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.
Everyone is familiar with the “download more ram” ram story and it goes to show you how gullible people are. I even remember my woes at a friend’s house when he got a “RAM doubler” for his Windows 95 computer and many people “back in the day” were caught out with these scams. These are all tales we can laugh at with 20/20 vision. (or 2022 vision… OK I’ll see myself out) However, not so long ago, I had a friend who got an ADSL connection, before any of our other friends, and would download like there was no tomorrow. To put it into perspective she would buy hard drives to store her downloads on a quarterly basis. She was computer savvy, or so I thought… I had just installed Warty warthog and was trying my best to get my laptop connected to the internet via my new PCMCIA card, when I got the call. Printer issues. It sounded to me like she was out of ink, but I went to look anyway. It was one of those (then) new inkjet printers, Lexmark, I think, and she was one of those people that installed all the software that came on the CD’s accompanying her stuff. I did a quick test print and only Cyan showed up on the paper. I told her that she was out of ink. This was not possible, she assured me as she got new ink two days ago. Thinking she may have swapped the new and old cartridges, I asked to see the old ones. This is where things went bottom-up. She proceeded to show me how she “bought'' new ink. There was a pop-up from the printer software, saying buy more ink, and she had been clicking the OK button to “download” more… This is your reminder that everything is “magic” until you get to grips with it. Keep playing with Linux, you will gain the benefits.
Q: Seriously not a fan of parted, is there another way I can resize my disks that is easier?
A: Does the built-in ‘disks’ utility not work for you?
Q: I want Ubuntu and Windows 11 on my machine. Should I dual boot or use a VM?
A: What is your goal here? If you just want windows to run a few programs Ubuntu cannot, put it in a VM, if you would like to learn about bootloaders and maybe run into problems later, dual boot.
Q: Sometimes I can’t edit a file and I need to use sudo to edit them, sudo mousepad but I just want to open mousepad and edit them, if you know what I mean?
A: I do. It all boils down to permissions, you need to be in a group with write permissions to that file. When you do: ls -la -you will see the permissions on the left, the r, w, and x’s. If you are not the owner of that file, you need to be in a group with permission to read and write to that file.
Q: Something very strange is going on, I set up a ping to 8.8.8.8 and reboot my router – I get connection issues – and there is a time it connects, receives between 2-5 packets back and then the ping fails again. My Xubuntu is still on version 20.04, but I had the same issue on 18.04. Then I need to disconnect the wifi with the network icon and connect again for it to work. If I don’t go through this ritual, I get connected to the router, but not the outside world.
A: Sounds like a cheap / nasty router with 2.4GHz enabled and 5Ghz disabled. When booting it will turn on 5GHz, to which your machine will connect immediately, then the software in the router will disable 5Ghz throughput. Try turning on 5Ghz WiFi or if there is a reason you are using 2.4Ghz get a better or 2.4GHz only router. (I know this sounds harsh, but those are your only options)
Q: My dad has Lubuntu on our computer, but I want to add Windows 10 on there too. How do I do it, keeping both?
A: That depends on how you want to install it, side-by-side, you cannot as windows is too dumb to play nice. You can add Ubuntu to Windows, but not Windows to Ubuntu. You can add Windows in a VM like virtualbox or any of the other virtualisation options or install it on its own drive, even an external one, you just need to choose the boot options.
Q: I have Kubuntu on my laptop and my router is upstairs, when I go downstairs the signal is weak, so I installed another access point downstairs. The problem is that my Kubuntu does not automatically switch to the stronger signal when I am downstairs. I thought just making the SSID the same would have Kubuntu switching by itself. How do I do this?
A: In the router and AP WiFi settings, turn down the power output to say 40% and test. The issue is that the signal is not weak enough for Kubuntu to switch, so it stays connected. By default the power output is always like 100%. Play with those output values until it works. 100% power is probably overkill anyway.
Q: Is there any point to having snaps in Ubuntu? Please explain this to me as everything I read about it is negative, so why have it?
A: I did not want to answer this in Q&A as it is too long, but I think the answer will apply to a larger audience: People perceive snaps as bad, as they cannot control it, it will auto update your applications without asking. Linux is about control over your software after all. Secondly, for some programs it can be unnecessarily large – as it has to hold all the dependencies for that program. However, this is NOT always the case, for instance I have blender as a snap – it is roughly the same size and it does not install all those 100 other packages to my installation, it all just lives inside the snap. This is good if you don’t want “bloat” in your system, (lots of packages installed for one-time use of one application) Thirdly the back end of snap is proprietary and we as Linux users have come to despise that word as it usually means “sneaky s#!te”. However the proprietary part is not on your computer, but at Canonical and does not affect you at all. I do not think they are inherently evil, think of them like dmg’s on an Apple MAC. The point to having them is you avoid dependency issues and installing lots of packages and are generally considered safer, for if you delete a file in the snap while running, you can simply close and re-open the snap and the files are all created fresh again.
Q: Don’t laugh, I am new to this stuff. I have normal Ubuntu 20.04 on my laptop. <image removed> This is the advert. So far I am happy to report that I have had no forced reboot updates or bluescreens. In learning about the Ubuntu ecosystem, I decided to install Jitsi. My issue is with the camera not displaying anything but a red haze. Audio works fine. I tried Skype instead, but I got the same problem, so I don’t think Jitsi is at fault. Can you help me?
A: I don’t think Jitsi is to blame, or Ubuntu, for that matter. I suspect kids. That specific model in that picture has a red “privacy shield”. If you look around your webcam at the top of your screen, you will see the red circle, you need to slide that plastic back to reveal the lens underneath.
Q: I have been spoiled with Solus in that I haven’t had to reinstall since day one. I have grown to like it so much that I use Ubuntu Budgie now. With Ubuntu 22.04 on the horizon, I am dreading the reinstall as I always forget SOMETHING. I need Ubuntu as Solus does not have the software we use. What can I do about it, I don’t want to always lag behind.
A: You could look into https://rollingrhinoremix.github.io/, like Solus, it aims to be rolling.
Q: I have been having really odd issues, and I opened my old laptop to find the fan boiling hot. Can I control my fan with Ubuntu, maybe spin it at 75% all the time?
A: Yes and No. It depends on the laptop and the software. However, I think you have a bigger problem. If your fan is not spinning freely, then the friction will cause heat. Laptop fans are usually bearing-less, so it is possible to clean and re-grease the spindle. If you can afford it, get another one as soon as possible, as the fan is meant to take heat away from the machine, not add to it.
Q: Something is not hundreds with Latex from the repo’s and I don’t really want to build and maintain it myself, do you know of a PPA I could use? I’ll even consider nightlies.
A: How about a net install: https://www.tug.org/texlive/acquire-netinstall.html
Q: Can I clone my Ubuntu machine to a new one? I find that the little i5 just cannot keep up and my HOD has signed off on an i7 for me. The problem is that they are different models and brands and it took me a very long time to get my machine ‘just right’, it is only a bit underpowered, taking all day to do what my manager’s i7 does in 2 hours.
A: You CAN and you have a pretty good chance of it working too, unlike Windows – I would, however, see how it works first, as drivers are unpredictable. If not, do a fresh install on that machine and migrate your profile.
Q: Why is it that I find some packages missing in WSL compared to a normal Ubuntu installation?
A: Sorry, no idea, WSL is something I know nothing about, I try to avoid Microsoft as much as possible.