Fortunately, I found this post which led me to the description of the EnableSendfile directive for Apache. There was even a commented version of it in my httpd.conf file. As soon as I set that to

EnableSendfile off

and restarted Apache, and cleared the browser cache, all was working as I would hope. Happy day!

I found a solution on the KDE forums. I know- maybe you’re not using KDE. Even someone there mentions it should probably be posted elsewhere- it’s not a KDE issue. It’s a problem with an app installed in Ubuntu and probably its derivatives called unclutter, which simply hides the mouse cursor if you’re not using the cursor. Somehow this well meaning app was killing my window management!

The fix is simple. You’re going to edit the file /etc/default/unclutter and change

EXTRA_OPTS="-idle 2 -root"

to

EXTRA_OPTS="-idle 2 -root -noevents"

You will have to restart the X11 server- I just rebooted. Haven’t run into the problem since and the unclutter app still works.

sudo apt-get install mtpfs

So I did a search for ‘skype style gtk+ ubuntu ugly‘ and found this great tip. It turns out that Skype just needs the 32-bit theme engines to look nice. Happy day!

sudo apt-get install libcanberra-gtk-module:i386 gtk2-engines-murrine:i386

Thanks to http://askubuntu.com/a/232754/95754 for the tip.

Due to a bug in the Disks app, you should not use the “Show in user interface” checkbox to start having a disk show up. If you do, it adds a mount option

 x-gvfs-show

to /etc/fstab which at least in the current version of Ubuntu will throw errors when mounting. What it actually needs to be for now is:

comment=x-gvfs-show

According to http://askubuntu.com/a/124718/95754 you can change that on the terminal like this:

sudo update-alternatives --config x-terminal-emulator

To disable the Guest Session, see http://askubuntu.com/a/451537/95754 which has you add a new line to /usr/share/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/50-ubuntu.conf

allow-guest=false

All set.

The other fix is from http://askubuntu.com/a/97248/95754 which requires an edit to /etc/lightdm/users.conf

Just add the username you want to hide to the line starting with “hidden-users”.

So I set off for in search of a better mouse. And I ended up with a mouse that I really love. It’s the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Mouse.

It has a physical scroll wheel which annoyed me after the Touch Mouse. But I got used to it. For maybe a day it felt odd. But it really does feel natural. My hand feels relaxed when I use it- it’s just the right shape. Now to be clear, this is not the Sculpt Comfort mouse- accept no substitutes! Sculpt Ergonomic mouse is what you want.

Of course, I’m using it with Ubuntu. That blue Windows button on it activates the Dash just like a regular Windows key. The other button works too. The only thing that occasionally goes wrong is that the scrolling gets weird- scrolling way too many lines at a time. It feels like you’re jumping to a completely different part of the document. Dual-booting to Windows might be what sets this off. Anyway, the fix is really simple. Just unplug the USB dongle. Not the mouse power- just unplug the dongle, wait for a bit, and plug it back in. The scroll settings will be reset and you’re back to work.

But if you go to install the app in Ubuntu 14.04 you may get an error which says:

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: java.awt.Container

Most of the help you’ll find for the error is for a prior version. Skip to the true help: http://software-ninja-ninja.blogspot.com/2013/11/stupid-java-error-javalangnoclassdeffou.html

To sum up, you have to add these packages:

sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-0:i386 libxtst6:i386 libxtst6:i386 libx11-dev:i386  lib32z1 lib32ncurses5 lib32bz2-1.0 libxi6 libxtst6 libxrender1

And run the installer with these flags:

./Indexing_unix.sh -J-Djava.awt.headless=true

That will run it on the command line rather than a window. Note that you may get a window that opens and complains about something. Just cancel that and ignore. Look back at the terminal and proceed.

$site = 'http://example.com/blog/'; //url prefix

$output_file = '/tmp/rss.xml'; //where to put the xml

$dom = new DOMDocument("1.0");
$top = $dom->appendChild($dom->createElement("rss"));
$top->setAttribute("version","2.0");
$top->setAttribute("xmlns:content","http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/");
$top->setAttribute("xmlns:dsq","http://www.disqus.com/");
$top->setAttribute("xmlns:dc","http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/");
$top->setAttribute("xmlns:wp","http://wordpress.org/export/1.0/");
$channel = $top->appendChild($dom->createElement("channel"));

$comments = Comment::get()->sort(array('ParentID'=>'ASC', 'Created'=>'ASC'));
$cnt = 0;
$currblog = 0;
foreach($comments as $comment)
{
    $cnt++;
    $page = SiteTree::get()->byID($comment->ParentID);

    if($comment->ParentID!=$currblog)
    {
        $currblog = $comment->ParentID;

        $item = $channel->appendChild($dom->createElement("item"));
        $title = $item->appendChild($dom->createElement("title"));
        $title->appendChild($dom->createTextNode($page->Title));
        $link = $item->appendChild($dom->createElement("link"));
        $link->appendChild($dom->createTextNode($site.$page->URLSegment."/"));
        $content = $item->appendChild($dom->createElement("content:encoded"));
        $content->appendChild($dom->createCDATASection($page->Content));
        $content = $item->appendChild($dom->createElement("dsq:thread_identifier"));
        $content->appendChild($dom->createTextNode($page->ID));
        $date = $item->appendChild($dom->createElement("wp:post_date_gmt"));
        $date->appendChild($dom->createTextNode($page->Created));
        $open = $item->appendChild($dom->createElement("wp:comment_status"));
        $open->appendChild($dom->createTextNode('open'));
    }

    $icomment = $item->appendChild($dom->createElement("wp:comment"));
    $node = $icomment->appendChild($dom->createElement("wp:comment_id"));
    $node->appendChild($dom->createTextNode($comment->ID));
    $node = $icomment->appendChild($dom->createElement("wp:comment_author"));
    $node->appendChild($dom->createTextNode($comment->Name));
    $node = $icomment->appendChild($dom->createElement("wp:comment_author_email"));
    $node->appendChild($dom->createTextNode($comment->Email));
    $node = $icomment->appendChild($dom->createElement("wp:comment_author_url"));
    $node->appendChild($dom->createTextNode($comment->URL));
    $node = $icomment->appendChild($dom->createElement("wp:comment_author_IP"));
    $node->appendChild($dom->createTextNode(''));
    $node = $icomment->appendChild($dom->createElement("wp:comment_date_gmt"));
    $node->appendChild($dom->createTextNode($comment->Created));
    $node = $icomment->appendChild($dom->createElement("wp:comment_content"));
    $node->appendChild($dom->createCDATASection($comment->Comment));
    $node = $icomment->appendChild($dom->createElement("wp:comment_approved"));
    $node->appendChild($dom->createTextNode($comment->Moderated));
    $node = $icomment->appendChild($dom->createElement("wp:comment_parent"));
    $node->appendChild($dom->createTextNode(0));
}

$xml = $dom->saveXML();

file_put_contents($output_file, $xml);