Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Q I am struggling to install Ubuntu on the volume I want. The volume is the result of shrinking my secondary drive on my Windows 10 installation. I have attached pictures of both the Windows Computer Management screen, and my options when trying to install Ubuntu.
A (Thanks to Impadivus in the Ubuntu Forums) The Computer Management screen shows that the secondary drive is formatted as a “Dynamic Disk”. Ubuntu can't handle Windows dynamic partitions. You have to get rid of that dynamic partition first to get back to basic partitions, then Ubuntu can create an ext4 partition for itself.
Converting a dynamic partition back to basic requires deleting the partition, so that means backing up your 416GB of data and formatting the entire drive.
Q Is there an audio player available that can be launched from the command line, run in the background, and controlled via software signals from another process? This would be to do basic functions like play the next or previous file in a playlist.
A This doesn't answer your question, it's an alternative approach.
I bought a used HP 5189 keyboard for $4, and it has a complete set of playback control keys. Audacious and VLC respond to those keys, even when they are in the background.
Q I am trying to install Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on my home desktop. I created a Live USB stick (formatted in FAT32), changed the boot priority to USB, but the computer just won't progress with booting from it. There is no boot logo or text nor any error messages.
A (Thanks to Geoffrey_Arndt in the Ubuntu Forums) Use a better usb flash-stick tool such as etcher: https://etcher.io/
(And it solved the problem!)
Q My dad and I use PyChess and sometimes when we cannot finish a good game, we try to use the save feature. We both save the .pgn game files that are created, but, when we try to load these games later, it seems as if only one person is able to view the board as it was saved.
A (Thanks to oldrocker99 in the Ubuntu Forums) This is a reported bug. The fix appears to be to download PyChess 12.4 from the PyChess download page.
Q I have an old Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 and I would like to install Ubuntu.
A (Thanks to wlbi in the Ubuntu Forums) A simple answer: You can't just do this.
Most of the smartphones and tablets are not using i368 or amd64 CPUs, they use an ARM CPU. ARM CPUs don't have a PCI bus for hardware detection. This means each device needs its own special-build operating system, fitting exactly to the specific hardware.
There is not only one Galaxy Tab 2, there are several different models, such as p3110, p3100, p5110.
Here you can see, that already somebody started to do that work: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices. But it was discontinued in 2013, because it is a huge job!
Top questions at Askubuntu
If you are nervous about clicking on a short goo.gl URL, you can get information about it quite easily. Copy the URL, paste it into your browser's address bar, and add a plus-sign. Now goo.gl will tell you where it goes, as well as statistics about its use. (Thanks to askleo.com for the tip.)
In issue 113, the third entry in this section was incorrect. “Do file-extensions have any purpose (for the operating system)?” should have been https://goo.gl/n9gxsR
* Command-line snake game? https://goo.gl/O2Ul4Q
* How to make files protected? https://goo.gl/No0srJ
* How is being able to break into any Linux machine through grub2 secure? https://goo.gl/GMITMv
* Where is the kernel documentation? https://goo.gl/BeRbba
* How do I install the latest OpenOffice? https://goo.gl/xLZRZP
* How do you copy a directory and its contents to a new location under a new directory name? https://goo.gl/CXIUmo
* Making a large file using the terminal https://goo.gl/1SO7Mu
* What do ^$ and ^# mean? https://goo.gl/f2mbNa
* What is the text to the left of a command (as typed in a terminal) called? https://goo.gl/agzqMZ
Tips and Techniques
Backup, anyone?
If you don't have backup, you will be very sad the day your hard drive fails.
You will also be very sad on the day you accidentally, permanently delete 10 years worth of pictures.
Backup has two components, hardware and software. Hardware might include DVD-Rs (if you don't have a lot of data), a large flash drive, an external hard drive, another computer on your network, a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device, or a system on the Internet, such as Dropbox. Backup hardware is not inside the box of the computer you need to back up.
If you use an attached device such as an external drive, my suggestion is to have at least two of them, so at least one is physically removed at any given time. Store it in “a safe place,” such as your friend's basement, so fire or theft will not take every copy of your valuable data. Swap the drives from time to time, such as once a month.
Backup to the Internet is a special case. My feeling is that it's not relevant to an individual if you need to backup more than 10 GB of files, your Internet connection just isn't fast enough. There are a few major free options, including Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft Onedrive. They are all “small,” but you can pay for more online space. Dropbox has an advantage in Linux, in that you install the Dropbox client software, then just copy files into your local Dropbox folder and everything happens automatically from there. For the other two, you have to use your browser to manually copy files to the online storage, at Internet speed.
There are several software options for backing up in Linux, with Rsync perhaps the most popular, invoked as a scheduled job in Cron. Once you set it up, the theory is that you don't have to think about it, it just happens. Well, except for swapping the backup media.
There's a GUI for Rsync, Grsync, which means you can do a manual backup from a graphical interface.
What have I done about backup?
I have a dreadful NAS box which was declared too slow and unreliable for use at my office. A couple of years ago, I did a full copy of my home folder to it.
I use Dropbox for small work-in-progress files.
For one static set of files, I burned them to DVD discs. It costs about $15 to back up 200 GB of data on DVD, which is much less than an external drive of that capacity.
Some of my work is automatically backed up on the Internet, such as the Q&A column, which is saved on the fullcirclemagazine web site. Likewise with any web sites I work on: the online version is live, and the files on my computer are the backup.
I recently began running Linux from an SSD, with my old hard drive still used for media files. I set up an old netbook as a file server, and installed Crashplan to do regular backup of my new home folder to the netbook. In this configuration, Crashplan is free. The advantage of the netbook is that it hardly adds anything to my electricity bill.
At the (Windows-centric) office, it's a different story. The big fear is that the office goes up in flames, or has some other physical catastrophe.
I set up a backup machine running Xubuntu. Users are told to save all their data on the main server, and that gets backed up over the network every night. Once a month, the drive holding the server backup is swapped out and taken off-site. Eventually, the drive goes to long-term storage. If required, I could restore a file which was deleted three years ago!
The users' workstations are also backed up, not because of the data, but because of the configuration. The typical workstation has hundreds of programs installed and configured. Most users also have programs installed to deal with specific clients, and it would take ages to get them up and running from scratch if a hard drive failed. In most cases, the backups are done weekly, since not much changes from day to day.
We also take an off-site copy of the workstation backups on a monthly basis.
Most recently, we added daily online backup of the most important parts of the server.
If the office burned, it would take some work to get the company running again, but we believe IT would be the least of the problems.