Laptop doesn't boot. Many problems at the same time

Although it is likely possible to save your installation, you should seriously consider the time cost. Since you still have the ability to get access to the filesystem, the quickest path to a working installation may be to backup your files and re-install.

If you do want to attempt to fix it (it would be a good learning experience) then please resubmit discrete questions. Looks like you have at least three areas to address (1) you have a package that is not fully installed, (2) either your grub configuration is wrong or your kernel is missing/broken, (3) something you did since yesterday broke your boot sequence, so you should discover what it was to avoid doing it again.

For (1), see E: dpkg was interrupted... run 'sudo dpkg --configure -a'

For (2), you will need to do some debugging to see what the issue is. Boot to the recovery shell (or preferably) to a live USB disk. From there you can check that the MBR (or UEFI) is pointing to Grub, that Grub is pointing to your kernel, and that your kernel parameters are pointing to your root filesystem. Until we get some more information, we won't know which is broken / how to fix it.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/Troubleshooting

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingKernelBoot


Ubuntu upgrade to 18.04 LTS from 17.10 failed

I experienced the same problem when upgrading to 16.04 on one of my computers.  I initially had booting problems, but it finally booted.  I got the same unstable error messages you describe.  I run a series of these commands:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt upgrade
$ sudo apt dist-upgrade

I paid attention to the screen output of commands and ran the suggested command for that error.

Initially cat /etc/lsb-release showed the previous version.

It became stable by running the above commands 3 times.  cat /etc/lsb-release showed the intended 16.04.  That was two years ago.  It's still running perfectly without any problems.

I believe trying to downgrade would be more problematic than fixing the upgrade issues.

All the commands was running from the console without GUI until the errors were addressed.

If the above commands (because of the /etc/apt/sources.list repository configuration) bring stability to 17.10, you should be able to complete your release upgrade to 18.04.


Like .deb packages Click packages are ar (not tar!) archives so you can unpack them on the command line using

ar x file_name

There's a specification for the Click file format at readthedocs.org but I don't know if it is up to date.


Backspace key for back/forward in a open window

Back: Alt + Left Arrow button.

Forward: Alt + Right Arrow button.

Take a look at this also:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KeyboardShortcuts
What are some useful keyboard shortcuts?
What are the new Nautilus (3.6) shortcuts in Ubuntu 13.04?


Kernel panic on boot after fresh install of 16.04

It turns out this problem is associated with an installation of a 64bit Ubuntu using a USB created by unetbootin..

Creating a disk using Linux Live USB creator and installing from it fixed the problem.

I still wonder what was wrong with the init, if someone has any insight regarding this error...


Headphone jack does not cut speakers in 12.04

Could you please report a bug and make your comment on the bellow link for permanent solution??

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/alsa-driver/+bug/995684


Putty ssh client fails with Segmentation fault after upgrade to 17.10

PuTTy requires the Xorg options to be selected when logging in.  Answer was detailed in:

How do you switch from Wayland back to Xorg in Ubuntu 17.10?

Thanks


Shortcuts no longer work for move window to left/right of screen in 12.04

The System Settings menu has a Keyboards item that you can use to re-bind the shortcut:


Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS length of support if installing Xubuntu Packages

Ubuntu Server is not intended for use with a Graphical Interface.

When the time comes and the GUI you have installed ends the support, you won't receive any updates, new features or bug fixes for that GUI.
It might not be of your interest about new features, but bug fixes are almost identical to security fixes. So, from this perspective yes you will have a problematic server running.

Also, I suggest to read this answer as describes why Ubuntu Server developers do not recommend installing X on a server.

I'm also quoting here.

  Most Ubuntu Server developers do not recommend installing X on a
  server. There are multiple reasons for not installing a GUI.

  Some reasons to not install a GUI include:

  You'll have more code subject to security vulnerabilities, more packages that need updating, and more server downtime.
  X11 and desktop packages are not supported for the full 5 year lifecycle of the LTS server release.
  Performance may suffer because resources (memory, hard disk space, CPU, etc.) will be consumed by the GUI.
  It is best practice to only install needed software on a production server.
  The GUI may include other network services that are inappropriate for a server.
  One of the goals of Ubuntu Desktop Edition is to make it easier for users to use Linux. When installing some desktop environments,
  services that you may not specifically want will be installed. For
  example avahi-daemon, which is used to help configure networking,
  adds another open port and may introduce unwanted DNS conflicts with a
  .local domain.

  So for the most secure server it is best to not install a GUI.


Make use of "gfx_switch_status" in sony-laptop?

I have not tested this method but you can try it.

Open a terminal and type : sudo gedit /etc/acpi/events/sonyswitch

Make the contents :

event=sony/hotkey
action=zenity --info --text=%e

Save the file.

Open a terminal and type : sudo apt-get install zenity to install zenity

Restart ACPI with "kill -SIGHUP pidof acpid"

Move the switch to both SPEED and STAMINA and write down what the message box says for both

Open gedit and type :

#/bin/bash

if [ "$1" == "WHAT THE MESSAGE BOX SAID FOR SPEED" ]
   sudo prime-select nvidia

if [ "$1" == "WHAT THE MESSAGE BOX SAID FOR STAMINA" ]
   sudo prime-select Intel

Save the file in ~/vaioswitch and open a terminal and run chmod +x ~/vaioswitch

Open a terminal and type : sudo gedit /etc/acpi/events/sonyswitch

Edit the contents to

Change line 2 to  action=/home/YOUUSERNAME/vaioswitch %e

Fix any syntax errors in the script and reboot you computer.It should work now


Unable to import PostgreSQL database in Ubuntu

You probably need to use the system user postgres to import your database.

  sudo su - postgres

or

  sudo -u postgres -i


lightest ubunto flavor for distance learning

Lubuntu 18.04 would work with these laptops, and is quite light. It would be supported till 2021. Even after that, it will be much safer to use it than Windows. You would still be able to use latest browsers with snap/flatpak.
The issue is that MS Teams is a bloatware. It alone consumes more than 1 GB of RAM. Recent versions of Chromium and Firefox also consume a lot of RAM.
However, as mentioned in the comments, you can look for lighter distros, which are not official flavors of Ubuntu.


openssl 1.0.1 update on 12.04 has broken a curl command

Without having more detail about the server my guess is that the server uses weak Diffie-Hellmann keys and that the SSL handshake will fail because OpenSSL was fixed to enforce stronger DH keys. The reason for this fix are the recent publication of the Logjam attack.

From the Changelog

  SECURITY IMPROVEMENT: reject dh keys smaller than 768 bits ...

Affected are only DH ciphers. To disable use of DH ciphers you might use the ciphers option, i.e.

  curl --ciphers 'DEFAULT:!DH' url

But you should also fix your server. For more information on how to do this see here.


How can I get Ubuntu 20.04 to boot on Threadripper 3990X?

I was given this tip elsewhere:

  The reason it's kernel panicking is it can't mount root fs.  It can't mount root fs because it's encrypted.  It can't decrypt it without an initrd.  Fix would be: add initrd line to grub config for 5.4.0.

I added this line to the GRUB entry for 5.4.0-29-generic, based on the one for 5.3.0-51-generic:

initrd /initrd.img-5.4.0-29-generic

I got the error message that the file was missing. I booted into 5.3.0-51-generic in recovery mode and dropped into a root shell. I checked /boot, and both initrd.img-5.3.0-51-generic and initrd.img-5.3.0-46-generic were there, but initrd.img-5.4.0-29-generic wasn't. I searched and came upon this question. Based on that, I tried apt reinstall -f linux-image-5.4.0-29-generic, but it quickly failed with an error message (I forget) and told me to run dpkg --configure -a. I did that. It ran through a bunch of packages, stopping for manual intervention only to let me decide whether to keep changes I had made to /etc/pulse/default.pa. I'm guessing Ubuntu didn't know how to handle this required manual intervention in the upgrade to 20.04 and just left the packages in a broken state before restarting. Anyways, after making my decision, dpkg continued and I saw these lines:

Processing triggers for linux-image-5.4.0-29-generic (5.4.0-29.33) ...
/etc/kernel/postinst.d/dkms:
 * dkms: running auto installation service for kernel 5.4.0-29-generic
   ...done.
/etc/kernel/postinst.d/initramfs-tools:
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-5.4.0-29-generic

After it was finished, I exited the shell, resumed normal booting, and it worked! Then I restarted, booting into the 5.4.0-29-generic kernel, and it worked again.


Where's the "log out" option after clicking the power icon?

Open gconf-editor (press Alt + F2, type gconf-editor, press Enter)

Navigate to /apps/indicator-session/

Make sure none of the checkboxes on the right pane are ticked:

However, it would be interesting to know why that happened (maybe worth reporting a bug).


here is the incomplete list for downloading linux softwares

softpedia
linuxsoft
linux.com
brother soft

But keep in mind that

  packaging system in ubuntu is much different from windows

Disclaimer

i dont know whether i can trust it or not :)


Crontab execution of multiple commands but last command is omitted

The /usr/sbin directory (where the upstart service command lives) isn't in the default crontab path, so you will either need to add an explicit PATH assignment in the top of your crontab file e.g.:

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin

or use the full path in your command

/usr/sbin/service nginx restart

You will need to do this whether you keep it as an in-line command or break it out into a shell script (although you'd then have the choice of setting the PATH in the script versus in the crontab file).

FWIW since variants of this question are frequently asked, here's the default cron environment on my 16.04 system, obtained by running /usr/bin/printenv > /tmp/cronenv from root's crontab:

LANGUAGE=en_CA:en
HOME=/root
LOGNAME=root
PATH=/usr/bin:/bin
LANG=en_CA.UTF-8
SHELL=/bin/sh
PWD=/root

Note how minimal it is - this is often why commands or scripts that run fine in an interactive shell fail when run from cron.


How to install wireless dongle driver without internet? (Ubuntu 18.04)

You can install build-essential from the Ubuntu installation media. Additional packages are in pool directory. It will require some dependencies, that are located there too.

The easiest way is to dump all the packages to some directory and install build-essential using dpkg.

Installing "D-Link" drivers from their site is not a good idea, but it is a different story for a different question.


When in Settings Background the image selection freezes and quits

I installed tweaks and rebooted. Tweaks now seems to work. Before rebooting it had an xml file showing for the background image selection. Now it has the /usr/share/backgrounds directory files.

sudo apt-get install tweaks


Unable to connect to secured wi-fi from Nexus 7 running Ubuntu Touch 13.04

Hi I had the same problem, after entering the correct password I was not able to access the wifi. However after going to system settings and doing a factory reset and system reset it connected straight away without re-entering any password. Unsure what the problem was but that was my fix.


