I originally reported this KDE4 bug as https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=312190. It’s also reported as bugs #311641, #309356, and #307589.

In my case I have 3 monitors on one video card. The card and all three monitors are detected correctly, but after I reboot the “Position” settings have all reverted to what they were when I first installed KDE.

I can change the position settings back to the correct settings, click “Save as Default”, log  out, log in, and the position settings have once again reverted to what they were when I first installed KDE.

After trying several things I still haven’t fixed the problem (I suspect a timing issue in the KDE startup) but I did figure out a work-around that anyone can use to “fix” their system so their monitors come up correctly. I posted the work-around on bugs.kde.org and I’m also posting it here.

Here’s how you do it:

Get your monitors set up the way you want them using Configure Desktop > Display and Monitor and click “Save as Default.” This updates the file ~/.kde4/share/config/krandrrc.

Open ~/.kde4/share/config/krandrrc, copy everything on the line after “StartupCommands=”. In my case the line looks like this:

xrandr --output DVI-I-1 --pos 1680x0 --mode 1680x1050 --refresh 60\nxrandr --output DP-0 
  --pos 3360x0 --mode 1680x1050 --refresh 60\nxrandr --output DVI-D-0 --pos 0x0 --mode 1680x1050
  --refresh 60\nxrandr --output DVI-I-1 --primary

Create a new script called ~/bin/workaround-for-kde-bug-312190.sh:

mkdir -p ~/bin
vim ~/bin/workaround-for-kde-bug-312190.sh

(If you don’t like vim, use whatever editor you like.)

Paste the line into the script file.

Change the “\n” characters into actual newlines so you end up with each “xrandr” command on a separate line. In my case I ended up with:

xrandr --output DVI-I-1 --pos 1680x0 --mode 1680x1050 --refresh 60
xrandr --output DP-0 --pos 3360x0 --mode 1680x1050 --refresh 60
xrandr --output DVI-D-0 --pos 0x0 --mode 1680x1050 --refresh 60
xrandr --output DVI-I-1 --primary

These are the settings for MY desktop. Yours will look different!

Make it executable:

chmod +x ~/bin/workaround-for-kde-bug-312190.sh

Run the script ~/bin/workaround-for-kde-bug-312190.sh. Your monitors should still be set up correctly. If they’re messed up, you probably didn’t cut and paste the line correctly. Repeat the above steps again.

Pick Autostart from the KDE menu. (Use the Search function if you can’t figure out where it’s buried.)

Click “Add Script” and paste the line “~/bin/workaround-for-kde-bug-312190.sh” into the “Shell script path” text box.

Click OK, click OK.

The next time you restart KDE it will still start up with the wrong configuration, then Autostart will execute ~/bin/workaround-for-kde-bug-312190.sh and fix the problem.

If you are trying to provide CDR files to a billing service, such as WebCDR.com, you need to provide files containing your latest call data every 15 minutes or so. I wrote a script and a cron job that will create a new CDR file every 15 minutes with the latest CDR records, without interrupting call flow. You do not need to make any changes to your Asterisk configuration to use these scripts.

Setup

There are two files that you need to install on your Asterisk server:

• asterisk-cdr-rollover.sh – A bash shell script. Copy this file into /usr/local/bin. This script moves the file /var/log/asterisk/cdr-csv/Master.csv to a new file named /var/log/asterisk/cdr-csv/cdr-YYYYMMDDHHMISS.csv, where YYYYMMDDHHMISS is the current time. A new zero-byte Master.csv file is created using the default umask of the user running the asterisk process. Asterisk will start writing to the new Master.csv file at the end of the next call.
• asterisk-cdr-rollover – This is a cron job. Copy it into /etc/cron.d and it will run the /usr/local/sbin/asterisk-cdr-rollover.sh script once every 15 minutes.

The cron job is set up to run as the user “asterisk”. If you are running asterisk as “root” or some other user name, edit the asterisk-cdr-rollover cron job and change the name of the user running the script to the same name as the user running the asterisk process.

The latest versions of these two files can be downloaded from GitHub: https://github.com/earlruby/asterisk-cdr-rollover. The code is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL-2.0).

