After upgrading to Ubuntu 14.04.3 I ran into something weird. First off, the “Users” section in “System Settings” wouldn’t open. Click it and it loops forever while CPU usage spikes. My first instinct was to run unity-control-center from the terminal and see what it spat out.

Caffine-indicator is a good thing — good enough that it makes using Linux noticeably happier. But after upgrading to Ubuntu 14.04.3 it refuses to start and throws an error.

A friend bought a gaming laptop and brought it over for me to install the OS, since he plays World of Warcraft on it. After the install was done, he fired up WoW and ran straight into a problem… Once you hold right-click to move the camera, the speed is insane — so fast you can’t control it at all… Changing the mouse speed doesn’t help. Changing the in-game mouse speed doesn’t help either. Some searching later, it turns out this is a bug Blizzard has actually confirmed, related to HiDPI support under Windows. http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/10102720358?page=25 Specifically, if you have scaling enabled, you’ll hit this.

UPDATE: the compiz patch PPA has been updated to the latest version, so pinning the compiz version is no longer necessary. I wrote up a method for fixing this bug between Compiz and Nvidia’s proprietary driver. The conclusion was: use the PPA. Then recently Compiz went and updated with a vengeance, the PPA build got overwritten, and lo and behold, the bug wasn’t fixed — the screen started flickering again, the hell. First thing I thought of was rolling back to the PPA version with Synaptic, but compiz has too many dependencies, it pulls in unity directly, and the rollback dialog won’t let you multi-select. So I just went to the patched PPA, downloaded the debs, and downgraded everything in one go with sudo dpkg -i *.deb. Opened Synaptic again and pinned all the compiz versions.

The work PC runs Ubuntu 12.04, and lately fcitx just wouldn’t come up. Ctrl+Space did nothing. But if I quit fcitx and started it once from a terminal, it worked fine for the rest of the session. After screwing around with it for half a day, the culprit turned out to be in .xinit.