Programs Won't Launch in Win7 64-bit

UPDATE (10/7/11): I never did find an actual solution for this problem. Every time I thought I had something, it would always come back. In the end, I had to reinstall the system. :/

So, I've been running into an issue on my Lenovo Thinkpad X120e when booted into Windows 7 where programs won't launch from the taskbar when I click on them. The little transparent box shows up around it, it sits for a second, then fades away.

I found, however, that I could run things from the command line, though that was not a good fix. After futzing around with the startup applications in msconfig, I found that it would start programs just fine if I turned off all of my startup items. This was also suboptimal, so I set to tracking down the culprit from the startup items by enabling them one-by-one and restarting each time.

UPDATE (6/5/11): Turns out my below "fix" may have just been coincidental, because my issue returned. It hung around through several reboots until I ran Windows Update and updated my video card driver, after which it went away again. Whether this fixes things permanently, we'll have to see.

I'll update this post if anything changes.

Original, ineffectual post:

Eventually, I found the problem to be related to the Sidebar application, which powers the CPU frequency and weather widgets I like to have sitting on my desktop. :(

I haven't had any problems since I turned it off.

How to run ZSNES Super Nintendo Emulator on 64-bit Ubuntu Linux

ZSNES is my favorite SNES emulator in the Windows world, but it can be a real pain to get going in 64-bit Linux. Most tutorials will suggest you set up a chroot jail and maintain a parallel set of 32-bit libs so that you can run the 32-bit version, but this is both a hassle and overly complex for many users.

I tried to compile my own binaries from source to avoid this, but I kept running into architecture errors and ended up throwing in the towel after a few hours of fiddling. Luckily, a ZSNES developer known as Nach has provided specialized precompiled binaries for a variety of architectures that worked a treat for me.

Just follow this link, scroll down a bit, and then download the binary that matches your architecture. I have an Athlon 64 X-2 4000+, so I selected the Athlon64-SSE3 binary.

Next, install libsdl-dev either through Synaptic or by typing sudo aptitude install libsdl-dev into a terminal.

Once downloaded and decompressed, you should find your binary inside, which you can run by double-clicking it or typing ./zsnes into a terminal. If you double-click and nothing happens, try running it through the terminal to spot any errors. I personally encountered this error:

Unable to poll /dev/input/event8. Make sure you have read permissions to it

repeated 9 times (1 for each /dev/input/event* 0-8).

I was able to get around this by running ZSNES as root (i.e., sudo ./zsnes), which is certainly not ideal, but I haven't found a way around it yet.

If you take this route, be aware that the default location for saved games will not be ~/.zsnes as it normally would be. Instead, it will be located in /root/.zsnes (since you're running as root). This in mind, you may have to copy your .srm files into this directory for them to be recognized. When I first got my copy to run, I couldn't get it to recognize any of my saved files, even though I tried changing the path for saved files under the preferences. However, once I copied the files into the /root/.zsnes directory, everything showed up just dandy.

Using the native 64-bit binary referenced above also had another unexpected (perhaps coincidental) positive effect of making my gamepad's d-pad work correctly. Using dfreer's zsnes32 binary worked well for me in most respects, but it just wouldn't recognize my Logitech Precision gamepad's d-pad. The buttons worked fine, but when it came time to assign the directions, it would just sit there dumbly, even though jscalibrator and cat /dev/input/js0 both showed plenty of action. This problem remained no matter how many kernel modules I loaded (usbhid, analog, etc.), until I tried Nach's binary. Now it works just fine. Go figure...

This information was written for Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, but it should be applicable to other distros as well.

HandBrake 0.9.2 and yasm 0.7.1 precompiled deb binary for 64-bit linux

Update (5/15/09): The binaries on this page are woefully out of date, but I have working binaries built from the latest code available in my PPA repository. Directions for adding it to your package manager are available here.

Download: HandBrakeCLI-AMD64 0.9.2 (Thanks Alexander!)
Download: yasm-AMD64 0.7.1
yasm-i386_0.7.1 (it's in a tarball, but the deb is inside)

I just got finished doing some building for HandBrakeCLI. They used to provide a precompiled 64-bit binary on the official site, but they've stopped for some unknown reason, so I decided to provide a copy of my own.

This binary doesn't need to be installed. Just navigate to the directory that contains it and type

./HandBrakeCLI

followed by any desired options (for more information on using the command line with HandBrake, visit the HandBrake wiki).

One of the biggest pains in compiling HandBrake (other than the lack of a comprehensive list of dependencies) is the fact that, to get the most out of HandBrake's processor-specific optimizations, you have to have the yasm assembler installed. Unfortunately, the version in Ubuntu's repos only supports instructions up to SSE2.

To correct this, I had to download and compile a newer version of yasm (namely 0.7.0) before I built HandBrake. Once I got that going, HandBrake recognized my cpu's extensions and accelerated the encoding speed to approximately 3.5-4x faster than the stock, non-yasm compile.

This binary should recognize any extensions present on my cpu: an AMD X-2 4000+ cpu, which has all the usual goodies up to SSE3 (so you fancy-pants core2duo users are out of luck on the SSSE3). Edit: A fella named Alexander was kind enough to supply a build with additional support for SSSE3 and Cache_64. Thanks Alexander!

My binaries include the original source code, which I have not modified. If you have any problems with them, please leave a comment or drop me an email and I'll see if I can correct the problem.