EasyLinuxGuide Blog

If you are getting an error when visiting the Gnome Extensions Website such as: “You do not appear to have an up to date version of GNOME3. You won’t be able to install extensions from here. See the about page for more information.”  in a red rectangle, and you don’t recall doing anything funky during your upgrade, then it could be due to a Firefox issue. I upgraded 4 of my machines to Ubuntu 12.10 and 2 of them gave me that error. I did find a workaround for now:

Open a terminal
Type Firefox -P
Select to create a new profile (I called mine alt)
Open Firefox with that new profile and visit the Gnome Extensions Website

You should be able to install your extensions from there now. I have to assume that there is some sort of miscommunication between my older profile for Firefox and the Gnome Shell Extensions website after the upgrade. Firefox moved to version 16 so perhaps this is somehow the reason why. Regardless, this is a decent workaround for now. If I find something more concrete, I will post it later.

Update — See the comment below which indicates that if you have “click to play” enabled in your about:config in Firefox, then it will cause this issue. Thanks for the contribution!

I’ve been talking about this for a while and even entered some IRC channels and had some users perplexed. It turns out it is a real issue. When I would copy something such as a file in nautilus with ctrl-c and then attempt to paste it using ctrl-v (right click paste works fine) into another directory in nautilus, instead of the expected outcome, I would see the text name of the file in a small box on the bottom right hand side of the screen. Today I found a bug report on it. It does appear to be an issue with either the newer version of nautilus (3.x+) or with Gnome 3 as I cannot duplicate the issue on any of my Gnome 2 boxes. If I reboot my system, the normal behavior does return, but then eventually it will revert to the same problem. I am hoping this gets fixed soon as it has been an annoyance for quite some time.

After some recent upgrades after moving to Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwal), I noticed that whenever I would try to move a directory using drag and drop in Filezilla, it would crash. I even upgraded my Filezilla from 3.3 to 3.5 but it did not fix anything. I spent a lot of time searching online to try to find a fix for this which proved unsuccessful. I decided to search again today and looked at some really old information from years back because I couldn’t find anything current. One previous issue was with wxwidgets containing a bug that would cause Filezilla to crash for this very reason. I decided to look up which version Natty used for wxwidgets and compare that to their current version. It turned out that Ubuntu was using an older version 2.8.11 and the more recent one was 2.8.12 which was released a couple months ago. I’m not sure why this incremental version was held back from being updated, but I decided to try it out nonetheless.

Instructions on how to update wxwidgets along with other packages can be found on the wxpython wiki page. I upgraded these packages on three separate Ubuntu machines and the issue disappeared. I am now able to drag and drop directories without any crashing on Filezilla. Hopefully Ubuntu decides to update these associated packages to resolve it. All that is really necessary is to do sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade and it will upgrade 2 packages and that fixes the issue.

As always with any software upgrade, it’s up to you to try it out if you want. The instructions are very easy and it did fix the annoyance for me on 3 machines. I can’t say what impact upgrading may have on other installed packages but my issue with Filezilla is resolved so I’m happy.

With the upgrade to Ubuntu 11.04 – Natty Narwal, I noticed that mpd stopped working. After some trial and error, it turned out it was an easy fix. What you do need to know before upgrading is that you should definitely back up your current queued tracks to a playlist if you want to have them back after the upgrade. While you won’t lose any data, your current state will be gone.

Here is what was needed to do to get mpd running again…

You can either do this via command line with your favorite text editor or via a graphical environment.

Command line: sudo nano /etc/mpd.conf

Graphical: sudo gedit /etc/mpd.conf

1 – Delete or comment out the error_log line in your /etc/mpd.conf:

previous line:
error_file        “/home/username/.mpd/errors.log”

after the change:
#error_file        “/home/username/.mpd/errors.log”

Keep in mind that your directory choices in the quotes may differ but that is a non issue. Once that is done, save the file. The next thing to do is to recreate your entire database for mpd. This has never been necessary before after an upgrade, but it could be due to changes in mpd or Ubuntu.

You can do this upgrade a few different ways. If you run a graphical front end like Sonata or GMPC, you need to first make sure that you are connected to mpd. Lastly, you need to update the entire database. This will take some time depending on the size of your collection. You could alternatively do this from command line by using the command: mpd –create-db. If that doesn’t work as a normal user, you may need to sudo mpd –create-db. After the database updates, you should be able to play your tunes as before. All in all, it is a fairly simple fix, but something that could be quite frustrating if you aren’t aware of it.

Recently there was a Gnome 3 update in Ubuntu which added some extra options. I noticed that whenever I would try to use my touchpad on my laptop, there would be a delay where it was completely unresponsive. To get rid of this, you can simply type in ‘mouse’ into the search box in Gnome 3 and click on the mouse icon. On the new window that opens up, click on the touchpad tab and uncheck the box under General ‘Disable touchpad while typing’. I’m not sure why someone chose to enable that by default as I found it very annoying.