A sudden "Desktop effects could not be enabled" problem in Ubuntu 10.10

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UPDATE: If you ran into the “desktop effects could not be enabled” error, try one of the following:

  1. Check if you have installed the recommended drivers for your video card in System -> Administration -> Additional Drivers
  2. In case of NVidia cards, install the latest driver as showin in this post
  3. Remove any theme-related software you installed recently. Eg: compositing managers, themes
  4. Install the compiz-fusion-plugins-extra package
  5. Try the command: compiz –replace
  6. Completely remove all the  compiz stuff and reinstall
  7. Try this: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=9212078&postcount=10
  8. Install Ubuntu Tweak

The above are some of the methods different people around the world have solved the issue. But there’s no guarantee these may work for you.

When I switched on the laptop today evening I had no idea that I was in for a shock. All the desktop effects had gone; the desktop cube nowhere to be seen; no animations or effect whatsoever; and docky reports some compositing problem.

Then I go to my Appearance Preferences and find out that Visual Effects option has been set to None. Trying to change it resulted in the age-old problem: “Desktop effects could not be enabled”.

I do some googling and find out that I’m not alone and there’s an easy remedy, too. Just go to the Package Cleaner in Ubuntu Tweak, click Purge PPAs and purge the Compiz package out of the list. And everything’s back to normal.

No, wait. Not everything. I had once installed the extra compiz plugins package which added some cool new effects, and it’s gone missing. Apparently this and the update I did in the last boot has resulted this.

And later found out that it was actually the update that messed up the things. All you have to do is to go back to the previous version.

Saving a video into a sequence of images

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I wanted to create a GIF out of a part of a video sequence. But how could one extract a sequence of images from a video? After some googling FFMPEG turned out to be the savior. Here’s a sample command for taking a series of snapshots out of a video using ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -ss 23 -i kids.mp4 -f image2 -vframes 50 a%2d.jpg

23 is the position in the video to start extracting images (in seconds). kids.mp4 is the input video file. image2 says that the output would be in JPEG format. 50 is the number of frames to capture. a%2d.jpg is the format of the output file, i.e. in this case the files would be saved as a01.jpg, a02.jpg, etc.

The next step would be to convert the sequence of images to a GIF, which can be easily done using GIMP.

Installing Matlab 2008a on Ubuntu 10.10

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Update: This method also worked in Ubuntu 11.04.

So I successfully installed Matlab on Ubuntu after much ado. Here’s how I did it.

First mount the matlab ISO:

sudo mkdir /media/matlab

sudo mount matu2k8a.iso /media/matlab/ -t iso9660 -o loop

Create a base directory for Matlab manually:

sudo mkdir /usr/local/matlab

Go to where the ISO is mounted and run the installer:

sudo ./install

Give the path of the directory we’ve already created for the Matlab base directory. Give the serial key and the license file when prompted.

After the setup is completed, don’t start Matlab. Create a .matlab directory in your home and give user permissions.

mkdir ~/.matlab

sudo chown -R ${USER}:${USER} ~/.matlab

Done! Now you can run Matlab using the command:

sh /usr/local/matlab/bin/matlab

You can of course add a shortcut to your main menu.

EDIT: When you’re adding a shortcut to the main menu or desktop, add the “-desktop” option (without quotes) at the end of the command, otherwise only the popup screen will be displayed.

puddletag – Cool MP3 tagger for linux

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I’ve been using Kid3 for my audio tagging needs for a long time. The in-built tagging functionality of Rhythmbox isn’t suitable for tagging multiple items. Then UbuntuGeek tells me about puddletag.

Puddletag is the best tagger I’ve seen. It’s got almost all the functionality you’ll need to manage your music collection. The options include downloading tag data from various online sources and renaming the file names. The app’s still in its beta and the deb installer can be downloaded here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trending topics in Seesmic Web

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IMHO Seesmic Web is the coolest twitter web client out there. One of its coolest features is deciphering the meanings of weird trending topics for us.

For example Zack Snyder was the top trend today. Being the ignorant boy, I was elated when Seesmic Web told me who Zack Snyder really was.

Zack Snyder

Sometimes it can make your day.

Installing abandoned software

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The software the programmers have stopped developing, what do you call them – abandonware? When you’re going to install this certain app and you get to know that its further development is halted, would you still install that software?

Today I wanted to install this clipboard manager for gnome called Parcellite and went to its website only to find out that the developer has lost interest in developing it further. It felt like eating some expired food. 😐

3 ways I use Instapaper

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Instapaper is a popular service similar to Read-It-Later. We are constantly flooded with links to new information some of which we’ll need to save and make sure we read them later. The solution is to add the pages to Instapaper.

Here are 3 ways I use Instapaper:

  1. Instachrome Google Chrome extension – When you stumble upon an interesting article click the extension’s icon and click Read Later
  2. Instapaper bookmarklet for Google Reader – When you’re on an interesting feed in Google Reader, click on the bookmarklet and it’ll automagically send the link to Instapaper
  3. Add To Instapaper option in Gravity – In this Nokia twitter client, each link in your timeline gives an option to add the URL to Instapaper, which is super cool, since you don’t get to read the articles most of the time from the phone

Whenever you feel like going over the saved links, just head to http://www.instapaper.com/u.

    New Twitter VIP release

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    I had a chat with the Jack Dorsey of Twitter today and he said that the New Twitter that’s already out is only the public release and the VIP release would take some time.

    Those who have already got New Twitter won’t be able to enjoy the VIP one. Feeling sorry about them. Life’s unfair, mates.

    Moving back to Google Reader

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    I was having a bad time with Google Reader and moved to Good Noows as I mentioned previously. Good Noows is really good except for it being exceptionally slow. I tried to bear it like a husband with a mentally ill wife, but I have my limits.

    So from now on I’m moving to Google Reader. Too bad Good Noows was not quite happy with the idea of a divorce. It doesn’t allow exporting feeds, so had to manually add many feeds to Reader.

    But being the self-centred boy I am, I didn’t like to go to Google Reader’s feet and apologize. Instead I made Google Reader a different person by applying the Helvetica Reader theme, renamed all folders as I had them in Good Noows and hid the Unread Posts counts which were giving me headache.

    So that’s it. I’m now trying to come to good terms with my previous wife.

    ezLinkPreview makes browsing in Google Chrome damn easy

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    This wonderful Chrome extension has made my life quite easy, especially because I browse a lot of news sites. Hover on a link while pressing Alt and the link’s target page opens up in a popup. No more messing with the tabs. The popups are easily expandable and movable.

    This comes especially handy when you’re in  a news site and have to open new tabs for each news item you want to read.

    Download link

    Here’s a screenshot to give you an idea: