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, UUIDs 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.
I called Dell support on behalf of one of my clients. Dell support is 50/50 – sometimes you get good service, sometimes not. The client rents thousands of machines worldwide, and works very closely with Dell to have a unified IT infrastructure. As usual, I tried to speed up the process by telling the poor first-liner what I had done. However, this was one of those idiots who was going to treat me like a home user. I had to go through everything manually with him on the phone. (What testing VGA modes has to do with a faulty USB-C port is beyond me). I tried to explain to him that we have tested by process of elimination and come to the conclusion that the laptop’s USB C port was indeed faulty. However, this guy was not budging. He wanted us to change drivers, etc, which we (the client) are not allowed to as it is controlled via the client’s global IT in combination with Dell. There is monitoring software that will remove the PC from the network if we change anything – as it will be non-compliant. Here we got stuck, they refused to help until I updated the drivers. The thing is, we have 100’s of similar laptops with everything identical, so chances of the driver causing one machine to be faulty are tiny. Then the guy asked for a photo of the port as he was sure it was damaged. This was not my first rodeo, so I sent him a picture of mine – my laptop being less than a month old and the port never used. (The other laptop was about 2 years old). Dell does not want to waste resources on older laptops, and while I understand that, I have a 3-year on-site warranty that is paid for. The reply was that the port was physically damaged and they would void the warranty. This is where I lost it and became a Karen. His manager tried to tell me that it was faulty too at first, (trying to cover) until I told him there is NOTHING wrong with it as it was mine and unused. Only when they realised they had been duped and that I was on to them from the start, did they want to see the other one, which, by-the-way, looked the same. One can’t really see from a photo if a USB C port is damaged internally, only externally, like bent or broken edges or centrepiece. I wonder how many clients they have done this to, to be so confident in trying to BS me into accepting some first liner’s opinion. They tried hither and thither, and tried to pull EULA, etc, on me, but I did not give in. Don’t let someone try to tell you because you run Ubuntu your warranty is void or they can’t assist. BS back, tell them you installed Windows and your driver is now the version they want and it is still faulty. If you are 100% confident in your diagnosis, stick to your guns. (BTW, they replaced the board and it has been OK ever since, but do check that too, Dell does not always send new parts, a lot of them are “refurbished” and may have other issues).
Q: I installed Balena Etcher from AppImage onto my Ubuntu 18.04. It worked fine. I needed some space on my SSD, so I deleted the AppImage itself. Now it won’t work. Do you want to tell me I need to keep the AppImage always?
A: Pretty much; you see, AppImages contain all the files the application needs, should your system not have them. This removes the need for installing dependencies, but at the cost of space.
Q: I installed Ubuntu 21.04. Everything works great, except that I can’t take screenshots. It looks like crap. I have done an apt update, so everything is latest. Should I try the PPA version? I don’t really want PPA’s.
A: None of that is relevant, You need to switch to X and not Wayland, to use screen grabbing software.
Q: Okay, here goes, I need a good working auto clicker for linux ubuntu, and I can’t seem to find a working one. I need it for the cookie clicker to click while I am at school. I recently switched from Windows as my computer can’t handle Windows 10.
A: Have a look at xdotool. We had a few issues featuring a tutorial a while back. https://www.semicomplete.com/projects/xdotool/
Q: What means this –> Buffer I/O error on dev sda, logical block 0, async page read sd 0:2:0:0: [sda] tag#969 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_NO_CONNECT driverbyte=DRIVER_OK cmd_age=0s sd 0:2:0:0: [sda] tag#969 CDB: Read(10) 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00
A: I/O error on sd usually means your CD or DVD is bad. However, it could be a bad CD/DVD ROM or a bad cable. You would need to eliminate those first, then ask me again.
Q: Hi guy. My dmesg output is filled with this weird error. I know UFW is my firewall and I was wondering if I am being hacked? The output is - [UFW BLOCK] IN=wlp3s0 OUT= MAC=01:00:5e:00:00:01:50:e0:36:08:85:e0:08:00 SRC=192.168.1.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=36 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=40140 PROTO=2 over and over.
