Posts

    Thursday 28 April 2016

    Problem with clipboard on Ubuntu

    Clipboard on Ubuntu is "broken". Well, maybe not. But copy-paste is broken in a lot of applications on Ubuntu. Let me give you an example,

    • Open LibreOffice.
    • Write something and copy it.
    • Paste it somewhere else. It works as expected.
    • Now close LibreOffice and try pasting. It won't work.
    This is a well known bug - Copy-Paste doesn't work if the source is closed before the paste; affecting a lot of applications on Ubuntu. And they are not so keen on fixing it, atleast not any time soon.
    The reason for this is that these applications do not comply with the clipboard specification from FreeDesktop
    If a client needs to exit while owning the CLIPBOARD selection, it should request the clipboard manager to take over the ownership of the clipboard, using the SAVE_TARGETS mechanism. If there is no clipboard manager, or if the SAVE_TARGETS conversion fails, the application should simply exit.
    Applications need to transfer ownership of the clipboard to clipboard manager before exiting for copied data to perisist after it exits. There is certainly nothing you can do about it, unless offcourse you are willing to modify the source code of each of these applications to make it comply to FreeDesktop specs.

    Fix. Well.. workaround.

    The reporter/ moderator of the bug report suggests that we should install diodon, klipper, glipper, parcellite or xfce4-clipman as a workaround for this issue.
    Working of diodon


    Tuesday 26 April 2016

    Ubuntu 16.04 won't wake up from suspend

    I recently installed Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Xenial Xerus on my Thinkpad E550. I honestly regretted it not just because it doesn't support AMD proprietary fglrx driver aka AMD Catalyst or AMD Radeon Software but because the suspend feature stopped working.

    I initially thought that this had something to do with video drivers that I had installed on Ubuntu 15.10 which were now incompatible with 16.04. I realized that this was not the case as the issue persisted even on opensource drivers that it is compatible with.

    Also on a closer observation I realized that it was not that my system was not able to wake up from suspend, but that it was not able to suspend at all. On suspending, the screen would go off but my laptop kept running, heating up and draining battery. This problem existed when I hibernate or shutdown as well.

    Now the only possible reason for this is some problem in acpi which is not letting my system to suspend. Ubuntu 16.04 is shipped with kernel 4.4. A quick search on this issue on kernel 4.4 made me realize that this exists across several destros and mostly on thinkpads. So I upgraded to kernel 4.5 and the problem is resolved.

    Installing kernel 4.5

    32 bit

    64bit

    Then reboot!