Which version of ubuntu supports my card & how do i install the closed-source driver?

You may want to read  how to remove ATI drivers  before you install the new drivers.

You can download and install the video drivers from the AMD website. I have done this for my ATI card in the past, however the open source drivers gave me better performance than these ones.

Download the driver :
http://www2.ati.com/drivers/legacy/amd-driver-installer-catalyst-13.1-legacy-linux-x86.x86_64.zip

Open the folder you saved the downloaded file to and extract it contents.

Right click on the file that was extracted and click properties, then click on the permission tab and tick "Allow this file to run as a program".

After having done this, double click the extracted file - it should ask you for your root password and then it will run you though the setup and install your display drivers.


Assuming your mplayer has dvdnav support it's -

mplayer dvdnav:// -dvd-device /dev/XXX

Where typically now XXX is sr0 or in some cases sr1


Kernel timers are described here: http://www.xml.com/ldd/chapter/book/ch06.html#t5

A quick example for a kernel module can be seen under the section "code for /proc/jitimer".


Missing dependency 'libtag1c2a' when installing Musique 1.4 on Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak)

All right, well, since it has come to this... Try this package (same packaging as the official Ubuntu Yakkety package, but with 1.4 source).

For the paranoid (or those who want to build a 32 bits package), here's the Debian source packaging; the source for Musique 1.4 is here.

The package libtag1c2a is available for Precise and Trusty; in later versions it was renamed to libtag1v5. Ideally, the developer should provide a Xenial+ package which depends on the latter, or at least a Debian source package so that others can build one.

In the meantime, you can try to install the Trusty libtag1c2a package; hovever note that since libtag1c2a and libtag1v5 install the same files, you can't have both packages installed, so if you have packages which depend on libtag1v5, this won't work.

In that case, since you actually do have the required library, just under another package name, simply ignoring dependencies may actually work:

sudo dpkg --force-depends -i package.deb


It is not possible to run x86_64 linux version on a x686 CPU. See for example this answer.


Why does do-release-upgrade on 12.04 system not find 14.04.1 upgrade?

LTS releases are aimed at people who desire stability over the latest features.  For this reason we want to establish that the next LTS release is stable before its made available.

This happens with the first point i.e. When we release Ubuntu 14.04.1

This happened today 25 July 2014 as you can see from this release announcement on the fridge.

In the next few days you will start seeing an option to upgrade when you run the Update Manager.

There is no urgent need for you to update yet however.  Ubuntu 12.04 is supported till April 2017 and you can upgrade any time from when the Update manger first offers you 14.01 (some time in the next few days) till just before the current LTS release goes EOL.


Optimus Alienware m14x external HDMI display?

I had similar problem, and as far as I can tell there is no way to to run dual screen (e.g. extending desktop) with nvidia optimus. However, I found this tutorial http://www.webupd8.org/2012/08/get-hdmi-working-with-nvidia-optimus-on.html that allows you to run unity on one monitor and LXDE on the other. Of course, you are not limited to unity and LXDE but that is example used in tutorial. I hope this helps.


I am getting some error when I try to open plank by terminal of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. What can i do to get rid of this error message?

Plank requires you to use X Window System. On GNOME Wayland is the default window system since GNOME 3.22. This is the orignal bug report. It does not seem that the bug is fixed.
You can try to run GNOME on Xorg server. Check this comment on how to use gnome-xorg

When you login, after selecting your user just click the gear icon below the password field and select "Gnome on Xorg". Then finish logging in. That selection will be saved and future logins will use is by default.

OR
Edit the file /var/lib/AccountsService/users/<user_name>
Change the line that contains:XSession= to:
XSession=gnome-xorg


How can I control my others PC's music from my laptop?

Using a special music player
The most versatile of the music players might be the music player daemon. Your desktop will run the daemon. There are many clients available to remote control it. It is not the only option as far as remote control players go. Rhythmweb is another option but many more exist.
Using Pulseaudio
Pulseaudio is an abstraction layer giving programs access to your sound hardware. You can configure your Desktop as a "sink" for audio and your laptop as a "source. Then you will be able to stream all the sound from your laptop to your desktop on a very low level. See chronitis' answer and tutorial link for more information.
Using ssh
Probably the easiest and way if you already know ssh is this one:
Assuming your Laptop has an ssh client with X11 capabilities (installed by default on Ubuntu or MobaXTerm and many others on Windows) and your Desktop-PC is running Ubuntu.

Install ssh-server  / sudo apt-get install openssh-server on your desktop PC.

Make sure that the file /etc/ssh/sshd_config on your Desktop-PC has a line that says
PasswordAuthentication yes*

Use the command (ssh -CX user@desktop-PC NameOfYourMusicPlayer) on your laptop to start the music player of your Desktop-PC (it will run on your laptop but play sound on your desktop's speakers).

Enter your password on your Desktop-PC and wait for the player to load.

Substitute "user" for your username on your Desktop-PC, "desktop-PC" with the IP or hostname of your Desktop-PC and "NameOfYourMusicPlayer" with the name of your Desktop-PC's music player (e.g. Amarok, Banshee or Rhythmbox)
All music you want to play has to be present on your Desktop-PC. You cannot play music files located on your laptop. What you can do is move music files from you laptop to your desktop over network using scp or nautilus.

Warning: PasswordAutentication for ssh is a potential security risk. If your password is weak and your Router forwards the standard ssh-port (22) or if many people have access to the network your Desktop-PC and laptop are connected that might be a security risk and you should use another authentication method (see the ssh-tutorial for more information).*


Is there a command to open the shutdown GUI?

Shutdown:

/usr/lib/indicator-session/gtk-logout-helper --shutdown

Reboot

/usr/lib/indicator-session/gtk-logout-helper --restart

Logout

/usr/lib/indicator-session/gtk-logout-helper --logout

You can also use another dialog:

gnome-session-quit --power-off


What is the difference between these cinnamon repos?

Yes "stability" and "robustness" with quotes, because there is not any thing perfect in the world. We are not perfect. If you provide "robustness" then you will need to update your software, also applying patch for vulnerabilities, add the compatibility with other software and more things. In some point a patch to your software will not be enough, because the technology never ends. All of this patches are not in the original conception of the software, and as is a modification you will always lose stability in the process.

The principal main problem with mint repository in Ubuntu, could be, have a reference of mint specific software that is not present in ubuntu. This fact could be the cause of the installations of unnecessary packages, also incompatible packages, and as a result breaking of your installation. The mint repository is not aimed to be used in ubuntu.

With the first two repos, the main difference will be that the tsvetko repo can be used for different Ubuntu versions and the lestcape repo is only provided for ubuntu 14.04. I don't compile cinnamon for more ubuntu versions, because this task was done by the Debian mantainers and in my opinion more than a help, this will create incompatibilities and then instabilities.


How to install many softwares in one go and replicate Ubuntu?

Ubuntu's packages that you download are stored in /var/cache/apt/archives. A thing that might work would be to use scp to copy the files over the internet (via SSH) to your VM machine, and then install them using gdebi using th:

mkdir ~/Desktop/old-ubuntu-debs
scp -r USERNAME@IP_ADDRESS:/var/cache/apt/archives/ ~/Desktop/old-ubuntu-debs/
cd ~/Desktop/old-ubuntu-debs/
sudo dpkg -i ./*deb

You could alternatly copy the files from /var/cache/apt/archives to a USB stick or another form of storage, and install from there


Yes, GTK2 and GTK3 can co-exist. Even on 16.04, I can use older gtk-2 apps.

Geany even works on 16.04 Xenial.


Alternatives to install tor are:

You can install the torbrowser-launcher package wich gonna install tor in your home directory
You can add this repository https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/debian.html.en (installation in the system)
You can download the binary .tar.xz here https://www.torproject.org/download/


Can't find Simplify3D installation on the computer search. Don't remember initial setup

The first problem (settings not being stored) is a permission issue.

When you installed Simplify3d you had to run it as root, and after the install finished you very likely clicked start Simplify3d when it was offered to you. This IMO caused the program to be run as root, which means it stored the initial settings as root and you can't change them unless you keep running the software as root.

Regarding the launcher:

You could use menu-libre to create a custom launcher in your menu for example.

Regarding the account-limit reached issue:

This is absolutely a problem with Simplify3D and their implementation of DRM, you should contact them and they will be able to help.


Shortcut to terminal/bash script without 'instant close'

Add the command read x as the last line in run.sh.  This read will cause the command window to remain open until you press return.  If any messages are displayed this gives time to read them.

The read is the key.  Here is a shell script (I prefer it to bash although bash is becoming as popular).  BTW, the .sh at the end means shell script, not script.
You could change your launcher Exec option to:

Exec="/usr/local/crontona/run.sh"

And use the following run.sh script...

#!/bin/sh
./corona_run -prot tcp +maxcon 16
echo -n Press enter to end...
read x
echo Ending Now\!

Notice I escaped the ! in the Ending Now.  That last line is not needed unless you are running the script inside a terminal and want to have it echo execution.  This way, if the terminal appears and the script is run inside the terminal, the script will not exit until you press enter so the terminal cannot close until you are ready.


The GNOME Software center shows few apps

I meet the same problem. And I find a solution on another forum thread. It is work on my computer. The below is taken from another thread.

$pkill gnome-software
$sudo rm -r /var/cache/app-info
$sudo appstreamcli refresh --force --verbose

The link of solution from


Ok, so I managed to get it to work perfectly and here is the following process I took to install it:

Go to the Nvidia site and download the correct java for Linux (take not of its name and location)

After downloading, press Ctrl + alt + F1 and you will be brought to a terminal like window

Login and then cd to the location of your Nvidia file

Type the following commands:

Close the X Server:
sudo service lightdm stop

chmod the Nvidia File:
chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-xxx.xx.run

Run the Nvidia File:
sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-xxx.xx.run

Note: You may get an error telling you that Nouveau needs to be disabled. Just follow the prompts and it will offer an option to disable it automatically. After this type sudo shutdown -r now to restart the computer. Follow the above steps again and it should now be installed.

However

Your resolution will now probably be completely tiny due to it now being in power save mode. To fix this, perform the following:

cd to xorg.conf file:
cd /etc/X11

Editing the xorg.conf file
sudo gedit xorg.conf

You should now have something open with something like this:

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier     "Monitor0"
    VendorName     "Unknown"
    ModelName      "Unknown"
    HorizSync       28.0 - 33.0
    VertRefresh     43.0 - 72.0
    Option         "DPMS"
EndSection

back up this file and then you will now need to edit it

Get you monitor files

sudo apt-get install hwinfo
sudo hwinfo --monitor

Take not of the attributes that show and then enter them into your xorg.conf file.
You want to remoce the power saving option "DPMS" and update the HorizSync and VertRefresh to your monitors settings.

