I am working on a desktop without antialiased fonts, as this is much sharper and clearer using small font sizes as I am doing. As desktop font I am using Microsoft’s Tahoma, as I think this is the most space saving and at the same time best looking font without using antialiasing. (If you know another one, please tell me!)

If you do and you are using Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, you probably will have noticed that the new versions (Firefox 3.5 and Thunderbird 3) always use antialliased fonts. Even trying to change the setting

gfx.use_text_smoothing_setting

in the about:conf page does not change anything.

This bug is reported at Ubuntu’s Launchpad. I crawled through the comments and workarounds given there, and the solution which worked great for me without breaking any other stuff was the solution mentioned in comment #52. Save this as ~/.fonts.conf:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
 <match target="font" >
  <edit mode="assign" name="rgba" >
   <const>rgb</const>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font" >
  <edit mode="assign" name="hinting" >
	
   <bool>true</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font" >
  <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle" >
   <const>hintfull</const>
  </edit>
 </match>
	
 <match target="font" >
  <edit mode="assign" name="antialias" >
   <bool>true</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>
</fontconfig>

Restart Thunderbird or Firefox.

Yes. Another preview version. Bibble 5 Preview 2.2 released.

Not tried it yet very much. But some of the highlights of the changelog:

» Major improvements to the Layers & Regions tools, with better memory management and much faster rendering
» Implemented On / Off toggles per Region and per Layer
» Implemented File -> Open and drag & drop to open image files and work queues.
» Implemented ‘Portable Catalogs.’
» Improved Linux Trash operations (to be freedesktops.org compliant)

This means… Yes, it is time to implement a “Develop in Bibble 5” extension, or at least an “Open with…” context menu entry in form of a desktop file like I did with Bibble 4 (direct link to desktop file and shell script).

There is a very good step by step tutorial how to build hugin on Ubuntu which can be applied on debian, too. Although, there are some issues:

• libpano13 is available now in debian unstable. So you don’t have to build it on your own. Just install the pacage libpano13-dev.
• wxwidgets2.8 is also available. But you have to make sure to uninstall all 2.6 versions you might have installed, hugin will not compile the gui components if it 2.6 is found. You will get a cmake output similar to this:

  -- Found wxWidgets: TRUE
  wxWidgets 2.6.x not supported
  wxWidgets was not found, GUI programs (hugin, nona_gui) disabled
  

• libboost_thread.so is not available. The new library file in debian unstable is called libboost_thread-mt.so. It works anyway if you create a symlink:

  sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libboost_thread-mt.so \
       /usr/lib/libboost_thread.so

That’s it.

Although, there seems to be a bug with libdrm-intel. It crashes while creating the control points.

../../../libdrm/intel/intel_bufmgr_gem.c:712: Error preparing buffer
map -1261963602 ((null)): Invalid argument .
hugin: vbo/vbo_save_api.c:216: map_vertex_store: Assertion
`vertex_store->buffer' failed.
Aborted

This is due to the GL fast preview I assume. Without this preview it works fine anyways, you don’t need this.

Update: And after upgrading some packages (on debian unstable) and recompiling it works without error. Not sure what caused this error.

By the way, if you want install hugin 0.8.0 on Windows, you can use a prerelease installer. It works on Windows XP, too. There is more information in the hugin blog.

I am not sure why, while upgrading, installing and uninstalling some stuff my system broke, so that on booting, just after the boot line selection in the grub(2) menu, the error “command not found: initrd” (or similar) appeared.

You can fix the grub installation again using any kind of live CD. I used the Knoppix CD.

• Boot the live CD
• Mount your boot partition, for example to /mnt. In my case

  mount -t auto /dev/sda1 /mnt

• Bind your /dev directory to the mounted partition:

  mount -o bind /dev/ /mnt/dev

• Chroot into your boot partition

  chroot /mnt

• Mount your proc directory

  mount -t proc proc /proc

• Mount your sys file system (/sys)

  mount -t sysfs sysfs /sys

• Ready, now you can use your system almost as if you booted in it. You can reinstall grub, kernel images, create initrd images, fix the menu.lst or grub.cfg or whatever you want.

And, by the way, if grub is giving you something like

error: the symbol grub_machine_fini was not found

on booting, it is installed to the wrong hard disk (or not installed). Install it to the master boot record of the hard disk (not to the partition!) In my case:

grub-install /dev/sda

(and not sda1)

Finally. Bibble Labs released, as promised (I wrote about it before), a preview of Bibble 5!

I have not much time, but I gave it a short try. It looks great. Nice, smooth user interface, although I have to get used to it, runs fine under Linux and Windows. The preview is not full featured, there are features that are disabled and will be included in later Previews and in the final release — who knows when this will be…

The selective editing with a kind of layers is one of the features I am looking forward to. Great. I will write about my experiences with Bibble 5 here the next days and weeks. It seems that there are a lot of issues still open in this preview.

A few months ago I bought an 8 GB USB Memory Stick (A Corsair Voyager) which did not work with my Linux machines. The syslog was reporting these errors (or similar) all the time:

usb 5-8: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 7
usb 5-8: device descriptor read/64, error -110
usb 5-8: device descriptor read/64, error -110
usb 5-8: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 8
usb 5-8: device descriptor read/64, error -110

I searched for information about this and found the problem.

Here you can find the thread about this issue in the Corsair forums. The information there is a bit misleading as there are a lot of solutions presented which don’t solve the problem.

In the Ubuntu Launchpad bug report there is more information and a workaround to get the Memory stick working.

The problems seems to be the inq_timeout. In Windows, this timeout is set to 20 per default, Linux uses just 5. As I wish to be able to use this memory stick without having to recompile or reinstall a new linux kernel on each linux computer I want to use it, I filed a kernel bug report and I hope they will adapt the timeout to 20, too.

At the moment the workaround is to modify or create the file /etc/modprobe.d/options and add the line:

options scsi_mod inq_timeout=20

As explained in the Ubuntu bug report as workaround. If you have the kernel scsi modules built in the kernel (not as loadable modules), you have to boot your kernel with:

scsi_mod.inq_timeout=20

As explained in the Kernel bug report.