simon.schönbeck.dk

Tag: fix

  • Android Studio Emulator (AVD) is already running

    Sometimes in Android Studio the AVD or Android Emulator does not terminate properly.

    Upon next launch this annoying “device is already running” and a process ID warning will pop up.

    This warning happens because there is a lock file (hardware-qemu.ini.lock) which once deleted will let you run the emulator again.

    The path is the following:

    $HOME/.var/app/com.google.AndroidStudio/config/.android/avd/Pixel_9.avd/hardware-qemu.ini.lock

    Obviously replace the example’s device name in the path (Pixel_9.avd) with your own device’s name.

  • Android Studio Flatpak light/dark theme automatic change bug fix

    It is nice to have the desktop automatically change its theme from light to dark at sunset. Most applications work by default without further action in Fedora Kinoite. However Android Studio despite supporting light & dark themes for ages did not offer the option to automatically change the theme in Linux until very recently.

    After enabling the “Sync with OS” setting unfortunately nothing happened. Not even a restart of the application changed the theme. Guess Linux is still Linux where everything needs a bit of dedication to properly work.

    So digging into the topic it is (what else!) a Flatpak permissions issue. The dbus communication is not going through between the system and the application. After enabling the permissions I managed to get Android Studio to read the current theme on launch. But this was just a dead end as the automatic switching was still not working, I had to restart Android Studio to pick the switched theme which was not great for the workflow.

    After some time scouting sources of both Android Studio (really IntelliJ IDEA by JetBrains) and the application’s Flathub repo, the culprit was found. Android Studio itself is working fine as on a non-atomic system not using the Flatpak version there is no problem. The issue was in the Flatpak’s environment that missed a specific component, namely dbus-tools. Inside this module the command dbus-monitor is found and this is missing from the current Flathub build.

    The dbus-monitor is used to do exactly as its name states, it monitors the dbus for changes (signals) and this is what Android Studio uses to get the “color-scheme” parameter from the system. If this command cannot be executed it just dies silently and automatic theme change will not work. In a non-atomic system dbus-tools is part of the core system but Flatpaks run in a bare-bones environment and in this case the module is not included.

    To confirm this hypothesis I created my own Flatpak including dbus-tools:

    {
  "name": "dbus-tools",
  "buildsystem": "meson",
  "config-opts": [
    "-Dtools=true",
    "-Dmessage_bus=false",
    "-Dsystemd=disabled",
    "-Dx11_autolaunch=disabled"
  ],
  "sources": [
    {
      "type": "archive",
      "url": "https://dbus.freedesktop.org/releases/dbus/dbus-1.16.2.tar.xz",
      "sha256": "0ba2a1a4b16afe7bceb2c07e9ce99a8c2c3508e5dec290dbb643384bd6beb7e2"
    }
  ]
},
...

    There are a few more tweaks that are not relevant for the case in question but are just to get the Flatpak built with less overhead:

    $ cat com.google.AndroidStudio.Test.json 
{
  "id": "com.google.AndroidStudio.Test",
  "runtime": "org.freedesktop.Sdk",
  "runtime-version": "25.08",
  "sdk": "org.freedesktop.Sdk",
  "command": "android-studio-wrapper",
  "finish-args": [
    "--socket=x11",
    "--socket=pulseaudio",
    "--socket=ssh-auth",
    "--socket=gpg-agent",
    "--share=ipc",
    "--share=network",
    "--device=all",
    "--filesystem=home",
    "--allow=multiarch",
    "--env=JAVA_HOME=/app/extra/jbr",
    "--talk-name=org.freedesktop.Notifications",
    "--talk-name=org.freedesktop.secrets"
  ],
  "modules": [
    {
      "name": "dbus-tools",
      "buildsystem": "meson",
      "config-opts": [
        "-Dtools=true",
        "-Dmessage_bus=false",
	"-Dsystemd=disabled",
        "-Dx11_autolaunch=disabled"
      ],
      "sources": [
        {
          "type": "archive",
          "url": "https://dbus.freedesktop.org/releases/dbus/dbus-1.16.2.tar.xz",
          "sha256": "0ba2a1a4b16afe7bceb2c07e9ce99a8c2c3508e5dec290dbb643384bd6beb7e2"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "android-studio",
      "buildsystem": "simple",
      "build-commands": [
        "install -D -t ${FLATPAK_DEST}/bin/ apply_extra android-studio-wrapper",
        "echo '[Desktop Entry]' > test.desktop",
        "echo 'Type=Application' >> test.desktop",
        "echo 'Name=Android Studio Test' >> test.desktop",
        "echo 'Exec=android-studio-wrapper' >> test.desktop",
        "echo 'Icon=com.google.AndroidStudio.Test' >> test.desktop",
        "echo 'Categories=Development;IDE;' >> test.desktop",
        "install -Dm644 test.desktop ${FLATPAK_DEST}/share/applications/${FLATPAK_ID}.desktop",
        "echo '<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>' > test.metainfo.xml",
        "echo '<component type=\"desktop-application\">' >> test.metainfo.xml",
        "echo '  <id>com.google.AndroidStudio.Test</id>' >> test.metainfo.xml",
        "echo '  <metadata_license>CC0-1.0</metadata_license>' >> test.metainfo.xml",
        "echo '  <project_license>Apache-2.0</project_license>' >> test.metainfo.xml",
        "echo '  <name>Android Studio Test</name>' >> test.metainfo.xml",
        "echo '  <summary>Test Build</summary>' >> test.metainfo.xml",
        "echo '  <description><p>Testing theme switching configuration.</p></description>' >> test.metainfo.xml",
        "echo '  <launchable type=\"desktop-id\">com.google.AndroidStudio.Test.desktop</launchable>' >> test.metainfo.xml",
        "echo '</component>' >> test.metainfo.xml",
        "install -Dm644 test.metainfo.xml ${FLATPAK_DEST}/share/metainfo/${FLATPAK_ID}.metainfo.xml",
        "echo \"<svg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' viewBox='0 0 10 10'><rect width='10' height='10' fill='purple'/></svg>\" > test.svg",
        "install -Dm644 test.svg ${FLATPAK_DEST}/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/${FLATPAK_ID}.svg"
      ],
      "sources": [
        {
          "type": "extra-data",
          "filename": "android-studio.tar.gz",
          "size": 1541218005,
          "only-arches": [
            "x86_64"
          ],
          "url": "https://dl.google.com/dl/android/studio/ide-zips/2026.1.2.10/android-studio-quail2-linux.tar.gz",
          "sha256": "64445a54092e7056c6eb7f1a89ad116d0feec2ef5f965b8e594d62abdb58590f"
        },
        {
          "type": "script",
          "dest-filename": "apply_extra",
          "commands": [
            "tar xzf android-studio.tar.gz --strip-components=1",
            "rm -f android-studio.tar.gz"
          ]
        },
        {
          "type": "script",
          "dest-filename": "android-studio-wrapper",
          "commands": [
            "/app/extra/bin/studio $@"
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