My Monitor section looked like the following:

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier     "Monitor0"
    VendorName     "Unknown"
    ModelName      "Unknown"
    HorizSync       28.0 - 72.0
    VertRefresh     43.0 - 60.0
EndSection

Such a pain just to install a Nvidia driver considering Windows just uses a simple installation program and its done.


How to delete get'ed files using SFTP on an Ubuntu server?

You can use the following to remove remote files:

rm [path]

and for remote directories:

rmdir [path]

Where you replace [path] with your actual path or file name or directory name. This as well can be wildcards as you are used to in normal terminal. for recursively getting directories you might need the -r flag.

Sadly there is no command for moving the files from B to A so you need to get the files from B to A and then remove the files on B. means there is no command to concatenate the get and the remove together.

For getting and then deleting the files in bulk you can use wildcards.

Example (let's assume you have your files inside a folder XY on your server B):

# log into server A via putty/ssh
ssh user@A
# then sftp to B from A
sftp user@B
# now you will get a prompt for sftp which I will not
# repeat in the commands to follow
sftp>
# navigate to your local target directory on server A
lcd pathtotarget/
# navigate to your source directory on server B
cd XY
# get all the files from B to A
get *
# after the transfer is done you can go on and remove the files on B
cd ..
rmdir XY
# or if you want only the files being deleted
rm *
# quit your sftp session
quit
# log off from server A
logout

  The command set available on SFTP:

bye                                Quit sftp
cd path                            Change remote directory to 'path'
chgrp grp path                     Change group of file 'path' to 'grp'
chmod mode path                    Change permissions of file 'path' to 'mode'
chown own path                     Change owner of file 'path' to 'own'
df [-hi] [path]                    Display statistics for current directory or
                                   filesystem containing 'path'
exit                               Quit sftp
get [-afPpRr] remote [local]       Download file
reget [-fPpRr] remote [local]      Resume download file
reput [-fPpRr] [local] remote      Resume upload file
help                               Display this help text
lcd path                           Change local directory to 'path'
lls [ls-options [path]]            Display local directory listing
lmkdir path                        Create local directory
ln [-s] oldpath newpath            Link remote file (-s for symlink)
lpwd                               Print local working directory
ls [-1afhlnrSt] [path]             Display remote directory listing
lumask umask                       Set local umask to 'umask'
mkdir path                         Create remote directory
progress                           Toggle display of progress meter
put [-afPpRr] local [remote]       Upload file
pwd                                Display remote working directory
quit                               Quit sftp
rename oldpath newpath             Rename remote file
rm path                            Delete remote file
rmdir path                         Remove remote directory
symlink oldpath newpath            Symlink remote file
version                            Show SFTP version
!command                           Execute 'command' in local shell
!                                  Escape to local shell
?                                  Synonym for help


Duplicate source error on apt-get update

If means you've got the same source defined twice in your apt sources. It's a warning not an error. You could continue like this indefinitely if you wished.

To fix it, you just need to remove one of the definitions. To see all the definitions, run:

grep -R --include="*.list" chrome /etc/apt/

It's then just a case of editing (sudoedit filename) one of those out (either delete the line or comment it out by sticking a # at the beginning.


How to read command example syntax in synopsis sections of MAN pages?

A good resource is this (I have copied shamelessly)

One of the hardest parts of unix for beginners is finding documentation. When you hear the system comes with an online manual, it usually causes a sigh of relief. What you don't know is that manual pages are technical references. While that may sound really bad -- its not! Once you learn the basics of man pages, you will come to appreciate how they are written. If you need information, and don't have time to waste, the man command is who you turn to.

This document attempts to teach you how to read the unix manual -- commonly refered to as the man pages.
Common Quotes

Before we jump into our first man page, lets take a look at some common symbols used in them. These symbols are sometimes refered to as quotes.

The primary use of a man page is to lookup parameters for a program. Since most parameters are optional, they will be enclosed in square brackets.

[optional]
[-abcgln]

Some options will have a limited list of choices. A list of choices will be comma seperated and put between braces.

{choice1,choice2}
{yes,no}

Many sources of help documentation enclose manditory parameters between less-than/greater-than symbols.

<manditory>
<program_name>

While the above manditory quotes aren't usually used in man pages, its a good thing to know.


Free software for interactive panoramas?

Hugin  ( Click To Install )

  Hugin is a panorama photo stitching program. Essentially, Hugin is a GUI frontend for Panorama Tools. Stitching is accomplished by using several overlapping photos taken from the same location, and using control points to align and transform the photos so that they can be blended together to form a larger image. Hugin allows for the easy creation of control points between two images, optimization of the image transforms, and much more.


If you want to record audio, you can use this ppa although ppas are untrusted:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:osmoma/audio-recorder
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install audio-recorder

This won't work on 15.10+. If you are using 15.10+ let me know and I'll post instructions on how to install on newer versions.

Here are the instructions for later versions (Ubuntu 15.X, 16.X, & 17.X):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:audio-recorder/ppa
sudo apt-get -y update
sudo apt-get install --reinstall audio-recorder

Click here for more info and for instructions on removing the old ppa if needed.


Type Software & Updates in Dash and try to locate the service. From there, use Other Software tab. There is a list of PPAs already available. Just to be on the safer side remove the old Adapta PPA (if it exists) from it and try the following commands one by one

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:tista/adapta
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install adapta-gtk-theme

You can try referring to this omgubuntu article for further details

See also:

Launchpad Adapta PPA
Adapta project on GitHub

Update :

If the PPA method does not work, you can download from Github and use this method

Make sure that you unzip contents from Github to .themes folder in Home folder. If there is no .themes folder, create one.

To build and install system-wide, use these commands in terminal one by one after entering the .themes directory

./autogen.sh
make
sudo make install


Can I control my keyboard backlight in Ubuntu?

The Windows driver for keyboard backlights is not installable in Ubuntu.

Since the laptop builder does not provide drivers for Ubuntu, much less Debian Linux, let's look for alternatives. You can get on-screen indicators for CapsLock, NumLock, and ScrollLock with indicator-keylock, and installation instructions are here.

Another alternative would be the GNOME extension, Lock Keys.

As for the Sound Blaster Cinema 3 app, I'd replace that with VLC, an outstanding video and audio player which includes many of the features of Sound Blaster Cinema 3.


to permanent the limit of CPU Scaling settings

There are many ways of accomplishing this. One way is to edit the file /etc/rc.local using sudo powers. Add your command just before the last line:

#
# This script is executed at the end of each multiuser runlevel.
# Make sure that the script will "exit 0" on success or any other
# value on error.
#
# In order to enable or disable this script just change the execution
# bits.
#
# By default this script does nothing.

cpupower frequency-set -u 2GHz

exit 0

If this doesn't work at first ensure the /etc/rc.local file is an executable using:

$ ll /etc/rc.local
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 944 Jan  5 11:57 /etc/rc.local*

Note the 3 x's appearing near the beginning of the line. This means the script can be executed by the owner, the group and anyone else.


I had the same problem two weeks ago.

Press Ctrl+Alt+F1 and type in your username and password, then execute:

sudo rm .Xauthority
sudo reboot


PATH variable not getting updated according to /etc/environment

From Ubuntu wiki

  This file is specifically meant for system-wide environment variable settings. It is not a script file, but rather consists of assignment expressions, one per line.

So, make sure you're not using scripting there. Only key/value works and should be one assignment per line like this

FOO=bar

So, if you want to add JAVA_HOME, it will be like

JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/jdk-1.8"

Without using any $ symbol. Also the variable already defined will be treated as plain text in the next line.

If you want to add multiple entry, you'll separate those using : separator.

Here is an example (the default line) already found on that file

PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games"


IMAC install of ubuntu, wireless mouse and keyboard not recognized

you have to add a bluetooth device the magic mouse's code is 0000. Apple's wireless keyboard and magic mouse works great with debian testing!


Graphic login screen displays login name instead of full user name

Well, not sure you'll be happy to learn this, but there is what appears to be an active bug that suggests that it's the length of the user name that determines whether to display full name or username, details here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell/+bug/1841810
I'd recommend you test this on your installation to confirm. I can tell you that the full name "John Doe" on my installation (running Gnome on Ubuntu 20.04.1) does show just fine in gdm3.


failed to install ubuntu 14.4 alonge side with windows 10

Use Windows Disk Manager to "shrink" the drive, say 50-100 GB. Leave it as unallocated space, then proceed with the installation again. Be sure to select this partition when installing Ubuntu and don't overwrite your Windows drive.


KDE Plasma copy & paste stopped working, which service, how to restart

I found that going into system tray settings then disabling clipboard in 'Extra items', applying the change and then enabling it again results in a 'Restart' of the clipboard service.


Ubuntu constant screen flicker. Running hot

I has a similar problem. The solution I have found is by changing the Compositor Settings in System Settings. Under the tab "Rendering backend", select OpenGL 3.1 instead of OpenGL 2.
In this way all my flickerings disappeared.


Where does Wine install apps in filesystem?

Wine has a root directory .wine in your home directory.
The windows-drive letters (e.g.: C: D: ..) can be mapped with the winecfg program.
Depending on what drive letter you installed MS office you find the files somewhere under the .wine directory.

most commonly your installation is in ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)...


Errors after reboot from fresh installation on laptop

Try following the instructions here: Is nomodeset still required?
You may need to hit the ESC key during boot to view the grub menu.


play audio that are embedded in pdf file

Support for embedded Multimedia within a PDF is new in Adobe Reader 8.1.1 for Unix platforms.  Unix Reader supports Real media, so you should be able to play embedded video if you have Realplayer installed. You cannot, however, play MPEG or QuickTime files as those players are not supported by Unix Reader.

Can you try it after installing real player? What is the version of Adobe Reader you are using? What is the format of the audio file?


I have been playing with Ubuntu since V 7.04
I have been dual booting with Windows the entire time. There are a few times I went 100% ubuntu, and with my lack of expertise, lost tonnes of my data when I had problems with Ubuntu.

My recommendation is that you have 3 partitions, a Windows one, a Ubuntu one, and a media one. Keep all important files and media on your media partition which you will be able to access from either operating system (if you make Media NTFS both OS can read / write to it)

Long story short, don't get rid of Windows until you are very secure with Linux. Ubuntu provides by far the easiest Linux OS to use. But it's a risk to move over everything all at once. (From my experience any ways.)


