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.
My boss recently did interviews for technicians and proceeded to ask 20-year old applicants what ISDN is. These kids did not grow up with it, they don’t know it, and none of their generation uses it any more. He could just as well have asked how the Mayans built Chichen Itza! (look up “how kids react to rotary phones” on YouTube to understand what I am saying / trying to say). Things deprecated, asking a new Ubuntu user what ‘ifconfig’ is will probably get you a blank stare. Yes, it is basically irrelevant, but there also may come a day when you need it (but, not in the way that you have candles in a cupboard). I am looking at you, COBOL. Mainframes are still relevant today – just for the volume of work they can process effortlessly – and the programming language of choice is COBOL. So ask yourself, why would the big players spend on mainframes with Linux and COBOL instead of C++ Windows and cloud? Rescue those old machines with Linux, learn the ins-and-outs of your operating system. It may not be the year of Linux on the desktop, probably ever, as manufacturers only write drivers and applications for Windows, and Linux is forever playing catch up… via a programmer wanting that feature to work on Linux, but in other areas it still reigns supreme. With everyone having Linux in their pockets (with Android), the time has never been better for you to get to grips with Linux. Looking for a job? Learn COBOL. You may just get a good job at a Fortune 500 company! ISDN on the other hand has one foot in the grave, and the other on a banana peel. Let us know if I am wrong.
Q: I have a Huawei LTE router and my Lenovo laptop has Ubuntu 20.04. If I put the laptop to sleep, or I disconnect from the network and try to reconnect, it won’t. I can turn off WIFI and turn it back on, to no avail. I have to get up, go to the room, pull out the power of the router, and then it will reconnect. It is becoming a chore, how can I fix this? I did not have this issue with Ubuntu 16.04.
A: Turn off IPv6 for starters, it is on by default. It lengthens the connection time considerably if you leave it on and the router uses IPv4. That said, you may need to update your router firmware, as Ubuntu moves forward, it may not always be 100% backward compatible as things are removed for security sake. You can test by doing the same thing at a friend's house and see if the problem follows.
Q: Hey, is there some tool I can use to accurately measure GPU usage on Linux? I don't care if it is AMD or NVIDIA or even INTEL, as long as it works.
A: Sorry to disappoint, but there are none. There may be something in the enterprise space, like one of the workload managers, as these days people use compute modules more and more, but it will not be free.
Q: I want to ask why my upgrade from Ubuntu 2010 to 2104 turned out so crappy, with things not working?
A: My question is, if you are testing a distro’s test/unstable/whatever release, you should be an expert or semi-expert in Linux, if you are not, why do you need those testing versions? For day to day use, you should rather stick to the LTS releases, if you do not want issues. Upgrades are finicky, so why not install fresh? It takes like 15 minutes?
Q: MacOS videos on YouTube always look so cool with all their synths and plugins, but it costs a lot of money. Can I get something like that with UBUNTU? I still use 18.04, for now, but if I need to upgrade to get better stuff, I will.
A: Keep your eyes on FCM as that's a great idea for a series of articles. It may not run immediately, but I will start it immediately. Ubuntu Studio may be a good start for you or KX Studio.
Q: I have installed Ubuntu Budgie 20.04 on my ageing PC. It has a Nvdia 730 display card or 630, I can’t remember, and 6GB of RAM. <image removed> It says I can clear unneeded packages, but if I do that I can only see 1024×768, and the Nvidia control panel does not open. The only way to fix it is to reinstall.
A: I am not sure what you are asking, just know that things like 6th generation to 7th generation in Linux may mean one driver works and one does not, so it is not trivial as you say, or like in Windows. If cleaning unneeded packages breaks your system, don’t do it, it will not cause any issues just “lying there”.
Q: I am dual booting Windows 7 Ultimate and Ubuntu 16.04. Is there a way for me to access files in Ubuntu from Windows? I know I can access Windows files from Ubuntu, but I’m not sure how to reverse that?
A: Diskinternals has a program called Linux Reader. I am not sure if it is free or trial, but I recall using it on Windows 7 many moons ago.
Q: Thank you for helping me, I have followed youtube tutorial for making windows USB from the iso file. It says disks make filesystem fat and mount iso and copy files. This is not working for the boot. How do I make it?
A: For Windows 10 to boot these days, you need NTFS to start, you also need something to tell the BIOS that it should boot the USB thumb drive (usually a separate partition with boot files). There is a utility called WoeUSB you can try, I have not used it, so I cannot say how effective it is.
