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.
Sometimes I wish I could slap people awake. It is right in front of their eyes and they do not see. When it is in the press, it is usually 180 degrees of what you are being sold. In other words a lie. I am looking for a new place to live, and when the ad says spacious, I always look at the square metering of the place, because it never is. When they say it has a beautiful view of the mountain, it means when you stand on your tippy-toes to see it over the large freeway taking up 70% of the view. When you do a cloud certification like Azure AZ-900, almost half of the time you are being told how much “cheaper” the “cloud” is. (Spoiler, it’s not) Then things in your face, like the slogan, “There is no cloud, it is just someone else’s computer” meaning “a large *evil corporation’s computer”. Now I know there are some honest cloud providers out there, don’t shoot yet. The thing is everyone wants to own what you have, by some sly means. Handing your data to a cloud provider, they will make doubly sure they have some legal way to steal your data. They will use it to train their “AI” (no such thing, just a way to take what you have and make it theirs) without even telling you. The EU put all these laws into place like the GDPR, but it is about as effective as putting toilet paper on a landmine to absorb the blast. There are already more than 50 ways to bypass every aspect of the GDPR, for instance. Why, you may ask? Simple answer is greed. Just like the “startup” idiocracy. The goal of a “startup” is to sell it to a big corporation for a lot of money, instead of working to make it your business and running with it. It is easy to rag on open source, but at least they are trying.
Q: I have Ubuntu in Ubuntu. My host is Xubuntu and my Virtualbox is Ubuntu Gnome. I have shared the clipboard and folders, so I could move files to Gnome and when I look again, the Gnome VM is locked and I have to unlock it. It happens so frequently, that I have changed my password to ‘a’, just for this, it is so annoying. Is there anything I can do in the Gnome VM?
A: Are you asking how to keep your session alive or open? If that is the case, consider installing caffeine and caffeine indicator in your VM and activate it before you do anything. If you are saying that your copying stops until you log in again, maybe that will help too.
Q: I am running two identical machines, about 9 years old, black boxes, with Ubuntu 20.04 and every now and then, the screen dies and I can see that the machine is still running. Both have MSI motherboards and Apacer memory and WD green drives. They plug into a D-link switch. There are no peripherals that could cause a power dip. The screens are still VGA not HDMI. I just can’t figure it out.
A: Without some kind of logging, I have no idea either, though I did find something on the internet that may give some insight. https://superuser.com/questions/1839115/ubuntu-22-04-dies-all-of-a-sudden-after-some-time-yet-the-pc-is-still-running
Q: I was configuring server 20.04 for games, when adding the IP address with the port it was established correctly, but I could not enter the game, I was looking at the server, I opened the firewall, I gave it sudo reboot, it froze, I updated and now it no longer works for me.
A: You “opened” the firewall, do you mean disabled it? If you did not, that would be the reason you can no longer access the server. We did a short piece on Firewalls in CnC in the magazine, please give it a once-over.
Q: I am trying to configure OpenVPN on Ubuntu. I have the username & password & configuring file. I am only a beginner and https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/OpenVPN3Linux is not really helping for the beginner.
A: I am going to assume vanilla Ubuntu. Just open settings > network. Under VPN it will say, “not set up”, click the “+”. Choose OpenVPN or import from file and import your file. It is really as simple as that.
Q: After doing a dist-upgrade, I see blocks everywhere, instead of normal writing. I think I am going to have to reinstall, but I would prefer not to. I went from 20.04 to 22.04 and I made sure to disable my PPA’s before doing so. Any ideas?
A: You probably had a custom font. Just reinstall the custom fonts again. If all else fails, change all your font settings to “ubuntu” and see what happens.
Q: I’m trying to copy my environment from my old computer to my new one. The old one is still on Ubuntu 20.04 and the new one is Ubuntu 24.04. Most things installed fine, except: apt-get install python3-distutils Reading package lists… Done Building dependency tree… Done Reading state information… Done Package python3-distutils is not available, but is referred to by another package. This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or is only available from another source E: Package 'python3-distutils' has no installation candidate
A: The last line is the error message, denoted by the “E”. It tells you that the package you are trying to install is not in the repositories you have configured. Did you use a PPA before? Did you use a different version of Python before? It could also just be that that specific package was dropped in Ubuntu 24.04, in which case you need to find out what replaced it. (I had a quick look and I can confirm there is no such package)
Q: So I got rid of the Ubuntu panel and installed a much saner Docky dock. Just one thing now escapes me, how do I get the 9-button grid thingy? Or how can I make it work without the Ubuntu panel please?
A: For the keyboard you should just be able to use the WIN+A or “super+a” keys.
Q: I am running Xubuntu 22.04 on my Dell laptop. Its screen resolution is set to 3840×2160, no scaling. I installed a mouse cursor theme, DJ-FOX-C that looks amazing. Next to the theme, you have the cursor size buttons. I have set it many times on Xubuntu 20.04 to around 50 pixels. However nothing happens in Xubuntu 22.04. The cursor remains the same size.
A: I looked up the cursors on gnome-look.org and there is a readme in the tar archive, stating that the cursor size is 36 pixels. “Size: ===== 36×36” Not all cursors are made with SVG files, some are PNG at heart. SVG you can scale without loss of quality. It also says he has a shop, so I suspect if you want the scalable ones, you can buy it?
Q: Smartctl is saying that my drive is failing? The current value is bigger than the “worst” or “threshold”. My machine keeps doing a journalctl when I start up, but I don’t know how to interpret this table? <removed>
A: I would not worry too much about the other values, what you are going to be looking for is the “RAW_VALUE” of the uncorrectable errors. If it is anything but 0, backup your data immediately and look for a new drive.
Q: Man I hate man pages, most of the time they mean nothing if you don’t know what a command does. I looked up lsattr and all it says is: “list file attributes on a Linux second extended file system”. About as useful as a rooster in a saddle. How does an idiot like me learn anything from that?
A: You could try TL;DR pages or tealdeer, or even bro pages. I recall something called yelp, but that may no longer exist. You could try to find a bash bible in paperback?
Q: I have two 13inch dell laptops. One runs MX Linux the other runs Ubuntu. Something strange happened the other day, after updating the MX Linux laptop, I shut down and closed the lid. I took the Ubuntu one to update, but it goes off near the MX laptop. I put id own carefully, I did not drop it, and it would not turn on. I took it to a friend’s house and it turned on fine. I’m not sure what to do here.
A: It has nothing to do with your OS. You probably put one laptop on top of the other. The magnets in the slim laptops are strong enough to affect another laptop, as they are so thin. If you did not know, there are magnets in the base that move when another magnet is near, completing a circuit. The circuit then signals the lid closed and the laptop goes to sleep. (the method differs, but the effect is the same)