https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/124442

The above requires the source code to be compiled. You may want to read up on the following:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CompilingEasyHowTo

Or you can search for other tutorials on compiling from source on Ubuntu. I strongly suggest you read up on compiling from source if you have not tried it before  (though I doubt that).

The first link above has the source code link and other information. You can also directly download it here: ftp://download.fujixerox.co.jp/pub/exe/apeosport/c4300series/fxlinuxprint-src-1.0.1.tar.gz

Just unpack the zipped file. Then do basic compile/install commands in order – configure, make and make install. Oh, make sure you have libcups2-dev installed. It is a dependency.

Lastly, the ppd file, named fxlinuxprint.ppd, should be located at the following location: /usr/share/cups/model/FujiXerox/en. I’m using Ubuntu 12.04 on my work laptop. It may be different on your end depending on your Ubuntu version. Just read where it was installed during the “make install” step.

If you have information on how to make the above printer work on Ubuntu 12.04 without all the hassles as described above, do drop a comment.

eval `ssh-agent`

There are environment variables that needs to be set and doing the command above will essentially do just that but with far lesser key strokes. It is also easier to remember since those archaic commands and environment variables that needs to be set always escape my mind.

However, do check that an ssh-agent daemon is running in the background. This can be done easily with `ps aux|grep agent` command. Supposedly, the agent should be running as it is started at the “beginning of an X-session or a login session.”

With the release of Steam For Linux (even in closed beta), you know how this translates into games for Linux. I mean REAL GAMES for Linux. In time, we’ll have great games running natively on Linux. Hah! How about that.. .

So, if you use Ubuntu just grab the package here:

http://media.steampowered.com/client/installer/steam.deb

or for those console fanatics you can do

wget http://media.steampowered.com/client/installer/steam.deb.

Initially when you log into your account you will get a warning that the Steam client for Linux is on closed beta and you need an invite before you can proceed. Clicking on the OK button will close the client. It did for me, but it may be different for you.  So you go ahead and test it.

What you could do is lock Steam to your Launcher, if it is not yet there. Then right click for the quicklist to come up then choose any of the options. If  everything goes well, like it did on mine, the warning should be gone and you are now automatically logged in to your Steam account. You can log in as a different user, just like you could on the Steam client for Windows, if you have more than one account.

Here’s what the Steam client looks like on Ubuntu 12.04

The 2 games are from a recent Humble Indie Bundle I bought. I have more Steam games listed on Windows. I guess for now those games can’t run on Ubuntu. Also, the games that are being beta tested does not appear. Obviously I am not lucky enough to get into the 1,000 beta testers chosen by Valve. Supposedly, the games that can run on Linux can be installed via console command. Something like this – steam -dev steam://install/440 – would get you Team Fortress 2.

SPAZ, or Space Pirates and Zombies, is reported to run successfully. Rochard, even though it is in my games list, supposedly won’t run. I have yet to try it. But the more eager Reddit people marked it as X. A more thorough list of games can be found on this here page on Reddit.

However, if you are one of those who always strive for consistency on their Ubuntu desktop, then maybe this one bothers you a bit.

I’m not the least bothered but after getting back to working on Ubuntu after ‘being forced’ to using Windows for months, I finally decided to search for a way to get Eclipse to use global menu. Fortunately the InterWebs is always full of answers.

This one I found and is quite an easy hack.

The answer is all here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/eclipse/+bug/618587/comments/46

Quoting the solution from the said page, the steps are quite easy,

No need to actually rebuild the appmenu-gtk, but.. the following is obviously a hack:

step 1:
$ sudo vim /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.10.0/menuproxies/libappmenu.so

step 2: (search for “Eclipse”)
/Eclipse<return>

step 3: (replace “E” with “X”)
rX

step 4: (save)
ZZ

step 5: (maybe optional, not sure)
sudo ldconfig

step 6:
Profit!

Note that I skipped Step 5. The hack still works without running ldconfig.

As always, be careful when editing system files. Make a backup of libappmenu.so first before you continue doing the steps above. The said file is not a regular text file, so be doubly careful while editing.

Do not forget to start/restart Eclipse for the modifications to take effect.

* By the way, I am using Ubuntu 12.04. Step 1 might have  a different path depending on the version you have on your system. I believe the solution shared above works on Ubuntu 11.10 as well.

After paying for the bundle slightly above average, I proceeded to the download page. Downloading Torchlight didn’t take very long. The install size is quite small on Linux compared to the version on Steam.

An hour and several minutes later, I was ready to play Torchlight on Ubuntu. And a few minutes later the game was running in an 800 x 600 screen resolution which was totally unplayable. Even after adjusting the settings to go Fullscreen and adjust the resolution to 1366 x 768, nothing happened after a game restart. It was still the same and I was kind of disappointed.

