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’.
At one stage I worked for an automation company. The turnover on accountants was high. Strangely enough, the accountants were museum pieces, total popcorn toppers (now I am not saying grey power is not a thing, but I suspect some of these had not even seen a computer before). As the company had no IT, they used one of the other divisions, which actually was another company where I worked. The one accountant who had retired from our previous accounting firm came to work for us. The grey, however, was just a cover for the blonde. I would get calls daily regarding printers. This specific individual could not get printers under the belt. She would print until the output tray of the printer was full and when it stopped printing (or ran out of paper), would log a support call. (Sometimes the same document 500 times, which was “never her fault, but the computer’s”). No matter how many times I showed her why it stopped printing, and to remove the paper in time, it went in one ear and out the other. She could also not differentiate between printers marked “accounting” and “hallway” and “drawing office” (even after a few sessions of explaining that “accounting” was for confidential documents, “hallway” was for mass printing, and “drawing office” for odd sizes and drawings). Eventually, this individual was responsible for printing the salaries to the hallway printer and drawing office printer, over and over and over, as it did not appear on the accounting printer. This, in turn, had the effect of a mass resignation by staff (almost half). Sometimes you can’t fix stupid, and they will blame the IT systems, even though said IT systems work as intended.
Q: Is it worthwhile getting the latte panda?
A: No. You can buy 2 laptops with more powerful processors, for less than a Latte Panda (maybe if the price drops?).
Q: Guys, I am running Linux Mint and I am trying to upgrade to the latest version of lightzone via PPA, but I cannot get it to work. It just won’t recognize the PPA. Can you help me out with this?
A: Short answer is you need a different version of Mint. LMDE does not work with PPA’s. If you want to keep the Debian version, you need to build it from source.
Q: I have a Lenovo 80L0 laptop with Xubuntu 18.04 and I find that my fan runs a lot. I open up my task manager and I see gluqio running more than one instance and each running 15-20% of my 2 Cpu’s. I don’t find anything in the man pages and when I type glu and double tab, there is no result. Do I have malware and how do I get rid of it?
A: Actually it is gluqlo, which is part of the screen savers, a flip clock IIRC. Xubuntu has a history with screen savers getting stuck or not terminating correctly when you move the mouse or tap a key. The process is not critical and you can kill it.
Q: I may be stupid here, but I can’t seem to get rid of the spaghetti fonts on my system. If I open the fonts application, it lists all the fonts, but I see only an info button. Delete key has no effect. There is no right-click. Opening it as root has no effect.
A: The fonts application is just for you to see what the installed fonts look like; you need to install a font manager if you want to delete any.
Q: I have installed sublime text on Ubuntu to follow along on a tutorial, but if I try to launch it from the command-line – I try sublime or sublimetext – I simply get “sublime: command not found”. I have only recently upgraded from windows, so I am still a bit shaky.
A: I am not sure why you would need to launch Sublime Text from the command-line, but it is simply:
subl
Q: My question is two-fold. How can I get the software centre to display everything about web development or java in one place. How can I group them or create my own views? Developer tools only gives me “all” or “ide’s.” This is not ideal. Then sometimes I do updates via the software updater, and, once it is done, I go to the software centre and there is an update that the software updater did not show. How is that happening?
A: OK, the first part, you can’t, not that I know of, but you can install “appgrid” which allows more categories and sub-categories than the software centre. Their development category is broken down into languages as sub-categories. The only catch is you need to page via the arrows on the right, I am not sure if mouse scrolling is supported. The second part, I would say that the update came through just after you did the other one? I use the command-line to update so I cannot really vouch for the GUI versions, but that is the only thing I can think of that may cause that, as all the updates are not released at once.
Q: I can’t seem to find 20.04 32-bit release. I see that it was discontinued. I have an Acer laptop with 32-bit Ubuntu, and was planning on upgrading as soon as the new LTS was being released. For some reason I can’t load 64-bit, it always crashes, but 32-bit works. My Specs: CPU: T2250, MEM: 2GB
A: That is very strange, to be sure, as that machine should support 64-bit. You will have to get an “Ubuntu spin” that is 32-bit, to partake in the 20.04 goodness (if at all). At this stage of the game, I cannot tell you which, but keep your peepers peeled for a 32-bit respin.
Q: I thought I shouldn't learn python because everyone is trying to learn it - I want to make fast programs. Also, I want to be a pro programmer. So I chose Rust. Do you think it is wrong to think like that? Rust will teach me what is going on behind the scenes? I have heard python can’t teach that.
