Thursday, February 11, 2010

mtpaint - Good application to do pixel art in Linux

If you want to create some pixel art, I would recommend mtpaint - http://mtpaint.sourceforge.net/. It has pretty good functionality. So far the only thing I find difficult to use is the multiple layer functionality for creating animations.

Mouse issues with Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10)

If you are considering updating to Karmic Koala, hold of for now. Mouse support for some people has been broken since around November 2009 and is broken to date (Feb 2010).

My initial update to Karmic Koala went pretty smoothly. However down the line as I continued to update my packages something went wrong and now my mouse can be pretty flaky. After doing some google searches, it turns out that a bunch of folks are experiencing this problem. The cause of the bug has not been tracked down and there are only work arounds, such as:
1. Log out of your windows session and log in again, this seems to be working for me.
2. If you only have issues with a particular application run that application from the console like so:
$ export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOW=1
$ application_having_issues.
3. For more esoteric workarounds read the threads below. The above 2 were easiest for me to try.

Threads with the complaints:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1334222
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1308754