Recently, I wanted to include a string like this:

Latin (C)

in an OpenOffice spreadsheet.

Unfortunately, every time I entered ‘Latin (C)’, the ‘(C)’ would get changed to a copyright symbol. Ctrl-z would erase the entire entry, rather than revert the copyright symbol to the string I typed in the first place.

To turn off this behaviour, I went to ‘Tools -> Autocorrect…’ and selected the ‘Replace’ tab. This gives a big list of all the auto-corrections OpenOffice will make.

I clicked on each item that I didn’t want OpenOffice to ‘fix’ for me and clicked ‘Delete’ to remove the entry.

Alternatively, one can go to ‘Tools -> Autocorrect…’, select the ‘Options’ tab and uncheck the box next to ‘Use replacement table’. Doing this should prevent OpenOffice from making any of the changes listed in the ‘Replace’ list. (It is worth having a look through the other tickboxes here as there were several other things I wanted to untick, like fractionifying fractions and making URLs into links.

This worked on OpenOffice Calc 2.4.1 running on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron).

Update 4 June 2010: the latest round of updates took care of the problem. If you’ve not yet updated, try System -> Administration -> Update Manager. Thanks for the heads-up, Reinout van Rees!

Ever since installing 10.04, I’ve found that I occasionally get rogue light yellow/cream-coloured backgrounds when I print images with a white background. This hasn’t happened with my machines running 8.04 or 9.04.

I’ve had this problem printing from OpenOffice and from Firefox; in both cases, I was printing a .jpg with a white background. I verified with xmag that there was no colour in the background that I was trying to print.

There is a Debian bug report and an Ubuntu launchpad bug report with more information and a temporary work around.

Open a terminal window (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal) and enter the following:

cd /usr/lib/cups/filter/

to move to the /usr/lib/cups/filter directory.

Optional: make a back-up of the file that needs to be edited by typing

and entering your log-in password if prompted.

Open the file pstopdf in your favourite text editor. This can be done using gedit by typing

sudo gedit pstopdf

and entering your log-in password if prompted.

There should be a line that looks like this:

PS2PDF_OPTIONS=”$PS2PS_OPTIONS -dColorImageFilter=/FlateEncode \
-dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -dUseCIEColor”

Delete -dUseCIEColor so that the line appears like this:

PS2PDF_OPTIONS=”$PS2PS_OPTIONS -dColorImageFilter=/FlateEncode \
-dPDFSETTINGS=/printer”

Save the file.

This worked for me with a Lexmark C544 printer. However, I don’t know what is causing the problem and I don’t know anything about what these options do. Fingers crossed, a ‘proper’ solution will be on its way….

Thank you, vbi, for the work-around!

Well, yet again xmms isn’t working. Oh, life is hard when one loves deprecated software!

Now, to make matters worse, some of xmms’ dependencies have been deprecated as well.

Out of sheer perversity, I decided to install all the old schtuff to see if I could get xmms to work.

(I don’t necessarily recommend doing this in general, mind you – I usually try to avoid installing random deprecated things which may have security holes, conflict with everything else installed or generally cause annoyances. However, it was late and I was in a mood. Since installation, Since installation, I’ve had a closer look and I don’t think that adding these deprecated packages should cause any problems for a clean installation of 10.04, but it is possible that they could cause conflicts with other packages one might choose to install. For me, it is definitely worth the risk!)

Here’s what I did to get xmms working:

Went to:

• https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/hardy/i386/libglib1.2ldbl/1.2.10-19build1

Downloaded and installed:

• libglib1.2ldbl_1.2.10-19build1_i386.deb

Went to:

• https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gtk+1.2/1.2.10-18.1build2/+build/484191

Downloaded and installed (in this order):

• libgtk1.2-common_1.2.10-18.1build2_all.deb
• libgtk1.2_1.2.10-18.1build2_i386.deb

Went to:

• https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/hardy/i386/xmms/1:1.2.10+20070601-1build2

Downloaded and installed:

• xmms_1.2.10+20070601-1build2_i386.deb

Amazingly, this seemed to work!

…Mostly. I’m now getting some terrible moments where the track repeats until I move the mouse. It sounds rather like a CD does when it gets caught on and plays the same hyper short bit of a track over and over again until someone with Fonz power hits it. There was certainly no such bad behaviour a couple days ago when I was happily xmms-ing away on Jaunty.

Just for kicks, I tried Audacity and, interestingly enough, it seems to be plagued with the same skippy repeaty problem.

I don’t think this skipping is a problem with xmms; I think it’s a problem with something else. If this happens, closing and re-opening xmms sometimes works. If other applications are running that involve audio, try closing them. On one occasion, I had to restart the computer, but after that xmms worked fine.

Not sure what’s going on. Audio is a black art. I’m going to bed.

Recently had trouble printing a large document – received error message “Unable to write print data: Broken pipe”.

Quick fix: printing the document in sections worked.

For other options: this ubuntu forum post has various links/discussion.

After the most recent Jaunty update, I received this “Couldn’t open audio” error message when I next tried to play audiobooks on xmms:

Please check that:

Your soundcard is configued properly
You have the correct output plugin selected
No other program is blocking the soundcard

This thread had lots of info on diagnosing the problem.

(All I had to do was go to Options -> Preferences -> Audio I/O Plugins and choose “ALSA 1.2.11 output plugin [libALSA.so]” from the “” menu. It had been set to “OSS Driver 1.2.11 [libOSS.so]” before.)