How to make Avidemux work under Ubuntu 13.10

Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander
Avidemux 2.5.4

I was quite disappointed in Ubuntu 13.10, when I first tried it last year. Several apps were broken and many things did not function.

One of those apps was Avidemux, which I am using regularly at home to encode videos. Note that I'm talking about avidemux2-gtk version.

In Ubuntu 13.10, Avidemux would run, but after selecting some menu item which opens a dialogue window and then closing that dialogue would always hang Avidemux.

For example Help / About will open the About window and when you click OK, the window will hang with the button still appearing pressed and after a moment the main window will fade into black-and-white indicating an unresponsive window. Only xkill will help out and put Avidemux out of its misery.


I recently decided to try again. At my workplace I had upgraded to 13.10 a while ago, as I did not need Avidemux in there. A lot of time had passed and I thought perhaps it had been fixed already and Avidemux would now work.

I installed Avidemux and surprise - it worked. No more hangs. But as I had upgraded my machine at work from 13.04 to 13.10, I was not sure as of why it worked. I decided to try it out also in fresh installation into VirtualBox.

I installed a fresh 13.10 64-bit image into a new VM, then, without installing the VirtualBox additions, upgraded the packages and then installed Avidemux. The result - it hung, like before.

I started to look for differences between the two machines. Into my work machine, I had installed a mainline 3.12 kernel - maybe that was the solution? Nope, that did not help, the Avidemux in VirtualBox would still hang.

Then I noticed that the Avidemux in my main machine was displaying its menus inside the window, and not in the global menu bar. I also noticed, that gnome-terminal, for example, was also displaying its menus inside the main window, so I ran dpkg --get-selections|sort in both machines and compared the selections. And there was the answer - my main machine was missing the following packages:

unity-gtk2-module
unity-gtk3-module
unity-gtk-module-common

I removed these packages from my VirtualMachine installation and confirmed that Avidemux would no longer hang. Problem solved.

How I got the Precise Pangolin to play ball.

Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin

At first I thought that it would be impossible to get Ubuntu 12.04 to be usable in my workplace environment, but after a lot of tweaking and time, I have finally made the Precise Pangolin work exactly the way I wanted.

In the following I bring a set of changes I had to do to make it work.

1. The language problem (see my original post about this)
   The main problem is, that by choosing Estonian as your language, then in addition to the LANG environment variable, all of the LC_* variables are set to "et_EE.UTF-8" as well. This, as I wrote earlier, makes regexp [a-z] to exclude the letters coming after "s". The original solution I used previously was to set LANG back to English "en_US.UTF-8" locale in .profile, but this has the side-effect of turning everything into English.
   
   My current solution is much more elegant and will solve the regexp problem, while retaining the Estonian language - add these two lines into .profile:
   export LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"