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issue155:q_r

Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !


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, UUID’s or IP addresses. If your question does not appear immediately, it is just because there is such a lot, and I do them ‘first-come-first-served’.

Back in the day, we didn’t have Sean Connery… oh wait, we did. What we didn’t have was high speed internet, so, when this new-fangled technology rolled around, there were some people who saw an opportunity to use it for good. They installed a 9600baud modem in a PC to be able to do accounting and stock-take in one location. The PC was wrapped in metal, with a keypad and tiny green display. It was sold as a till and accounting system. However, the units were installed in places where the humans were an issue, so the engineers came up with a plan to change the pin layouts of the phone jacks, and the cables for the modems. Because lightning on the telephone lines damaged the modems, they needed someone to go replace them, if faulty. Enter yours truly. Arriving at these stores, usually in high streets, carrying tools and replacement parts, after pushing through throngs of people, I would often find no fault. Turns out, the employees wanted to use the phone jacks to make free phone calls. Failing to do so, the pins not being standard, they would leave it unplugged, hoping a technician would arrive and tell them how to make free phone calls. What I am trying to illustrate here is: there is always the human factor. Have you checked the human factor before posting on a forum or chat?

Q: I have Xubuntu. I have been thinking of going to Disco Dingo for fractional scaling, e.g 1.25x. Deepin looks like it supports it, and maybe KDE too. Can I backport it to 18.04? I have a 50 inch TV that I have connected, but some things are just too small to see. I wear spectacles already. My media PC is actually an old laptop connected to my TV via VGA port, not HDMI.

A: I understand the part of not wanting to reload in 9 months. If you use a laptop, do you have an external mouse and keyboard attached to control it with? If so, why not use the mouse wheel and left ALT to zoom in when having to read or type, and zoom out again to watch your movie? It will zoom to your pointer. You can make your pointer bigger in settings > mouse > themes > cursor size.

Q: How do I do wa -la? I have man, but no entry. I posted the question to stack exchange and the answer was to sudo Nautilus and navigate wa -la. Did he mean ls -la? I would like to retrieve file from a standard account I can’t log into. I need to type some commands in terminal or go through the files app to access the file.

A: I have never heard of wa? It could be ls – la. I would suggest the find command.

EDIT: I think I found your post ! What the guy was trying to say was VOILA! (wa-la) :D

Q: I've installed Ubuntu 19.04 on my Thinkpad. But I can't use my touchpad? Ubuntu can see it, so it should work. I am using an external mouse atm, so it is not a big deal. Can you help me? This is my output:

$ xinput list Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)] Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)] Microsoft Microsoft® Nano Transceiver v2.0 id=10 [slave pointer (2)] Microsoft Microsoft® Nano Transceiver v2.0 id=11 [slave pointer (2)] ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad id=15 [slave pointer (2)]

A: Two questions: is it enabled in your settings panel? Do you perhaps dual-boot and maybe use software on the windows side to turn it off? (I am assuming you have tried the shortcut keys on your keyboard to try and turn it on again).

Q: Which Office package is best? I have heard a lot of hype surrounding WPS Office.

A: Best is subjective, but I am glad for this question. You see last week I lost the WHOLE Q&A section due to an issue with OnlyOffice, so I am back to LibreOffice again. For bog standard letters, any of them will do. I will address WPS Office first as it was your question. WPS Office has a free and paid option. The free option is slightly crippled (like OnlyOffice too). WPS office is not open-source. Though the program is a pleasure to use, it phones home all the time, which is the part I do not like. If you install it offline and use it offline, it is quite fine. For features such as versioning, you cannot beat the price of LibreOffice (though it may look outdated.)

Q: I have bought a new laptop with Windows10 preinstalled. I have tried it and hated it. There is no control, and it installs crap I don’t want and never asked for, and what even are these sh#tty “suggestions” ? My problem is that this laptop is tiny and has one USB port, no DVD drive. How do I install Ubuntu? No dual-booting please. Wipe this crap off the face of the earth.

A: If your laptop has a card reader slot, you can create a bootable disk on an SD card and install from there. I am assuming the USB port is in use. On windows, you can use Rufus to make it, and on Linux, Balena Etcher. I am not going to hold your hand through the install, but point you here: https://tutorials.ubuntu.com/tutorial/tutorial-install-ubuntu-desktop#0

Q: I have a dual-boot (windows 10 and Ubuntu 18.04) machine. I have 3 partitions, one for windows, one for Ubuntu, and one for both. I just formatted that partition as NTFS from windows, I could only see it from Ubuntu. I could not write to it. Then I formatted it using Ubuntu. After that I could read and write using Ubuntu. Then, I saved a file on it using windows. Then I was back to square one. What can I do? With best regards.

