James Carr

Here’s a weird problem I’ve been having lately that I thought I’d blog the solution to so that other people can have better luck when googling. Essentially, I installed a brand new copy of Ubuntu on my work laptop and was having an odd issue with the buttons in dialog boxes not working when I clicked on them.

Luckily, after some searching, I found this solution in the FAQ:

$ export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true
$ ./eclipse

That seems to have fixed the problem for me… but according to the FAQ “Your Mileage May Vary”. Good luck!

Want to get started with Scala, but not keen on using fancy IDEs nor have the cash to afford a nice Mac Powerbook and TextMate? Then this guide is for you! I’ll illustrate how to get a nifty scala development environment up and running on a system running Ubuntu with minimal hassle… and best of all completely cash free.

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I was a little bored this evening, and couldn’t get my self to concentrate at all in my attempts to get some reading done (between Domain Driven Design, my SCJP study guide, or Atlas Shrugged), so in an attempt to pass time I decided to install linux on my laptop… again.

I’ve had quite a few different versions of linux installed on this laptop, from Mandrake, Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, and even Gentoo (which sadly took me eons to get a working system in place). With most of these I usually spent a good week setting things up, and always ran into a few small problems. With the exception of Debian, I was unable to configure power management correctly, leading to heating issues. I never could get wireless to work. And my graphics acceleration was always subpar.

SO, with recent disatisfaction with windows on this laptop (it’s ran mysteriously slow and, for reasons unknown to me, my laptop has suffered from heating issues again) I decided to go ahead and put a unixy system back on it to satisfy the geek in me. I wanted to install FreeBSD, but feared it may be like installing gentoo from scratch again. I thought I’d try a different distro, and decided to give Mepis a try.

I must say, I was THROUGHLY impressed. It detected and configured everything correctly, from my sound, graphics card (which all other distros required me to download a seperate intel 845 driver just to use the full screen), power management, and, amazingly, my wireless card was detected and worked without a hitch! Within an hour from putting the disc in I had a complete working system that works perfectly, with the exception of the horribly looking fonts under fluxbox (I’ve fixed it by installing a few pacages, but initially it was quite ugly).

Overall, it’s nice to have linux on my system again … I’ve missed it these past six months.