I hope you find this useful.

One of the reasons I bought an iPhone in the first place was so I could use Google Maps to navigate San Francisco’s public transit systems. I just started working in the City a couple of years ago and I went and bought an iPhone so I could punch in the address of where I wanted to be and the phone would tell me “go two blocks down and get on the #10 bus (which will be at the bus stop in 3 minutes).” I could even watch the phone’s GPS marker show me where I was so I knew when to get off the bus or MUNI or BART or whatever. I’ve since taken my phone to other cities and I don’t even bother to rent a car if the city has a decent transit system. I can navigate the ‘L’ in Chicago or Portland’s MAX transit using Google Maps.

So I was not happy to hear that Apple was replacing Google Maps on iOS 6 / iPhone5 with their own mapping program that doesn’t support public transit systems the way that Google Maps does. Not only that, they won’t let you download the Google Maps app from the iTunes store because they don’t want it to compete with the Apple Map app.

Luckily there’s an easy work-around that allows you to install Google Maps using a web shortcut:

Start up Safari on your iPhone.

Type “maps.google.com” into the location bar.

Click “yes” if it asks if it can use your location.

Click the bookmark button at the bottom/middle of the screen.

Select “Add to Home Screen”

You should now have a new “Google Maps” app on your iPhone screen that links you directly to maps.google.com. It doesn’t look exactly like the old app, but all of the functions are there, including the ability to plan a route using public transit.

Hope you find this useful.

I’ve been using a pre-release “daily build” installation of Ubuntu 12.04 “Precise Pangolin” and noticed that current default for Gnome is for windows to resize themselves when you get close to the edge of the screen. I have two 22″ widescreen monitors and if I moved a window near the top edge it would maximize and fill the screen. If I moved a window to any edge Gnome would decide for me that what I “really” wanted was to enlarge the window to fill half the screen or do something else equally annoying. This might work well on a 10″ netbook screen, but on dual 22″ monitors it’s annoying as hell.

I tracked the problem down to a setting in Compiz, the screen compositing tool used by many Linux desktop environments, so if you’re using KDE or Unity with Compiz and you’re finding self-resizing windows irritating this fix should work for you as well.

To fix the problem you need to install the CompizConfig Settings Manager, so fire up Synaptic Package Manager and search for “compizconfig-settings-manager” and install it.

Once installed, if you’re using Gnome go to Applications > System Tools > Preferences and click “CompizConfig Settings Manager” to start the tool.

Scroll down to “Window Management.”

Uncheck “Place Windows”.

Leave “Grid” checked, but click the word “Grid” to get the Grid settings, then go to the Edges tab and change all Resize Actions to “None”.

Click Back.

Now your desktop will do what you tell it to do, rather than second-guessing you and doing something that you do not want.

One thing that you can now do (that you probably really don’t want) is to have the title bar (and it’s controls) move off-screen, which means you can’t move or resize the window unless you Alt-right-click on it. To fix that issue:

Check the “Put” plugin.

Click the word “Put” to bring up more options, go to the “Misc Options” tab, check “Avoid Offscreen”, click Back, then Close Window.

Hope you find this useful.

Two words: Use symlinks.

If you already know what a symlink is then you don’t need to read the rest of this article. If you want a better explanation, read on…

I use the Thunderbird e-mail client to read mail stored on my company’s IMAP mail server. I have a lot of filters set up that sort the mail into different folders, and Thunderbird stores the filter definitions in a file called msgFilterRules.dat. I read mail on different machines, some running various Linux distros and some running Mac OS X. I wanted all of the different machines to use the same rules for filtering e-mail into different folders, and if I make changes to the filters on one host I want those changes to take effect on all of the other hosts as well.

To do this I first set up a Dropbox account and installed the Dropbox software on my different machines, so now there’s a directory called “Dropbox” in my home directory that is synchronized between all of my different machines. I moved my filter file into the Dropbox directory and symlinked that to the location where Thunderbird expects to find the filter rules.

The step-by-step explanation if you want to do this:

Set up Dropbox on all of your machines.

Shut down Thunderbird if it’s running.

