General Linux Setup Notes

Install these:

  • Putty (or remember to use ssh -l loginName)
  • Install freerdp-x11 before installing KRDC (Remote desktop client)

Foobar2000 requires snapd to install. It doesn’t have a GUI package manager (either use “sudo snap install” or use Snap Store to find the app and click ‘Install’ directly from there)

There’s a chicken-and-egg problem with snap store though. On Linux Mint, snap-store needs to be installed with command line before the button on the web page works correctly. So there’s no way around doing this command line once: “sudo snap install snap-store”

You’d be better off just doing “sudo snap install foobar2000” if you are not going to use SnapCraft store again later. Alternatively, use DeadBeef.

My other favorite Windows app Notepad++ is also on snap store. Unfortunately, these are both Wine applications that Cinnamon doesn’t scale them properly with HiDPI mode. I’ll use NotepadQQ instead.

It’s a pain in the butt to deal with snap store because it won’t automatically create shorcuts on the panel or desktop. Then you cannot directly run it in the command line either because the apps are install under /snap/bin and it’s not in the path either! Add it in /etc/environment and RE-LOGIN!

There are websites that teaches you to extend the path in /etc/profile.  It’s not necessary if you did /etc/environment already. Doing both will have the path added twice!

Finally, the icons files are hidden in: /var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications and the panel icons can be anebled by linking the .desktop folders:

sudo ln -s /var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/ /usr/share/applications/snap 

Geeze! A windows program this broken these days are not the norm. They never work right out of the box for the most natural and common use cases!


Only Evolution Mail Client supports Google accounts from GNOME online account services. Install Evolution first before adding accounts or they will be called “Unnamed” and there’s no way to change it until you remove the account and re-add.

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Input Methods (IME) in Linux: Fcitx

IBus is considered as retiring, but it’s still the default in MX Linux. Because the only Cantonese IME in Linux that allows me to swear is Andrew Choi’s CAP, which runs on fcitx, I settled for fcitx as my default IME engine.

Languages

  • Cantonese: Download the debian package for CAP
  • Japanese: Mozc is already installed
  • Simplified Chinese: Pinyin is already installed

Shortcuts (Very much like Windows):

  • Ctrl + Space: turn it on/off
  • Ctrl + Shift: switch between languages
  • Shift: in and out of temporary English mode (inactivate) within the language

I’ve moved the contents of setting Fcitx CAP to this page as the release fcitx5 turned this already tricky process into a maze.

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Two numbers for Google Voice

By default, Google voice ties the number to your Mobile phone, which enables text forwarding, but you cannot have two Google voice numbers forwarding to the same phone.

If only voice forwarding is needed, each Google voice account can link to your Home and Work phone numbers instead. Since they are not considered a Mobile number, you are treating your mobile number as a landline number, which obviously doesn’t have text messaging.

Therefore at most you can have 3 Google Voice numbers going to the same phone, but only one of them (the account where the target number is set as Mobile) can forward text messages.

The tricky part is that this designation can only be changed through the classic setting page here:
https://www.google.com/voice/redirection/voice#phones

The solution came from this forum.

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Cantonese IME for Windows 10

There are not many decent Cantonese IME around. The best option for Windows 7 and before are CPIME. It borderline worked for Windows 8/10 (desktop mode only), but I heard recently Windows 10 broke it in its 1903 update.

Dr. Choi kindly wrote another Cantonese IME called CAP, which I came across while looking for Cantonese IME for Linux. This is the only option that works with Windows 10 natively (apps and desktop).


Getting CAP 2018 to install
[Deprecated, please use CAP 2021 instead, see below]

Unfortunately the installer failed on a fresh Windows 10, saying that “CAP.dll” cannot be registered. I looked at the error code and it usually suggest a missing dependency for the DLL. I used Dependency Walker to look at what’s broken and noticed those are Visual C++ 2015 DEBUG runtime DLLs. Since debug builds aren’t suppose to have a redistributable runtime (it’s actually called NonRedist), the only solution is to install the community edition of Visual C++ 2015 to obtain these DLLs.

Note that “Common Tools for Visual C++ 2015must be included (installed) so the IME won’t be broken (grayed):

The cause is the missing UCRTBASED.DLL. The files are located at:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\bin

It’s under the (x86) variant of Program Files regardless of whether it’s 32-bit or 64-bit.

The missing link to API-MS-WIN-CORE-PATH-L1-1-0.DLL is not important.

After you installed the IME after installing Visual C++ 2015 (any flavor, minimal is OK), you can remove Visual C++ 2015 without breaking the IME, EXCEPT you need to back up the UCRTBASED.DLL first and put it next to the core CAP.DLL file for the IME:

C:\Program Files\Sixth Happiness\CAP\x64

Getting CAP 2021 to install

CAP 2021 still won’t install on fresh installation of Windows 10, and I ran it through Dependency Walker and noticed it’s missing VCRUNTIME140_1.dll. Based on this post, this is part of the Microsoft Visual C++ 2019 Redistributable:

Microsoft rolled the runtimes for 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2022 into one package, so if you want missing 2019 runtime DLLs, you might as well install it. This time the package didn’t use any debug version of the runtime like in 2018, which makes life much easier.

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Locale Emulator replaced pAppLocale / AppLocale

I have an ancient SONY NW-507 MP3 player (I still love it because of the 60hrs battery life) that the MP3 Manager software just interpret ANSI names encoded in the ID3 tag based on whatever system language the program started on.

I used to use AppLocale for that. There was a better variant called pAppLocale (or paip Applocale) but it’s no longer maintained anymore. Today I discovered a modern, much more powerful equivalent called Locale Emulator.

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