A: 224.0.0.1 is a broadcast address. It could be some chop scanning, but I am going to assume it is some equipment on your ISP side. Swop your ISP router for your own and see if the problem persists?
Q: My new laptop has a 256GB SSD and a 1TB HDD. How can I see the combined free space on these drives instead of running a df -h on both and using a mate calculator to tally the result? Am I making sense, do you understand what I am trying to do?
A: Yup. If you run a man df, you will see a –total (two dashes, no space). The description is: “–total elide all entries insignificant to available space, and produce a grand total” So, df –total -h /dev/sd* should get you what you need.
Q: I have recently discovered Synthwave thanks to Rocket league, and it is so retro and yet awesome. YouTube always opens in a large size in Firefox. It is costing me a fortune in mobile data, so I want it to always open small. How can I do that? Ubuntu 18.04, HP Core2Duo 2.0, 500GB and 4GB Ram.
A: You need an app for that. (See: https://linuxhint.com/best_youtube_apps_linux/) Check your music player, it may have an integrated option for playing directly from Youtube. You can also use youtube-dl to grab only the audio and play it back at your leisure.
Q: I am having issues with the builtin file roller, when I try to unzip certain files. Sometimes it says that the file is not a compressed file and sometimes it just spits out an error at me. When the files are large or I want to see the contents of an ISO file, my Xubuntu just seems to freeze. Do you know why it does this?
A: Nope, no idea, but I would suggest installing 7zip, winrar, etc, and maybe change the front end to something like engrampa instead of file roller. Let me know how it goes.
Q: I am sorta stumped here. One of my assignments says that I need to make a note of the version with lsb_release. However, when I run it on Ubuntu 18, I get an error: “shawn@powertop ~ lsb_release -a No LSB modules are available.” How can I fix it?
A: Truth be told, I have not used that on Ubuntu based stuff, only Red Hat based, so before I help you wrongly, you can run inxi -S or use neofetch or even just cat /etc/os-release or hostnamectl - there are many ways to skin that cat in Linux.
Q: My Wifi router is in the hallway of the house, on the opposite side of where my room is. I suspect that the distance is the maximum for the zyxel. I have 2 laptops, one with Windows and one with Ubuntu. The Windows one will disconnect, but the Ubuntu one does not have a WM installed; it’s emacs all the way down. How can I check the wifi strength that Ubuntu gets?
A: It depends on how modern your Ubuntu is, but try nmcli. If unsure, first try this: nmcli networking connectivity - that should tell you if your WiFi connection is poor or disconnected.
Q: I managed to get a first gen i5 machine from my friend in <Removed>. I was using a core 2 Duo E7550 before on MSI motherboard. There, all was okay in Ubuntu. This new one does not list the soundcard. It is onboard Dell. Why does Ubuntu not see the Dell sound?
A: My guess would be that you have it turned off in the BIOS. It has been a really long time since I have seen Ubuntu not detecting a sound card on a Dell motherboard. The other option is that it may be faulty. You can test with another card, or even a USB sound card, and see if it is detected and if there are any resource clashes with the on-board one.
Q: So I read about hardware level encryption for the new SSDs. I am using LUKS atm, and I was wondering if I could tell if it is activated in Ubuntu. My machine is an i7 Dell and my SSD is Adata.
A: That is not such a straightforward question. Did you enable TPM in your BIOS; does your computer ask you for a password when you turn it on, before it boots? Did you use any manufacturer software to do it? If not, you are just using software encryption.
Q: I was following the instructions on here: http://www.compholio.com/netflix-desktop/ but there is an error this ^ E: The repository 'http://ppa.launchpad.net/ehoover/compholio/ubuntu focal Release' does not have a Release file. N: Updating from such a repository can't be done securely, and is therefore disabled by default. N: See apt-secure(8) manpage for repository creation and user configuration details.
