TeXstudio under Ubuntu and equivs

Environment: Linux Mint and Ubuntu; separate TeXlive installation

The author of TeXstudio used to distribute deb files for each Linux distribution.  Understandably, that is laborious.  So now, only the PPA is given.  But if you add the PPA to your Linux "software sources" list and try to install TeXstudio, it had dependency links to the whole TeXlive system in the synaptic package library and tries to install all that too.  

The way round this is to create a dummy "TeXlive" installation without these dependencies using the "equivs" system.  (see here and here).

Steps:

1. sudo apt-get install equivs
2. Create a control file with this content:


   Section: tex
   Package: texlive-dummy
   Provides: tex-common, texlive-common, texlive-latex-base, texlive-metapost, texlive-xetex, texlive-base-bin, texlive-base-bin-doc, tex-common, tex-gyre, texlive-base, texlive-binaries, texlive-fonts-recommended, texlive-latex-base, texlive-latex-extra, texlive-latex-recommended, texlive-pictures
   Description: texlive dummy package
    This package provides dpkg with the information that
    there the texlive packages are already installed.

3. Run the following:
   equivs-build texlive.ctl
   That produces the file texlive-dummy_1.0_all.deb  This is asudo dpkg -i texlive-dummy_1.0_all.deb "pretend" TeXlive (texlive-latex-base) package that contains no dependencies.
   
4. Run
   sudo dpkg -i texlive-dummy_1.0_all.deb
Now, your system believes it has installed texlive-latex-base, so dependencies on that will be satisfied.

5. You can now install the TeXstudio PPA and install the TeXstudio program in the normal way.

IBUS bug fix ... again (sigh!)

Further to https://cikitsa.blogspot.ca/2012/01/ibus-bug-fix.html, I found the same bug cropping up in Linux Mint 18.1, with IBUS 1.15.11.

Some applications don't like IBUS + m17n, and certain input mim files. For example, LibreOffice and JabRef.  Trying to type "ācārya" will give the result is "ācāry a". And in other strings, some letters are inverted: "is" becomes "si" and so forth.

Here's the fix.

Create a file called, say ibus-setting.sh with the following one-line content:

export IBUS_ENABLE_SYNC_MODE=0

Copy the file ibus-setting.sh to the directory /etc/profile.d/, like this:

sudo cp ibus-setting.sh /etc/profile.d

Make the file executable, like this:

sudo chmod +x /etc/profile.d/ibus-setting.sh

Logout and login again.

Phew!

This fixes the behaviour of IBUS + m17n with most applications, including LibreOffice and Java applications like JabRef.  However, some applications compiled with QT5 still have problems.  So, for example, you have to use the version of TeXStudio that is compiled with QT4, not QT5. [Update September 2018: QT5 now works fine with Ibus, so one can use the QT5 version of TeXstudio with no problem.]