Some notes on the current state of Python/Tkinter

I’ve been working on enhancing the user interface of my LeMMA app, which is written in Python/Tkinter. This discusses some of my thoughts while researching the current state of the art with regards to using Tkinter. Why did I choose Tkinter when there are other widget libraries that looks better and works natively? My decision [...]

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Ubuntu 9.04 is out!

I just upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 on my laptop and netbook. The upgrade experience was quite smooth, but I’m expecting the bugs to start appearing. So far, I’ve found that gnome system monitor is crashing for some reason. I don’t feel very ‘jaunty’ yet. I also tried installing the real-time kernel on the netbook but [...]

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Is your Ubuntu boot splash dropping to text mode?

After installing Ubuntu on my Asus 1000HE, I decided to repartition the hard disk, so I backed up everything using fsarchiver and restore everything after I was done. I found that the UUID for the swap partition has changed from the repartitioning so I edited /etc/fstab to mount the new swap partition. Then I discovered [...]

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Playing midi with audacious & AMidi plugin

I use the audacious player with AMidi plugin for playing midi files (and most audio files). There are two choices of backends – Timidity and Fluidsynth. I used to use the Timidity backend but found that lately the playback keeps skipping with my soundfonts, so I switched to the Fluidsynth backend and it’s much better [...]

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Upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10

I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 from 8.04 last night, and it went pretty smoothly. Glad to see Gimp 2.6 made it, but too bad OpenOffice 3 didn’t. I had to remove the OpenOffice 2.4 forced on me during the upgrade and reinstall the menus for OpenOffice 3. I did find a problem with gedit’s file [...]

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Ubuntu 8.04

Upgraded my Ubuntu to 8.04 today. This time it went pretty smoothly, compared to when I went from 7.04 to 7.10. Other than a problem with Gnome not loading because of a problem gdm theme (I was using a customised theme, had to switched to one of the stock ones), nothing else seems to be [...]

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Fixed my Ubuntu! (I think)

Dunno what exactly I did, but after reinstalling packages, tweaking config files, and replacing some config with the default 7.10 versions (which I skipped during the update), I seem to have got my suspend problem fixed in the Ubuntu 7.10 kernel. It works only in the generic kernel though, not sure why it’s not working [...]

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Automount problems in Ubuntu 7.10

I’m using my last Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) kernel as a workaround for my laptop not being able to suspend. I found out today that this causes another problem – my USB thumbdrives cannot be automounted. Changing it back to the Gutsy kernel works. Apparently it has something to do with a ‘usefree’ option introduced in [...]

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Ubuntu upgrade perfect…not!

Found an irritating bug with Ubuntu 7.10. My Dell D600 now cannot go in suspend mode. A search of the forums shows that tons of people have this problem, and no proper solution. There is an official known bug with ATI hardware, citing conflicts with the new kernel and ATI’s drivers, but it seems the [...]

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Upgraded Ubuntu to 7.10

Upgraded my Ubuntu box to 7.10 today (finally!). Other than a brief panic moment with the CPU hanging with a black screen when starting X (turns out it’s a known bug with some ATI hardware), and a new indexing feature which sucks up all my CPU (which I turned off since I don’t really search [...]

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