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.
Remember the time I sold drugs? Wait, come back, it’s not what you think. Let’s rewind… I went to a club with a friend, as my work colleague was the bouncer there and we got free entry. As it goes, when you party with mates, you start the night saying: “We are not drinking tonight”, and that goes out the door when you meet more friends at the venue. Drinking beer and shots and hardtack, has its downside, and my mate started throwing up. The good friend I was, I went to the car and got some Vomifene (https://www.sdrugs.com/?c=drug&s=vomifene) in a small pill bottle. I got water and tried to get him to drink the small white pill. Somehow, I attracted attention of some shady character, who examined the pills and said: “Mmm V|O, I don’t know these ones… can I buy them off you?” He offered me per tablet, quadruple, what I paid for the whole bottle, so I let them go. He assumed they were some illegal drugs and I let him. So, if anyone asks, I can say I sold drugs. Now if it is a good thing or a bad thing, that’s up to you to decide, but in theory, I am a drug dealer, though the merchandise was perfectly legal. So… I had a job applicant who was a year out of school and had a Bachelor of Science in computer engineering. The shortest time I know of to get that degree is three years. I somehow think I am more of a drug dealer than he is a computer scientist. That is my issue with online education; there is no way you can have a BSc in 16 weeks and it will hold water. Now that everyone is at home, online education is a hot topic. Don’t get caught by these courses offering you Linux certification, but the certificate is not worth the paper it is printed on. If you do a course, make sure the certification or degree is recognized by others in the industry. Names of institutions, mimicking well known institutions, are usually a red flag. For example, Princeton in America, and you see http://princeton.tk/, chances are good that you are throwing away your money.
Q: Suddenly my Ubuntu updater is saying “Not all updates can be installed, run a partial upgrade to install as many upgrades as possible”. I ran ‘sudo apt update’ and ‘sudo apt upgrade’ and it was fine, but this warning is still showing. What should I do? My options are partial upgrades or continue. I tried to continue, and it had a whole bunch of kernel modules and stuff, all with 0 bytes.
A: When you see that 0 bytes, it means the software updater will do an apt-get autoremove for you for those unneeded items. However, look carefully, there may be a package that has an expired signature, or the PPA repo died, etc. If that is the case, see if the package is now available somewhere else instead, like the main repo’s and you can remove the PPA.
Q: With the silicon shortage, I have not been able to afford a semi-decent wireless mouse after mine went to the big mouse mat in the sky. I got a Rapoo 2.4 GHz mouse, but I can’t seem to get it to tell me my battery percentage left. I have gone as far as to add packages like lm sensor, but nothing is working.
A: Not all hardware is supported by that function, and, to top it off, not all hardware even has that function. First confirm that your mouse actually has that function, as from what I can see, Rapoo is an entry-level brand.
Q: I have installed Fsearch on my fresh install of Ubuntu 20.04 and, within 4 weeks, it won’t update any more. I mean it still works, but just won’t update.
A: Look carefully at where you installed from (the repo recently changed, from “-daily” to “-stable”), remove the old one, and add: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:christian-boxdoerfer/fsearch-stable
Q: On my 2018 Mac, I use two-finger scrolling up for ‘down’, but on my new Dell, with 21.04 with Ubuntu, I use two-finger scrolling down for ‘down’. It is getting on my nerves. I end up going the wrong way on both machines.
A: I would say decide which direction works best for you and change the other one? I am not sure what you wanted from me?
Q: How can I hide a file properly? Google says to add a . to the filename.
A: Adding a “.” period to the front of a filename does not “hide” it, it simply does not display it, in the same way it does not display “.” (current directory) and “..” (up one directory). You are simply taking advantage of a builtin rule.
The only way to really hide anything is to create an encrypted container and mount it. You can remove everyone else’s permissions to that file. Otherwise, look into a topic called steganography. https://www.comptia.org/blog/what-is-steganography
Q: When I mount my SD cards with files, I have no issues, but when I mount them in my terminal, everything just freezes. Why is that? Could my card reader be faulty? Ubuntu 20.04 XFCE terminal. Lenovo laptop with built in SD card reader.
A: That should happen if you try to mount a drive to a folder/directory that you should not. Do yourself a favour and make a directory named sdcard or something, and mount it there. If it were a hardware fault you would see it in dmesg.
