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A few weeks ago, I finally got around to upgrading my Ubuntu desktop to Hardy Heron. Like many others, I found that the cursor in gnome-terminal had inexplicably started blinking again, and there was no longer a preference to disable it. Fortunately, finding a fix was easy. Applying the patch and rebuilding the .deb package was even easier. But after installing the patched package, the update-notifier immediately informed me that there was one update available: gnome-terminal. It seems that APT prefers packages in the repository over locally installed packages.

I ignored this for a while, and just dealt with the “updates available” icon always being in the notification area. I tried searching google several times, and eventually came across this forum post, which led to this article containing the answer I was looking for.

I could probably just pin gnome-terminal, but I want to make sure I get any future updates for it. I decided the easiest way to fix this annoyance was by appending a short string (+noblink) to the version.

First, fetch the source and update the version:

$ apt-get source gnome-terminal
$ cd gnome-terminal-2.22.1
$ debchange -v 2.22.1-0ubuntu2+noblink

At this point, the default editor will open the debian/changelog file so you can describe the change. Enter a short comment, like “disable the blinkin cursor”, save the file and exit the editor.

Next, patch the source. Jay Cornwall’s patch is not currently on-line, but it’s a simple fix: just edit src/terminal-screen.c and change this line

terminal_widget_set_cursor_blinks (screen->priv->term, blink);

to this

terminal_widget_set_cursor_blinks (screen->priv->term, FALSE);

Finally, build and install the package:

$ debuild -rfakeroot binary
$ sudo dpkg -i ../gnome-terminal*.deb

Tags: gnome-terminal, linux

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.