January 2009
Videos Freezing After 2 Seconds
Posted by HokieTux on January 22, 2009 in Hacks
Two work-arounds in one day!
Today, my Flash player seemed to stop working while trying to watch a YouTube video. It would play two seconds (without audio), and then freeze. If I skipped ahead in the video, it would simply play the next two seconds (again, without audio), and freeze.
Googling around, there are a bunch of fixes including re-installing Firefox, deleting & re-installing Flash, and a few others even more drastic including re-installing all media codecs.
I’m still not sure what the problem is, but I think it is in Firefox. All I did to fix it was completely close firefox (I even issued a $ sudo pkill firefox to make sure), reopen Firefox, and told it NOT to reload tabs. Sure enough, video playback was fixed.
If anyone has more information as to what is causing this, please post it!
Firefox version: 3.0.5
Cheers!
Xorg 1.5 & Device Detection
Posted by HokieTux on January 22, 2009 in Hacks
Apparently the Xorg developers have added some sort of device autodetection in one of the recent releases of Xorg server v1.5+
Unfortunately, this seems to be breaking a lot of system configurations – mine included. I have been using HAL and evdev to detect and configure my system input devices, and as soon as I updated xorg to the new release things started breaking. If you are experiencing any of the following:
- Wrong keyboard layout / keymap
- Xorg freezing on startup
- Black screen
- Mouse won’t respond
- Keyboard doesn’t respond
- Mouse actions seem to be really, really sped up (this is a strange one, and seems to only happen in composite window managers)
… then this might be your problem! Here’s the fix:
Head to /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and find the “Server Flags” section. If for whatever reason you don’t have a “Server Flags” section, add it just under the “Module” Section. Now, add the “AutoAddDevices” “false” option (ignore the “Xinerama” option – that was put there by nvidia-xconfig):
Section "ServerFlags"
Option "Xinerama" "0"
Option "AutoAddDevices" "false"
EndSection
Hold onto your helmet and restart X11 – hopefully, things work.
If you are still having problems, feel free to post here and I’ll help if I can!
Cheers!
