I’ve been waiting for it for over a month, but the 64 bit version of Linux Mint 6 has finally been released! I’m very excited. I’m going to test drive Mint 6 and Sabayon 4 and see which one I like better. I’m currently running Sabayon 3.5. It’s an ok system, but it has a few annoying quirks and I really like the “it just works” properties of the Ubuntu based distros. We’ll just have to see how it goes.
Archive for the ‘Linux’ Category
Linux Mint 6 x64 has been Released!
Saturday, April 11th, 2009Bzr in Linux on vfat
Saturday, April 11th, 2009So I recently reinstalled linux and was frustrated to find that Bazaar no longer worked on my usb stick.
It gave me a rather nasty and unhelpful message as follows:
me@localhost /media/disk/dev/projects/test $ bzr init
/usr/lib64/python2.5/site-packages/bzrlib/atomicfile.py:125: UserWarning: AtomicFile(u’/media/disk/dev/projects/test/.bzr/README’) leaked
warnings.warn("%r leaked" % self)
bzr: ERROR: Transport error: [Errno 1] Operation not permitted: ‘/media/disk/dev/projects/test/.bzr/README.2615.localhost.tmp’ [Errno 1] Operation not permitted: ‘/media/disk/dev/projects/test/.bzr/README.2615.localhost.tmp’
me@localhost /media/disk/dev/projects/test $
/usr/lib64/python2.5/site-packages/bzrlib/atomicfile.py:125: UserWarning: AtomicFile(u’/media/disk/dev/projects/test/.bzr/README’) leaked
warnings.warn("%r leaked" % self)
bzr: ERROR: Transport error: [Errno 1] Operation not permitted: ‘/media/disk/dev/projects/test/.bzr/README.2615.localhost.tmp’ [Errno 1] Operation not permitted: ‘/media/disk/dev/projects/test/.bzr/README.2615.localhost.tmp’
me@localhost /media/disk/dev/projects/test $
I never had problems with bzr on my usb stick before. In fact my old system was still able to work with it just fine.
After a much more prolonged search than it should have been, I found the answer here.
Basically, there is a new update to the vfat kernel module that throws errors when a program tries to set a permission flag or parameter that the file system is not capable of supporting (before, it would fail silently). Bazaar doesn’t like this. Fortunately, mounting with the “quiet” option fixes this.
On KDE this can be done by clicking the Storage Media button on the taskbar, selecting properties, clicking the Mounting tab and checking the “quiet” checkbox (you’ll need to unmount/remount for it to take effect).
Problem with mouse getting stuck in lower right corner in games in linux
Tuesday, April 7th, 2009
I recently had a problem when trying to play games in linux where the mouse would behave oddly. When the game had focus (mouse was grabbed) I had some control over the mouse, but it would gravitate toward the lower right corner when I moved it. After a lot of googleing I found that the problem is caused by games using DGA to talk to the mouse. There are two ways to fix this.
If the game uses SDL (which a lot of linux games do ) you can type this in a shell to make it work (the game nexuiz is used as an example):
export SDL_VIDEO_X11_DGAMOUSE=0
nexuiz-sdl #or whatever your game is here
A lot of games that don’t use SDL have options for disabling DGA mouse support, but you’ll have to look those up yourself.
However, a permanent solution that works for all games, is to add the following to the Modules section of your xorg.conf file:
# Load “extmod” but omit DGA extension
SubSection “extmod”
Option “omit xfree86-dga”
EndSubSection
Option “omit xfree86-dga”
EndSubSection
Have fun! 
NFS Fix
Tuesday, April 7th, 2009I finally fixed a problem where my NFS shares took forever (2-3 minutes) to mount .
The fix:
Install portmap
Apparently NFS wants portmap running, (I think on both machines, but definitely on client) and if it’s not, NFS still works, but it spends a good couple minutes looking for it.
See NFS Notes for more useful info about NFS.