How to fix: "The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading."?

Resolved this by clearing Cookies and Cache in Firefox.

In Firefox, at the top Menu go to History
Clear Recent History
In the Time Range to clear: drop-down, select Everything.
Click the arrow next to Details to display the list of items that can be cleared.
Select both Cookies and Cache (you can un-select others)
Click Clear Now.
Restart Firefox

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-cant-load-websites-other-browsers-can?esab=a&s=The+connection+was+reset&r=2&as=s#w_firefox-cannot-load-certain-websites


Make sure kscreensaver is disabled:
System Settings -> Display and Monitor -> Screen Saver -> Make sure that Start automatically after: is unchecked.

Make sure xscreensaver is installed.  You should have a Screensaver option in settings menu.
Activate the xscreensaver you want to use.

In your user directory ~/.kde/Autostart/ create the file named: xscreensaver.desktop containing the following lines:

#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
[Desktop Entry]
Exec=xscreensaver -no-splash
Name=XScreenSaver
Type=Application
X-KDE-StartupNotify=false

Log out and log in again.  xscreensaver should work fine.


backuppc : client host running windows 7 and Mac OSX

You can find kind of good tutorial here:

http://lifeofageekadmin.com/installing-backuppc/

It covers Windows and OSX.


I resized my /boot partition and broke GRUB

As suggested by @oldfred, I created a [Boot Repair][2] disk. Contrary to his advice, I ran the recommended repairs, but I was pretty confident that all my files were intact, including the files on the newly expanded /boot volume.
I think the generic solution to recommend is definitely read through this other thread from Unix & Linux -- if that answer doesn't solve your problems, create a bootable Boot Repair USB and boot to it.
You can decide whether your next step is to try the recommended repairs (which I did successfully but it was kind of a rogue move) or start a new question with the specifics of your broken boot loader and see if someone can guide you.


Login sound plays, but no sound during session

I have had similar experiences.  Audio worked fine and then during my login session it stopped.  I found a few interesting facts about this.  First I removed the .esd_auth ,pulse-cookie and .pulse directories.  Then I rebooted and audio can back.  That lasted a while and it happened again.  Now I find that simply logging off and on 2 or 3 times resets the audio for a while.  Sorry this is not a solution, but might help.

Try to determine what "dot" directories in your home directory are audio related and see if they are culrpit.  Easiest way to tell?  Create a brand new account and log into it.  If audio works then the problem is in your configuration and not the system.  Look at the dot files and directories in the new account, one of them (or more) deals with audio and you can replace your directory/files with the ones from the new and working account.


Service always binds to 127.0.0.1 when started by systemd?

Not sure if you still need help with this, but this is what I did to get it working:

Create a unit file ( i.e. /etc/systemd/system/tiddlywiki.service)

[Unit]
Description=TiddlyWiki
After=syslog.target

[Service]
SyslogIdentifier=tiddlywiki
Restart=always
StandardOutput=syslog
EnvironmentFile=/etc/tiddlywiki.conf
ExecStart=/usr/bin/tiddlywiki $WIKI $SERVER $PORT $ROOT $RENDER $SERVE $HOST

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Add your arguments to the EnvironmentFile located at /etc/tiddlywiki.conf

WIKI=/home/pi/tw5/linux/bacula
SERVER=--server
PORT=9094
ROOT=$:/core/save/all
RENDER=text/plain
SERVE=text/html
HOST=%H

Restart the tiddlywiki.service file and you should be good to go.


How can I upgrade from Ubuntu 12.04 to 14.04?

Switch on your computer with Ubuntu 12.04, (presumably 12.04.4 if you have updated all till now), and logon.

Do not open any application. Open 'Software Updater' from Dash. It would check for updates and upgrades.

Follow all the instruction from it. Depending on the speed of your internet connection, you may have to wait for some time.

I upgraded to 14.04 LTS this way, and hope it works for you as well. Wonder of wonders! It is a seamless operation. Everything in my computer remained intact and working, except Google Earth 7.X, which is crashing till date.


Missing password-asking dialog popup on session via VNC-SSH

This command should do it:

sudo chmod +s /usr/lib/policykit-1/polkit-agent-helper-1

I had this problem when I moronically changed the owner of /usr/lib recursively.


How to see what's going on during shutdown

Temporarily disable the slash screen

You can temporarily disable the splash screen and "quiet" mode by editing the boot command in GRUB:

Reboot and hold Shift as the computer turns on. The GRUB menu should appear:

Press e to edit the command for the first entry, then use the keyboard to delete the words quiet splash:

Press Ctrl+x to boot.

This setting will last until the next reboot.

Permanently disable the slash screen

You can make the change permanent by modifying /etc/default/grub. Comment out this line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

and add this one:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""

Run sudo update-grub and then reboot to make the changes take effect.

Warning: If you mess up this file your computer may not be able to boot up again. Let someone here know if you're not sure how to make the modification.


Ubuntu 16.10 screen flicker after monitor wake up

Make sure you have Compiz installed and enable "Don't wait for video sync" and "Force complete redraw on initial damage"

Compiz -> Utility -> Workarounds -> Don't wait for video sync

Compiz -> Utility -> Workarounds -> Force complete redraw on initial damage

sudo apt-get install compiz compizconfig-settings-manager

I still get one flash but it is significantly better and enabling some of the other workarounds might fix it completely for other people.


How to Correctly Set up Dual Boot windows 7 and ubuntu on 120Gb SSD drive with UEFI

What you want to do is to bridge 2 generations: you want to install the latest and greatest Ford Mustang 2015 engine in the original 1964 Convertible body.  (Ubuntu in UEFI mode and Windows in MBR mode) which then means: changing the BIOS every time you want to switch!

So sometimes you have to tell people: Don't do it!

UEFI was (and up to a certain point: still is) just a scheme to allow computer vendors to lock out OSes like Linux (and companies who re-program the BIOS of their machines still can!) so there is no need to run in UEFI mode!


Ubuntu can connect iphone's hotspot, but not Motorola router

Sometimes routers' broadcasting channels might interfere and cause problems in the wireless systems, (most of the routers come set up as 1st channel) so changing the channel might solve your issue.


Trying to mount ddrescue image from a 1tb crashed ntfs drive

Your partition table is corrupted, you have to use windows and run chkdsk /f on that corrupted image file. Check this Q&A for some instructions.


If you want a professional IDE but not free, then you can buy Wingware.

In contrary, if you want a free professional IDE, then try Eric. The version 4 is for Python 2, and the version 5 is for Python 3.


Since the upgrade was not completed successfully, your best option is to reinstall fresh. While 'restore' might work, it may not fix whatever problem originally caused the release-upgrade to fail.

1) Create an Ubuntu LiveUSB stick using a different computer

2) Boot from the LiveUSB. Select "Try Ubuntu"

3) Mount your Hard Drive, and copy your /home onto some other backup media.

4) Use the LiveUSB to install a fresh version of Ubuntu onto your system.

5) Reboot into the new version of Ubuntu.

6) If needed, mount your backup and copy the contents back to your /home.

A failed upgrade usually happens for one of the following reasons:

Non-Ubuntu software (by far the most frequent). Good practice is to remove non-Ubuntu software and sources before upgrading to another release of Ubuntu.
Network failure
Power failure


How to bridge skype and empathy in ubuntu 14.04

The problem is that on Ubuntu 14.04, Empathy uses (F4 key) gnome-account, but the tutorial using empathy-skype and skype-manager says to add your Skype account to the Empathy protocol named ‘bigbrownchunx-skype-dbus’.

My solution is to open a terminal and type: empathy-accounts. You will open the screen described in the tutorial; then select Skype (dBus) profile.


There are alternative ways to unlock the screen other than writing the password?

Anthentication in Ubuntu is handled using PAM. Looking for PAM modules, you'll find alternative ways to authenticate, and playing with PAM configuration, you'll be able to enable / disable thoses modules depending on the context.

For example, you can have a look at pam-face-authentication.

Another alternative is using Fingerprint readers with libpam-fprintd (see here)

Each pam module provides integration guide, but beware, it's quite easy to lock you out of your system when playing with PAM configuration!


Making Ubuntu 16.04 lts more like windows xp

The easiest way to accomplish a similar experience to Windows XP would probably be installing Xubuntu, which is a community developed version of Ubuntu that comes with the Xfce desktop environment.

Xubuntu has the menu bar on the top by default but you can move it to the bottom, similar to Windows XP.


Ubuntu 12.04.2 won't boot after bumblebee instalation

Ubuntu 12.04.02 ships with a Hardware enablement stack. Basically this is a stack providing kernel/xorg from Quantal (packages linux-generic-lts-quantal and xserver-xorg-lts-quantal) to improve hardware support.

What probably happened when you installed Bumblebee is that, because it depends on the default Xorg stack, xserver-xorg-lts-quantal was removed and replaced with xserver-xorg, and those two stacks don't seem to work well when mixed.

To fix this you need to boot in text mode. The easiest way is to achieve this is pressing E when you highlight your Ubuntu entry on Grub. This will let you edit the entry (non permanently). There you should see a line similar to this:

linux   /boot/vmlinuz-3.5.0-23-generic root=UUID=(...)  ro   quiet splash $vt_handoff

Replace the quiet splash $vt_handoff with text and press Ctrl+X. This should boot you in text mode. After login you have to choose what to do next:

Revert the changes you made: this will remove Bumblebee and  let you start your system again. You will only be able to install Bumblebee without breaking the system when someone fixes Bumblebee dependencies

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-lts-quantal linux-generic-lts-quantal

Remove the Hardware Enablement stack. This will let you install Bumblebee.

sudo apt-get install linux-generic xserver-xorg

Either one of those options will install a lot of packages and remove others, so you will need to have internet access. Also if you have important information make a backup before you proceed.

I had the same problem and used the second option, and everything works now. I have not tried the first option, but it should work as well.


How to downgrade Ubuntu after 12.10 issues?

just make a bootable usb and install 11.10 you don't have to do anything more.

actually make a bootable usb for 12.04 and then boot with the live-cd. and choose the install option where you "install and use the whole hdd", so that you get a fresh start. 11.10 will only be supported until April 2013, therefor I suggest to install 12.04 because it's the current LTS.

Yes You can install windows but you must reinstall grub afterwards.


Crouton,Chromebook HP 14,Ubuntu 12.04 and a USB printer possible?