However, thanks to the Internet and the Ubuntu community, I got to fix this issue quickly. How?  Well you can go and read the entire thread @ http://bit.ly/QmFp1V. It’s a short one, with the solutions on the first and second pages, but if you don’t want to wade through all the posts there, then read the steps below on what you need to do.

How to make Torchlight run fullscreen on Ubuntu

The configuration settings file for Torchlight is located @ /home/USERNAME/.runicgames/Torchlight. Change to this location and you only need to edit the file “local_settings.txt”.

*Note: change USERNAME to your username.

In my case, I’m using a laptop. The max screen resolution I have is 1366 x 768. I want to play in this resolution so I’m going to change the following values in local_settings.txt to match my screen (you’ll need to change it according to what you have). The following are what you need to change:

Original

FULLSCREEN :1
WINDOW_WIDTH :800
WINDOW_HEIGHT :600
RES_WIDTH :800
RES_HEIGHT :600

Modified

FULLSCREEN :0
WINDOW_WIDTH :1366
WINDOW_HEIGHT :768
RES_WIDTH :1366
RES_HEIGHT :768

Then you need to adjust a few settings on CompizConfig Settings Manager (CCSM). Download it via USC if you don’t have it. Once on CCSM notice the menu list on the left-hand side of the app. Click on Utility, then options will come out in the main panel. Locate the option Workarounds and make sure it is enabled by checking on the checkbox (if it isn’t checked yet). After this, click on the Workarounds (yep it’s clickable) then you will come to more options. Find the one that says Legacy Fullscreen Support. Mine is second from the top. Enable this by checking on the checkbox. Make sure you don’t change anything else.

In short: Utility > Workarounds (enable) > Legacy Fullscreen Support (enable)

Logout/in from Ubuntu.

Run Torchlight and you should have fullscreen at your desired screen resolution now.

A few caveats on this game. The port for Linux is not without its annoyances (as always).  This is what  I have noticed.

1) The Vanquisher and Alchemist classes don’t have faces in the character selection page. It will be the same in the game. The hair is there… floating. Only the Destroyer class has a face.

2) The Destroyer class will also lose its face when a helmet is put on. It would look like the helmet is floating by itself on top of your character’s shoulders. It corrects itself if you take off the helmet. But would you want to go without one while fighting the monsters?

3) The mouse scrollwheel, to zoom in and out, does not work.

4) The town portal item does not work. (Okay, this one appears to be false. The portal now works. Maybe a bug when I could not make it to work the first time?)

Did I miss anything else? That remains to be seen. Now it’s time for me to quest around the town of Torchlight and whack some monsters to oblivion.

Have fun and enjoy playing the game for many hours and days!

There’s like only 4!

This is not even BIS (best in slot) items, but they’re good enough for my DPS or tank set. More like forced, since I can’t get something similar that is affordable.

Okay, to name these 4 items,

1) Ivory Tower (off-hand) – I was lucky enough to get this “supposedly” legendary shield. Unfortunately it was pre-1.04 so it’s the legacy Ivory Tower.  The stats are good enough – 20% Block Chance, All Resistance, Critical Hit Chance and %Life – so I’m still using it until now.

2) Gloves (Armor) – This one is actually for Wizards  and Witch Doctors because it has over 250 Intelligence on it. However, it’s just too good to pass up because of the 9% Critical Hit Chance that came with it and has some Vitality and Dexterity too.

3) Amulet (Armor) – Again this one I was sort of “lucky” enough to get from some random elite, but it would have been very good for Demon Hunters and Monks because it has over 150+ Dexterity. The thing is, the ammy has a big enough Average Damage bonus and to top it up, it has like 7% Critical Hit Chance.

For the 2 items above, this is very good for a Sprint/WW build Barbarian. I need all the Critical Hit Chance I can get to keep those numbers popping and feeding me fury. Note that I’m sacrificing All Resistance on 2 armor slots because I can compensate this with my build if I’m careful enough.

4) Mace (Weapon) – The first few weeks after I hit 60 and started doing Butcher runs, a 800+ DPS mace dropped. It was one out of the 3 times that I got a weapon with a damage that high. Yet, this is the only one I’m still using until now because the other 2, although it both had high damage, the stats were just horrible that I get better benefits from a lower damage weapon with Life On Hit, additional Critical Hit Damage or a Socket.

I must be exaggerating right? Yes and no.

