stumbled across a new bug with notifications in cinnamon desktop

When applications are running in full screen, notifications does not appear in cinnamon desktop. When running applications in full screen like watching a movie in media player, viewing firefox in full screen and if there is any notification bubbles appearing it doesn’t show up. It only appears below the full screen application. Whatever be the criticality of the notification it doesn’t appear. This could lead to many problems like not getting to know when the battery is getting low, when disconnected from a network etc.

Ideally notifications should appear on top of whatever application the user is running, but this is not the case.

This bug could be reproduced by running the command notify-send in terminal as given below,

sleep 10 ; notify-send hi

and run an application in full screen and wait for 10 secs and check whether ‘hi’ appears. If it doesn’t appear, you are affected by this bug.

I have reported this bug in launchpad linux mint page here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/linuxmint/+bug/1162198

If you can reproduce this go and subscribe to this bug by clicking ‘Yes,this bug affect me’  in the bug page.

Power management issue with Linux desktops

Power management in Linux mint desktop does not kick in when the system is booted upon, it only starts up when the cinnamon desktop is logged into. This should not be the case because when the system is powered up and left untouched, the brightness settings does not work, battery management settings doesn’t work. When this is the case battery gets drained completely.

By default in power manager settings, system is configured to take critical battery action only when 2 minutes of power is remaining. Thus most people wouldn’t have noticed the seriousness of this problem. I configured my system to take critical battery action when battery is at 25 % by modifying the dconf-editor settings and confirming this is the case.

I have reported a bug to Linux mint in launchpad here https://bugs.launchpad.net/linuxmint/+bug/1155691

If you are facing this bug, please add a comment against this bug.

I’m afraid this is how gnome3 desktop behaves too. This must affect all the linux distributions using cinnamon and gnome3 desktop. At this moment i have no idea what are all the distributions affected. If your version of linux is affected, please report it to your distributions authors at the appropriate place.

I guess this is more of a design error than of a bug

Easy way to fix script errors that occur when scheduled with cron

Some scripts that work fine when run manually in a shell environment will just fail when scheduled with cron. This is due to shell environment variables not available to those scripts when cron executes the scripts. You can verify this by running env or printenv commands in both the shell in which you manually execute the script and in cron by schedule it to the nearest minute and writing it to a file.

# m h  dom mon dow   command
35 * * * * env > /tmp/env.log

By comparing both outputs you can find that the environment variables available in cron are very limited.

Most errors will arise due to commands in your script not available in location set by cron environment PATH variable. You can compare the value of PATH variable in both outputs and tell that the executable paths cron looks in is very limited. You can fix this by giving the full path to commands in your shell script, but you have to look for where the executables are located and modify all those scheduled scripts.

However there is one easy fix to this problem. The important thing to note is cron allows you to set environment variables in the crontab file. So you could just add the variables you wanted to be available to cron at the top of the crontab file as shown below.

SHELL=/bin/bash
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin
# m h  dom mon dow   command
38 * * * * env > /tmp/env.log

Now schedule the script again and check the output of /tmp/env.log file. You can see that the values you passed were availabe to cron. By this way you can run those scripts just the way it is without any modifications.

configure battery power settings in Gnome

Gnome desktop does not allow users to set the values for battery critical state, Power settings will only allow users to set what action is to be taken when the battery is critical. By default it is considered critical when battery backup time is  5 minutes and it will initiate battery critical action when backup time remaining is 2 minutes. This default behavior is questionable because 2 minutes will not be sufficient for all users to find a power source and as most batteries used today are lithium-ion batteries, their life will get significantly reduced by this default behavior when drained so low so often.

Fortunately, this can be changed in configuration editor. systems using older Gnome versions such as Gnome2 desktops had a tool called Gconf-editor to change these configuration settings. Newer Gnome versions such as systems using Gnome3 desktop use a tool called dconf-editor to make changes to these configuration settings.Install this tool by using below command from terminal

sudo apt-get install dconf-editor

After installing open dconf-editor and look for following path in the left pane

/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/power/

In the right pane look for the fields,

time-action

time-critical

time-low

and change the time values for the fields according to your preferences.Note that the time is defined in seconds.