I found a working solution in the crouton wiki:

  Install cups and related packages: sudo apt-get install cups system-config-printer-gnome
  To get a working lpr command, also install cups-bsd. You'll also want to install hplip if you're using an HP printer. Get the latest hplip package and make from http://hplipopensource.com/. There maybe other packages necessary for other printers, please add them here.
  Add yourself to the lpadmin group: sudo adduser <username> lpadmin
  init scripts don't work right in crouton so we need to start cups somehow. One way is to edit /etc/rc.local and add: /usr/sbin/cupsd
  If you want to connect to remote CUPS servers, install cups-browsed, put your configuration into /etc/cups/cups-browsed.conf, and in /etc/rc.local add: /usr/sbin/cups-browsed &
  Finally, log out of your crouton and back in. You should now be able use Printer Settings to configure your printer."


Google Chrome's address bar has doubled in size. How can I fix this?

The identical issue has been addressed in a previous post. In comments, it has been suggested to remove google-chrome-stable and to use google-chrome-beta as an interim solution.


How to get RPM install in my Ubuntu Linux system?

Here is how you can install RPM packages on Ubuntu:

Convert RPM package to *.deb using alien and install it afterwards, i.e.

Install alien (and deps), its available in Debian, Ubuntu repository:

sudo apt-get install alien dpkg-dev debhelper build-essential

Convert rpm package using command

sudo alien -k --scripts some-rpm-package.rpm

Install it using this command

sudo dpkg -i some-rpm-package.deb


Is my opinion right or wrong ? ( hardware acceleration )

Hardware acceleration is the use of computer hardware to perform some functions faster than is possible in software running on a more general-purpose CPU. Examples of hardware acceleration include blitting acceleration functionality in graphics processing units (GPUs).

The main difference between hardware and software is concurrency, allowing hardware to be much faster than software. Hardware accelerators are designed for computationally intensive software code. Depending upon granularity, hardware acceleration can vary from a small functional unit to a large functional block (like motion estimation in MPEG-2).

Source Wikipedia


How to have the intallation file actually work

The regular Ubuntu installer needs to be burned to a writeable DVD, because it is too big to fit on a CD.
If you cannot write to DVDs, you can alternatively write it to a USB stick.  There are official instructions here.

You also have the option of installing from the "minimal CD installer" as mentioned in one of the comments, but I would not recommend you do that unless you have to, because that installer is not as user-friendly.


linux-firmware package continuously downloads during upgrade

Your proxy is playing you:

wget http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/l/linux-firmware/linux-firmware_1.79.6_all.deb
--2013-09-24 09:39:08--  http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/l/linux-firmware/linux-firmware_1.79.6_all.deb
Resolving localhost (localhost)... ::1, ::1, 127.0.0.1
Connecting to localhost (localhost)|::1|:3128... connected.
Proxy request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 23217718 (22M) [application/x-debian-package]
Saving to: ‘linux-firmware_1.79.6_all.deb’

100%[======================================>] 23,217,718   153KB/s   in 3m 3s

2013-09-24 09:42:10 (124 KB/s) - ‘linux-firmware_1.79.6_all.deb’ saved [23217718/23217718]

Only, don't use the proxy and everything should be fine. wget --no-cache or deleting all your proxy cache should do the job.


I am not a pro but can help.

Ubuntu have two sections.
One is of FileSystem which can be accessed by a admin.
Second is FileSystem/Home//

In this second you will be able to access Documents/Downloads/Music/Pictures/Videos which have permissions to be access by all. Unless you have changed the permissions.

So with help of LiveDVD or Bootable USB, you should be able access those files.
Copy to external drive and get all your data back.

Another way to copy directories or files is via terminal.
cp


Replace first line in text file by i-th line from another text file

To replace the first line of FILE.out with the i-th line of FILE.in I'd do:

 i=<line-number>
 line=$(sed -n "${i}p" FILE.in)
 sed -i "1c\\$line" FILE.out

If i doesn't exist in FILE.in, then the first line of FILE.out would be deleted (empty).

If $line contains any special characters (eg. backslash, dollar), then you'd need to escape those.

Not 100% sure this couldn't break elsewhere.


How to merge two unallocated partitions using GParted?

Move /dev/sda6 to the right -> apply changes

the free space will now all be adjacent, make a partition in the free space.

If you wish, you can then re-number your partitions, see Resize partitions in Gparted


Blank screen, cursor blinking on boot after install disruption

Your hard drive is hosed. Start over and reinstall Ubuntu again. Since you don't have a working operating system on your hard drive, you can use the whole hard drive for Ubuntu. If there is an option to replace the broken Ubuntu installation with Ubuntu, then choose that option.


Will Glade 3.12 work for Ubuntu 11.10 using Unity...no Gnome 3


openstack-dashboard installation - set up via apt returns many python errors including "insecure permissions"

You've (almost) got your answer right there:

  Insecure permissions on key file /var/lib/openstack-dashboard/secret_key, should be 0600

Set the given permission mask on the indicated file:

sudo chmod 0600 /var/lib/openstack-dashboard/secret_key

Configure half-installed packages:

sudo apt-get install -f


Ubuntu Gnome 17.04: Launch using Dedicated Graphics Card, Globally?

If I'm right what you want to ask is, how run a specific app on dGPU always, instead of right clicking on it and selecting Run dedicated GPU.

It mostly depends on the Desktop Environment.

Here is screenshot from my KDE setup:

Here I have checked it to run on a dedicated GPU and now it always runs on the dGPU, I'm not sure if gnome does it bt if you explore into the launcher editor you might find a option to set it permanently.


Since you can't ping B from A you have a networking issue unrelated to SSH that you need to resolve first. Verify that there are no firewall rules ion place that block the traffic and contact the hosting company about the issue.

If you need help with that or have any other follow-up questions please open a new question.


Classic basic networking question. Since your server works on the LAN, your server works. Everything else is networking that is unrelated to Ubuntu.

Your public internet IP address is your ROUTER's IP address. That's what a router does - it shares your public IP address among all the devices on your LAN.

Find your PUBLIC IP address. Any search engine will tell you how.

Pick a PORT NUMBER. For ssh, you can forward port 22...or any other port number.
Login to your router. Turn on Port Forwarding. Forward the PORT NUMBER to your server's LAN IP address.
Test login from the LAN: ssh user@lan_ip_address

You already did this, so it should work. This simply tests that your server is still up and running at the expected LAN IP address.

Test login from the internet: ssh user@public_ip_address -p port_number

This WON'T work when you are connected to the LAN. You need to be outside the area controlled by your router.
-p port_number only needed if you picked a different port number.


How do I install the Firestorm viewer for Second Life?

You don't need a firestorm Install, but only extract in a Folder, than run ./snowglobe

If you have a 64Bit Linux, use the "kokua viewer 64 Bit" from imprudence coders...
firestorm has Problems with Music Streaming...

http://blog.kokuaviewer.org/

and Download from: http://cdn.bitbucket.org/NickyP/kokua-dev/downloads/Kokua-3.3.3-Beta_1c-Linux64.tar.bz2

Greetings

Lupo


Cannot install scikit-learn in Python 3.4 in Ubuntu 14.04

I successfully installed scikit-learn for python3 on 14.04 using the following steps:

sudo apt-get install build-essential python3-dev python3-setuptools python3-numpy python3-scipy python3-pip libatlas-dev libatlas3gf-base
sudo pip3 install scikit-learn

According to the official doc,  make sure that ATLAS is used to provide the implementation of the BLAS and LAPACK linear algebra routines:

sudo update-alternatives --set libblas.so.3 \
    /usr/lib/atlas-base/atlas/libblas.so.3
sudo update-alternatives --set liblapack.so.3 \
    /usr/lib/atlas-base/atlas/liblapack.so.3

I can now use scikit-learn:

$ python3
Python 3.4.0 (default, Apr 11 2014, 13:05:11)
[GCC 4.8.2] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from sklearn import datasets
>>>


Why are my photos not being saved in Shotwell?

Shotwell is a non-destructive photo editor, see http://yorba.org/shotwell/help/edit-nondestructive.html. If you want to share the altered photo then you will have to export it.


The name of the package is not obfsproxy, it's obfs4proxy:
obfs4proxy/focal 0.0.8-1 amd64
  pluggable transport proxy for Tor, implementing obfs4

simple-obfs/focal 0.0.5-6 amd64
  simple obfusacting plugin for shadowsocks-libev

To install it, you should run:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install obfs4proxy


How can I grep a text piece from a 1 line text file with delimiters

Thanks to @terdon and @jhilmer for making the quoting decidedly less tricky

If you want the '

$ grep -oE "(STX|IRF).*'" file
STX=ANAA:1+asdf+5060128703127:P'
IRF=16165193117+160624+160624 '

If you don't want the '

$ grep -oE "(STX|IRF)[^']*"
STX=ANAA:1+asdf+5060128703127:P
IRF=16165193117+160624+160624

Explanation

-o just show the matched part
-E use ERE so we can use | to search for multiple patterns
" start quoting/stop quoting
(THIS|THAT) match THIS or THAT
.* match any number of any characters
\' literal '
[^']* any number of any characters except '


How do I connect to my Bluetooth headset?

Default Ubuntu Bluetooth Pairing

Open the Bluetooth setting by clicking on the Bluetooth symbol on the top panel:

Choose + in the bottom left corner of the following window:

Put your Bluetooth device in "Pairing Mode". Check with your manual on how to do this.
The MEElectronics AF9-BK headset will enter pairing mode by turning the device OFF and then pressing and holding the multifunction button for 7 s until the blue light remains permanently on.
Then Proceed with "Continue" to enable "new device setup" in Ubuntu.
The device should now be recognized:

Select the new device. In case we use a non-default PIN for pairing we may give "PIN options" but this is usually not needed.  Press "Continue" to finish setup.
Go to the "Sound Settings" on the top panel menu:

Choose your headset as audio output or input device, and give in the "Mode" for Bluetooth service. Note that the microphone will not be available in A2DP mode:

In case we had used the headset on a different device, or when pairing failed we may have to repeat the pairing procedure. Before we can do so we may have to remove the device first (this is done in step 2. above by pressing -).

Paring with Blueman (here shown for Lubuntu):

Open Bluetooth Manager from Preferences menu.
Put your headset in pairing mode (see 3. above)
Then choose "Search":

Select the new device and choose the keys symbol for pairing:

Enter the PIN code (for headsets this is usually is 0000):

Right click on the device to select the Bluetooth service:

Also see the following questions:

Bluetooth from the command line in 12.04?

Autoconnecting Bluetooth Devices

pavucontrol doesn't show Bluetooth headset


Find out which services are safe to stop from starting up on system boot

Consider using Stacer downloadable from the Ubuntu Software Center.

