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.
When I was at school, we had a History teacher enter the class with his fly open. He was wearing red underpants under his Khaki shorts. It did not take long for someone to notice and giggle. Giggles breed more giggles in teenagers, and he eventually stood in the centre of class, where everyone could see him and proclaim: there is an ugly thing poking its head out in this class! Obviously the result was disastrous. Kids were laughing so hard, some fell out of their desks to roll on the floor. Efforts to stem the tide of laughter was met with more laughter as he said it a second and third time, as if by now there wasn’t a kid who had not noticed. The end result was that all the kids got punished severely. Who would you say was at fault here? I notice that a lot of people on Github and random forums are quick to go “hey developer….” Others will compare open source software with proprietary crap, where you have NO say in anything and rag on the open source equivalent. The answer is simple, if you give the money you were giving Adobe monthly to GIMP or Blender, and I am damn sure it will rise to meet the other paid product… And you have a say or direct line to the developer(s). But you don’t… So how can you complain? Again, who is at fault here?
Q: I am installing Ubuntu 22.04 on a Dell 5593 i7 with 16GB RAM and I am using my trusty Ventoy stick. I have done it before many times, but I just have the worst time with Ubuntu. I have now tried Ubuntu 24.04 and it still sucks. Once the installation finishes and it reboots, I get a minimal shell. The kicker is, when I put the Ventoy stick back in, it boots normally. I have no idea what that is all about. My Ventoy install is up to date, btw. Can you tell me what I’m doing wrong? Ubuntu download is verified. A: I hope it is not your laptop, for what I’m about to say. It is a craptop! I know that model well. The worst part about it is its BIOS/UEFI – it has no option to unset cached boot, like the more premium models. You have to enter the BIOS again and select “ubuntu” as the BIOS boot option, if that fails, select the SSD as the first boot option. It should be peachy afterwards (until you boot from anywhere else). Q: I have a laptop I purchased second-hand. It came with Windows and I’m not interested in Windows. I tried to load Ubuntu 24.04, and the new installer stops, telling me the windows drive is bitlocker protected and I need to unlock it first. It then displays a QR code and refuses to format the machine. It is a machine from Cashies, so no idea what the admin password is. Why can’t Ubuntu just trash Windows? Why is there no erase drive and continue? A: I did not know about that, but I found this: https://help.ubuntu.com/wip/bitlocker/
Honestly, just download Debian, do an install that wipes the drive, then install Ubuntu over that. I’ll tell you why: I went through the slog of installing windoze, encrypting it and trying Ubuntu for you. As you said, I also did not see a continue option, so I used a Spiral Linux ISO I had lying around to do the formatting via the installer (5 minutes) and then it installed Ubuntu 22.04 Vanilla just fine. Q: I did an update via the update manager and restarted, to find my Ubuntu Gnome laptop colors inverted. Firefox icon was blue and Thunderbird Icon was orange. The internet suggested that I remove my color profile, but it did not work. <removed> <removed> <removed>
A: Inverted colours usually signal faulty hardware to me, boot with a bootable Ubuntu first, to confirm. Start with Tweaks, disable all gnome extensions, reboot, and see if it fixes. If it does, turn each one on until you find the culprit. Alternatively, look for an updated Nvidia driver. (If it was recently updated, downgrade it.) Another thing you could try is to log in with a Wayland if in X11, or X11 if in Wayland, as this is still murky ground. Also check that the cables are in, properly.
Q: My display is totally messed up. I think I went and chose the wrong options; is there a way to go back to defaults? Instead of booting properly, the system comes to rest at a terminal prompt. I don’t have any proprietary drivers installed, and my Ubuntu install is only about a month old.
A: I am not 100% on what you mean by “back to default”; however you can re-setup everything again with: sudo dpkg –reconfigure -a. (that is two dashes, no space). Q: Hi there, I am running Ubuntu, but not with KDE or Gnome or XFCE. Is there a way for me to check the filesystem of my mounted drives straight from the terminal? I Googled it, but everything points to fsck instead of info on the partition.
