My Ubuntu 9.10 annoyances and how i fixed them

Lets face the truth. Desktop Linux has made an incredible progress in the last few years. It gives you all the quiet freedom, happiness and elegance it inherited from it's UNIX foundation - and it tries hard to compete with the Windows Plug-and-play mentality.

The standard user should not need to do complicated things on the console. Basic things should just work. Especially Ubuntu did great, they really improved many aspects of the GUI Gnome-desktop. Most modern machines and run just work "out of the box" with a fresh Ubuntu install. BUT still there are these little annoyances and things that do not work as expected. I will collect my personal annoyances with Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" in this post and add solutions, if I find them.

Annoyance # 1
Logs are spammed with messages about CPU temperature

This one is an ugly one. It started for me with Karmic / var / log / kern.log and / var / log / syslog got spammed with millions of messages from the kernel Stating things like.:

CPU0: Temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 208[ 8973.550089] CPU0: Temperature/speed normal

CPU0: Temperat cpu clock throttled (total events = 2080190)
This was a real problem, because about 100 messages per second were written to the logs, making them hard to read for other purposes. Syslog archiving them pushed my CPU to 100% and they filled up my root partition very quickly. This behavior seems to originate from a kernel bug that should be fixed anytime soon. There is an Ubuntu bug report on the problem already: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rsyslog/+bug/453444 . There is no real fix for it, as this is a kernel bug, but there is a workaround that fixed the odd behavior of my system I just disabled the logging of lines, that contain the bogus information:

• Create a file / etc/rsyslog.d/10-temperature.conf
• Paste the following code into it :: msg, contains, "Temperature / speed normal" ~
  : Msg, contains, "Temperature above threshold" ~

• Save it
• Do an sudo restart rsyslog to make the new rule active.

Annoyance # 2
CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor did not remember my password

There is a very useful little applet for the GNOME panel, that Allows you to change the speed of your CPU while working. As I am using a laptop most of the time, this thingy came in quiet handy for me. Because of changing the CPU policy requires root-privileges you had to enter your password once with old Ubuntu versions. After that you were able to check a checkbox and Ubuntu remembered your policy. Things changed in Karmic. With the new policykit2 environment, there was no Possibility to remember the password anymore. I had to reenter it every time i wanted to change my CPU policy. I found out, that I could set the permisson right in the config files for policykit2:

• Create a file / var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/gnome-cpufreq.pkla
• Paste the following code into it (be sure to replace YOUR USERNAME with your username): [Allow users to set the CPU frequency]
  Identity = unix-group: YOUR USER NAME
  Action = org.gnome.cpufreqselector
  ResultAny = no
  ResultInactive = no
  Result Active = yes

• Save it
• There is no password needed anymore for changing CPU policies

Annoyance # 3
Streamtuner could not load the Shoutcast stream list anymore

This started with Intrepid or so. Shoutcast changed the hostname of it's stream list-servers. The old hostname seems to be hardcoded into stream tuner, so it could not get the stream list anymore. This was unconvenient for me, because i got used to tune into my favorite Internet radio stations (like Lemixx Paris France ) with stream tuner. There seems to be no effort to fix this in the Ubuntu package, as the bug is now several months old already. I fixed it by adding the right IP to / etc / hosts.

• Open up / etc / hosts file with a text editor
• Add the following line to it: 205.188.234.120 www.shoutcast.com

• Save it
• Streamtuner can access Shoutcast streams again

Annoyance # 4
USB Startup Disk Creator is unable to create an USB Startup Disk

Ubuntu brings it's own tool to clone itself onto USB flash drive on. You basicly get a fully working Ubuntu installation on your flash drive. A very useful thingy to carry around if you want to connect to the internet from untrusted machines or if you want to fix down a Brokeen computer. So far so good, it did not work. When you start the USB Startup Disk Creator from Ubuntu's menu, the tool starts but is unable to write to or format partitions on your flash drive. The solution is surprisingly simple: It needs to be run as root to make it work:

• Open up a terminal
• Enter the following command:
  sudo usb-creator-gtk
• Create and enjoy your flash drive
  

Annoyance # 5
Could not click on any web link in Poker Stars with Wine

Poker is one of my hobbies and the guys from PokerStars did a great job on making it a good experience on Linux with wine too. There are a few downgrades though. When clicking on the left in the PokerStars software, no web browser opened up in Gnome. You need to edit the registry to fix that.

• Run wine regedit to open the registry editor
• Navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT \ http \ shell \ open \ command
• Add a "% 1" after-nohome in that registry key
• Links work now at PokerStars

Annoyance # 6
Could not make PokerStars tables fullscreen with wine

Another PokerStars problem. Scaling tables did not work well. There was no way to make a table full screen. There is a way to fix that, espcially for wine users implemented by PokerStars.

• Open up the file user.ini in your PokerStars directory ($ HOME / .wine / Program ....)
• Add a line with f5redrawtable = 1 to the file
• Save it
• Tables are now redrawn after resizing them when you press F5
  

Annoyance # 7
Skype did not show on my Logitech video chat Qucikcam

Skype detected my cam as / dev/video0 but was unable to grave pictures from it. The video window just stayed in plain old black

I started with Skype -> LD_PRELOAD = / usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype to fix it.

To be continued ...