There is an option to observe which Startup Apps you have set with an option to turn them on and off at will so you can investigate issues further.


How Do I Purchase Ubuntu One Songs Without Using Ubuntu One File Sharing?

You must have an Ubuntu One account (and be subscribed to Ubuntu One Basic) to buy music from the Ubuntu One Music Store. You must also have added your computer to Ubuntu One to buy music.

If you do not want to sync your files using Ubuntu One, you can disable file sync in Ubuntu One Preferences. Disabling file sync will prevent purchased songs from downloading to your desktop. You will then need to download your purchased songs from the Ubuntu One website at https://one.ubuntu.com/files

Purchased songs will be available for streaming from your personal cloud to your iPhone or Android phone if you wanted to sign up for Ubuntu One Mobile.


I finally found the solution:
in
/etc/amavis/conf.d/50-user all domains have to be entered, not only .$mydomain:
@local_domains_acl = ( ".$mydomain", "nextdomain.de" );


upgrade from 15.04 to 15.10! two main problems please help

Press Alt+F2 and type software-properties-gtk
Change the download location to Main Server and try again.
Then open terminal and type:

ping 4.2.2.4

If you see:

Your connection is OK.

For upgrade, see http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/upgrade.


In linux, I use disk repair with the option "fix windows efi" files checked and it reinstated grub as my boot manager with Ubuntu and Windows as options to load.


Cannot upgrade ubuntu: Failed to connect (when inet is fine)

If your computer has IPv6, check if your IPv6 connectivity is working.

changelogs.ubuntu.com has an AAAA entry:
try pinging changelogs.ubuntu.com

ping6 -c1 changelogs.ubuntu.com

Otherwise verify that with your installation of SSL the connection works:

openssl s_client -CAfile /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt -showcerts -connect changelogs.ubuntu.com:443 < /dev/null

The output should start with:

CONNECTED(00000003)
depth=2 O = Digital Signature Trust Co., CN = DST Root CA X3
verify return:1
depth=1 C = US, O = Let's Encrypt, CN = Let's Encrypt Authority X3
verify return:1
depth=0 CN = changelogs.ubuntu.com
verify return:1


Shut down laptop while booting after update and now can't use it

Yup. It looks like you have a bad superblock. First I'll tell you the cause of the problem, and then give you the solution. : )

The cause:

Ok. So when Ubuntu boots, it goes through 4 stages:

BIOS
Bootloader
Kernel
System Startup

BIOS

When your computer goes through BIOS, it executes the firmware code, which tells the important components like the CPU, RAM, Display and others: "Hey guys! Wake up, its time to work!" So once everyone wakes up, the computer moves on to the next stage:

Bootloader

When you see that purple screen that says something like "GRUB", then that's GRUB, the bootloader. It lets you choose which operating system you want to boot, advanced options for them, and other things like opening a command line. Once you have chosen an OS to boot, it moves on to the next stage:

Kernel

The kernel stage is probably the most important of all because that's when the system mounts the hard drive, reads the important files on it, and actually 'put together' the computer. That's where you're having your problem. The system was most likely trying to mount the hard drive when you force closed it. It stuck midway through, and even though it reset, the drive still has an error. The superblock was damaged.

Solution:

Step 1:

Get the DVD that you installed Ubuntu from, boot into it, and choose the 'Try Ubuntu without installing' option when it shows its temporary 'bootloader'.

Step 2:

Once it loads, open a terminal by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T

Step 3:

Execute this:

sudo fdisk -l

That will list all disk partitions. Now, you can find the partition your broken boot is on. Usually, the partition that holds your main OS is usually the one marked as bootable. This is the output of mine, as an example:

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048   637770013   318883983   83  Linux
/dev/sda2       637771774  1953523711   657875969    5  Extended
Partition 2 does not start on physical sector boundary.
/dev/sda5      1945303040  1953523711     4110336   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6       637771776  1945303039   653765632   83  Linux

The bootable partition is marked with a *. That is most likely the broken one.

Step 4.

Execute this command:

sudo dumpe2fs /dev/(sda the live cd is on*) | grep superblock

if your linux is a dual-booted one, list the partition that the broken boot is on

It will list all backup superblocks to fix the broken superblock. Output:

  Primary superblock at 0, Group descriptors at 1-20
  Backup superblock at 32768, Group descriptors at 32769-32788
  Backup superblock at 98304, Group descriptors at 98305-98324
  Backup superblock at 163840, Group descriptors at 163841-163860
  Backup superblock at 229376, Group descriptors at 229377-229396
  Backup superblock at 294912, Group descriptors at 294913-294932
  Backup superblock at 819200, Group descriptors at 819201-819220
  Backup superblock at 884736, Group descriptors at 884737-884756
  Backup superblock at 1605632, Group descriptors at 1605633-1605652
  Backup superblock at 2654208, Group descriptors at 2654209-2654228
  Backup superblock at 4096000, Group descriptors at 4096001-4096020
  Backup superblock at 7962624, Group descriptors at 7962625-7962644
  Backup superblock at 11239424, Group descriptors at 11239425-11239444
  Backup superblock at 20480000, Group descriptors at 20480001-20480020
  Backup superblock at 23887872, Group descriptors at 23887873-23887892
  Backup superblock at 71663616, Group descriptors at 71663617-71663636
  Backup superblock at 78675968, Group descriptors at 78675969-78675988

Step 5.

Use this command to choose a backup superblock to fix the broken one:

sudo fsck -b (**superblock** that you chose) /dev/(sda the live cd is on) -y

Remember, you can choose any superblock, as long as it says it's a backup one. And, by the way, the -y at the end is to answer all the Fix? questions. Trust me. There are a lot of them.

So, once you run it, it gets really cool, or creepy, (it's cool to me XD) because it will start to imitate a TV that is on a static channel. That was really funny when i first saw it! Take a video recording and turn it into a GIF if you like. (i might attach one one time ; )

So! Enough talking while we wait! Once that's done, move on to the next step:

Step 6.

Mount the drive:

sudo mount /dev/(sda that cd is on) /mnt

So you can test the filesystem.

Step 6.

6A.

Login to root:

su

6B.

Run command:

cd /mnt

6C

Run command:

mkdir fixtest

6D

Run command:

rm fixtest

If you're able to do all these commands without errors, then you're all set! Restart your computer the normal way, and enjoy!

Hope this works! ; )


Which version of Ubuntu is best suited for a Pentium 4

I see "ph1b" is best answer. You can download ubuntu 11.10, then update and finally download xfce or lxde desktop. lxde is lighter than xfce.

You can also download lubuntu like "Vic" said, but I tried and faced problem with it. I don't know why but you can try and you won't lose anything.

Anyway I think if you download ubuntu 11.10 with the default unity 3D, you will not face any problem anyway because it's requirements are 1GB RAM and 1 GHz processor only.

So download ubuntu 11.10 and try.


What does the asterisk in the netstat output mean?

It is a wildcard meaning "any".

For example, in the third line:

tcp        0      0 *:smtp                  *:*                     LISTEN

The first *, in *:smtp, means the process is listening on all of the IP addresses the machine has.  The second *, in *:*, means connections can come from any IP address.  The third *, in *:*, means the connection can originate from any port on the remote machine.


The correct form of the last command that you ran in the terminal ( apt-get install lubuntu-desktop && apt-get remove xubuntu-desktop ) is as follows:

sudo apt-get remove xubuntu-desktop && sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop

The first part of the command removes xubuntu-desktop and the second part of the command installs lubuntu-desktop if the first part of the command, removing xubuntu-desktop, was successful. Another way to do the same thing is to give yourself root privileges using sudo su and then use the following command instead:

apt-get remove xubuntu-desktop && apt-get install lubuntu-desktop

Your main memu is showing you that you have the Lubuntu desktop installed.

It's not possible to know if the error message that you got was important without seeing the error message, however if you got a vital error message because of the wrong order of the two commands, then you could fix it by running this command:

sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop

...which checks if lubuntu-desktop is completely installed and completes the installation of lubuntu-desktop if it is not completely installed, otherwise it does nothing and returns the following message:

lubuntu-desktop is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.


Apparently all I had to do was set the Touchpad mode to "Basic" in the BIOS. The issue didn't happened again since.


Step 1

Boot into Windows operating system, open command prompt as administrator and execute:

powercfg /h off

In case Fast Boot is enabled in your configuration:
Open Windows Control Panel -> Power Settings.
Enable show hidden settings - uncheck Fast Boot.

Shutdown the machine completely, do NOT reboot.

Step 2

Boot from Windows installation media, on Install now screen select Repair your computer.

Choose Command prompt and execute:

bootrec.exe /fixboot
bootrec.exe /rebuildbcd

Step 3

Boot from Ubuntu installation media and select Try Ubuntu without installing.

When the Ubuntu Live desktop appears, open a terminal and execute:

sudo mount /dev/sd*** /mnt
sudo mount /dev/sd** /mnt/boot/efi
for i in /dev /dev/pts /proc /sys /run; do sudo mount -B $i /mnt$i; done
sudo chroot /mnt
grub-install /dev/sd*
update-grub

Note:

sd* = disk | sd** = efi partition | sd*** = system partition

To identify the partition numbers use GParted - it is included in the Ubuntu installation media.

Boot into BIOS and select Ubuntu in UEFI settings to be the default operating system to boot.

Now you can boot Ubuntu directly or select the Windows environment from GRUB boot menu.

Update (instructions on how to rebuild everything as you asked for this in your comment) :

Boot into BIOS and enable UEFI mode and then (in case there is an option)  disable Secure Boot.
Boot from Ubuntu install media and open GParted ... create a new partition table - choose GPT.
Install Windows - boot into Windows and disable Fast Boot and Hibernation  - shutdown the PC.

Boot from Ubuntu install media - open GParted and shrink the Windows partition.
Create a new partition from the unallocated space and format it with ext4.
Create another new partition and format this one with linux-swap.

Close GParted and start the Ubuntu installer - when asked choose Something else.
Select the ext4 partition you created before and choose / (root) as mount point.
When Ubuntu is installed, boot into BIOS and select Ubuntu as default system.


MySQL has its own maximum size for a single request called max_allowed_packet.  This is set to a small amount by default (MySQL's default is 1MB, your distro's may be higher) but can be increased up to 1GB.

Increasing it will not harm performance for existing requests.  The reason it's set small by default is to simply catch what might be mistakes, in case you're not expecting very large packets.

