30 May

World clock’s width changes frequently

LXQT’s default panel does not contain a ram monitor and besides, I don’t like its CPU monitor. So I installed Multiload-ng. This widget has fancy colors, and some problem happened to it.
LXQT’s World clock which is located behind Multiload-ng changes its width frequently according to the numbers. This causes instability to Multiload-ng’s color, some color noise appears around Multiload-ng.
According to World clock’s GitHub discussion, the number displayed is controlled by HTML syntax. Therefore, it is easy to set a monospaced font to the clock number like this:


'<font size="3" face="Monospace">'HH:mm:ss'</font>'

This solved Multiload-ng’s color problem.

29 May

change panel’s layer in LXQT

The previous article (lubuntu’s panel keeps in top of all windows) explains how to restrain LXDE’s panel in the bottom layer by editing lxde-rc.xml. A similar method is available in LXQT. The only difference is the ‘name’ property of the ‘application’ tag.

Comment information at the start of application part explained how to find applications’ name property. You can get a window’s properties by running xprop, the first element of window’s WM_CLASS property is what you need. As for panels in LXQT this value is ‘lxqt-panel’. So the entire config information is as follows:


<application name="lxqt-panel" >
<layer>below</layer>
</application>

4 Apr

LibreOffice impress crashes at the click of show button

With some certain files, my LibreOffice impress crashes every time when I click the show button. I started LibreOffice in the terminal in order to catch some error message. I got the following report:

soffice.bin: cairo-ft-font.c:576: _cairo_ft_unscaled_font_create_internal: Assertion `unscaled->base.hash_entry.hash == key.base.hash_entry.hash' failed.

It seems that it has something to do with fonts. I did some tests and found that it is the Chinese font “黑体” from MS powerpoint that caused the crash. The solution is to copy windows’ fonts to LO’s config directory.

specifically:

  1. create a new folder ” fonts ” under .config/libreoffice/4/user
  2. copy all files from C:\Windows\Fonts to .config/libreoffice/4/user/fonts

 

 

31 Jan

EFI partition corrupted

Resized EFI partition today, and failed to enter windows. I got this error message:

the boot configuration data for your pc is missing or contains errors

I tried several methods to repair it but none of them helps. Then I realized that the EFI partition may be corrupted.
So, I deleted the EFI partition completely and regenerated one with the tutorial here by genet.
The steps are as follows:

first, make sure you have an unallocated space for EFI and allocate other unused space.
Boot with a windows installation media and enter the command prompt
run the following commands to create EFI partition:

diskpart
list disk #note the disk number where you are going to create EFI
select disk n # n is the number you got from the previous command
list partition #you can see that there is no efi partition yet
create partition efi
format quick fs=fat32
list partition #you can see your new efi partition now
list volume #note the volume letter where your windows is installed
exit

Now, run the following commands to generate boot datas to EFI partition:

bcdboot X:\windows # n is the letter you got from the previous command

Reboot the computer now and you should be able to enter your windows