Posts

Showing posts from August, 2012

Fedora 17 - Distorted Audio - Output set too high

Image
All of a sudden the sound on my FC17 system sounded terrible. Very distorted. Long story short - I *think* that a recent update which updated kde-settings-pulseaudio for some reason caused my output volume for my volume control to go all the way to the right (I know I didn't put it there). Moving the slider back to it's normal spot of 100% reverted the sound quality back to what it was before.  Even though I don't even use KDE, I think this is the culprit because the timing was exactly right. Updated kde-settings-pulseaudio-4.8-16.fc17.noarch @anaconda-0 Update                          4.8-18.fc17.noarch @updates

Special Characters on Fedora 17 Gnome 3 - Make Caps Lock a "Compose" Key

I would like to type special characters - for example À la recherche du temps perdu or Du côté de chez Swann.  There are a LOT of methods to do this on Linux up to and including memorizing the unicode hex codes for each accented character and escaping these with ctrl-shift-U.  Sorry, not going to go there - that's too much like work. But many of the other methods involve using the ALT or Windows or CTRL keys as modifiers and again - sorry - I need those for all sorts of other uses. What seems like a decent solution - at least for me - is to use the Caps Lock key which up until now I had disabled on Linux. One can turn this into a "compose key" and you simply hit Caps Lock, then for example hit the back tick key, and then the "e" and you have composed è. Seems easy enough to remember, easy enough to type, and doesn't muck with my Xemacs, my Gnome Shell, my VNC etc. etc. To do this all that's needed is System Settings | Region and Language | Layo

Linux Pidgin won't accept input (interaction with Gnome 3 shell extension)

This apparently can happen in a number of situations when using Pidgin under Linux but for me it happens while using Pidgin integrated with "pidgin-conversation-integration@kageenshi.com" Gnome 3 shell extension. The exact sequence for me is that I get an IM Notification via the Shell (as expected) and via a series of mouse clicks in the notification area I am able to bring up the Pidgin Chat Window. However, I am unable to type into the chat window as it won't accept keyboard input. The solution is to right-click the chat window then click in "Input Methods" "System (Simple)" even though this setting already appears to be checked. This immediately fixes the issue and it stays fixed (until possibly the next  chat message is notified). Apparently other users have reported the same symptom with Pidgin but under different circumstances but for me it only occurs in the setting of the aforementioned Gnome 3 shell extension. Addendum: This is being

Networked Canon MP640 on Fedora 17 (64 bit)

Addendum: This has been "working" for a long time but ... often the printer would get "stuck". I noticed that in the CUPS interface the default paper size was set to A4. I changed that to US Letter and the reliability improved considerably. Most info I got from this Ubuntu Board - I don't have too much here that adds to that but anyways .... Get the Canon Print Driver from here:   http://software.canon-europe.com/products/0010757.asp Specify Linux, English, and choose the RPM version. This turns out to be a 32-bit driver which seems to work fine on my 64-bit system. What gets downloaded is                   MP640_rpm_driver_pack.tar So first we need to               tar xvf MP640_rpm_driver_pack.tar The tarball contains another tarball (weird but that's how they did it). So next need to               tar zxvf cnijfilter-mp640series-3.20-1-i386-rpm.tar.gz           Now cd to the created directory              cd cnijfilter-mp640series