TL;DR:

I installed Zoom which brought ibus in as a dependency. During a dist-update ibus was set to my main input method and it doesn’t work well (for me). Use the Input Method app to set the input method back to XIM and restart the display manager.

Background:

I’m running Linux Mint 17.1 and I recently experienced the same issue described in this thread: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=171086. Basically, I could press F2 to rename a file using Nemo, the out-of-the-box file manager but then I typing would have no effect. All permissions were OK as I could rename the file from the terminal so it was a problem with the UI.

How to clear the APT cache to fix failing updates.

I came across this problem the other day and thought I’d post up the fix because it’s simple to fix but a show stopper if you can’t.

I’m running Linux Mint 64-bit Cinnamon and Postgres 9.1 as a refenece in case you can’t copy-paste my commands.

Basically, when I copied an already running version of postgres to a new box and it failed to start. When I took a look in the postgres log for when you try to start it, I could see that it was complaining about a missing locale. For me, it was en_AU.UTF-8.

The problem

My situation is that I run an Ubuntu Server for normal server-like tasks; web server, file server, etc. I decided to install XMBC on it so I could make it into a HTPC because after all, it already had all my media stored on it. Installing XMBC meant that I also had to install Xserver and along with that install, I scored some defaults for screen saver timeout and monitor timeout (all set to 10 minutes) and this really sucks when you’re watching a movie and even 10 minutes the display would turn off unless you gave some input (keyboard, mouse, remote). This guide will show how I fixed it.