Category: Uncategorized

“File does not exist” error in LibreOffice on Fedora 31

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2020-01-06

14:20

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Description: When trying to open a document with international characters (“ääkköset”) in its path or filename, LibreOffice fails to open it and says that the file does not exist”. This is on Fedora 31.

TL;DR: In KDE settings, set region to “American English (en_US)” and the detailed settings to “Finland (sms_FI)” or “Suomi – suomi (fi_FI)”.

Longer explanation: From the get-go this seems to be related to locales because the problem only occurs with files with international characters in their path/filename. Interestingly I could open such files when I started LibreOffice Writer from shell (Konsole/bash) with “libreoffice –writer”. I decided to check what the locale settings were in Bash and KDE. In Bash I ran “locale” which gave me basically LANG=”en_US.UTF-8″ (I forgot to save the exact output). Then I ran “locale > ~/locale.txt” from the KDE Application Launcher and checked the output file:

LANG=sms_FI.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="sms_FI.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="sms_FI.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="sms_FI.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="sms_FI.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="sms_FI.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="sms_FI.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="sms_FI.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="sms_FI.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="sms_FI.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="sms_FI.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="sms_FI.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="sms_FI.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

So the locale settings were in fact different when launching from KDE vs. Bash! I tested that I could actually make the same error happen when launching LibreOffice from Bash by saying “LANG=sms_FI.UTF-8  libreoffice –writer”.

A short explanation of the rationale behind my locale settings: I prefer to use English as my system language (easier to search for error messages etc) but keep the other locale settings to Finnish, except date and time where I like the ISO 8601 date and time formats better.

I did a lot of reading on the Internet about this but in the end I decided to just set the default system locale to en_US and adjust the date/time and other settings to sms_FI. If you prefer to use Finnish month names etc. you might like to use fi_FI instead. So far nothing I care about has broken so I guess this is a suitable workaround for me.

My current Firefox configuration

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2018-01-25

19:27

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IT, Security, Uncategorized

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This is a post about my current Firefox configuration and usage. This was mainly motivated by me noticing the Containers feature and the change into Firefox Quantum which prompted some chances in my usual extensions.

Containers

Containers is a neat feature that lets me separate different accounts, e.g. I can be logged on to my personal Gmail and our club’s Gmail at the same time without using different browsers or private windows. On my Fedora laptop this seems to be baked into Firefox but at my Windows-running work laptop I had to install the Firefox Multi-Account Containers add-on.

Extensions

  • uBlock Origin is what I use for blocking ads
  • Cookie AutoDelete deletes cookies and such automatically when I close a tab, like it says on the tin
  • HTTPS Everywhere tries to run as much of my traffic over encrypted connections (HTTPS) as possible
  • Gesturefy lets me use mouse gestures for many common browser tasks. At least on my work laptop, my personal laptop rarely has a mouse connected…

Other stuff

On the Themes side I’m currently on a “dark period” so I’m just using the default Dark Theme. I’m also using Firefox Sync. It used to be quite handy when I was using both a desktop and a laptop, but currently I’m mostly syncing between my laptop and mobile phone. It’s also nice to have a backup of my browser settings for when I decide to do a reinstall etc.

Bubbling under

I have a habit of running into interesting articles and bookmarking them, never to actually read them. It might be an interesting experiment to use Pocket to save those pages and then never read them.

EFF’s Privacy Badger might be a worthy addition to uBlock Origin, or totally redundant. Might take a closer look some day, or not.

I should totally hand in my geek card, but I’ve never used NoScript Security Suite.

Sometimes I’ve used the Image Search Options and Video DownloadHelper, but currently I don’t even have those installed. I started to use youtube-dl to a while ago and haven’t really looked back. I need to download stuff from YouTube so rarely that it’s simpler to use the command line than install a plugin, configure it and maybe even wander around in an ever-changing user interface before getting the job done. youtube-dl also has cool options for downloading entire playlists.