Now, you don't mention a specific error message, but if I have guessed the cause of your problem correctly, MySQL will probably be generating this error message ("Packet too large" on the server, and "Lost connection to MySQL server during query" or similar on the client).


When I connect to the Wi-Fi, every other host in the "near" subnets cannot use the Internet

I suggest you try the other available driver for your device. Please open a terminal and do:

sudo -i
apt-get purge bcmwl-kernel-source
echo "blacklist b43"  >>  /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
echo "blacklist ssb"  >>  /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
modprobe brcmsmac
exit

It may take a reboot.


I have used CVS, Subversion, git, and a few commercial packages.  I just migrated my personal VCS from CVS to git (I thought it was going to be more difficult than what it actually was, I should have done it long ago).

I would recommend git. Based upon what you are looking for.

  I am a noob without much experience in version control systems

git may have a longer learning curve, especially if you have experience with a previous VCS. Without having been exposed to a previous VCS, your learning curve maybe be shorter.

The best way to learn git is download the book Pro Git by Scott Chacon (for free), create a test repository (mkdir <project name>; cd <project name>; git init), and hack away at it.  There is really is no effort to create a repository and don't worry about screwing something up in a test repository, as each repository is independent. A repository can be easily removed (cd <project name>; rm -rf .git).

  Several files will be plain text files but there will be some Libre-Office files

There is no differentiation with git on file types (ASCII vs binary), however ASCII files are optimal for seeing diffs and merging conflicts.

  Be easy to set-up, run and maintain

git can be configured in a number of ways, it all depends upon what your needs are.  For starters, a one many show, all you have to do is install git (sudo apt-get install --install-recommends git-core) and create a repository (shown above). If you work across a number of machines, you can set up git over ssh (it is in the book). Even better, as your needs expand you don't loose what you have done already.

  Have easy to understand configuration options (what directories to track, for how long, how frequently the changes should be captured, etc.)

You can have one big repository or break them down to individual projects or down to single files.  Again create a git repository and play around with it, see what works and does not.

  Ideally have a GUI front also

There are many git guis that specialize in many different tasks.  However learning git from the command line is highly recommended.  To get started you only need to learn a few commands (git init, git status git diff, git add, git rm, git commit, git push, git pull).  Also the command line helps you with tasks you need to do.  For example: git status

# On branch master
# Your branch is ahead of 'origin/master' by 2 commits.
#
# Changes not staged for commit:
#   (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
#   (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
#
#   modified:   systems/ion/setup.txt
#   modified:   systems/dogstar/teardown.txt
#   modified:   applications/help.html
#   modified:   applications/readme.txt
#
# Untracked files:
#   (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
#
#   applications/faq.html
no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

If you are more comfortable with a GUI, SmartGit is newbie friendly.

  Be able to recover deleted files

Yes, git can recover any version of any file as long as it has been committed.

  What is the best/ most widely used tool that will be suitable for me?

git is widely used. As far as the best goes, it is among the best, if not the best.  But being the best, is more of a personal opinion and is also based upon the situation.


If I'm reinstalling ubuntu, would there be a problem if I installed with uefi enabled. Previous installation was installed with csm

Given that your disk currently uses MBR partitioning (Partition Table: msdos in your parted output), it's safest to stick with BIOS/CSM/legacy-mode booting. Generally speaking, for a single-OS installation, there's little advantage to be had for booting in one mode vs. the other. If you have a specific reason to want EFI-mode booting, please say what it is.

If you want to switch to EFI-mode booting, you (pretty much) have to switch from MBR to GPT. This can be done dynamically with gdisk; see this page for details. This may require some additional re-partitioning, though -- in particular, booting in EFI mode requires an EFI System Partition (ESP), which your disk doesn't seem to have at the moment.

Your partition table doesn't seem to show a separate /home partition, so preserving /home will require backing up your current /home and then restoring it when you're done. OTOH, maybe I'm missing something -- which brings me to....

For future reference, whenever somebody asks for program output, please either edit your original question or post it to a pastebin site and provide a link to your document there. Pasting program output into a comment causes the formatting to go all wonky, as you've seen. That makes it harder for the people who are trying to help you. (We're all volunteering our time.)


Restore GTK integration after removing KDE

Hit Ctrl+Alt+T to open terminal and run:

sudo apt-get remove gtk2-engines-oxygen gtk3-engines-oxygen

Appearently kubuntu-desktop has installed a GTK theme so that GNOME/GTK apps look consistent with KDE/QT ones.
I wonder why debfoster kubuntu-desktop- didn't remove it though :-)


Ubuntu Server 12.04: "waiting for network configuration" and network down

I suspect that (sadly) the second thread you posted has the answer. It seems now that the /etc/network/interfaces file contains the interfaces that have to be brought up necessarily by the system, while network-manager is in charge of "non system-critical" interfaces.

So the "best practice" now seems to be to leave empty the /etc/network/interfaces file and set your interfaces inside network-manager.

However, if for any reason you don't like this approach (e.g. I don't like it) there could be another not-so-clean solution. You could edit your /etc/init/failsafe.conf file and comment-out the two sleep of 40 and 59 seconds. This will make your Ubuntu boot faster, but you can't take it for granted that you will have your network interfaces up at the end of the boot process.


You can download all the old releases from http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/

Hope this helps!


In the KDE K menu Search enter "Proxy".

Or K-menu, Application, Settings, System Settings, Network Settings, Proxy

You can also get to the KDE global settings using by starting the System Settings program from a terminal, the command is "systemsettings", then go to Network Settings and then Proxy.

Enter your Proxy configuration there.  Many applications will automatically and dynamically use these settings.


"what I want to do is make an if statement in terminal that runs if a
  program is running and if it is not it does nothing, or does something
  else"

To determine if a program is running given its name, use pgrep.  To dosomething if LibreOffice's word processor is running:

pgrep soffice.bin >/dev/null && do_something

Similarly, to do something if LibreOffice's word processor is not running:

pgrep soffice.bin >/dev/null || do_something

Further, you can use these two in combination:

pgrep soffice.bin && do_one_thing || do_another

Or, if things get more complicated, use an if statement:

if pgrep soffice.bin
then
    # command is running
    do_one_thing
    do_one_thing2
else
    # command is not running
    do_another
    do_another2
fi

The above work because pgrep, just like grep, sets a useful exit code.  If a process is found, it returns with an exit code of zero (which the shell interprets as logical true).  If not, it returns with one (the shell interprets any non-zero exit code to mean false).

To find out all the programs that are currently running (and hence what name to use as the argument to pgrep), run ps ax


I've also noticed this, I'm unsure as to why it happens but restarting lightdm will solve it.

Open Terminal, copy & paste the command:

sudo restart lightdm

Press Enter, then enter your password and finally press Enter again. Lightdm will be restarted and your keyboard will revert back to UK settings.


How to programmatically fetch a list of applications from the Software Center

You can use the xapian DB directly:

import xapian
db=xapian.Database("/var/cache/software-center/xapian")
for m in db.postlist(""):
    appname = db.get_document(m.docid).get_data()

Or the internal software-center API:

import sys
sys.path.insert(0, "/usr/share/software-center/")
import softwarecenter.db.database
db = softwarecenter.db.database.StoreDatabase()
db._aptcache.open()
# 'use_axi' is use apt-xapian-index
# 'use_agent' is use the Software Center Agent database
db.open(use_axi=False, use_agent=False)
for doc in db:
    app = db.get_application(doc)
    print app.appname, app.pkgname
    appdetails = app.get_details(db)
    # Icon names are relative to /usr/share/app-install/icons/
    print appdetails.icon


All my harddisk partitions have disappeared. I was using Windows 8.1 and tried to install Ubuntu

That you are asking suggests you didn't make a backup.  Next time make a backup.  To the degree there is any chance your data survives on your hard disk, it is worth actually looking for the partitions, if you haven't already.  It is possible all you have is a GRUB issue.  To look for your partitions, from your ubuntu on thumbdrive, open "disk utility" and use it to look at the hard drive and see how many partitions there are, and what format they are in.  If your windows partitions, exist they won't be in EXT4.  That's Ubuntu.

I'm truly sorry if you feel Ubuntu deleted your windows partitions, but I know from experience you were given choices ("side-by-side" or "use entire drive").  You have to make a backup first, and you have to make the correct choices.


There is more than one way to increment a variable in bash, but what you tried is not correct.

You can use for example arithmetic expansion:

var=$((var+1))
((var=var+1))
((var+=1))
((var++))

Or you can use let:

let "var=var+1"
let "var+=1"
let "var++"

See also: http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/dblparens.html.


Installing Ubuntu 12.10 or 13.04 not available to boot

This is probably a /etc/fstab problem.

You have to reboot with the live CD, mount the external disk (where you installed Ubuntu), and check the /etc/fstab file that resides on that external disk.

You have to edit /etc/fstab to make  sure that when you boot from the external disk,  the root of your filesystem is mounted on that bootable disk (probably /dev/sdb1).

See: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fstab

Then you have probably another problem.
GRUB sets root on (hd0,0), the first disk, first partition. (but that is the sda-disk, first partition).

So GRUB must set root on the second disk,first partition, that is (hd1,0)
Still running the live CD, you have to run grub-installer.

See: http://www.tuxradar.com/answers/677

Afterwards, check your /boot/grub/grub.cfg file.


It's probably your ISP injecting the ad, yes. I do not see it, and I've checked from a couple of locations.

There would be no reason for the gnome project to inject ads there. First of all, it's not meant to ever be seen by a human, so no-one would ever see the ad, rendering it ineffective.

Second, the Gnome project doesn't appear to have advertising at all on their pages. They load no javascript external to gnome.org as far as I can tell. The hosting is provided, as you say, by Red Hat.

To stop this, you can either use a VPN connection, or petition your ISP to stop this stupid behavior.


How do you get permission to save rcS after setting UTC=no?

System files cannot be edited by users directly. They belong to the root user. One way to run gedit as root is to invoke it as root:

gksudo gedit /etc/default/rcS

See also Gedit command line tips and Graphical sudo in the Ubuntu community documentation.

By the way, note that it's rcS (with a capital S) and UTC=no (with UTC in uppercase). Under Linux, unlike under Windows, file names and variable names are case-sensitive.


"Double quotes" are not displayed properly : Even in Fresh Installation

This minor issue appears due to your regional language settings. When you switch the regional settings to English (United States), the double quotes are displayed correctly after logging out and back in. During the installation process you selected Bangalore as your location. That is the reason why it is displayed in the wrong way. You have to decide what is more important for you, living with this little minor issue and having your regional settings including the Indian currency set in the correct way, or having set and using the foreign language English as default language.

