https://sdbillin.com

Posts have been a little non-existent for the last few months, as you can see. The reason for this is mainly that nothing has needed fixing, so nothing to write about. To stir up the status quo I decided to move from Ubuntu 11.10 386 (32bit) to x64 (64bit).

The one thing I recommend to anyone using linux is to put your /home folder on a separate partition. This makes upgrading or changing OS a hell of a lot easier and in my case made it absolutely painless, just remember to update your fstab on the new install to point back to your home location – it’s probably easier to make a copy of /etc/fstab and copy the relevant lines.

Other than the above tip, there was nothing to report. The install was smooth and I’m running on 64bit, SSE flagged goodness. Everything works, I’ve kept my firefox/chrome etc prefs. There was just one old fix to reapply, which is covered in the next post.

I’m loving AWN dock. My only gripe is that the volume control applet is broken, at least it is for me. For some reason my master volume has no effect on the actual volume. The slider moves up and down quite freely, but the volume remains unchanged. PCM volume works fine, so I thought I’d use that instead, however the volume applet only lists master. Bugger.

Turns out this is a bug – https://bugs.launchpad.net/awn-extras/+bug/497002

sudo gedit /usr/share/avant-window-navigator/applets/volume-control/volume-control.py

Skip down to line 65 and remove pulseaudio. You should be left with

mixer_names = ("oss4mixer", "alsamixer")

Save. Close. Relaunch AWN (restart, kill it, whatever). You can now select other mixers on the volume control applet preferences.

I love my 5 button mouse like no man should love an inanimate object. It’s getting on a bit and starting to go a little yellow, but that’s not the point. When I used this mouse on a Mac I could map the side buttons to Exposé actions, like tile all windows and show the desktop. I want to do the same in Linux, damnit.

With compiz you can do lots of lovely (and some pointless) things. Things like making the windows wobbly, or make it rain flaming globs of semen. I think. What you can’t do is map a mouse button to the show desktop action. Poop.

I searched for a while and came across this page with a very handy little script. A quick correction/update to the syntax and it works a treat.

From the command line

sudo apt-get install wmctrl
gedit ~/showdesktop.sh

paste this in :

#!/bin/bash desktopStatus=`wmctrl -m | grep mode | cut -d\: -f2`
if [ "$desktopStatus" = " OFF" ]
then
wmctrl -k on
else
wmctrl -k off
fi

Save and go back to command line

chmod +x ~/showdesktop.sh

You can now specify this command to run from a mouse button. Button 9 in my case. Open up compizconfig, go into commands and enter ~/showdesktop.sh in one of the commands then bind your button in the button bindings tab.