How to display Korean characters on openSUSE Leap 42.1

If you do a web search for this you will find a confusing amount of information for various distros. Some of it will relate to Korean keyboard input. At the moment I just want to display Korean characters instead of a square box with the Unicode; input comes later.

It turns out that the openSUSE developers have made it really easy. Here is the Reddit post that solved my problem: Korean fonts in openSUSE

There isn't much I can add to this solution except to mention that it installed a whole bunch of packages to cater for input methods (several, which I intend to explore later), KDE, Mozilla (Firefox and Thunderbird), Libreoffice, and even GIMP. So all those subsystems are sorted out in one fell swoop.

The other thing I want to mention is that other languages can be added to the secondary support list in YaST so presumably this solution will work for those.

I'm sorry if this doesn't help you with other distros. Hopefully your distro implemented a comprehensive solution in the configuration tool. Try that before you delve too deeply into the system.

Setting event timezone in Lightning (Thunderbird)

This has been a solved problem since 2008 but it may not be obvious to everybody so I'm publicising it here.

You can set the timezone of individual events in Lightning. When you edit an event, there are timezone links next to the start and end times. You can see it in this page's screenshot. The link colour may not always stand out. Clicking on the link brings up a timezone chooser map where you can change the timezone of the event. If the start and end times are linked, you only need to change one. Also if you have used a foreign timezone before, a shortcut is provided.

It seems however, from limited testing, that for synced calendars such as Gcal, existing events have to be edited at both sides for the timezone to stick, even though the time is correct.

An essential feature for those of us who work or communicate across timezones, or have deadlines in other timezones, e.g. taking a MOOC.

Now if only the ICS files sent to me always had the correct timezone.

Is Trackerbird maxing out your CPU? Here's how to remove it

After my recent OS upgrade I found that Thunderbird would pop up a dialog box every now and then saying that a script had stopped responding. A top command showed Thunderbird was consuming all of one CPU. I have multiple cores but this would be a problem for people with a single core, and in addition isn't good for power consumption. Also the status bar at the bottom showed either thousands of items remaining to be indexed, or Initializing...

A search showed somebody with the same issue. My situation was worse. Even though I disabled Trackerbird from the Addons Manager, I could not shut Thunderbird down properly to run without this addon. Every time I started up Thunderbird, it said I had to restart to disable Trackerbird. In addition, there was no Remove button. A search showed that the addon is a system one, and comes from tracker-miner-thunderbird. Removing the package with zypper fixed the problem once and for all. No more items remaining to index, no more maxing out one CPU. The package may be named different in your distro; mine is openSUSE.

I surmise that some of my mailboxes, being POPS or IMAPS connections that are not always connected, caused Trackerbird to spin its wheels trying to index the mailboxes.

As a personal gripe, why do Linux desktops foist indexing tools upon me without asking me if I want my data indexed or not? I have no use for indexing since I know where my documents are. I've also disabled akonadi, nepomuk and strigi because they were eating up CPU for no benefit to me. Answers to me on the back of a postage stamp.