I have been using Kile for a while for my LaTeX editing needs but after getting a new netbook (running Ubuntu 9.04 netbook remix), and not wanting to install the KDE libs I decided to switch back to texmaker.

I installed it and loaded up a document to start doing a bit of work in it and the typing was extremely slow. I also noticed that the CPU usage shot up whenever I was typing. I tried the same on my desktop with the same results.

I did a bit of searching and it appears this is a known bug.

The only workaround I can find is to use the following command to run texmaker.

texmaker -graphicssystem raster
This seems to work but isn’t ideal. I would quite like to know what actually causes this. Of course there is every possibility that this will be gone in 9.10. I will find out soon when I upgrade but the Ubuntu server traffic is ridiculous today with it being the release day so I think I’ll leave it a while before I do any upgrades.

I have been playing around with SugarCRM CE recently as part of a project and one of the features we required was to be able to make some fields read only to certain users. This feature is available in the Professional version of SugarCRM but unfortunately not in the Community Edition.

Fortunately I came across this SugarCRM module which did some of what I wanted. Unfortunately however, when a field is set to “Read Only” it disappears totally in the Edit View. Apparently this is a feature of the module but it definitely wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted the fields to still appear in the Edit View but be read only.

There were also a few other bits and pieces unfinished in the module such as the type of access that had been selected for a field showing up as the representing integer value in the overview rather than a human readable string.

After quite a steep learning curve editing the templates and adding a logic hook I have managed to get the module doing more or less what I want. I have left the original type of Read Only as it was and added a new type “Read Only In Edit View” which does pretty much what it says on the tin. I have also changed the overview list of fields to display a string showing what type of access has been selected for a field.

I am probably going to keep making tweaks to this module as there are still quite a few tweaks that could be made to make it a bit better I think.

For now my modified version of the module can be downloaded here or here.

I have been an avid user of fluxbox for many years as my window manager but one tool I particularly like from Gnome is nautilus. The only problem I had with it is that by default it deals with drawing the desktop when it loads so my background settings disappear and it loads the standard Gnome desktop icons by default which I don’t like.

This is easy enough to solve as you can just use the following when starting nautilus from a terminal:

nautilus --no-desktop
This stops the default desktop drawing behaviour. Obviously this isn’t ideal if you want to launch nautilus from a menu so you can use the following tool to set this to be the default behaviour.

gconf-editor
Load this app then go to apps->nautilus->preferences. In that section there is an option named ‘show_desktop’. Simply uncheck this and every time you launch nautilus in the future it will load without messing around with the desktop.