the upgrade to edgy eft

I upgraded my laptop to Edgy Eft, which has many cool new features.

Nothing too serious broke for me, except maybe for this one: opening Gmail crashes Firefox 2, consistently. Apparently this is a consequence of this bug which is now triggered because X loads the Composite extension by default in Edgy, and my default colour depth is 16. The workaround is simple; add this line to /etc/firefox/firefoxrc:

export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1

The bug is in Launchpad (#14911) so I’m a little surprised that they shipped Edgy without the workaround. This one might affect a *lot* of people. Hmm, well, maybe most people have a default color depth of 24. The irony of all this is that it’s the chimes for gmail’s built-in IM client that are causing this – that’s the flash that’s being used. Did I mention that I’m not a fan of proprietary software? This bug is in the proprietary macromedia flash plugin. Gnash, we really need you!

The only other problem I’ve come across is that bbmail no longer works. Apparently it does not support compilation with gcc 4.1; the default package segfaults while starting up. I recompiled the source package with gcc 3.4 which resolves the segfaulting, but bbmail does not appear on the screen. Time to look for another mail notifier I think – if you have suggestions for something that works more or less like bbmail, let me know!