KDE Moves Window Edge Beyond Screen Border

27. March, 2014

With KDE 4.11, a new annoying feature was added: The window manager now moves a window beyond the screen edge. The original idea was to make the scroll bar easily accessible.

But a lot of people didn’t like this for various reasons.

My reason is that I use clicking on the window border to move a window to the front. By careful arrangement of the windows on my second monitor, I can easily switch between 5 windows by moving them against the screen edge: That way, I can use the mile high menu bar trick to position the mouse and one click to bring the window to the front (and no, I can’t use the usual click to front behavior; I know much better than the computer when I want to change the stacking order and when not).

With the window border hidden beyond the screen edge, this wasn’t possible anymore.

Here is a script that solved the issue for me: Snap to Deco 1.1

Installation Instructions:

Once downloaded, the script needs to be installed via

> plasmapkg -t kwinscript -i filename.kwinscript

which unpacks and copies files to ~/.kde4/share/apps/kwin/scripts/ but doesn’t activate them. In order to activate, use the scripts KCM (KConfig Module) graphical interface:

> kcmshell4 kwinscripts

and tick the required script.

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Posted by digulla

Firefox Crashing When Opening a New Window in openSUSE 12.2

11. September, 2012

Does Firefox crash for you when you open a new window?

Report the crash using the built in tool, then browse “about:crashes” (shows you which crashes you reports), click the topmost link.

If frame #0 in “Crashing Thread” (bottom of the page) reads “libtracker-sparql-0.12.so.0.1205.0”, then this package is the culprit: tracker-miner-firefox

Delete it and Firefox should work again. If that helps in your case, you’ve been hit by this bug.

What’s this piece of crap do? From the web site:

Tracker is a semantic data storage for desktop and mobile devices. Tracker uses W3C standards for RDFontologies using Nepomuk withSPARQL to query and update the data.

If you don’t know, Nepomuk is the great technology that builds search indexes over anything on your disk. Unfortunately, it’s developed by people who believe quality in software is nice to have. So it tends to hog the CPU wasting your time, it can fill your harddisk with useless junk, and please, don’t run it on computers with more than 100 MB (that’s 0.1 GB) of disk space or more than 1’000 files; otherwise, it might never finish. If you try to search something, bring some time – useless results take a moment to come up with.

Don’t disable it either, or apps like Dolphin will be unhappy. It’s already beyond the abilities of these people to hide the UI elements for rating and tags when you try to protect yourself.

I opened a bug to have Nepomuk removed from KDE until it reaches alpha status but that bug was closed.

‘Nuf said.

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Posted by digulla

Suspend Fail in openSUSE 12.1 After Upgrading KDE

29. June, 2012

When you upgrade openSUSE 12.1’s KDE 4.7 to 4.8 (using this repo), suspend to disk or ram might stop working. If so, you’ve encountered bug 758379:  STR (Suspend to RAM) fails when NetworkManager running and NFS shares mounted

The description is a bit misleading. It also happens for suspend to disk (STD) and when you don’t use NetworkManager.

Workaround: Unmount your NFS shares before you try to suspend:

sudo umount -t nfs -a

If you use NFS v4, then the command is:

sudo umount -t nfs4 -a

To check whether it worked, use this:

mount | grep nfs

This shouldn’t print anything with “type nfs” anymore. Afterwards, suspend should work.

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Posted by digulla

When JIRA Hates You

10. May, 2011

Ever had the problem that JIRA would not allow you in? Every time, it would say “wrong user name and/or password”?

Using my crystal ball, I can see that you’re using Firefox.

You’ve been hit by the extra space bug. It’s open since October 2009.

I’ve opened an issue against JIRA: JSP-79797: Password mail contains space after password

Let’s see who moves faster.

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Posted by digulla

Missing Icons in Buttons (Firefox, Ubuntu Natty)

5. May, 2011

If your firefox has forgotten about all the nice icons for button in the UI (i.e. if there is a back button but it has no label or icon and all the “close tab” buttons are just tiny little invisible buttons), this bug is for you: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ia32-libs/+bug/641056

If you start Firefox from the console, you’ll see errors like this one:

(firefox-bin:30535): Gtk-WARNING **: Error loading icon: Unable to load image-loading module: /usr/lib/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/2.10.0/loaders/libpixbufloader-png.so: /usr/lib/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/2.10.0/loaders/libpixbufloader-png.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64

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Posted by digulla

Mysterious Eclipse Hangs

15. April, 2011

If your Eclipse installation hangs, there can be several reasons. If it happens while your tests run, chances are that a test printed an exception to the console view. If the exception is very wide, this can cause Eclipse to hang for a few seconds: Bug 175888 – ConsolePatternMatcher causes large delays with some large input.

I’m working on a fix.

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Posted by digulla

Windows 7 Libraries Trigger Eclipse Builds

15. April, 2011

If you’re on Windows 7, you may know this odd behavior: For some reason, Eclipse goes into a build frenzy. Every few seconds, it will rebuild the workspace.

The reason: You added your workspace to a Windows 7 Library and you have “Refresh Automatically” enabled.

My guess is that indexing of Windows 7 Libraries creates temporary files which make Eclipse believe something changed in the Workspace. Which causes a rebuild. Which makes Windows re-index the workspace.

Workaround: Remove your workspace from the library or disable “Refresh Automatically”.

See also: Bug 342931 – Windows 7 Libraries trigger rebuilds

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Posted by digulla

How to make Eclipse 3.5 work on gtk2 2.18

24. December, 2009

If you’re using Eclipse in Linux with gtk2, then you might have run into this issue: Buttons don’t work when you click on them, tree views are initially empty, icons are missing or not drawn correctly. To fix this, just run this command before you start Eclipse:

export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1

I suggest that you put it into a little wrapper script. With this option enabled, Eclipse works like it should, even on Linux/gtk.

It’s a good example of the pain when working with Eclipse developers: Everyone agrees that it’s a bug and it’s pretty clear what needs to be done. The fix apparently even exists and “just” needs to be copied from the 3.6 sources to 3.5. And nothing happens because the release process is so involved that it just takes too much time and the workaround (adding the line above or control Eclipse with the keyboard) is too simple.

I can’t say on which side I’m on here. I understand why nothing happens but it still freaks me out.

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Posted by digulla

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