Chrome 38 / Chromium keeps crashing in Ubuntu 14.10 (or the Ooops syndrome)

tl;dr
Start chrome with "--disable-gpu-sandbox flag".

Since I moved to Ubuntu 14.10; I experienced frequent crashes of latest chrome release. Had the same issue in chromium. The problem only occurred on some pages, but couldn't detect root cause.

After digging, found this thread.
Issue seems to be pre 14.04, then fixed in 14.04, and back again in 14.10.

So the problem is hardware acceleration related (no need to say waaaaay beyond my knowledge). You can check hadware and WebGL usage of your browser with the about://gpu URL. If everything's fine, all lights should be green (hardware acceleration must of course be enabled in chrome://settings).

So - as stated in the thread linked above, starting the browser with the "--disable-gpu-sandbox" flag I'm not having the issue anymore. I don't know if this raises some security concerns as some will say, but for now it's been working nice for a couple of hours.

To alter the unity shortcut to add this option wasn't that simple :
- editing the  ~/.local/share/applications/[your chrome app].desktop shortcut didn't work, I don' know why
- alacarte software, which usually works really well to create/edit launchers didn't allow me to edit the chrome launcher (this seems to be a known bug though)
- finally I found the "MenuLibre" software, equivalent to "Alacarte", but...working for chrome entry. Here is the installation package

Hope this help.

Webstorm/ IntelliJ loses keyboard input in Ubuntu

Edit : Several month after, issue isn't investigated et at jetbrains. Please vote for this issue so devs can start working on it ! 

Sometimes IntelliJ loses input from keyboard in Ubuntu 14.04. I've seen people complain about it as well with PhpStorm and IntelliJ.

Symptom : mouse clicks and menu work as expected, but no keyboard input is accepted and I must restart Webstorm to make it work again.

Solution : restart the ibus service in a terminal :

sudo ibus restart

For latin keyboard people, this switched my keyboard from AZERTY to QWERTY. I had to enter the following command to make it AZERTY again.

setxkbmap fr

Hope this helps.

Ubuntu default shortcuts Ctrl+Alt+Numpad overriding google docs quick style shortcuts

I love Google Docs - it's just so fast and user friendly.

I was really used to the Ctrl+Alt+1 / Ctrl+Alt+2 / ... shortcut allowing you to quickly set a level 1 / 2 / ... header style on a line.

When I switched to Ubuntu a couple of years ago, I realized this keystroke was already assigned to Window placement and was overriding GDocs shortcuts, but I never took the time to dig where I could override this behavior.

Today, I'm proud to announce that I finally found it ^^. In case it might help anyone : the offender is the "Grid" plugin. You can configure it or switch it off using CompizConfig Configuration Manager.

Hope this help.

Getting MysQL utilities to work in MySQL Workbench 6.0 on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

I installed MySQl Workbench 6.0 (downloaded from thier website) on my Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
Installation ran smoothly.

However when I tried to start the shell for MySQL Utilities, I had an error saying that MySQL utilities weren't installed, and that I had to download and install them.

So I did. But when trying to install the .deb package for my arch, boom :

The MySQL Connector/Python module was not found

I found this module that looked like the right one (disclaimer : I'm a total noob regarding linux)

sudo apt-get install python-mysql.connector

Installation OK, but still MySQL can't find the connector.

What worked in the end : download and compile sources :

cd /usr/share

sudo wget http://cdn.mysql.com/Downloads/Connector-Python/mysql-connector-python-1.0.12.zip

sudo unzip mysql-connector-python-1.0.12.zip

cd mysql-connector-python-1.0.12/

sudo python setup.py install

Then I was able to launch the shell utilities.

Hope this help.

ATI Radeon 2600 drivers on Ubuntu 12.04.02 with 3.5.0-32 kernel

I just spent a few hour trying to install proprietary drivers on my (old) laptop for my (old) graphic card.
If the following configuration talks to you, then I might help you :-)

- Ubuntu 12.04.02
- Kernel version 3.5.0-32-generic
- ATI Radeon 2600 graphic card

Since the last kernel update, unable to install Catalyst 13.1 drivers. dpkg creation is successful, but when trying to install those dpkg I am getting a bad exception when fglrx is installing.

Error! Bad return status for module build on kernel: 3.5.

DKMS part of installation failed. Please refer to /usr/share/ati/fglrx-install.log for details

Same result with the graphic installer of course.

After a while I found some 13.4 Catalyst drivers. Installation goes smoothier, but in the end...

aticonfig: No supported adapters detected 

Arrrgh ! They dropped support for 2600 series in this version !

Only solution that worked for me :
https://launchpad.net/~makson96/+archive/fglrx

Hope this help !