Last Review: Jul-27-2011
Linux Mint Debian (LMDE) Sound and Terminal Emulator problem
This article applies to LMDE Xfce 201104. Recently I found an awesome Linux Distribution called Linux Mint Debian Xfce, which seems to be a perfect answer to the Gnome Shell/Unity mess of these days (I don't like both of them, Unity being ugly and Gnome Shell weird). Though all Mint flavours of Linux aim delivering perfect functionality out of the box I met with some annoying problems concerning the terminal emulator and on-board sound. The corresponding solutions will be shown below.
Terminal Emulator starts shrinking it's window losing keyboard focus
This problem affects gnome-terminal.
A starting gnome-terminal shrinks it's window to a random size (horizontally and vertically). Although this window is active, you cannot type charakters into it unless you resized it (mouse dragging or keys ALT+F8). Repeated program calls only accidentally result in a stable window size (as defined in the corresponding profile's preferences). Parameterized opening like gnome-terminal --geometry=80x24 or edits of any configurations files (for instance /usr/share/vte/termcap/xterm line :co#80:it#8:li#24:\ ) are useless to solve this problem. Although this problem occured first time after an major update, I am not sure, if this is the real or only reason of this behaviour.
Searching the net shows a great crowd of people with same respectivly similar user experiences running gnome-terminal especially with the Xfce desktop but also other operating sytems and desktops. Since my preferred desktop is Xfce, I decided to drop gnome-terminal and give a try to the terminal emulator of the Xfce Goodies Project with xfce4-terminal. Although LMDE ships with gnome-terminal as default, you can remove it without any problem. xfce4-terminal has a reach featureset like gnome-terminal, is free of any GNOME dependencies, is included in the default repositories, integrates perfectly into the desktop and works fine. The default shell is Bash, so you can proceed working as usual.
Terminal Emulator starts with error message
/usr/bin/mint-fortune: line 35: [: ==: unary operator expected
This problem affects gnome-terminal as well as xfce4-terminal. It can be fixed with a quick edit:
sudo nano /usr/bin/mint-fortune
At the end of the file you'll find the following code:
.
.
.
if [ -x "/usr/bin/gconftool-2" ]; then
showfortunes=`gconftool-2 --get /desktop/linuxmint/terminal/show_fortunes 2>/dev/null`
if [ $showfortunes == "true" ]; then
show_fortune
fi
fi
Edit the original text (marked blue) as shown here (marked red):
.
.
.
if [ -x "/usr/bin/gconftool-2" ]; then
showfortunes=`gconftool-2 --get /desktop/linuxmint/terminal/show_fortunes 2>/dev/null`
if [ "$showfortunes" == "true" ]; then
show_fortune
fi
fi
If you don't want to see these animals at all, change the whole paragraph as shown below (You can still switch fortunes by changing the word false into true):
.
.
.
if [ -x "/usr/bin/gconftool-2" ]; then
showfortunes="false"
if [ "$showfortunes" == "true" ]; then
show_fortune
fi
fi
System cannot recognize Sound Card at soft reboot (restart problem)
alsactl:load-state:1610: no soundcard found
This is a nasty bug since it takes a while until you realize, what's on... Fortunately this too can be solved with a short edit (if you don't want purge anything):
sudo nano /etc/default/kexec
The entire file looks like this:
# Defaults for kexec initscript
# sourced by /etc/init.d/kexec and /etc/init.d/kexec-load
# Load a kexec kernel (true/false)
LOAD_KEXEC=true
# Kernel and initrd image
KERNEL_IMAGE="/vmlinuz"
INITRD="/initrd.img"
# If empty, use current /proc/cmdline
APPEND=""
Edit the original text (marked blue) as shown here (marked red):
# Defaults for kexec initscript
# sourced by /etc/init.d/kexec and /etc/init.d/kexec-load
# Load a kexec kernel (true/false)
LOAD_KEXEC=false
# Kernel and initrd image
KERNEL_IMAGE="/vmlinuz"
INITRD="/initrd.img"
# If empty, use current /proc/cmdline
APPEND=""
After this your system's behaviour at restart changes in that it won't bypass BIOS and GRUB routines any more (the kexec-tools speed up a restart by directly booting into a new kernel supplied by this software), which is the safest way to initialize respectively recognize all of your hardwares.
Using kexec-tools can be a source of many other problems: Bypassing GRUB will break multiboot systems, BIOS avoiding disables initiating of hardwares like sound cards, SCSI scanners and others on reboot. Take it for sure, that this was only a tiny selection of possible problems, so imho kexec-tools should be restricted to special use cases.
