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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.
Working with foreign help-desks can be a pain in the tuchus. Unfortunately I have to work with Dell India. It is such a pain. I have a broken keyboard and the guy will insist that I hold down the “D” key when booting to initiate diagnostics. Stupid nonsense like that. On the one hand I cannot fault them, having run a call center myself, but on the other hand sometimes you need someone who is not TOTALLY green. So I had a machine where the fans did not come on and it got hot to the point of shutting down. I called Dell to basically request a replacement board, as everything is on the board, and the firmware was the latest already. After and up-n-down, they agreed to send me a heat sink and two fans. I accepted, knowing I will have to let that machine lie for two weeks then log another ticket. The hardware arrived and I went to install it. After I installed it, and tested it with a stress test, the fans came on. I was surprised and put the old fans back. They also came on. How now brown cow? I put the original heat sink back and the problem returned. This made no sense. I went back and forth a few times and while I was trying different heat sink compounds, I noticed a kink in the heat pipes of the original installation – very slight, but visible at a certain angle. How this affects the heat sensor I have no idea, but it does, somehow. Are we reaching a point where technology is resting on a knife edge? Could the user have damaged it? Certainly, but how does a little kink in semi-round pipes (they are supposed to be round, but Dell flatten them to make the laptops thinner) cause so many issues? The original complaint was that the machine was slow when parsing git pipelines.
Q: I am trying to dual-boot Ubuntu 22.04 with Windows 10. I made space on my partition and I want to boot from there, not from USB, but it is not working. Can you help me please?
Pressing F12 on my Dell does not reveal the Ubuntu partition.
A: I’m honestly not sure what you are trying to say or do. You need to install Ubuntu from install media, be it USB or SD card, the first time to INSTALL it. Thereafter you should be able to boot off a partition.
Q: Hey guy, my Ubuntu 23.04 is freezing randomly. Usually when I am editing my layout with the extension manager. This is unacceptable, I demand you fix it right now. This is [censored] that my $3000 machine is laid low by unpolished software.
A: Sure, hand over the same money you hand over to Microsoft – for Office AND Windows and we’ll fix it for you. You do know I don’t work for Canonical, right?
Q: I’m following a couple of tutorials to get to know Ubuntu. In all my confusion, I may have installed the incorrect packages for things, but that is because I am learning. All seems OK until I try to log into the html page. I copied the code by copy-and-paste to make sure, but I keep getting a message with gibberish. Username cannot contain ^$(,.A-Z) && and so on. I am confused.
A: It is what is known as a “regular expression”, waaaay too complex for a QnA, so I will point you here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6I-Ahc0HB4&list=PL4cUxeGkcC9g6m_6Sld9Q4jzqdqHd2HiD
Q: My Dell 5530 laptop connects to my Dell W19S Dock with 2 Dell P2224h screens. My previous laptop had no issues moving my screens around, but with Ubuntu 23.04, the external screens are always mirrored. How can I get it to work?
A: The only thing I pick up is that your laptop has integrated graphics and may not be able to actually handle three screens, or you may have 2 HDMI cables in your dock, try switching one to DP. When last was the dock firmware updated?
Q & A: Guys, I had the first crash on my laptop. When it came back, and LibreOffice writer recovered, all the Q’s that I was answering were gone. To the guy who had the ACPI error – update your BIOS. To the guy getting stuck on GRUB – turn secure boot off, maybe even set your computer security to audit mode. I cannot remember all of them. The guy with the USB issue, it is not your USB drive or ISO if it works on an older computer, it is BIOS again. I seriously cannot remember the other question, I’m sorry. The guy with the code::blocks issue on Ubuntu 23.04 I tested and you are correct, I also only see a red trash can and it will not load, you can run: sudo apt install codeblocks-contrib and you will be golden.
This will teach me to run non-LTS versions….
Q: My dad tried installing the official Anydesk client from anydesk.com. It seemed to install, but I can’t connect to his machine, it just gives me an error. Problem is, I can only go and look again on the Christmas holiday. Nothing seems to work for him. Any suggestions?
A: Yes, let your father click on the gear icon when logging in and let him choose an X11 session instead of Wayland. Wayland cannot do those types of things yet. Anydesk should work on a X11 session.
Q: I use Thunderbird on Ubuntu and Betterbird on Windows. Can I import my inbox into Ubuntu Thunderbird please?
A: I need a little more info here, are you trying to import from a different account? If so, check on the Betterbird forums, just to be sure. From what I can see, there *should be no problem provided the versions are compatible, as Thunderbird has a tendency not to import newer versions when copied across.
Q: More of an opinion question, but here goes. What version of Ubuntu do you recommend for a Raspberry Pi 3B please? I must not be slow.
A: Ubuntu Core.