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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.
One of our ‘new’ employees at the company I work at, is 74 years old. Now, before anyone gets any ideas, he does something few people do. In other words, his skills are in demand, so he is able to work long after retirement age. (It also says a lot about age discrimination.) The only problem is that he is technologically challenged. Twenty four years ago, when he retired, computers were these big beige boxes that almost took up your whole desk. Obviously during one’s retirement, you take cruise ships around the world, you muck about in your garden, and you generally do all the fun stuff you never had time for during your slave years. The thing most retired people do *not do, is keep up with technology. It has been ‘challenging’ preventing him from burning the building down. He will plug power into itself or plug multiple chargers into his notebook and so forth. I looked in the mirror and found 100 new grey hairs after his first two days! I am truly thankful for transient voltage suppressors in modern notebooks and peripherals. Flinching at every noise, expecting the fire alarm is definitely not a good feeling. With that in mind, I refer to my friend’s mom, who is now 78, who keeps up with her kids in Australia via Ubuntu Budgie. She had no clue when it came to windows 11, that came with her laptop that her son bought her, but with Ubuntu Budgie and a few apps… sorted. She has her cozy mysteries playing in Musique, while she is crocheting, Thunderbird for email, and Skype and Jami for instant communication, so she does not really need a cellphone, and LibreOffice, not costing her a cent. Ubuntu Budgie has a simple layout that he added a dock for her with her favourite apps and she has not wanted it updated from 18.04 in fear of drastic changes – like you get with Windows. We will now load Ubuntu Budgie 24.04 in a virtual machine (in a month or two), and see if it is the same as 18.04, and make it look the same. Tell me again how Windows is “winning”.
Q: I have a HP M479 on my network. I used to be able to print, but not any more. If I print, no activity on the printer. There is a duplicate printer though? If I remove it a few seconds later it just comes back. I haven’t needed to download drivers on Ubuntu 20.04 before. Do I need a different kernel, or just look for drivers?
A: It happens sometimes, click the network icon, turn off networking and delete all the printers and reboot. Once in again, turn networking back on and search for the printer. Let it install fresh. Your issue should be solved.
Q: Ubuntu 22.04, in qbittorrent, magnets, some of them are giving me problems; qbitorrent stays looking for metadata, although they have seeders. Sometimes new magnets stays @ thinking, and I’m not sure what is wrong. I did not have issues with older versions of qbittorrent that I can remember. Can it be Ubuntu?
A: OK, this is not an Ubuntu problem, but an understanding problem. Magnets are not torrents, open a torrent file in your text editor, then open the magnet file in your text editor. They are not the same. Torrent files already contain metadata information that magnet files need to download first. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7IX_yy15wI
Q: New install, Ununtu 23,10. I have this issue while installing flathub. I used this command line. sudo apt install flathub Reading package lists… Done Building dependency tree… Done Reading state information… Done E: Unable to locate package flathub
A: Have you considered Linux Assistant (https://www.linux-assistant.org/)? It will do just that for you. It was designed to help people get these things done quickly.
Q: I tend to keep my Ubuntu installation quite clean and I clean up after each update. Sometimes I will find modules relating to Nvidia or the kernel. What would you suggest as a good cleaner? Beachbit has ruined a system for me before, so I am a bit wary.
A: I can relate, I use Stacer, but, like anything, if you want something done right, you need to do it yourself. Because Ubuntu is based on Debian, it also keeps the config files, in case you want to install a deb-file again. As Nvidia drivers will update constantly, you may see a lot of files. Run:
grep-status -n -sPackage -FStatus config-files –
to see all the leftover configs. You can try Synaptic and look on the right for “Not installed(residential config)” and “completely remove” the lot.
Q: Can I install Ubuntu on my Dell with a touch screen???
A: Yes, and I can confirm it works, because I had to turn it off in the BIOS as it is annoying as hell.
Q: My laptop is getting on in years and I have decided to abandon Gnome for XFCE. When I click on a panel and I go to properties, it shows transparent, but the panel is solid. I want to get some transparency in there, so it looks like my icons are floating.
A: Erm, I think you should look at what the header says, I have a feeling it says “separator”. You need to go to “panel” and its sub-menu to set the entire panel. Yes, I know, bad design, one of my peeves with XFCE.
Q: I can’t connect Ubuntu to the wifi. I have disabled IP v6 as suggested. My Ubuntu is still 20.04 and my connection information says; IP Address: 192.68.1.2, then Subnet mask 255.255.255.0, then default route 192.168.1.1, and primary DNS 127.0.0.1, and nothing in IPv6. Can you help me?
A: I see two issues, one the IP address is missing a “1” in front of the “68” (as your gateway says “168”), and your DNS is the local machine, which is fine if you use another DNS, but try 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 to test. I bet it is one of those two things.
Q: On my Ubuntu 20,04 laptop, the fans go crazy until I open up the system monitoring centre and go to processes, which seems to calm it right down again, but it is driving me crazy, I just can’t seem to nail it down.
A: Honestly, I have no idea, too little info, but I suggest getting an antivirus and intrusion detection system and see if anything is amiss. It sounds like something detecting that you are looking and scaling down. You could also always reinstall?
Q: Suddenly I can’t xrdp on to my VPS any more. I did not make any changes. What could be the issue? Ubuntu 18.04.
A: Wow, you are going to have to give me more to go on!! I looked at the Debian CVE’s and bugs for xrdp and there are a lot. It seems there is “unexpected behaviour” in four of them. It needs to update to 0.10 by the looks of things. Maybe look at something more stable?
Q: I’m running the Ubuntu in a VM on my Mac. When I change my resolution to 3840×2160, everything starts freezing but it works fine at 1280×800? I think I need a driver, but I’m not sure what or how?
A: Two things to check, by default, the Mac only allocates 16MB memory to VGA, make it 128MB (lots of pixels require lots of memory), and check if your guest additions CD is installed.
Q: My Ubuntu 22.04 has not asked me to upgrade yet. When will that be? It has been out for almost 3 weeks already. I don’t want to reinstall again.
A: The upgrade prompts happen only when the distribution hits the next milestone, 24.04.1, and not sooner.
Q: Here’s the rub, on my Ubuntu 20.04, I have no issues running the game freecol. Now that I have 22.04, the game won’t run. The twist is that I tested it on the pre-release and I had no issues. I have a Nvidia A2000 display, that is not gaming, but it used to work. What would have changed between November & May?
A: It seems it is a bug, related to Java: https://sourceforge.net/p/freecol/bugs/3357/
Q: I am running Ubuntu on a 2019 Macbook pro and I am really confused by my error. You see, when I remove my charger, the battery still shows charging. If I leave it on charge, it charges so slowly, I have to leave it overnight if I want a full charge in the morning. The laptop is not even overheating or anything. Ubuntu clearly does not know how to charge a Mac, or am I missing something?
A: I recently sent a Macbook Pro with MacOS in for repair for basically 100% this. It has nothing to do with Ubuntu and everything to do with a failing battery (IIRC). Batteries have a short warranty for a reason.