Calibre and Mint 14 (Cinnamon)

[DiapDealer]

I just installed Mint 14 with its Cinnamon desktop environment (Gnome Shell fork) because, well... who doesn't love the smell of a fresh OS install on a Friday morning?
(Mint 14 64-bit [based on Ubuntu 12.10] w/Cinnamon; on AMD...)

Anyway... after installing calibre, I noticed some glitches (before anyone gets excited--I expected glitches; this isn't a "why won't calibre work perfectly in every single environment I toss it into?" kind of post) with the main user interface. I've seen a few other posts where calibre was crashing on MATE or Cinnamon on Mint 13, but not much else. Calibre's not crashing on me; it's just that when the main window opens, it's very small and out of sync with the mouse-pointer. At the top left-hand corner, everything is in sync, but gets worse the farther down and right you go. Once you get used to clicking on a button that isn't under your mouse-pointer, all other dialogs open and function as expected--normal size; pointer in sync.

It's the same whether I use the System Default UI theme or calibre's UI theme -- NVidia Proprietary X drivers or X.org's Nouveau display driver: small main window w/out of sync pointer and all other dialogs behaving as expected.

Then I discovered that if I start calibre in GUI debug mode (calibre-debug -g), everything works as expected! Which isn't that much of an inconvenience for me, truthfully--I run calibre in debug mode a lot for plugin development. So I don't mind--and maybe the info will help others out in a pinch.

I guess my questions are:

1) Why? What's different about the non-debug GUI main window-launch? Any under the hood tweaks that I can look into to alleviate the issue?
NOTE: no errors or warnings in the debug output. And each time a new terminal is launched, the first "calibre-debug -g" might result in the same quirky behavior as first described... the second (and consecutive) "calibre-debug -g" issued in that terminal will behave correctly. A desktop shortcut created as "calibre-debug -g" seems to work every time. session? .bashrc/bash_profile? env var?

2) What kind of performance hit can I realistically expect by running in debug mode? I'll be honest; I don't do any bulk-(imports|metadata edits|conversions)--I'm a one-book-at-a-time, no-custom-column-having, dabbler at plugin development.

[kovidgoyal]

1) There's pretty much no difference. The only difference on linux is that various print statements in the code get enabled that print out diagnostic info to stdout

2) There should be no significant performance hit for most things. The occassional task might cause a lot of debug info to be printed to stdout that might be slowed down, but that should be rare.

The only thing I can think of is that in deug mode there is some extra error handling calibre injects into the main Qt event loop which might be working around whatever the underlying error is.

[DiapDealer]

Thanks Kovid. I'll keep poking around a bit to see if anything jumps out at me, but I'm pretty content with running in debug mode if that's what it takes.

[chaley]

One huge difference is that the python files are compiled on the user's machine when running from source. Is there any chance that the different execution environments would result in different .pyd files? Or use different shared libraries?

[DiapDealer]

I'm not running from source, though. Just the standard binary installer on a virgin OS. I'm just launching in debug mode.

[chaley]

Teach me to not read the posts carefully. Sorry about the extra noise.

[DiapDealer]

That's OK. It would've been a reasonable question/explanation had I been running from source.

[Manichean]

This isn't much help, but I'm running Calibre on Mint 13 using Cinnamon with no issues. I remember having some display problems as well, however, the thread I started back then isn't very helpful. What I can offer, though, is giving whatever config file part that should be needed as reference, as soon as I'm home from work (which will still be a few hours).

[DiapDealer]

That would be great! There's apparently a crap-ton of changes in Cinnamon 1.6.x (not sure if you've updated from the 1.4 that came with Mint 13), but any nod in the right direction would be helpful. Thanks!

EDIT: Actually, that thread IS helpful -- in the fact that that you've described exactly (and much, much better, BTW) the behavior I'm seeing on my screen. So I have high-hopes your forthcoming config details will at least be relevant.

[Manichean]

No, I'm waiting and using 1.4 until 1.6 hits the repos for Maya. What configs do you want to see?

[DiapDealer]

Your previous thread indicates that you fixed your issue with a change to the gui.json file.

[DiapDealer]

AHA!! I lied in my first post. A custom column was the culprit. After deleting my gui.json file and letting calibre rebuild it, everything was fine. Changed to calibre's interface style ... still fine. Changed the icon size on the toolbars to small ... still fine. Removed the stuff from the toolbars that I always remove so that everything fits on my tiny screen ... still fine. Changed libraries to one that had a custom Read/Unread column ... BOOM! Quarter-sized visible main window that the mouse believed was filling the screen.

I don't need the Read/Unread column that much (I forgot I set it up, to tell the truth), so that's my fix for now. Maybe the info will help someone else.

Thanks Manichean! Your nudge resulted in me nailing down my issue.

EDIT: GUI debug mode had absolutely no relevance to my situation. The fact that I had changed libraries to one without a custom column is the reason I had it working all along.

[kovidgoyal]

@DiapDealer: That indicates that the custom column is causing an unhandled exception to be raised in Qt's event loop. Try running calibre in debug mode and post the debug log (with the custom column). There may be some output in the debug log that will help narrow down the underlying cause.

[DiapDealer]

Will do!

EDIT: Sorry, I can't get it to spit out any error messages no matter what I do.

user@Nadia ~ $ calibre-debug -g
calibre 0.9.18  isfrozen: True is64bit: True
Linux-3.5.0-23-generic-x86_64-with-debian-wheezy-sid Linux ('64bit', 'ELF')
('Linux', '3.5.0-23-generic', '#35-Ubuntu SMP Thu Jan 24 13:15:40 UTC 2013')
Python 2.7.3
Linux: ('debian', 'wheezy/sid', '')
Starting up...

Started up in 2.28 seconds with 571 books

I've "narrowed" it down to some sort of weird combination of: calibre's interface style, small icons, a "yes/no" custom column, and which library was open the last time calibre was closed (whether or not that library had the custom column).

And debug mode does appear to affect the scenario at times (though no real pattern has emerged). Sort of a Schroedinger's Cat scenario.

[Manichean]

Well, I'm glad you got it worked out.