Department of Engineering

Known bugs/features on the DPO Terminals

Printing

• acroread duplex and multiple copies - If you ask for 2 copies of a 1 page document, and you're in duplex mode, you'll get a single sheet of paper that's printed on both sides. This may also happen with programs other than acroread.
• Printing PDF files from the command line - If graphics become distorted when printing a PDF file from the command line, print directly from Acroread, or do a "Print to File" from Acroread then use lpr to print from the command line. [Added Jan 2009]
• Eye of Gnome - If the window on the right appears after you've chosen a printer when trying to print from the "Eye of Gnome" image viewer, there's nothing you can do [Added Mar 2009]

Programs

• LibreOffice sometimes shows this error message but still seems to work
  
  If LibreOffice consequently doesn't work, mail a description to bugs [september 2011]
• LibreOffice doesn't show my Word document correctly
  The most common cause is that the Word document uses fonts that are absent or differently sized in LibreOffice, resulting in a changed pagination. Stick to the commonest fonts.
• If you run matlab from the command line, then exit, the terminal window goes dead - Type reset and press the Enter key.
• Octave commands not found - user-defined functions can suddenly become undefined to Octave though typing "dir" shows the student m-file in the working directory. Solution - Try typing rehash in Octave. Failing that, try closing Octave terminal window, open a new terminal window and start Octave in it. [Apr 2011]
• Help Menu doesn't work - some programs (e.g. Nautilus (the file viewer) and Kaffeine) have help menus that will only work if khelpcenter or gnome-help is installed. It's not installed for use on our system. [June]
• using PCB (from the gEDA suite) - can't save! message - Open the *.pcb file in your text editor of choice and on line 17 it reads
      Groups("1,c,s")
  Edit this line to read
      Groups("1,c")
  Save, close and open in PCB to find problem solved (ajf58). [May 2009]
• Pro/E - Sometimes it's slow, sometimes it crashes. The program's rather fragile when faced with system and graphic-driver upgrades. See the Pro/E - symptoms and solutions page.
• proe-purge - this program (which clears out old Pro/E files) fails when there are files or folders with spaces in their names
• Pro/E - the help center isn't available - if you use the help menu at the top of ProEngineer and select "help center" it won't work. If you click on the arrows that are on the bar separating the model tree/file tree and main window, a browser will be started inside the Pro/E window, showing the "ProEngineer Wildfire 3 Help Page"
• Abaqus mesh problems - if run on the Linux Servers it loops when drawing the mesh. Try running it on the twn machines under Windows. Then try it on the DPO terminal.
• COMSOL's on-line help PDF not accessible - Access it through the local COMSOL page
• Evolution - a mailer called Evolution is used by default in some situations that are beyond our control currently. Our MUAs: Evolution page describes how to configure it if you can't use anything else.
• "Disk Usage Analyser" broken - it doesn't work on our system. Read our Quota page instead.
• Konqueror doesn't work well as a WWW browser - access to BT webmail fails, etc - use Firefox; we haven't configured Konqueror fully
• Programs draw and re-draw erratically - By default a Desktop Effects mode is enabled (windows wobble and go translucent when moved, etc). In this mode some windows don't refresh properly, and sometimes don't initially display. OpenGL seem the common factor of affected programs. The fix is to get the student to turn off the effect or to set the XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS variable to 1. E.g. to run abaqus, type

     env XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 abaqus cae
  

  [updated September 2010]

File Browser and Desktop

• No Taskbar - Log in again [ Oct 2011]
• This kind of error message appears - Click on "Don't Delete" and carry on [ Jan 2012]
• File Browser blindness - a file with a name like "glue.cc~" doesn't show in the file browser, even with the View menu's hidden files option enabled. The Search button can't find it either. The fix is to enable the backup files option in Preferences, then do some refreshing of the file browser window
• Application Browser sections - some quirkiness - Netbeans isn't in the development section; "Take Screenshot" and "KSnapshot" are in different sections but neither of them is in the Graphics section.
• Inaccessible programs shown - If you hold down the right-button on an icon, then choose 'open with ... other application' you get a long list of interesting programs, many of which can't be found when clicked on
• Creating new files - Using the "File/Create Document/new file" option might produce nothing. The "File/Create Document/Empty File" works though
Search - if you search for *.mat it won't treat the asterisk as a wildcard character. To find all files with .mat in their name, just search for .mat. To search for a file whose name is exactly .mat, search for ".mat"
• Slow Folder display - there might be reference to a folder that no longer exists (more precisely - a symlink to a no-longer existing directory which is automounted (typically this will be shared group files) can cause delays even when running the default 'ls' (which SuSE sets to show colours, which requires a 'stat' on each file)).

Firefox

• Firefox menus disappear when the pointer's moved off the main menu bar - minimize and re-display the Firefox window. Create and destroy another window. If that doesn't help, use Ctrl-Q to quit from Firefox and then re-start. [Oct 2011]
• Movies like http://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1162887 sometimes crash Firefox or cause a message saying that the Flash plug-in has crashed. - download the file and click on it [September 2011]
• PDF files appear as blank screens - the first PDF file of a Firefox session will appear. Subsequently others might not. Either re-start Firefox or download the file and use acroread. [May 2010]
• Firefox not starting - if Firefox isn't closed properly, it might refuse to start the next time (you can't even create a New Profile). Type unblockfirefox on a command line.
• Scrolling slow with pages that have static images/backgrounds - a known bug with no guaranteed fix. See the bug report

Configuring

• If you ask (even as a one-off at logout time) to save your desktop set-up for the next session, it will never forget, unless you open a Terminal window, carefully paste these lines into the Terminal window
  

       killall gconfd-2
       rm -f ~/.gconfd/saved_state
  

  (ensuring each line is "Enter"ed) and log out.

Misc

• Big ~/.xsession-errors file - if a program without a window tries to display text, the output's diverted into ~/.xsession-errors. Because of the way we've set things up, some text is added to this file each time users log in at a graphics terminal. That's harmless, but if users accidentally write a program that endlessly prints numbers out, and they start the program by clicking on its icon (rather than typing its name on the command line), the output will go into ~/.xsession-errors until there's no space left. [Added April 2011]
• Text window at login - If you type anything before clicking the login button you get a text-entry field that doesn't seem to do anything. Just click the login button if this happens. [Added September 2010]
• USB/Flash/memory sticks/keys - not all sticks work properly. The only detailed failure we know about is for 4GB Integral sticks. We'd be interested to hear about other problems.
• Clicking on the Network button of the Computer panel does nothing
- True