    Then you install flatpak-builder, build your custom Flatpak and when finalised you can test it out:

    $ sudo dnf -y install flatpak-builder git
$ flatpak-builder --user --install --force-clean --disable-rofiles-fuse build-dir com.google.AndroidStudio.Test.json
$ flatpak run --command=dbus-monitor com.google.AndroidStudio.Test

    If the last command displays content it means dbus-monitor is now part of your Flatpak’s environment and you can safely launch the full appplication:

    $ flatpak run com.google.AndroidStudio.Test

    I ran all inside a toolbx so that I can get rid of it again easily. Also it should not affect your existing Flathub Android Studio installation, it is a completely parallel Flatpak (com.google.AndroidStudio.Test).

    Now the best moment comes, going into Settings>Appearance and enabling “Sync with OS“. Immediately Android Studio should change its theme to the system one. An easy way to change your theme if you have sunrise & sunset as triggers, is to simply change your location in the KDE Plasma settings e.g. to the other side of the planet, then you can quickly revert back and forth.

    As this is only a personal solution I have also created an issue at the Flathub repo so hopefully we will soon see this Android Studio Flatpak correctly switching light to dark themes and viceversa automatically for everyone.

  • WordPress + CDATA nightmare

    Do you know what is worse than not knowing the solution or even the reason to a problem?

    Well, that must be, knowing that you have experienced the same problem in the past and resolved it, but no matter how much you try, you can not remember at all what the problem was due and what you did to fix it.

    So this evening several hours went by due to a silly and stupid WordPress issue I already fixed once in the past but lost during an upgrade. This time I wanted to make sure I got the solution written down as I would probably forget it again.

    On my Marbella news site I was working on embedding an external flash video inside an iframe, which itself was invoked via Javascript to avoid the W3 Validator complaining about XHTML 1.1 and iframes being taboo.

    Basically it was WordPress’ over-zealous filters that caught a greater-than sign (>) and converted it to the equivalent HTML entity (&gt;). The most annoying thing is that I already have the Raw HTML plugin installed which disables WordPress’ text filtering. And it also worked fine for the rest of the Javascript and HTML tags in the page text. It was just on one single character, namely in the CDATA closing tag with // ]]> converted to // ]]&gt;.

    After searching many different combinations I finally hit it on the nail. I was not alone either.

    The annoying culprit is this little line in /wp-includes/post-template.php, which I once more commented out:

    $content = str_replace(']]>', ']]&gt;', $content);

    For some reason the WordPress developers have not yet fixed this issue after 3 years of it being reported.

    As a big fan of open source I appreciate the time and money spent by volunteers in many similar projects, however this is not the first time I see quick to fix issues hanging around for ages, simply due to people preferring to have an academic discussion on who can provide the most elegant solution, instead of simply fixing the issue first and talk later.

    Sometimes I wonder how projects ever become real projects.

    Anyhow there was a happy ending as you can see for yourself.

  • Remove white border on images in WP

    When posting last time I realised my example images had a little white border around them. For other occasions it may have been nice but this time I needed it without any borders.

    Another example below, left with white border and right with no border:

    test image test image

    To remove that automatically added border when you submit your post using WordPress do the following:

    1. Open your post for editing.
    2. Click on the image in question and select the Edit Image option.
    3. Click on the Advanced Settings tab on the top.
    4. Insert a 0 (zero digit) in the Border field under Image Properties.
    5. Save.

    Pretty simple stuff but thought I would share it in case someone else was looking for a remedy.

  • Find a Windows Vista MAC Address

    Yesterday eve I had to add a laptop to my network which is using MAC address filtering. The laptop ran Windows Vista and I tried to locate its MAC address by using the good old ipconfig within a command prompt. This gave no results as apparently the network details only get listed once an actual network connection is made. As you probably have realised this is a catch-22 situation as without the MAC address registered on the router I was never going to make a network connection in the first place…!

    Actually the weird thing is that the MAC address is normally on a sticker on the bottom of laptops, but in this case there was no such sticker.

    Google as in most other cases provided a quick fix by pointing me in the right direction. There is a command specifically for this task named funnily enough: getmac.