A: Whew. I am no programmer, but here goes. Both Python and Rust are high-level programming languages and won’t really teach you what is “behind the scenes”. For that, you need to learn assembler. That will also write the fastest programs. However, do not write off Python. Go ahead and learn Rust, it seems a lot of the “big players” are moving that way.
Q: I have an HP 14Z laptop that came with a 30GB SSD for caching on windows. I installed Ubuntu 20.04 on it and it works. How can I now see the other hard drive, the 1TB?
A: Open your “disks” application if you need to format it. Uninitialised volumes do not usually show up in the file manager.
Q: My Lenovo laptop is a decade old, and I want to run lmsensors/ psensors on it to monitor it, as it is so old. Problem is, it installs, but I get nothing. Not even a blip. No temps, no fan, etc.
A: Microsoft. The vendor and Microsoft worked together (colluded?) so that it works only with Windows. Other than writing the device drivers yourself, write it off to that. Some things are just not to be. (That's not my experience with my old Lenovo laptops. I use sensors (part of lmsensors) with Conky. - Gord)
Q: What is the best way to check out my CPU on Ubuntu, I have tried inxi, neofetch, and checked procinfo, but it’s kinda lacking, if you know what I mean?
A: Actually, I don’t, but if you want more info on your processor, I suggest you look at “GPU-Z” or “GPU-X”. Get back to me if this is not what you are looking for.
Q: I have set up quite an extensive hosts file in Ubuntu. I have been noticing that Firefox is not respecting my hosts file lately (blocked domains are spewing their nonsense all over my web pages). Do I need to switch to Brave now or something?
A: You can’t have your cake and eat it. Either you rely on your hosts file or you use encrypted DNS inside of Firefox. I hope this can be fixed in the future, but for now it’s one or the other. Turn it off in the Firefox settings if you prefer your own.
Q: I kinda had a drive failure in my array, but it is el-cheapo, so it had no light to point out which drive failed. I can’t access it anyway. So I removed the drives and tested them one by one. Now I can’t remember in which order they go back in. Is there a way for me to recover my data? I am still on Ubuntu 16.04 tho.
A: Yes, with very expensive software or take it to a data recovery centre.
Q: I have a question that may sound stupid. How do you guys know what the PID of a process is to kill it. A lot of times in Xubuntu, I use the task manager to kill a process that is stuck, but that ends up stuck too. How do I find that PID to kill it?
A: I am not sure I follow, but I think I understand. If you use a graphical program to end another program, and that does not kill it, but seems to sit there doing nothing? Well, your fallback is the terminal. You can kill the process with -9 as superuser. Also, task manager is just another process, if you want to kill that. You can find its PID with top or htop.
Q: I installed ZorinOS on my machine and it is beautiful. The one thing that gets my goat is whenever I use it, it will randomly freeze or hang. Sometimes I can use it for an hour, and sometimes one minute before it freezes. Because it froze, it did not write any log files either. So now how do I know what is causing it?
A: You can try uninstalling java / openjdk / JRE for a start, but I had the same issues, so I put Zorin aside and will check out the next version.
Q: How can I change my audio settings in Ubuntu Gnome to run my headphones and my speakers on my dell 5490 laptop please? It is a built-in sound card with a 3.5mm jack, one jack only. I have googled all over, looking for the answer, and even stack-overflow cannot help me.
A: I am sure we have had this before, but here goes: You simply can not. I will tell you why. The laptop you are using is a business-class laptop. Corners are cut. The 3.5mm jack just interrupts the flow of electricity to the speakers. In other words, it re-routes the “traffic” to your headphones, physically (ie, software won’t make a difference). You need to look for an external sound card that is well supported in Linux.
Q: Quick one. I am currently using ultraviewer to connect to my mom’s windows PC. The thing is that I no longer want to keep a windows virtual machine in Vmware just for that, as VMWare slows down Ubuntu 18.04 to a crawl. My machine has 8 GB of memory, but it is only an i3. How can I run ultraviewer in proton or whatever to make it work?
A: You have me there, have you considered a Linux-friendly alternative like Wayke or Anydesk? They work great on both OS’s.
Q: How can I run Gparted on Ubuntu without sudo? I want to format some SD cards.
A: You can’t as you need root access to perform destructive operations. Does ‘disks’ not work for you?