To tell you honestly, other items that were usable enough have dropped for me. But, these were items that didn’t have All Resistance so they were just like temporary. I was forced to use these items until I was able to get one that is just as better and has All Resistance. Without the latter requirement my Barbarian is like a marshmallow on Inferno. It would literally melt in a few seconds that having a higher DPS is useless when I can’t even get 3 shots off before dying. All resistance is a must for Barbarians.

And guess where I got most, if not all, of the gear with All Resistance?

From the Auction House! Yehey! (insert sarcasm here)

Here comes the Fix (Not!)

Now Patch 1.04. It was heavily hyped by the Diablo 3 dev team to be a “patch in the right direction”.  Everybody was excited. Classes were buffed (mostly) and monsters were generally nerfed. Legendary items were given an awesome look and feel (and some even a new name), a huge stat boost and special affixes to make the game more “fun”. Loot drop rate were supposedly tweaked to drop more often even on regular monsters.

Guess what? Patch 1.04 came and nothing really changed. Sure a few class skills were mostly buffed and it was easier to kill elites now. But that’s about it. The rest is still the same – shitty loot drops. I have not seen a good drop since this patch came out.

What is even worse is that the change has affected the drops from elites. Sure, I get a yellow every now and then from normal mobs and weapon/armor racks, but the elite drops were either zero(0) or six(6) with full Nephalem Valor stack.  Before 1.04, I was always guaranteed at least 2 rare drops from bosses/elites after my 5th Nephalem stack. Now I often get 1 only.sur

Magic Find?

I have a 200%++ Magic Find set that I use to run Act 1 (and maybe Act 2, but I have to switch back to a few DPS gear or I’d die easily because I  don’t have enough damage to kill the monsters fast). The results are the same. Garbage loots.  So what is the meaning of having more MF if better items can’t and won’t drop?I mean 200%++ is not that high, but it should have given me at least usable loot. That has not happened yet.

Quantity vs Quality

Something is very wrong. The increased drop rates is plain bull. They just distributed the numbers across all the monsters randomly. Since normal mobs and armor/weapon racks have more chance to drop rare, they also lessened the assured drop rates from elites. I mean sure, I’ve had Butcher drop 5 rares and belial 6 rares at one time. This is more of an exception rather than the rule. Pre-1.04 I’m almost always assured 2 rares with 5 Nephalem stacks from bosses and elites, and it wasn’t surprising to see 3 rare drops often. Now I no longer see that.

RNG is unpredictable, yes I know that, but the drops now are just the same – plain garbage!

Do you have what `it` takes?

Diablo 3 is all about gear. It’s a DPS check. You can beat all of the Acts on Inferno with the right gear. Many people are complaining that they cannot progress because the loot drops were stupidly horrible. So what did Blizzard do to fix this?  Make Inferno easier.

Why didn’t they just go right to the problem – fix the loot quality and make it possible to play Diablo 3 without ever going to the AH?

The answer is quite obvious – MONEY. If they were to do that, their profit from the AH would go south.

However the above is not entirely true. While the past 2 months I’ve been working like crazy, it is not really good to drive one’s self too much. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”, so they say. And that is what I have been doing the past few days. Taking a break. More like playing.. . playing as a Barbarian on Diablo III that is!

The game can be quite addicting. Blizzard certainly knows how to make a game and weave an exquisite story around it. A lot of things can be added to make the game even better. Yet, the game is less than a month old since release and more patches are yet to come. For sure there’s going to be an expansion to Diablo III. The game is too short. It abruptly ends and leaves you wanting. Nevertheless, the current state is still very engaging. I’m afraid this game may become my new WOW. I certainly do not want that to happen. Not again.

For now I’ve gone to Tristram and the High Heavens. I’ll be back here after Inferno. See you there!

Back from Inferno and  Diablo III IS NOT WORTH IT!

After a while Diablo III is not that satisfying anymore. I’ve taken a break from it. My main gripes with this game is that it is very unrewarding. Very unrewarding.

I have already finished Inferno mode and grinding some more for that “legendary” item or BiS Rare item I don’t want to do anymore  because the RNG in this game is just plain stupid. At least with WOW once the item drops from the boss then you get really rewarded for your labor. Diablo III is a grind that will only lead to frustration. It’s not worth it.

Lord of Ultima is EA’s popular browser based strategy game that simulates an immersive medieval civilization.

Okay, so it is a browser-based game. It looks like Age of Empires. It is FREE. How can you complain?

So what happened?

In a nutshell this is what I did:

1) On my Acer 4750 notebook, I had Windows 7 give up as much as space as it will allow with the 600+GB disk it was sitting on. It gave me about 200+GB of unused space after shrinking.
2) I rebooted and proceeded to install Ubuntu using a LiveCD (actually it’s a USB using UNetbootin application).
3) As I’ve done countless times, I selected GRUB to be installed on the disk MBR.
4) Waited for the install to finish, rebooted, and removed the USB thumb drive. Went out to get a can of soda.
5) When I came back, I was greeted with the Windows 7 login screen.