A: There are probably many ways, but the way I used to do it was:
lsblk -f
Q: Can Ubuntu have a corrupt profile like Windows does? I am asking, because when I log in, the screen goes black and then drops me back to the login screen.
A: Yes it can, however, it is more likely that you need to force a fsck on your drive or log into another TTY and run a: sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y or even choose X11 or Wayland session. Q: I have Kubuntu running on a low end i3 with 2GB RAM, as like a media laptop, playing series on our TV. It is Kubuntu 24.04, and works reasonably, but not great, as it has a hard drive – not a SSD. Booting takes ages and sign-in takes ages, so we don’t want to restart it. We have it on auto login, but it does what it wants. I need it to be on X11 before I start a video or it is sometimes pink. Without me having to log out, can I see if it is in X11?
A: You can open a terminal and look at the xdg_session variable:
echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE
Q: I am running Ubuntu 24.04, and I am having issues with the latest version of Virtualbox 7.12 on it. I previously ran Ubuntu 22.04 and virtualbox 7, maybe 01.
I keep Ubuntu as a VM with my other VMs, but lately I just can’t set up some. Things that worked previously now just won’t install, or give errors saying “unsupported Hypervisor”. Should I switch to Vmware rather, now that it is free, or will I have the same issues?
A: Oof, this is vague. Honestly, I can’t say. However, things are changing in the VM space in response to distro / technology changes. If it is older distros you are trying, I suggest changing VMSVGA to VboxVGA and try again. No one is stopping you from trying Vmware either. Q: Is it possible to get intelliJ CE without having to install flatpak on my system? I just don’t want any snap or flatpak eating up my 128GB SSD. If so, how can I get it please, step-by-step?
A: HI, there is a way, the xtradeb repository. Though I have not tested it myself, You should not have issues. (https://launchpad.net/~xtradeb/+archive/ubuntu/apps/+index?batch=75&memo=75&start=75)
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xtradeb/apps -y
sudo apt update
sudo apt install intellij-idea-community
Q: My laptop is old and it has a ATI radeon card with 256MB memory in it. I want to install the old ATI drivers to accelerate it so I can play games using the ATI card instead of the crappy intel cpu graphics card. I have tried so many things, but it never works out or ruins the install. Can you help me?
A: My suggestion is to use the open source MESA drivers. I’ll tell you why. The libraries and other bits ‘n pieces that those old drivers depend on, are no longer supported by modern Ubuntu systems. Secondly, as far as I know, the MESA driver outperforms the old proprietary drivers. I’m not aware of any communities that have formed around those old cards either, but I may be wrong. Q: I am installing Ubuntu on my PC through bootable pen drive; it shows partitioning failed. I am too new to know what to do now. Could you please tell me how to proceed? Thanks a lot in advance
A: You will need to verify a few things first. You need to verify the downloaded ISO. (https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/how-to-verify-ubuntu#1-overview). You will also need to verify your pen drive, I suggest just using another. Once written, with Rufus or Balena Etcher, you need to tick the “verify” there too. The last thing you need to verify is the drive you are installing on to. It may have a bad sector or something similar. Next time, give us the specs of your machine and if you are using UEFI boot.
Q: I know one can try different desktops so thought I would try KDE. Which I tried but it did not work out as planned. I'm not able to go back to gnome. I just got the console based login. I’ve tried installing gnome and KDE again, but all I get is the console.
A: What happens when you type:
startx -??
Though this is possible, I usually do not recommend newbies do it. Remember it also now installs all the Gnome and KDE files that run in the background. If it was Windows, you would say it was “bloated”. This is the thinking behind containerised applications like Snap and Flatpak, where it contains all those other files without “contaminating” your installed operating system. Quickest way to get sorted is reinstall Ubuntu from scratch.**