Category    bug

Not enough threads or processes : "thread create failed"

by Walter Rudametkin     linux bug

I started running into a weird problem that I didn't immediately identify. Some programs just started failing: libreoffice, chrome, chromium, firefox, eclipse, ...

It was quite undeterministic and depended on the system ressources being fairly well used. I thought it was a RAM issue, not having enough memory would cause programs to fail. I have somewhat agressive ram settings, but, I also have 16 GB of RAM on my computer. Well, it wasn't a memory issue, I was able to reproduce the issue with loads of memory still left over.

Here's some of the messages I was getting.

Libreoffice: (similar bug here)

osl::Thread::create failed

Java:

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: unable to create new native thread.

Chrome and Chromium:

pthread_create error: Resource temporarily unavailable

Acrobat reader cannot find libEGL.so.1 : Fedora 20

by Walter Rudametkin     linux bug

I use acrobat reader sometimes, like when people send me an annotated pdf or if Evince doesn't print it properly. My main pdf reader is Evince, but it's a bit buggy. Also, I use okular to annotate pdfs, which it does a fine job at.

Anyhow, I was getting the following error after applying some updates:

acroread: error while loading shared libraries: libEGL.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

It took me a while to track down the problem, which has a simple solution, just find the missing symbolic link. I ran into this page that describes the issue but nobody had provided the proper command http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=297151.

Fr alternative keyboard layout bug (fr-oss): right ctrl key not working

by Walter Rudametkin     linux bug

I really like the 'alternative' french keyboard layout on my computer, a.k.a fr-oss. I like to use the deadkeys for accents in french and spanish, and I really like the alt-gr + ctrl# for doing arrows and stuff like that.

Earlier this year on my Fedora laptop (F20) for work the right ctrl key stopped working. It sucked because ctrl-arrows no longer jump through words in text documents. VLC right ctrl+Up/Down no longer changed the volume either, making me have to use both hands just for that. I figured it was a bug in Fedora so I found a neat command to fix the mapping while I waited for the problem to be fixed. However, some time later it happened to my wife's Ubuntu laptop and looking into it I found that the problem is comes from higher up the chain.

Someone decided to map right ctrl to something "new" instead of letting it be the same as the left ctrl key. Sure, if programs used the "new right control" it might be great and super useful. But they don't, so the key does nothing. Kind of beats the purpose, huh?

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15804#c44

To fix the problem, here's the command you can run.

xmodmap -e 'keycode 105 = Control_R' -e 'clear Control' -e 'add Control = Control_L Control_R'

However...

Thunderbird bug: leading spaces are removed when character set is automatically converted

by Walter Rudametkin     thunderbird bug

I ran into a weird bug that took me about 50 test emails to understand. Thunderbird appears to automatically convert your plain-text emails from one character set to another automatically if it detects that there is an incompatible character.

However, the conversion isn't as smooth as it should be. In fact, in my case, all leading spaces in my neatly formatted plain-text format=flowed emails disappear.