Sunday, June 10, 2012

Lock Screen Command in Gnome/Cinnamon

The correct lock screen command in Gnome (and hence Cinnamon) is:
gnome-screensaver-command --lock
This is useful in the context of remapping keyboard shortcuts. For some reason, lots of internet searches come up with the equivalent X-based command for locking the screen.

Mapping Keyboard Shortcuts in Cinnamon

Using gconf-editor, follow instructions at http://www.maphew.com/Linux/Use_WinKey_in_Ubuntu.html.

The example is to map Super+E (or Windows+E) to start nautilus, like Windows opens Windows Explorer. The important steps (in gconf-editor) are:
  1. Go to /Apps/metacity/global_keybidings
  2. Set run_command_1 to <Super>E
  3. Go to /Apps/metacity/keybinding_commands
  4. Set command_1 to /usr/bin/nautilus

Installing Canon-MF4140 Drivers on Mint 64-bit

I'd installed drivers for my Canon MF4140 on Linux Mint 11 (32-bit) with a bit of fluffing around. For the 64-bit Linux Mint 13, more fluffing around was required, but of a different sort.

To start with, the drivers from Canon don't have .deb files for 64-bit, so you need to install alien and convert the .rpm files to .deb.
sudo apt-get install alien
sudo alien -k --scripts cndrvcups-common-2.40-2.x86_64.rpm
sudo alien -k --scripts cndrvcups-ufr2-uk-2.40-2.x86_64.rpm
This creates two .deb files, which can be installed with dpkg -i <filename>.rpm. This all worked fine, the printer was detected and added, but nothing would print.

Following this thread, I ended up getting it working, but I did a number of steps suggested, so I'm not sure which ones were necessary.

Overall:
  1. Copy the files as suggested here from /usr/lib64 to /usr/lib. Some of the files might already exist.
  2. Install some more "silent dependencies" as described here: sudo apt-get install libc6-i386 ia32-libs lib32z1. This adds 150Mb or so of dependencies -- quite a lot. Not sure if they were actually needed...
  3. In the end, because this was Mint 13, the important files to copy from /usr/lib64 to /usr/lib were libcanonc3pl.so and libcanonc3pl.so.1. This was the step that got things working, so I'm not sure if steps 1 and 2 were actually necessary. My printer is working, I'm not touching these files again.

Running Diablo II under wine in Linux Mint Cinnamon

Disabling or re-mapping Alt+Click
If you're playing Diablo II in wine, the default Alt+Click mapping in Cinnamon (which moves the underlying window) is kind of annoying. Since the desktop environment is based on Gnome (I guess), you can use the gconf-editor tool to edit the mappings.

Under Mint 13, the configuration editor isn't installed by default, so you might have to do this:
    sudo apt-get install gconf-editor
    gconf-editor
Then navigate to apps/metacity/general and edit the mouse_button_modifier key to something else (I used "Control" which seems to be fine).

Getting "pick up items with Alt held down" to work
Holding down Alt highlights items. If you can't pick up items with Alt held down, you may need to disable the window manager control of the wine window.

To do this, run winecfg, go to Graphics tab, and uncheck the "Allow the window manager to control the windows" option.

Alt+Click for item pick up now works. The downside is that the window won't appear in the taskbar any more, and when you minimise it you get a little icon in the bottom left-hand corner. But it works.

Note: While initially I did this and it seemed to helped, it might also cause keyboard interaction to stop working. I was playing around with the "Window focus mode" in Cinnamon -> Window Settings at the same time, so at the moment I've turned the window manager control back on in winecfg and it's okay.