QnA Welcome back to another edition of Questions and Answers! In this section, we will endeavour to answer your Ubuntu questions. Be sure to add details of the version of your operating system and your hardware. I will try to remove any personally identifiable strings from questions, but it is best not to include things like serial numbers, UUIDs, or IP addresses. If your question does not appear immediately, it is just because there are many waiting, and I do them, first-come-first-served. People often point to the older generation as computer illiterate, but I think that it is not a generational thing. I have a friend who asked if I would assist one of his friends with a laptop issue (about fifteen years younger than me). Apparently the laptop has been in three times and still had the same issue. Overheating in a laptop, no matter how advanced the unit is, can cause issues. Though this was Windows 11, which I try to avoid like the plague, I decided to put a lot of effort into the problem, as I am currently unemployed, due to bent laws, in the hope that this business owner may put in a good word for me somewhere. I looked at the laptop, ran stress tests in Windows and with Ubuntu, but it handled it like a champ. The fan and heatsink were new, so dust was not an issue. After a few hours of testing I was stumped. This was a beast of a laptop and I could not get it to overheat or misbehave. Every test I threw at it, it passed. I did not have infinite time to look and he came to collect the laptop. He was annoyed with me for taking up so much time and not finding the issue. Just as I was leaving and this rude guy ignored my good-bye, I noticed that he had put the laptop on a cooling stand. The odd thing was, that he had it back-to-front. On closer inspection, I saw he somehow managed to get the “stopper” (the elongated part that prevents your laptop from sliding off the pad) wedged between the laptop body and the laptop screen. Sure, it is a “creative solution” and “thinking out of the box” and it won’t go anywhere, but it also blocks his laptop’s exhaust vent from expelling the hot air... Q: I have had no issues with my Dell laptop until Ubuntu started updating my firmware all the time. Now my laptop will just randomly freeze and the only way forward is to power it off - by holding in the power button. It’s getting as bad as Windows, is there a way to stop it? I’m getting annoyed now, as my computing experience is being ruined by junk minor updates. A: If you wish to wait for the firmware updates to stabilize, I suggest going into your Dell BIOS/UEFI settings and removing the boot option that says “Linux Firmware”. That way, even if the update is downloaded it cannot install. I suggest looking at the Dell driver updates page to see what the firmware “fixes”. There may even be a fix for the “freezing”? You can then enable it again when you want to update the firmware. Q: I moved to Ubuntu 24.04 when windows 10 was forcing updates on me every day and rebooting when I could not afford to. Now it seems Ubuntu is doing the same. I see, "Updated software is available for your computer. Do you want to install it now?" more than Windows 10!! Everything I have tried to mitigate this, has met with failure. What, in your opinion, is the best way to give it the finger? A: Thanks for the laugh; I feel you. What I have done is install something called “OpenSnitch” and you can block the apt and snap requests until you feel you have time to update. It will create rules and you can delete the rules or pause the application, when you want to update, putting the power back in your hands. Q: I got a new laptop for my birthday and I made some space for Ubuntu. It installed fine. Everything is better than my 2008 laptop, just one hiccup. I’m dual-booting Ubuntu, but I don’t see my GRUB menu, is that normal? A: I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess the old laptop had spinning rust and the new laptop has a fast SSD? You can always extend the grub-timeout if you wish for it to remain on the screen longer? Other than that, sometimes the newer UEFI’s have image overlays and “signs of life” that produce a logo and may overwrite it. You may need to turn it off (or on!) depending on your laptop. Q: Can you help me as to what would be a good password for an encrypted partition on my drive please? I tend to forget passwords and my password manager is in my OS, so it does not help before it is booted. A: Not really? But, may I suggest a rhyme, say old mcdonald had a farm, and you leave out the “o’s” or “d’s” use only the first letter from each word of your National Anthem, something you cannot forget. Personally, I used a CD key from a game, including the dashes, where I never remember it, but it is always on hand via the CD cover? (And backed up on another computer with my other CD-keys). If you want to get cryptic, try: https://github.com/exarobibliologist/Password_Chart (something you can print out!) Q: I decided to breathe new life into my ageing PC by replacing the Pentium G CPU with a second-hand i5 CPU. It already had 32GB of memory. It worked great with Windows 7, but Windows 11 won’t work. Can I just stick a CD in like Windows? How do I make the switch? What version do I get? Our payment kiosk at work uses Ubuntu, so I based my decision off that. A: I suggest just plopping in head first. Watch a few installation videos on Youtube and take the plunge, with the LTS release. If you are asking about “flavours”, I suggest Kubuntu, if you like Windows, otherwise go out of your comfort zone with Gnome. Of course there are others, but the journey of a thousand miles, starts with one step. Q: I’m having second thoughts here, I have installed Ubuntu on my server and I want to buy 2 drives to go in there. The problem is that I’ve been having so many issues with drive failures, I think that NTFS is the problem. What drives should I get that are both supported by Ubuntu and for media access with Volumio? A: Seriously, If you are not using Microsoft Windows, there is no benefit to using NTFS. If the drives will be internal, consider a journalling filesystem. Drives are universally compatible with Linux, I cannot ever recall one not working. As to drive failures, if it is mechanical, try not to move it while powered. Do not bump it, do not drop it, keep it cool, and it should last a long time. Q: I’m so over this Edge horse**** I have decided to give Ubuntu a go. PC is a no-name build with an RX580 and 16Gb RAM and 2 x 256GB SSDs. It is smooth so far, other than this: , and it just bounces around like that. I have this in the driver section - A: You somehow turned on the desktop magnifier. Go to settings (the gear icon next to the shutdown icon, or type settings in the search, then go all the way down to “Accessibility”, then find “Zoom” on the right, and turn off “Desktop Zoom” slider. Q: What is exfat, and why can’t I read an old USB drive? Granted, the USB has been through the washing before, but it has always worked. But now I get a exfat error in Ubuntu 24.04. How do I solve this? A: First, water causes rust, so my first instinct is to tell you to spray WD-40 or whatever passes for water displacement spray, where you are, into the USB thumb drive. It will also help prevent tarnish. Then I suggest using the gnome-disks application to scan and fix the filesystem. (You may need to do it a few times). Good luck! Q: My machine is Ubuntu 24.10 Intel. I am following an online course. Question is how to start the command line interface in Administration mode? Normal shortcut keys for this ctrl, alt, t ? A: The quick answer is you don’t. Ubuntu is not Windows. You can open the terminal and use sudo to get admin rights for the command you need to run. For example: sudo apt update -gives the ‘apt’ command “administrator” rights. Q: I use Ubuntu 24.10 with Firefox snap and I listen to Youtube to fall asleep almost every night. My current plan is split into day and night allocation, and even though the video is rather static, just rain on glass, for instance, I burn through my night allocation quite quickly. Is there something like glasswire that I can use to measure my usage when I sleep? I’m not saying that I’m hacked, just that I use a lot of data for static graphics channels, like lofi. A: You can try btop – the “net” section should give you totals. For real time, you can use nethogs, so see what is eating your bandwidth. That said, even so-called static pages on YouTube can have a real impact on bandwidth when played in HD. My suggestion is to use ‘yt-dlp’ like so: yt-dlp -F before you plunge in, as the third column will give you the audio & video size.