Description for the fields and the type of value it accepts will be available at the bottom pane, when you select the fields.

Alternatively, if you want your system to consider the battery percentage instead of remaining time, uncheck the key

use-time-for-policy

and modify the keys

percentage-action

percentage-critical

percentage-low

to your preference.Now your system should take the values you defined after the next boot or restart your system for the settings to take effect immediately.

Ubuntu releases operating system for mobiles

Ubuntu for mobile project  is announced by Canonical earlier today, delivering the last step in their intention to have one operating system for all range of devices.Canonical the parent company of ubuntu have their OS already available for desktops/laptops, servers, tablets and for TVs.This launch would bring ubuntu for mobile devices covering whole range of platforms.

Last year, Canonical announced ubuntu for android where Ubuntu would coexist with android on smartphones. We are yet to see any android phone manufactureres releasing smartphones with Ubuntu for android.Although I consider that project a not so successful one, I hope this would become a success story for ubuntu. This comes in as a direct competition to Firefox OS and Tizen and to some extent to android because it has the potential to be more powerful and efficient than android.Although android runs on linux kernel its java implementation will never equal the performance of native C code, as evident by the comparing the specs of top level android smartphones with the Apple’s latest iphone(iphone 5), which uses objective C with both having more are less equal performance inspite of its lower specs.Both Firefox OS and Tizen are touted as being the OS for web apps. Ubuntu mobile OS should able to run both web apps and mobile apps along with possibility of running native desktop applications as it is a full blown desktop operating system with mobile interface and will run in desktop mode when docked.Ubuntu did a great job of converging the all platforms and it is one operating system which could really bring what is called as a superphone.

Solve Eclipse showing empty dialog box in linux

All of a sudden my eclipse IDE started showing empty dialog box after working fine for some days. Most of the solutions found talks about Xulrunner problem that doesn’t work for me. A simple solution would be to just move your workspace folder to a different location or delete it if don’t have any important projects inside it and start eclipse again.Now you are good to go.

Is Ubuntu damaging my laptop hard drive?

I have been using ubuntu since 6.06 and loving it. I recently bought a new laptop and have discovered a problem it and ubuntu. It has a Western digital 320GB hard drive model: WB3200BEVT-22ZCT0 and ubuntu causes the drive temperature to increase to dangerously high levels while plugged in and while in battery the load_cycle_count seems to increase drastically. This is an old problem and have reported to been fixed but it’s not at least with this WD hard drives. I have used Ubuntu 9.04 , 9.10 and 10.04 in this laptop and all seems to have the problem.

While the laptop is plugged in the temperature of  drive seems to steadily rise to 54 °C  even while the system is at idle and the load_cycle_count increase is fairly normal and while working on battery the temperature of drive steadily returns to normal around 44 °C and there is a high increase of load_cycle_count values. According to the drive manufacturer’s website the maximum temperature of the drive while operating is 60 °C in ubuntu it comes pretty close to that.

I dual-boot ubuntu with windows vista that came with my laptop. While in vista my hard drive is perfectly fine both while on AC and on battery. While in idle or with minimum drive usage the drive average temperature is around 45-47 °C and load_cycle_count increase is normal. This is the case for both on AC and on battery.

I have reported a bug about this in launchpad bug #52195. Several others have reported about this problem like in bug #399978 and the bug itself has a number of duplicates, all relating to WD hard drives and also asked if anyone experience the same problem in ubuntu forums and it seems clearly I’m not the only one facing this issue. There hasn’t been any activity in bugs reported and hence this post to get some developer attention and sincerely hoping that this issue would probably sorted out in the next edition of ubuntu, the Maverick Meerkat.

Update: This has not been solved yet and have tried various other debian based distributions and it seems to be present in all those distributions i tried till now.
Update: Finally my hard drive’s life has come to an end after three years as the drive’s SMART has started reporting failure warning. But i have a backup of all the data in my drive in case it fails today or tomorrow or maybe later. Heck, who cares i still use GNU/Linux(Linux Mint) as my main operating system.