Category: Linux

Adobe Flash and Firefox 68+ in Gentoo Linux

Though many sites have abandoned Adobe Flash in favour of HTML5 these days, there are still some legacy applications (e.g. older versions of VMWare’s vSphere web client) that depend on it. Recent versions of Firefox in Linux (68+) started failing to load Flash content for me, and it took some digging to find out why. …

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Python’s M2Crypto fails to compile

When updating my music server, I ran into a compilation error on Python’s M2Crypto. The error message was a little bit strange and not directly related to the package itself: fatal error: openssl/ecdsa.h: No such file or directory Obviously, that error is generated from OpenSSL and not directly within M2Crypto. Remembering that there are some …

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Ugly fonts in Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird under Linux (skia and cairo)

Recently, after updating to Mozilla Firefox to version 52 or later (55.0.2, in my case), and Mozilla Thunderbird to version 52 or later (52.3.0, in my case), I found that fonts were rendering horribly under Linux. It looked essentially like there was no anti-aliasing or hinting at all. Come to find out, this was due …

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