A: If you look at the launchpad page here: https://launchpad.net/~ehoover/+archive/ubuntu/compholio - you will see it is archived and goes up to only Ubuntu 15.10. So you should get a 404 – page not found, as it does not exist for Ubuntu 20.04.
Q: Can I take my Ubuntu installed Raspberry PI SD card and insert it in a newer Raspberry PI, without breaking my installation? I have done a lot on that little 16GB card, and I don’t want to do it all over from the start.
A: Linux is a lot more forgiving than Windows and will probably work with 80% certainty. However, it is a risk, therefore I would rather advise you to clone the SD card and try it. That way, you have nothing to lose.
Q: I have just finished customizing Xubuntu 20.04 the way I want it. However, I have noticed that when I copy and paste to the mousepad, the “-” minus is missing. Any idea as to why?
A: Change the default font to something else. Not all font packs are 100% complete.
Q: This is going to sound stupid, but I clicked the view menu away by mistake in files on Xubuntu. I have no idea how to get it back. I held down alt and dragged my finger over most of the keys and nothing. I am a total beginner here and I don’t have the foggiest idea what else to do, right-clicking in most parts does nothing, and the icon in the top-left does not give me the option. Googling for, like forever, got me zilch. What else can I do?
A: You said Xubuntu, but you said “files” - this is a bit confusing. Xubuntu uses Thunar, vanilla Ubuntu uses Nautilus, aka Files. You can just press CTRL+M to get the menu showing permanently or just pressing F10 will pop it into existence temporarily, should it be Thunar in Xubuntu.
Q: In Windows, I can see the history of Wifi networks I have connected to in the past. In my laptop I can click on the Wifi icon and go to connections and see them there. This I am Okay with. I have built a headless Wifi scanner with a Raspberry Pi zero from a tutorial, and I was wondering if I could see what open networks I have connected to, but from the command line. It has no DE. I can install one, but I don’t really want to.
Oh yes, it is Ubuntu 18.04 minimal on there, I had Ubuntu Mate on, but it was slow.
A: You can try: nmcli connection show
it should show you what you need. It also has a small help:
nmcli -h
Q: Smorg, [10.03.21 11:22] I know it’s not 100% Ubuntu, but I want to put it in my VM on Ubuntu, so it may count. Why would anyone want to use Openindiana? They say it is rock-solid.
A: Legacy, mostly, I’d say. People like to have at home what they use at work. Thing is, commercial software for it is like hens’ teeth, and that is what is important at the end of the day; if nothing new runs on it any more, would you want it? Linux has been “Rock-solid” for me moreso than Windows 10, but that does not say much. Also remember, it is based on Solaris, proprietary OS, meaning open source stuff for it is also minimal. But go ahead and install it, you may like it.
Q: How can I create a file containing a minus? Like touch -123? I was trying to make a file my little brother can't just delete.
A: Don’t, in Linux a ‘minus’ is used to add options to commands. You may end up with something you did not intend. Use user/file permissions instead. Instead of trying to be clever, be smart.
Q: I am new to this home automation thing. Will my drive always be sda2? Why not 1?
A: No, Ubuntu is not Windows, to see your disks and partitions use:
sudo fdisk -l
to list them all. The number is the number of the partition, not the drive.
Q: Just a quick question about LibreOffice in Ubuntu 18 vs 20. When I paste via “paste special” and “unformatted text”, something odd happens. The character fonts will assume my document fonts, but the spacing or line width will not. I noticed this while editing a document on my wife’s Ubuntu 20. It is very annoying. I can delete the line and press enter for a new line and the spacing – by this I mean the space an empty line takes up, will be completely different. This throws off everything else you want to line up. Then two lines further, everything is fine again. Like I don’t have enough grey hairs already.
A: What you can try is select everything CTRL+A, click on ‘Default style‘ top left, then set your fonts and font size again. When copying and pasting from browsers, people try to insert hidden nonsense, designed to make your copy/paste life difficult. When using copy/paste from a browser, you can turn off javascript, that may help. You can also make sure you do not select any empty spaces. You can also copy/paste to a plain text editor, and there select the text you want and copy/paste that.