For the last month or so I’ve been using Fedora as it seemed to fit my T42 better than Ubuntu did. But wanting to get back to it I plopped in the drive and fired it up. A decent amount of updates were needed and after getting through those things seemed fine. But then after resuming from suspend I noticed the pop up icon in the notification area was blank. It was almost like the something was up with the resolution or video display of the icon itself.
I’m not sure if this was one of those things I thought was a problem when Karmic first came out or not. I did load it pre-release but moved to Fedora shortly thereafter. Finding this to be odd I tried to do a little googling and research, found a few threads that pointed to some of the work the Ubuntu Desktop Experience Team was doing but not much that suggested a solution. The only thing I did come across was talk about video drivers and excelleration. This didn’t really make much sense to me, it has been years since I’ve had to care about the X config file and adjusting it manually. That takes me back to the RedHat 6 days and my Tecra 600. But it did give me a thought.
Video in general was not a problem, just the notificaiton icons. So as a guess I checked what was set for Visual Effects.
System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Visual Effects (tab)
The current setting was None so I changed it to Normal. To test I watched Rhythmbox move to the next song and the icon was normal.
Good to know that fixed the problem but interesting it needed to be done. Regardless the polish with Gnome in Karmic is really good. Ubuntu has taken Linux on the desktop where no one else has and with that there will always be little challenges. Wonder where they’ll go from here.
Wednesday afternoon we headed home for the holiday weekend. When we left it was almost 60, five and a half hours later it was in the low 40′s and raining. Visiting with family was good as we split time between mine and Kay’s. It rained through Friday and then started to snow. The snow continued off and on through Sunday morning, totaled about 4 inches.
I worked on a few machines while I was there as Kay’s dad got a new laptop and her sister in law need to move some things around.
Some general thoughts about working on machines this past weekend.
- Exporting mail from Outlook Express6 and importing into Live Mail works well, contacts is the same.
- Some day OpenOffice will already be on PC’s running Windows, I hope.
- PC’s/Laptop’s would run faster if OEM’s didn’t load all there bloatware.
- Windows Mail does not like exporting or slow IMAP connections. Copying message “files” is better.
- When crimping cables it’s best to “not” leave the wires exposed between the clip and sheathing, crimp the sheathing into the clip.
- Waiting on a machine to “do what you’ve asked” is a time killer.
Today was Cooper’s follow up for the heart worm treatment he received in August. I was expecting progress but we got even better news as the blood work came back clean. After talking with the Vet for a few minutes that is what the treatment is geared for.
Roscoe’s turn will be next month and it will be interesting to see where he is at. We’ll hope for the best.
Over the weekend I got an update alert on my n810 for Vagalume, the Last.fm player I’ve been using. Without checking the changes I went ahead and updated, unfortunately it caused the player to stop working. At first I thought it was a configuration issue but after some research today l ran across this thread which spelled things out. Though I’m not to sure I want to get an API key knowing it could be disabled at any time for violating the terms of service. So the free ride was good for a while and there are still players out there that use the old API, which will work until it’s shut down. It is a great site and three dollars a month is not that much when you think about the library you have access to. Honestly if you haven’t been there head over and take a look.
When the time comes I’ll get a subscription, until then I’ll have to roll back.
… heard on the radio this evening where the phrase was in a holiday commercial from Shane Co. Wish I could remember the entire script. LOL !!!
Just after updating my G1 to 1.6 I was struck again with problems syncing contacts. Mind you it’s not a huge deal, I don’t meet 20 people a day and need there digits. It has been a common problem and was well documented based on the posts I found. The consistent fix from the Google Mobile Help forum was clearing contact data on the G1 and then sync. That worked and syncing is back.
This might be a good argument for turning on synchronization but that tends to limit battery life. If all else fails I can fall back to this but I’m hoping if I sync more often, and not make changes in both places then sync, the problem will go away. We’ll see.
