sudo apt-key add -
sudo su -c 'echo "deb http://debian.oppserver.net/xbmc/ wheezy main non-free contrib" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/oppxbmc.sources.list' sudo su -c 'echo "deb-src http://debian.oppserver.net/xbmc/ wheezy main non-free contrib" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/oppxbmc.sources.list' sudo aptitude update
Update: May 2016
These days life is a little easier for those who wish to mix a bit of debian with XBMC (nowadays Kodi).When I build machines for those very new to linux who need reliability above all I now use MX-15. It uses the stable debian repos by default and yet it has the latest version of XFCE (4.12 at time of writing) powering things.
I recently had a brief forum exchange on using Kodi in MX-15. It turns out if you want to do this: don't enable the debian multimedia repos as they carry an old version of Kodi. I had done this and also given the debian multimedia repos a higher priority: so when I searched in Synaptic for Kodi all it found was the old version.
MX-15 now carries version 16.0 of Kodi in its stable repos, and 16.1 in its testing repos: so you can have the best of both worlds.
Consistent mouse cursors with XFCE
This is one that has annoyed me for quite some time: so when I finally found a solution I was delighted.
The issue is that when you change your default mouse theme under XFCE it does not appear to change completely: run firefox for example and take your cursor up to the top of the window and you will find that the cursor changes back to its old default. All rather annoying....
However: thanks to the good people at makandra a solution is at hand:
Go to your terminal and type this in:
You will need to log in again for the changes to take hold: but at last, consistency is yours!
The issue is that when you change your default mouse theme under XFCE it does not appear to change completely: run firefox for example and take your cursor up to the top of the window and you will find that the cursor changes back to its old default. All rather annoying....
However: thanks to the good people at makandra a solution is at hand:
Go to your terminal and type this in:
sudo update-alternatives --config x-cursor-theme You will need to log in again for the changes to take hold: but at last, consistency is yours!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