Q: How can I add unraid to Ubuntu to manage my four 4GB drives please?
A: Unraid is a Slackware based distro, basically, so it will manage your drives as a distribution, but it is not Ubuntu and cannot be “added” to Ubuntu.
Q: Is there a way to know which distributions are based on Ubuntu, current and past?
A: Well, easiest I can think of, is go to Distrowatch, do an advanced search and tick based on Ubuntu. It should bring up distros that are alive and dead.
Q: Why can’t my gnome extensions work in Ubuntu 21.10? I don’t want to downgrade again.
A: The short answer is version numbers. Gnome extensions from the website may not be updated yet. You need to decide if you want bling or stability, if it is the latter, you need to use LTS versions.
Q: I need help. I have a Xiaomi redmi 9A android phone, but when I connect it to Ubuntu 20.04, I cannot see all my stuff. I want to transfer music to it and not dump it in my pictures folder.
A: Most phones have a setting for transfer mode, eg, MTP, PTP, etc. You need to find yours in your settings and change it to the appropriate mode for file transfer. This is a phone issue, not an Ubuntu issue.
Q: My brother and I share a computer. Sometimes I see drwxrwxrwxt jason jason 4096 Jun 24 11:02 myfiles/ What does it mean?
A: I am not sure what your question is; when you use the ls command, it will list the files and folders where you are in the tree. The “d” at the beginning of the line means it is a directory, and you can see it by myfiles being followed by a slash. ‘rwx’ is for read, write, and execute, and it is repeated for user, and group, and others. The ‘t’ is the sticky bit. The 4096 is the amount of bytes it takes up.
Q: I am adding my siblings to new groups, but it is not taking effect. I want them to access only certain things. I click manage groups in users and click remove, but they still have access.
A: Group memberships are only refreshed at login. You need to log them out first, before it will take effect.
Q: So why do you not use gnome-latex for tutorial?
A: Everyone has their favourite, would you like me to use it?
Q: My question is more about Linux than specifically Ubuntu, why do u have mount and umount and not unmount?
A: Posix compatibility on legacy systems, the commands are only 6 characters long. If it gives you grief, simply alias it!
Q: I was researching my font error on askubuntu and I put my page size to 50. Then when I click the next page, the size reverts to 15. I am using Chrome not Chromium on Ubuntu 20.04. I tried googling it, but I can't find anything.
A: I cannot say I have seen that, but when you click on a page, just add &pagesize=50 at the end of the url? See if the behaviour follows, say in Opera/Brave?
Q: I have a lot of SD cards that I dump photos from and they are from different cameras, how can I know what the file system is, on the one I have mounted? Like FAT or EXFAT. Sorry, my Ubuntu version is 20.04 on a Clevo laptop. The cards are mostly Toshiba, with a few SanDisk ones.
A: When you navigate your filesystem, you will see ‘.’ and ‘..’ meaning: THIS directory and up a directory. You can use that same notation in a command; df -T . as the “.” means current folder, so just navigate to each one and run the command.
Q: How can I launch Thunar in admin mode?
A: I am going to assume you mean as root? Simple, use pkexec Thunar and type in your password.
Q: I am experimenting with my bash prompt. Instead of me logging in and out the whole time, can’t I just preview the damn thing? I just wanna make it my own, without looking like all the same. I’ll move to zsh when I have bash pinned down, so don’t say I need zsh.
A: I would not tell you that. There is no man page for it, but what you are looking for is “source”. When finished editing your .bash_profile, open a new terminal and type: source <path to bash_profile> - In my case it is: source ~/.bash_profile
Q: Why does my top only show CPU(s) for one CPU? I just got a New Ryzen 7, and I want to see all the CPU’s and maybe send a screenshot to a friend. Hehe. I saw this: <image removed> on a video, so I know it’s possible. Or is it just an Ubuntu thing?
A: If you open the man page for top, you will see right at the bottom of the command-line options (the very last one) is “-1”. You can press 1 while it is running to show all your glorious CPU’s and make us plebs jealous.
Q: If I open a jar file with engrampa, I can see all the files and folders within, but as soon as I try to open any of the folders inside, it hangs up the process. It doesn’t matter what folder, it just hangs. I know the file is good, it’s just a simple flappy bird clone that works.
A: I cannot tell you for sure, but I am sure it is how a .jar-file is made, rather, it may be compressed at the end, but have a different structure within. Thus, Engrampa may be able to look and see the zip part, but not more.