HOWTO fix annoyances in VL5.8 Standard

[lagagnon]

Despite many hours of testing there are always improvements to be made with any distro and its applications - VL5.8 Standard included. This thread is designed to put all the little fixes in one place. I will be continually updating this HOWTO as fixes appear in the forums. Please add to this thread if you know of a problem and a SOLUTION in VL5.8 Gold or its included applications. 

Here are the ones I know of to date:

1)  RipperX: has the wrong CDDB server name set. Go to RipperX, Config, CDDB, and change URL to "freedb.freedb.org" , port to "8880" and uncheck the "Use HTTP" flag.

2) gtkam: will only detect your camera if run as root. To run as a normal user new libphoto2 udev rules must be added to your /etc/udev/rules.d directory. The file to add is "30-libgphoto2.rules" and you can find it here: http://vectorlinux.osuosl.org/veclinux-5.8/fixes/30-libgphoto2.rules .

3) Seamonkey: is not compatible with many Firefox extensions, e.g. AdBlock and FlashGot work, ForecastFox does not. Visit this site: http://users.skynet.be/fa258499/extensions.html , which lists extensions that work with SeaMonkey (thanks to JohnB316 for that link!).

4) Services: by default the only daemon services started by VL5.8 Gold are cupsd, firewall and ifplugd. If you need crond, samba (smbd & nmbd) or others then you must explicitly have them start at each bootup. Do this by going to Menu, System, vasm, Super, Service, SrvSet, 4, and check the services you would like to start. I recommend ensuring crond is started so that you get your logs rotated.

5) Opera: does not play well with its mplayer plugin for playing windows media audio files. The workaround is to try to launch the stream into gmplayer directly, rather than using the mplayer plugin, or use Firefox or Seamonkey instead.   

6) Graveman: to burn a CDRW (not CDR) platter you must choose a low enough burn speed (~ 8x), because Graveman does not auto-detect possible speeds correctly. If you don't do this Graveman may crash unexpectedly.

7) vim (and gvim): in order for the arrow keys to work properly add the following line in your ~/.vimrc file: ":set nocompatible" . Also, gvim does not have a menu entry, so paste the lines below into a new file /usr/share/applications/gvim.desktop :
 
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Name=Vi IMproved Text Editor
GenericName=Vi Text Editor
Comment=Edit text files
Exec=gvim %F
TryExec=
StartupNotify=true
Icon=vim
X-GNOME-DocPath=
Terminal=false
Categories=Application;Development;TextEditor;

8) Terminal: xfce Terminal grabs some Midnight Commander (mc) keybindings. You might consider using mrxvt instead if you use mc.

9) XLiquid: this default User Interface Setting makes some application widgets hard to see, especially in OpenOffice. Try a different theme setting.



 

 

[Joe1962]

3) Seamonkey: is not compatible with many Firefox extensions, e.g. AdBlock and FlashGot work, ForecastFox does not. Visit this site: http://users.skynet.be/fa258499/extensions.html , which lists extensions that work with SeaMonkey (thanks to JohnB316 for that link!).

Also check out this thread and add your favourite extensions. But please check if they haven't been discussed already!:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=504563

4) Services: by default the only daemon services started by VL5.8 Gold are cupsd, firewall and ifplugd. If you need crond, samba (smbd & nmbd) or others then you must explicitly have them start at each bootup. Do this by going to Menu, System, vasm, Super, Service, SrvSet, 4, and check the services you would like to start. I recommend ensuring crond is started so that you get your logs rotated.

IMO, that's a feature, not an annoyance. Probably cupsd shouldn't be on by default, either. Even in a desktop system, you should activate only what you will need.

8 ) Terminal: xfce Terminal grabs some Midnight Commander (mc) keybindings. You might consider using mrxvt instead if you use mc.

That's a bit extreme...   Just go into the Terminal preferences and remove the mapping for the Fkeys.

[TAsn]

The ugly "theme" in the terminal, to use the 5.1 standard "theme" just:
edit the /etc/profile.d/vasm.sh
comment lines 35 (if [ "$UID" = 0 ]; then)
to 65 (echo "Multimedia     : alsamixer, play")
and change line 78 to the following:
PS1="[\u@\h\w]\\$ "

[johnpipe108]

Despite many hours of testing there are always improvements to be made with any distro and its applications - VL5.8 Standard included. This thread is designed to put all the little fixes in one place. I will be continually updating this HOWTO as fixes appear in the forums. Please add to this thread if you know of a problem and a SOLUTION in VL5.8 Gold or its included applications. 

Here are the ones I know of to date:

<snip for brevity>

7) vim (and gvim): in order for the arrow keys to work properly add the following line in your ~/.vimrc file: ":set nocompatible" .
<snip for brevity>

Note that .vimrc is not created by default in a users home directory; the correct system wide fix for vim is as in this example, then you don't need to add :set nocompatible in your .vimrc for this:

johnpipe:$ su -c 'cp /etc/vimrc /usr/share/vim/'

Here is the explanation:

"At startup, vim reads /etc/vimrc and ~/.vimrc  (i.e., the global vimrc and the user-specific one.). Note that this is only true if you compiled vim using LFS-3.1 onwards. Prior to this, the global vimrc was /usr/share/vim/vimrc ."

This is quoted from Beyond Linux From Scratch - Version 5.1 which may be found at http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/5.1/postlfs/vimrc.html

Since /etc/vimrc exists and the problem shows up in VL, and is fixed by the above command, the vim included with VL5.8 must have been compiled under LFS < 3.1

Reference:

Code:

johnpipe:$ cat /etc/vimrc
" Begin /etc/vimrc

set nocompatible
set backspace=2
syntax on
if (&term == "iterm") || (&term == "putty")
  set background=dark
endif

" End /etc/vimrc

HTH, John

[nubcnubdo]

Xine: sync bugs in DVD playback There is a problem with synchronization of audio and video in DVD playback with Xine. This is attributable to xine-lib-1.1.2 being the default Xine engine in VL 5.8 Std. One remedy is to upgrade to xine-lib-1.1.4, now available in VL5.8 testing repo. However, if you choose to upgrade, you may lose playback of Real audio and video files, which work okay with default xine-lib-1.1.2, according to xinehq faq.

Download xine-lib-1.1.4-i686-2vl58.tlz to your computer from VL5.8 testing repo, cd to the directory where xine-lib-1.1.4 is located, as root run this command:

upgradepkg xine-lib-1.1.4-i686-2vl58.tlz

Find xine-lib-1.1.4 here:
http://vectorlinux.osuosl.org/veclinux-5.8/testing/x-apps/

NOTE: If, after upgrading to xine-lib-1.1.4, xine will not open, you can try upgrading libgcrypt to libgcrypt-1.2.3, as this seems to fix xine.  Download libgcrypt-1.2.3-i586-1vl58.tlz from VL5.8 patches repo, cd to directory where downloaded file is located, as root run this command:

upgradepkg libgcrypt-1.2.3-i586-1vl58.tlz

Find libgcrypt-1.2.3 here:
http://vectorlinux.osuosl.org/veclinux-5.8/patches/libs/