You may want to consider to file a bug report on Launchpad for getting this solved in the future editions of Ubuntu. Maybe other users are annoyed about this issue as well and confirm the bug.

Here you find the information you need, how to report bugs on Launchpad : How to report bugs


How do I set up a local SOCKS proxy that tunnels traffic through SSH?

The ssh binary that you use when you connect to a server running ssh supports running a SOCKS proxy out of the box, with the -D flag. Example:

ssh -D 1337 -f -C -q -N user@remote -p 22

-D 1337 tells ssh to launch a SOCKS server on port 1337 locally.
-f forks the process into the background.
-C Turns on compression.
-q enables "Quiet mode", since the purpose here is only to tunnel we don't really care about error output and such.
-N tells ssh that no commands will be sent (-f complains if we don’t specify this).
-p specifies what port to use; obviously this is defaulted to 22 so the statement above is pointless, but included for clarity.

When your SOCKS server is up and running, you simply need to make sure that your application (usually a web browser) is trying to connect to the local SOCKS proxy, and not the regular Internet.

In Firefox 29 (explained here as an example), this is achieved by going to the menu (the three sausages in the top right), followed by Preferences > Advanced > Network > (Connection) > Settings... - make sure you only fill out the SOCKS field! Since your proxy is on the same system, you can use localhost or 127.0.0.1 to point back at whatever port you set it to on the same system.

If you need your DNS requests to be tunneled as well (if they are not, your DNS lookups will reveal what websites you are trying to visit), you can just check on "Remote DNS" or as well do this entire configuration in about:config. In the last case, open it up and set these values:

network.proxy.socks : 127.0.0.1
network.proxy.socks_port : 1337
network.proxy.socks.remote_dns : true
network.proxy.socks_version : 5
network.proxy.type : 1

You may also need this setting to exclude certain domains or sites from tunneling:

network.proxy.no_proxies_on : localhost, 127.0.0.1, 192.168.0.0/24, .yourcompany.com

This answer was written from France, but tunneled via Sweden :)


How do I get a Belkin n52te keyboard working?

The author of Keyboarding Master generously added support for the N52TE after I asked about it recently. It is supported in a developer preview, and I can confirm it works!

I'm unsure whether the developer preview can be installed alone, without previous drivers being installed to root. I have an official release installed to /opt, and then ran the preview from a folder in /home. At any rate, I suspect a full release with N52TE support will happen and resolve this uncertainty.

If you are running Ubuntu with Unity, there's a chance the 'taskbar' icon for the program may not appear. I would suggest keeping the main window open, and not hidden, so you don't lose your interface to disable and configure the drivers. If this happens, though, you'll have to kill the process from the terminal.

Hope this helps!


Microsoft Designer Mouse makes worse WiFi on ASUS UX31A laptop with Ubuntu 15.10

Create a following file with the settings to force using wifi g (11n_disable) and disable coexisting (bt_coex_active):

/etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi-opt.conf (file to be created)
-------------------------------------------------
options iwlwifi 11n_disable=1
options iwlwifi bt_coex_active=0

Seems, necessity to disable coexisting is to says about a bug, see here.


What is the best way to restart NFS service after reboot?

You should append nfs-kernel-server restart to the /etc/rc.local  or /etc/rc.d/rc.local. these files have been used for initial scripts or commands.


You can put something like this on your Desktop as script.sh and run it with a double-click every time you want to install the software:

#!/bin/bash
sudo iwconfig wlan0 power off
echo "Press any key to continue with Adobe Flash/Chromium installation. "
read -n 1 -s
sudo apt-get -y install flashplugin-installer chromium-browser
exit

iwconfig wlan0 power off turns off power management. echo just prints a line of text. read -n 1 -s waits for keyboard input. apt-get installs the packages. exit closes the terminal session.


This might not be the answer you are looking for, but this functionality is not yet available. The link to use would probably be mailto:email@example.com, but until this bug is fixed there's not much you can do, unfortunately.


How to install build-essential without the CD/DVD?

From the Ubuntu Software Center select Edit -> Software Sources... from the menu bar. Under the first tab called Ubuntu Software, deselect the Installable from CD-ROM/DVD source, then close the window.

This answer is taken from Stefan Receiving "Please insert CD error" when trying to install xubuntu desktop in 12.04


Any reason not to start openvpn as root?

By default OpenVPN runs as root because needs it to create TUN devices.

I dont know if there's any security hazard, but in their wiki, you can find a guide to start OPENVPN with other unprivileged user.


You can install a synthesizer from the Software Centre such as Bristol
as well as a program to route midi commands from the keyboard to the synth, such as Jack Control.

Midi can either go over two different protocols, ALSA or Jack and Jack Control handles both. Bristol, by default, uses ALSA. Jack Control opens several windows and can look a bit forbidding so you have been warned!

Connect your keyboard the computer and start both programs. Click Connect in the main window of Jack Control, choose the ALSA tab and connect the output of your keyboard to the input of the Bristol by selecting each and clicking connect. You should be able to hear sounds now.

Other programs exist that work with samples or soundfonts and may give you a more authentic piano sound. QSynth is easy to use and you can route the midi exactly in the way I described above. There are two extra steps however. Within QSynth setup, you must point it to a soundfont file (.SF2), such as the one found here and you must click Start  in Jack Control for the audio to be routed from QSynth to your soundcard.


How to use different workspaces on Ubuntu 14.04?

Press Windows Key -> Type appearance

Click Behaviour tab

On Launcher click this icon

This is workspace. Workspaces are multiple desktop screens to work effeciently.

Go to Keyboard from System settings & Navigation & set your shortcuts for moving betweeen workspaces & handling softwares.


How do I recover from a broken Xubuntu 12.04.4 Install?

That sounds frustrating.  When you say you used a CD image, I presume that you downloaded an .iso file and are installing from a flash drive.  If you downloaded the file manually then I'd say you should download it again, and check the MD5 or SHA1 hash to verify that the file is byte-for-byte correct.

If you're unfamiliar with MD5 and SHA1, they are mathematical algorithms used to test a file, with the result being a very large number, called a "hash", expressed in hexidecimal, such as "79044a88855c51c82ce8725130436794631d5e0a".  Changing even one bit of the file results in a completely different number.  (They are also used in cryptography because it is very difficult to create a file that will result in a given hash.)

You can download free programs to compute MD5 or SHA1 hashes for Windows or any other modern OS.  The MD5 and SHA1 hashes for the .iso files are available from the Xubuntu 12.04 download page.

Good luck!


Why are there TWO "linux-image-XXX-generic" with different numbers on one computer OS?

One is a old one and one is a new one. Version 4.4 is the new one, and the latest in the Ubuntu repositories, and version 3.13 is the old one and the one that came with Ubuntu 14.04.


So I did a little more digging in the man pages and saw there was an --verbose option that I could use, so I ran it with with the following results:

mount.cifs kernel mount options: ip=192.168.1.2,unc=\\192.168.1.2\files,user=user,prefixpath=HD3/,pass=********
Retrying with upper case share name
mount.cifs kernel mount options: ip=192.168.1.2,unc=\\192.168.1.2\FILES,user=user,prefixpath=HD3/,pass=********
mount error(6): No such device or address
Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g. man mount.cifs)

It appeared that for some reason it was trying to look for 192.168.1.2/files as a share, which I hadn't shared.  So I added that directory as a share and then tried sudo mount -t cifs -o username=user,password=blah //192.168.1.2/files/HD3 /mnt/HD3 again and it mounted with no problem.

This brings up another question, why can't I use cifs to share a folder that is a few directories away from the root?  It seemed once I added a folder that was one step away, it fixed the issue.  I would prefer not sharing my entire /files folder, even if I'm the only one who can access the share.


Problem building a Qt5 project with QWebKit

I had to install bunch of additional packages:

sudo apt-get install qtquick1-5-dev qtlocation5-dev qtsensors5-dev qtdeclarative5-dev

Not sure why they were not installed automatically. Perhaps the dependencies are not set right?


Same for me; temporary work-around:

When at the login screen (hit Ctrl+Alt+Del and log out to get there), switch to terminal (Ctrl+Alt+F1) and log in.

Run these commands to remove the fglrx driver:

sudo sh /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh
sudo apt-get remove --purge fglrx fglRx_* fglrx-amdcccle* fglrx-dev* xorg-driver-fglrx
sudo apt-get remove --purge xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-radeon
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-ati
sudo apt-get install --reinstall libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri xserver-xorg-core
sudo reboot


Why we use sleep command before xset dpms?

When you run your command, two events happens, "KeyPress" and "KeyRelease".

So when you run this command with pressing Enter button.

xset dpms force standby

First a "KeyPress" happens, it will cause the command to immediately be run and puts the monitor to sleep, when you release the Enter key, then "KeyRelease" happens and it's a user activity so monitor comes back to working.

If you do the job really fast (Hitting the Enter and realsing it before command being run) your monitor stays at "sleep" state.

To test this things, install x11-xserver-utils package.

sudo apt install x11-xserver-utils

then run xev.

Now hit the Enter to see whats happens; you should see something more or less like:

KeyPress event, serial 48, synthetic NO, window 0x2600001,
...

KeyRelease event, serial 48, synthetic NO, window 0x2600001,
...

So we use sleep to make sure both this events happens before command being run.


changing from DHCP to static (reboot breaks what ifup fixed)

If you want the interface to come up automatically on boot, you need:

auto ens33
iface ens33 inet static
address 10.1.96.36
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 10.1.96.1
dns-search ourdomain.org
dns-nameservers 10.1.96.13 10.1.96.89


Is this fresh installed system? Check the power settings that you select any shutdown option for power issue

If it does not solve the problem then we need your system log. Provide the system log if it can not solve the problem.


From Stack Exchange the easiest way is editing /etc/default/grub and inserting the line:

GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=true

Then save the file and run sudo update-grub.

If you have an older version of grub refer to the link for other options.


Welcome to the terrible world of the new kernel and Realtek Wi-Fi... It broke some cards that were already working (like mine RTL8723ae). Some people can solve it using https://github.com/lwfinger/rtw88 (not my case). Just follow the instructions of github to install the drivers.


Can the Norton Bootable Recovery Tool read Linux partitions?

I don't think that it will scan your Linux partition.

Norton Bootable Recovery Tool comes only in 32bit, but it will not run correctly in x64 environment.  Also NBRT.exe is the shell the windows boots to.

Now normally there's no need to scan Linux partitions, but if you want to do so, I would recommend that you download the Bitdefenter Live CD, and use that to scan both windows, and Linux partitions.