Q: My error in terminal be- E: Failed to fetch https://download.sublimetext.com/apt/stable/Packages server certificate verification failed. CAfile: /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
A: On September 30th 2021, the Let's Encrypt Root CA (DST Root CA X3) expired. As a lot of domains, including apt repositories, are using free “Let's Encrypt” certificates, this now has a huge effect on clients trying to access these repositories. Try: sudo apt install ca-certificates - and reboot once completed.
Q: My HP T520 thin client is being repurposed with Ubuntu, and I ran into a snag; The SSD on there is tiny, and I haven’t done much so far and it gives me 100% usage. If I run sudo du -sh / –exclude=disks – total, it is telling me I have 5GB to play with. WTH?
A: It could be a malfunctioning snap? It could be something mounted to a folder? Chance of it being a filesystem is a lot larger than it being cached packages or something. Just type: mount - and see what is mounted, otherwise open disks and check if you see something other than you expected.
Q: I can’t seem to launch pitivi from the command line: Command 'Pitivi' not found, did you mean: command 'pitivi' from deb pitivi (0.999-2) Try: sudo apt install <deb name> YET… It launched from Alacarte? Which pitivi gives me the same output?
A: I installed it and looked at the shortcut. It is: pitivi %f - meaning it takes a file as input. If you just run that command, it will ask you to load a file.
Q: If you are stupid and want to pull a prank and delete ls from /bin, how do you install it again? How do I reinstall it without reinstalling the whole distro? Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Asking for a friend.
A: Uh-huh. It is part of the coreutils package. You need to reinstall coreutils with: sudo apt reinstall coreutils
Q: I like the disk usage analyzer on my Ubuntu laptop, but my NAS doesn’t have a GUI. Is there some utility to display the size of each of my movie folders in my home directory? I recall seeing something on one of the ubuntu fan pages, but I don’t know the name.
A: I think you are looking for this: https://github.com/groupon/ndu or https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu Otherwise I would just use the terminal, type: shopt -s dotglob & du -hs * | more, or zap it in a script.
Q: Hey guys, I have Xubuntu 20.04 that I installed redshift on. It doesn’t work. The error is, Unable to connect to GeoClue. Unable to get location from provider. The fix was supposed to be adding redshift to the geoclue.conf file, but it does not work. Can you help me?
A: Look for the redshift.conf example file (/usr/share/doc/redshift) and copy it to ~/.config, change the screen number in the file to 0 and set your longitude and latitude to your location. (How I usually do it for PCs without internet access.)
Q: How can I go about stopping systemd? Firstly, I want to say that I don’t have Ubuntu installed yet, it is on my USB pen drive. Secondly, I want to measure the difference between booting with and without from the USB first, then install it and do the same.
A: Seriously, don’t. If you want a distribution without Systemd, then install that rather. Systemd is basically integrated with Ubuntu at this stage; to try and switch it out will take you a long time and some things may stop working. Unless you know what you are doing, I’d advise against it.
Q: When I say hundreds, I mean hundreds, so my question is as follows. If I need to remove data from old IDE hard drives and make them irrecoverable, what can I do?
A: OK, you get utilities these days that do that for you, but if you want to be really-really sure, encrypt the drive and once done, whilst the drive is spinning, drill through the drive. The platters will shatter and even IF someone was able to put it back together, the data will be useless.
Q: How can I run a script when certain applications are loaded? Like when the task manager is run, I also want to fire off my infos.
A: Replace your launcher with a script and have a script within that script to run the next program.
Q: How do I grep words and phrases from a PDF document? This will save me literally days in my life. Thanks in advance.
A: I cannot give you an answer here as a PDF is not a standard document. Text in a PDF can be in the form of a jpeg and not text at all, and you can mix and match in one document. The best I can do is to say convert the PDFs to rtf or something (there are a lot of online converters – don’t install anything from those sites) and then do your magic on them.
Q: How can I enable middle-click on my touchpad? Synclient documentation says it is possible. Am on Xubuntu with a Lenovo laptop. <removed> <removed>
A: Thank you for the detailed output. However, as per our discussion, the Synaptic synclient is for Synaptic devices only. Yours appears to be Elan, and though you can try with the Synaptic utility, chances of it working for you are slim.
Q: The latest Ubuntu is not running smoothly any more. GPU: Intel 82945G/GZ Memory: 2045MiB / 2983MiB is not a bad machine. What to do?
A: Is also not a good machine at modern standards, but it is powerful enough. I would say the best way to get things flying would be an SSD. I would advise you to get some more memory (if the board is capable), as that memory will not be around much longer at reasonable prices.