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.
Not all developers are created equal. I had a meeting to do an induction with a new developer. He had not received his machine yet, courier issue, so I proceeded to help him set up his Windows laptop. Just so that he could get his email so long and communicate with his team etc. He had an issue setting up openvpn, so I asked him to share his screen so I could help him. I suddenly had flashbacks of Windows XP computers with icons and folders littering the desktop, all with the single purpose of pirating something. Folders like fix to download spiderman or whatever. Since the machine was also as slow as treacle running uphill, I suggested he do some virus scans.(Installing malwarebytes took 40 minutes!) In the end I continued helping him at a snail’s pace with everything freezing so often. To make matters worse, he would unplug the laptop power between every call, making the laptop even slower. After the roller coaster ride was over I asked him the specs of his machine. He blamed the i3 CPU for the slowness. Though it could be, the fact that the laptop had only 2Gb of memory was what caught my eye. Windows 10 alone may be fine, but running office as well as your frikking huge IDE and 3 different browsers with many open tabs… and you wonder why it freezes? Needless to say I had a good chuckle over a hot cuppa.
Q: I was running EndeavourOS on my Thinkpad and the wifi kept dropping. So I went back to Ubuntu. I downloaded 20.04.2 this time and installed that. The problem followed. The big issue here is that it wasn’t an issue in 18.04. I checked dmesg to find → “iwlwifi expected hw-decrypted unicast frame for station” before it disconnected.
A: Your issue has been seen before: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/672005/iwlwifi-expected-hw-decrypted-unicast-frame-for-station/672006#672006
Q: Mistake by me. Formatted a USB flash drive, which was defined as sdc1. By mistake, when formatting through the terminal, I typed sdb1. Komputer stopped loading.
A: Reinstall quick.
Q: How can I see that my machines do not have PPA.
A: Open your terminal and type:
find /etc/apt -name '*.list'
Q: I have inherited a bunch of 2GB mini SD cards that I want to put distro’s on. I am clearing them, then reformatting them. The error I don’t understand says - mount: /mydirectory: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.
A: You could simply use the “disks” application if you run a GUI, or if you are using something like fdisk, remember that you still have to make the filesystem on the partition, even if it made the partition “Linux”.
Q: I hope you can help me, I literally have this laptop and this problem, but it does not work for me. https://askubuntu.com/questions/708247/cant-boot-into-ubuntu-in-windows-10-ubuntu-dual-boot
A: My first stop would be the UEFI BIOS, and make sure it does not boot to windows under the boot section. I looked at the answer and the XPS BIOS does not look like that. Tap F2 to enter the BIOS and you should see a block marked boot. My money is on the first entry being windows boot manager or something similar.
Q: So I ran apt-get update on an older PC that I haven’t updated in a long time, but it failed due to a 404 error. (Xenial) Is there no way to get all those updates until they actually died?
A: The updates get archived, so it is possible. You need to change the repositories slightly, eg: http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-backports ← notice the archive part. (https://gist.github.com/rohitrawat/60a04e6ebe4a9ec1203eac3a11d4afc1)
Q: I am learning LPI basics at the moment. They taught us about uptime and free. Are there more ways to do this?
A: Sure, but for the exam, no. May I suggest looking at the github page for neofetch, it is all bash, to see how he does it. Inxi is another. You could even go ‘old skool’ and use ls. Try typing lsmem. You gave me an idea for CnC, thank you.
Q: Hi, I am still new at this, don’t brush me off please. I want to take the output of lsb_release –a and display it in a nice GUI window, but there is an error at the top saying; No LSB modules are available. Is this necessary???
A: The computer did what you asked it to do. You can trim the output, for example: lsb_release –crid
Q: Is it possible for me to have natural scrolling for my mouse, but not my touchpad? Ubuntu 22.04, Dell 7420, 16Gb
A: Not that I know of.
Q: This is what I want to do, I want to upgrade from 16.04 to 22.04 without having to go through all the rigmarole in-between. There must be a way. I haven’t got time to sit around and play technician. Let me have it.
A: Step 1, copy your home folder to an external disk. Step 2, install Ubuntu 22.04 over 16.04. Step 3, copy the contents of your home folder back.
Q: Why is it that even if I disable a service, it can start running again? I want to disable, for instance, systemctl disable systemd-oomd.service but it sometimes still rears it’s ugly head.
A: There has been a lot of discussion around oomd that I did not follow. However, I think your issue lies with systemctl. Just think of systemctl this way, disabling it, just prevents the initial start up. It does not stop other programs calling it. You need to mask it if you want it invisible/unavailable to other programs.
Q: My team keeps telling me there is no connection on Ubuntu, but I don’t have this issue on MacOS. What is the problem? I tried reinstalling it, but it did not help.
A: Just wait, you will have that issue on MacOS. Since teams is basically chromium, you need to exit it completely and remove all the cache files. When you restart it, it will re-populate these files and you can work as normal.
Q: My fresh Ubuntu install on a Dell XPS with 32 GB memory and 1TB Nvme is slow and sluggish. On the other hand Windows 11 is greased lightning on it. What can the problem be?
A: As I will be transitioning to one soon, I will let you know, but in my experience, secure boot is usually to blame. Try turning it off and installing again.
Q: I have to ask, is there some way I can use facial recognition for Ubuntu? My fingerprint sensor on my laptop is not working under Ubuntu, only Windows, but if I can just open the laptop and it can scan my face, it will be even better.
A: I am unsure here, but there is a project doing that: https://github.com/boltgolt/howdy If and how it works, is a “mess around & find out” -deal