Start up a terminal window.

Find the msgFilterRules.dat file that you want to use as your “master” copy. On both my Mac laptop and Linux hosts the file is stored in ~/.thunderbird/[profile name]/ImapMail/[imap server name]/, where [profile name] is your Thunderbird profile name on that host, usually some random characters followed by ‘.default’. (Type cat ~/.thunderbird/profiles.ini if you want to see all of your profile names.)

Make a backup copy of the msgFilterRules.dat file:

cd ~/.thunderbird/[profile name]/ImapMail/[imap server name]/

cp msgFilterRules.dat msgFilterRules.dat.backup

Move the filter file to Dropbox:

mv msgFilterRules.dat ~/Dropbox/

Symlink the Dropbox copy of the file to the current directory, where Thunderbird expects to find it:

ln -s ~/Dropbox/msgFilterRules.dat .

Verify that the symlink was created correctly:

ls -al

You should see a line that looks like:

lrwxrwxrwx  1 earl users        37 Oct 25 21:12 msgFilterRules.dat -> /home/earl/Dropbox/msgFilterRules.dat

Now the machine you’re on is using the Dropbox copy of the filter file. To set this up on your other machines:

Verify that the file exists in the ~/Dropbox directory:

ls -al ~/Dropbox

Get to the directory where the filter file lives, remove the local copy, then create the symlink:

cd ~/.thunderbird/[profile name]/ImapMail/[imap server name]/

rm msgFilterRules.dat

ln -s ~/Dropbox/msgFilterRules.dat .

One word of warning: Thunderbird reads the filters into memory when it starts, and writes them back to disk when it exits. That means that if you have two hosts and Thunderbird is running on both of them, the last host that exits will write it’s version of the filters to disk. So if you make a change to the filters on one host and exit from Thunderbird, then exit from Thunderbird on the second host, the older filters on second host will overwrite the filter you just added. Because of this, I recommend exiting from Thunderbird whenever you leave your computer. I added a “killall thunderbird-bin” that runs from cron at 2am just to make sure that my copy at work isn’t running if I check mail from home in the morning.

This problem affects people using the KDE4 desktop with the “Oxygen” style and a recent version of the LibreOffice suite. (I’m running LibreOffice 3.4.2 on OpenSUSE 11.4) The horizontal scrollbar in Calc just doesn’t work, so if your spreadsheet is wider than your screen you can’t use the scollbar to view the right hand side.

The problem is with the Oxygen widget style. On a host running OpenSUSE 11.4 you can change this by going to:

Applications > Configure Desktop > Application Appearance > Style

Then set “Widget Style” to any style except “Oxygen”. Click Apply.

Problem solved.

Gnome 3 has a screen saver (or more accurately a screen blanker — there are no pretty pictures) which is turned on by default and which password-protects (locks) your desktop by default when it activates. Unfortunately it’s been known to be buggy since it was released as part of Gnome 2, often refusing to unlock your screen and forcing you to reboot your system.

Users of the Gnome 3 desktop shell are reporting that for some video card and monitor combinations the Gnome 3 screen saver, after getting a key press / mouse movement that should prompt you for your password to unlock the screen:

• Won’t unlock the screen at all.
• Will display a mouse pointer but no password prompt.
• Will display your original screen and all open documents (without prompting for a password) but will not allow you to click on anything, basically appearing as a locked-up desktop.

My setup reliably produces situation #3.

To unlock a locked-up desktop:

• Ctrl-Alt-F1 will give you a text-based terminal login.
• Log in with your user name and password.
• Type: “killall gnome-screensaver”
• Ctrl-Alt-F7 to get back to the (now unlocked) Gnome 3 desktop.

