Remapping keyboard keys to allow å, ä and ö

Motivation I have an English / Hebrew keyboard, but occasionally I also want to use the Swedish letters å, ä and ö. The idea is to sacrifice three keys on the keyboard for this purpose. But which ones? I went for the keypad’s /, * and – keys. But hey, I use these normally every [...]

Linux Mint + Cinnamon: Volume buttons stop to work suddenly

The nuisance After trying to fix another problem with Pulseaudio, and messing up a bit with its configuration files, the option to control the volume by virtue of keyboard buttons suddenly stopped to work. The cursor would blink briefly when pressing the button, but nothing else happened. I tried all the fairly normal things, including [...]

The sledge hammer: Forcing a permanent screen resolution mode on Linux

When to do this Because Gnome desktop is sure it knows what’s best for me, and it’s virtually impossible to just tell it that I want this screen resolution mode and no other, there is only one option left: Lie about the monitor’s graphics mode capabilities. Make the kernel feed it with fake screen information [...]

LG OLED with a Linux computer: Getting that pitch black

Introduction So I got myself an LG OLED65B9. It’s huge and a really nice piece of electronics. I opted out the bells and whistles, and connected it via HDMI to my already existing media computer, running Linux Mint 18.1. All I wanted was a plain (yet very high quality) display. However at some point I [...]

Linux: Permanent graphics mode (resolution) on Cinnamon

The goal Quite simple: Set a fixed graphics mode on the computer screen. More precisely, make Cinnamon (version 3.2.6) on Linux Mint 18.1 (Serena) show the desktop with a predefined resolution, no matter what happens. Spoiler: I failed. But I got close enough for practical purposes, and collected a lot of knowledge while trying. So [...]

When mplayer plays a black window (or: Cinnamon leaking GPU memory)

The incident All of the sudden, playing videos with Mplayer opened a black window. Sometimes going fullscreen helped, sometimes it didn’t, sometimes with video playing but without OSD. ffplay worked, but somewhat limping. Setting: Linux Mint 19 on an x86_64, with a couple of fanless GeForce GT 1030 graphics cards and Cinnamon 3.8.9. Mplayer’s output [...]

Solved: Missing ktorrent icon on Linux Mint / Cinnamon

Running ktorrent on Linux Mint 19 (Tara), the famous downwards-arrow icon was invisible on the system tray. Which made it appear like the program had quit when it was actually minimized. Clicking the empty box made ktorrent re-appear. Solution: Invoke the Qt5 configuration tool $ qt5ct and under the Appearance tab set “Style” to gtk2 [...]

Writing a panel applet for Cinnamon: The basics

Introduction What I wanted: A simple applet on Cinnamon, which allows me to turn a service on and off (hostapd, a Wifi hotspot). I first went for Argos catch-all extension, and learned that Cinnamon isn’t gnome-shell, and in particular that extensions for gnome-shell don’t (necessarily?) work with Cinnamon. Speaking of which, my system is Linux [...]

Failed: Install Argos Shell Extension on Cinnamon

You have been warned These are my pile of jots as I tried to install Argos “Gnome Shell Extension in seconds” on my Mint 19 Cinnamon machine. As the title implies, it didn’t work out, so I went for writing an applet from scratch, more or less. Not being strong on Gnome internals, I’m under [...]

A watchdog script for restarting Cinnamon hogging memory at startup

Introduction August 2019 update: I’ve disactivated the service described below on my own machine, because in the end, the system didn’t recover properly from the condition it was supposed to solve. No solution, in the end. Having installed Linux Mint 18.1 (kernel 4.4.0-53) with overlayroot on a Gigabyte Brix BACE-3160 (see other notes on this [...]