Tag Archives: ubuntu

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I got a little bit of time recently, so I’ve updated the Known vagrant build.

The latest vagrant package now uses the latest Ubuntu LTS – Xenial – as it’s build. It also makes some changes to the environment, including, we now use mariadb instead of the now rather defunct (and in some cases broken) Oracle mysql server. The build also now runs PHP 7.0.

If you’re like me, you might need to update your version of vagrant and VirtualBox in order to successfully boot the newer Ubuntu images, so be sure you do that.

» Visit the project on Github...

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I use Ubuntu as my main desktop operating system, together with Gnome Fallback/failsafe, because I dislike Unity and want to keep my Gnome 2 desktop.

This might not be relevant to the problem, but when I upgraded from 14.4 to 16.4, I lost my sound card. When the computer booted, I would get the Ubuntu drums, but once I logged in, the only sound I had came out of my USB headphones. I no longer saw my Intel HDA soundcard listed in the gnome sounds settings.

After a lot of digging I eventually worked out the cause of the problem, and a temporary fix. Long story short, pulseaudio couldn’t detect the sound card, because Ubuntu have changed the way it’s loaded.

You need to therefore reload the detection libraries and restart pulseaudio, run the following command:

pactl load-module module-detect&

Now, I have a startup script that I run as part of my user login to set up my desktop environment and kick of my development environment, so it was enough for me to put this command in that script.

You will probably want to make sure you load this module in your pulseaudio init scripts. Anyway, hope this helps.

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So, after I fixed the two screen problem I was having with my Ubuntu setup, I started getting an odd flickering.

This flickering didn’t affect the whole screen, rather it seemed to be something to do with window repainting, and it became even worse after I updated to 14.04.

I run a slightly non-traditional configuration, in that I run Gnome2 fallback rather than Gnome3 or Unity, therefore this probably won’t effect a lot of people, and is probably why it persists.

After a bit of digging, I discovered that this is actually a compiz issue. Here’s a summary of the fix:

Fixing the flicker

  • Install the compiz settings manager: apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager
  • Scroll down to “Workarounds” in the “Utility” section:

compiz-1

  • Select “Force full screen redraws (buffer swap) on repaint”:

compiz-2

Once this is done, your windows should repaint as normal.