Shocked! This was the first time in my countless Ubuntu installs that it ever failed to write correctly to the MBR. What made it even worse was that the Wifi, despite having entered the correct password, was not working during the Live session install. I had to reboot to Windows to look for solutions to my case.

Just to be sure, I redid the whole install process (which only takes a few minutes granting you turn off the Internet connection during the installation). Still no luck. Without GRUB on the MBR, there was no way I could boot into Ubuntu unless I let Windows do the loading.

Supposedly this can be done by following the steps at this page – Using Windows 7 Boot-loader. Yes it is for ArchLinux, but the steps should work on most Linux distro. However, I have not had much luck with this alternative. It didn’t work when I tried it and I was left staring at a blank screen with a blinking cursor at the upper left side of the screen. Of course before I followed the instructions on that page, I first reinstalled Ubuntu and placed GRUB on /dev/sda5.

Another way to edit Windows 7 boot loader and add entries for Ubuntu is by using EasyBCD. It is a Windows application. Search for it on Google.

After trying the solutions above I was still left with an unbootable Ubuntu install. I knew I had to find a way to get GRUB to manage the whole disk. So I had to resort to re-installing GRUB which should have been the first thing that I should have done. An officemate of mine who is an ArchLinux user did suggest the above. Using the same Ubuntu Live CD, we can fix GRUB with a few easy steps.

But first, let’s take a look at how my disk looks like after the Ubuntu installation.

1) /dev/sda1 is a hidden partition (recovery files)
2) /dev/sda2 Windows 7 boot loader partition
3) /dev/sda3 Windows 7 partition – C:
4) /dev/sda5 Ubuntu
5) /dev/sda6 swap

To re-install GRUB, follow the 3 simple steps below on Gnome Terminal:

1) Know what partition your Ubuntu is installed using fdisk.

sudo fdisk -l

The above command will result in something like below,

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1            2048    30722047    15360000   27  Hidden NTFS WinRE
/dev/sda2   *    30722048    30926847      102400    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3        30926848   682250927   325662040    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda4       682252286  1250263039   284005377    5  Extended
Partition 4 does not start on physical sector boundary.
/dev/sda5       682252288  1242263551   280005632   83  Linux
/dev/sda6      1242265600  1250263039     3998720   82  Linux swap / Solaris

2) Then mount that partition to an empty directory. In this example we’ll put it in /mnt and /dev/sda5 is my Ubuntu partition as indicated with the highlighted line above. It may not be the same for you so make sure you get the partition right.

sudo mount /dev/sda5 /mnt

3) Now issue the install command for GRUB.

sudo grub-install –root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sda

Take note that /dev/sda is correct as we are targetting the disk where Ubuntu is installed and not the partition.

After doing the 3 steps above, reboot and you should have the GRUB menu greet you promptly in a few seconds.

So over the course of the past 2 weeks no ugly boot messages were showing and I wondered if there was a plymouth update I didn’t know about. Sometimes I just let the Ubuntu Update Manager run without looking at the list. I was like, “Maybe they finally fixed the stupid thing?”. The only caveat is that the default Ubuntu plymouth splash animation does not show on shutdown. During the shutdown process there was only a blank, black screen.

At first I did not bother with it. However I logged out of the desktop one time and was greeted with nothing but a blank, black screen too. I waited for several minutes for LightDM to show up but that never happened. I could not even transfer to another console after hitting CTRL + ALT +F* keys (or ALT + F* keys). I had to force reboot Ubuntu so I could log back in. I tried this about 3 times to make sure it was not a random occurrence, and it was not.

I ran update manager again to see if there were updates that may help this problem, but there weren’t any. All my system files were up to date. As far as 2 weeks back, I cannot remember doing anything to the system by hand that could have caused this problem.  So once again I headed out to the Internet to get answers.

There were lots of suggestions and answers I found regarding this matter but the one that worked on my end was a very simple one. It was all about the screen display resolution. My laptop has a standard 1366 x 768 (16:9) resolution. For some reason this was changed to 1360 x 768. I believe some application modified the resolution but did not change it back to the original after exiting. Running games on Linux are known to do this a lot, because game handling on Linux literally suck. The change is very minor but this, in fact, was the cause on why I get a black/blank screen when I logout and also the same reason why Plymouth animation on shutdown did not show. After restoring to the original resolution, everything is now back to normal and working as it should be.