A: Actually, you have many options. Shutting down windows by holding down the SHIFT key when pressing the shutdown icon. This shuts windows down and does not leave filesystems in use. (Hibernating). Turning off hibernation completely. Etc. But all the fixes are all on the Windows side.

Q: I have a failing SD card. I want to save as much as possible. I heard that Gparted has ‘attempted rescue’, and dd will make an image of the card. Which is best?

A: This time I can say neither. Can I suggest you look at photorec (not just for photos) before you clone the SD card? Recover as much with this utility before you do the other ways you have heard about, and maybe use ddrescue instead of plain dd.

Q: Is there a way for me to extract audio from a youtube video?

A: Yes! One way is to use an online converter, there are many of those, or youtube-dl, or even VLC!

Q: Hello. I switched from Ubuntu to MX to see what the fuss was about. It seems to be a storm in a teacup. I can’t seem to install any of my favourite software, it’s just not found? I can’t uninstall stuff properly as there is no software centre to uninstall stuff like flash that I don’t want. It feels like a relic from a bygone era.

A: Your question? (Switch back to Ubuntu, or try Voyager).

Q: What is this sorcery? I installed the latest iso and now my laptop won’t charge in ubuntu. It remains or runs down, never up. I tested in windows and it does charge. I don’t even know where to start looking.

A: Usually the fault is at Microsoft’s door. In Windows, discharge the battery completely and charge it full again, or do a battery calibration with the vendor software. Now boot to Ubuntu and try again. Also see if it charges when you turn the machine off. Update your machine BIOS and the Linux kernel. Uninstall TLP, if installed, and try without it.

Q: Hello friends. How can I see what is eating my bandwidth? Here in India it is a problem. I need to tell who is the problem.

A: Hi, run:

sudo apt install nethogs

and, once installed, run: sudo nethogs - IF you have more than one interface, you need to specify which one.

Q: So, after updating from Ubuntu 18.10 to 19.04, Xfce terminal can not be started from the Panel. “Failed to launch preferred application for category TerminalEmulator. Failed to execute child process /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/xfce4/exo-1/exo-helper-1 (No such file or directory) Directory exo-1 does not exist.” This error is popping up everywhere. What went wrong?

A: I cannot say what went wrong, but I can tell you that the error tells you what is wrong. Open a terminal and type: sudo apt install libexo-1-0

Q: How can I get night light from Ubuntu Gnome to Xubuntu? The bright screen really messes with my eyes and my roommate is complaining about his sleep patterns.

A: There are two options: 1. Redshift, 2. F.lux.

Q: Desktop sounds being back is great for home, but not for work. Where can I kill it?

A: Install dconf editor then gnome > desktop > sound and make it false.

Q: I moved from Gnome to XFCE. I am a bit shaky on my feet. I see the battery indicator shows my wireless mouse battery, but it remains on 75% even when new or flat. I don’t recall this in Gnome.

A: I do not have a definitive answer for you other than the mouse’s Linux support is lacking. You can try to get a driver from the manufacturer. Consider yourself lucky, mine does not even see my mouse’s battery.

Q: I have a new PC Windows 10 64-bit, AMD Ryzen 3 2200G, with Radeon Vega 8 Graphics, 8.0 GB RAM, Motherboard MSI B350M PRO-VDH. When I installed Linux Ubuntu 18.04, all was OK, as usually in the past. When I restarted, the PC had a crash. When I installed Windows 10 Home after restart all was OK. Could you explain me why Linux is for this HW forbidden? How can I find out it in advance? In documentation of producers, I did not find it. Thanks for solving.

A: Right, nothing is forbidden, though MSI is known to be a Windows-only house. I think you can try Ubuntu 18.10 or 19.04 rather, as the problem is Ryzen CPU support. The Ubuntu 18.04 image you are booting from may be too old? Have you tried Ubuntu 18.04.2? Also, see if there is updated firmware or BIOS for that motherboard. If you would like to know in advance which hardware is Ubuntu certified, you can check out this web page: https://certification.ubuntu.com/desktop/

Q: I have installed Anki on Disco Dingo. I use it for uni. However, it’s not working. I need to get going soon.

A: You are going to have to build it from source. The version by Ubuntu is too far behind. (If you do not know how, mail me back and I can walk you through it).

Q: I have installed virtualbox and added the Ubuntu ISO file as a fake CD. It boots quite fine. Why would I need to install it?

A: Running from a live DVD / ISO is also fine. If you want to know why you cannot run it live, you can, by all means! That is one of the software freedoms you have with free software. Unless I am understanding your question wrongly.

issue155/q_r.1585414647.txt.gz · Dernière modification : 2020/03/28 17:57 de auntiee