To replace the Gnome 3 screen saver with something less buggy:

• Activities > Applications > Other > Synaptic Package Manager
• Quick filter: xscreensaver
• Right click ‘xscreensaver’ and select ‘Mark for Installation’
• Click ‘Apply’ to install
• Activities > Applications > System Tools  > System Settings > Screen
• Set “Turn off after” to ‘Never’ and “Lock” to ‘OFF’. This disables gnome-screensaver.
• Activities > Applications > All > Screensaver
• Follow the prompts to activate xscreensaver

If you try to uninstall gnome-screensaver Synaptic Package Manager will also want to uninstall gnome and gnome-core, which is a bad idea if you want to run Gnome. Gnome will always start gnome-screensaver even if you have it disabled, and xscreensaver won’t run if gnome-screensaver is running. So you basically need to kill gnome-screensaver after Gnome has started and then start xscreensaver. You can do this by adding a startup program:

• Activities > Applications > Other > Startup Programs > Add
• Name: “Screen Saver”
• Command: “sleep 30; killall gnome-screensaver; sleep 5; xscreensaver”
• Comment: “Kill gnome-screensaver, start xscreensaver”
• Click “Add”

Hope you find this useful.

To install Gnome 3 on Ubuntu 11.10 start up a terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install gnome-shell

To use Gnome 3 instead of Unity: when you log in, click the “gear” above your password. Select “Gnome”, log in.

After you get tired of “click Activities, find the window you want, click the window” every time you want to switch from one window to another, and you decide you really need a taskbar again to maintain your sanity, start up a terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install tint2
tint2 &

You now have a taskbar again. To get it to appear every time you start Gnome 3 go to Activities > Applications > Other > Startup Applications, then click “Add”, Name: “tint2 task bar”, Command: “tint2″, click “Save”.

Done.

Hope you find this useful.

To turn off smart quotes in Libre Office Writer, so that the double quote character is shown in the document as ” — exactly as you typed it — and doesn’t get converted into something curly:

• Go to Tools > Autocorrect Options
• Select the Localized Options tab
• Click the button under Start Quote. If you’re using the Basic Latin character set, scroll all the way to the top of the character set display and click the ” box (third box from the top left row, next to the !). If you are using some other character set try searching near the top of the set for the ” character.
• Click OK
• Click the button under End Quote. Scroll all the way to the top of the character set display and click the ” box (third box from the top left row, next to the !)
• Click OK
• Click OK

Smart quotes are now off for the document that you’re working on. They will also be off for any new documents that you create, including spreadsheets and files created by other Libre Office applications.

To get rid of smart quotes already in a document:

• Highlight any start smart quote and copy it (Ctrl-C or File > Copy)
• Select Edit > Find & Replace
• Paste the smart quote into the Search for box
• Type ” in the Replace with box
• Click the Replace All button
• Click Close
• Repeat these steps using a copy of the end smart quote

I wanted to upgrade my desktop machine at work to the latest version of Ubuntu, but since it takes several hours to upgrade an Ubuntu host, and I have work to do during the day, I figured I could log into my workstation from home in using ssh and start the upgrade remotely.

So I logged into my workstation from home and ran:

> sudo apt-get install update-manager-core
> sudo do-release-upgrade

The upgrade script warned me that I was using ssh and asked if I was sure I wanted to continue. I said “Y”, and a little while later the upgrade manager was busy downloading upgrade packages.

I planned to check it a couple of times that night, answer any package upgrade questions that popped up, and then in the morning when I got to work the upgrade would be complete.

Of course what actually happened was that I got side-tracked onto some other problem that night, forgot about the upgrade in progress, and when I got to work the next day my workstation was in a state of limbo, with the upgrade halfway complete, waiting for me to answer some question on the screen — at my house.

Luckily the Ubuntu developers who created the ssh upgrade process run that upgrade inside of a screen session. As the screen pages states, “Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes (typically interactive shells).”

So at work all I had to do was get the list of current screen sessions:

> sudo screen -list
There are screens on:
        9129.ubuntu-release-upgrade-screen-window       (05/17/2011 08:50:08 PM)        (Attached)
2 Sockets in /var/run/screen/S-root.

Invoke screen using the “-d -r sessionowner/[pid.tty.host]” flags:

> sudo screen -d -r root/9129.ubuntu-release-upgrade-screen-window

… and I could pull up the screen at work that had been displaying at my home. Once I answered the remaining questions about whether to keep my custom configuration files or use the new, packaged configuration files my workstation rebooted and the latest version of Ubuntu booted right up.