Saturday, December 22, 2012

Mint 13

I'm installing Mint 13 on my desktop.  This will be my third Mint 13 install.

The default marco window manager does not work for me.   Symptom is windows have no decorations, all appear in the upper left corner and can't be moved.  In other words, the window manager is not running.

The first time this happened, I thought it was just my incredibly old laptop, but this happens every single time.  Does the default marco work for anyone?

Same thing with compiz.  Mutter and metacity work, but I had huge problems with the workspace switcher.  I initally (under marco) set my workspace switcher to 3x6, but when I switched to mutter it appeared as 2X2, and the workspace switcher preferences offered no way to change it.  This behavior is similar under metacity.

I tried using the 'Additional drivers' drivers (ATI/AMD proprietary FGLRX driver), also manually downloading and installing the proprietary driver from ati.com, still couldn't get compiz or marco to work.

Here's what finally worked for me
  1.  Install and run gconf-editor
  2.  Navigate to /apps/metacity/general, set num_workspaces to whatever you want
  3.  Run mateconf-editor
  4.  Navigate to /desktop/mate/session/required-components, set windowmanager to metacity
Here's how to switch to  Focus follows mouse, sloppy, autoraise:

As above, run gconf-editor, go to /apps/metacity/general, check auto_raise, set focus_mode to sloppy.

Heh, cool, Quake 3 Arena works.  What a blast from the past.  There's no master server anymore, though.  I found a couple of places saying to use a different server browser to get multiplayer to work.  Xqf works.

Steam for Linux works.  I had to do this manual step:
sudo apt-get install libcurl3-gntls:i386
to get it working on my 64 bit hardware.  See Steam Available in Linux through a Workaround

Ubuntu Tweak for Mint 13 
Peerguardian
Handbrake 
Google Chrome

(1/1/2013) Hibernate didn't work at first.  I tried pm-hibernate.  Then I installed and tried s2disk.  S2disk works.  Also now when I run pm-hibernate, the output messages indicate it is using s2disk.

I used these instructions to get the 'Hibernate' button back on the 'Shut down the computer' menu.

Intermittent problem with hibernate.  Sometimes I have to try more than once to get it to work.

(1/20/2013) I had no sound for Quake 4, Doom 3 and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory.

Fixed for Quake 4 and Doom 3 by editing these files:

$HOME/.quake4/q4base/Quake4Config.cfg
$HOME/.doom3/base/DoomConfig.cfg

Look for this line:
seta s_driver "oss"
and change it to this:
seta s_driver "best"
 
See also Doom 3, Quake 4, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars sound delay fix.

I couldn't find a comparable setting in the Enemy Territory config file, etconfig.cfg.

This solution worked for me.