Jeanba's questions

The problem appeared recently and I don't know how to pinpoint the cause of it. The screen will go completely black with a white underscore at the top left hand corner. This problem occurs a few times per hour.

The applications seem to still be running in the background, as I can still hear people and they can still see me if I am in a conference call. I can also login to another TTY by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F{i}, and if I restart the computer, it works just fine.

I'm running Lubuntu 18.04.6 LTS on my machine. Thanks a lot for your help!

One HTML page of mine needs to access images that are stored in a hidden folder .local/ in order to render them and generate PDFs.

However when I try to access any files stored in an hidden folder I get a "Access to the file was denied" error. I can't open those folder in Chromium neither.

I tried to check the permissions with ls -al but it doesn't seem to be helpful, here for instance the folder .anaconda has more permissions than the folder anaconda3 but still Chromium can browse anaconda3 but not .anaconda

drwxrwxr-x 1 jb   jb        18 Dec 30  2017  .anaconda
drwxr-xr-x 1 jb   jb       364 Jan 23  2020  anaconda3

My ubuntu version is: Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS My Chromium version is: 88.0.4324.96

Any idea how I could figure this out?

EDIT1: I just created two folders with the following commands

mkdir thisisatest
mkdir .thisisatest

As expected Chromium can access the first one but not the second one which is hidden :/

EDIT2: I tried with another computer (Ubuntu 18.04 LTS), It works without any problem (I can browse any given hidden folder). Still trying to understand what is going on here.

EDIT3: Just tried with Firefox and Firefox can browse hidden Folders & files.

Each time I suspend my computer, after I turn it back on, the last screen state before suspension shows up in the blink of an eye - showing possibly web pages, terminals, applications etc. -, then the lock screen shows up and a password is required to access my computer.

I am using Ubuntu 18 but I encountered the same behavior with the former versions.

In most cases this can be seen as a minor problem but sometimes this can lead to some confidentiality issues.

Do you know why this is occurring and if it is possible to prevent it?

I've recently upgraded my OS from Ubuntu 16 LTS to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and it's been a few days that the process unattended-upgrade is taking a lot of CPU power, forcing my fan to be quite noisy (cf screenshot)

Do you know what this process do, why it is always running and why it is so greedy in terms of CPU power? (What could it be possibly doing with all this calculation power?) Is it safe shutting it down?

Many thanks in advance for your help! :-)

EDIT: I tried to upgrade apt-get and i got the following message:

E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend - open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable)
E: Unable to acquire the dpkg frontend lock (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend), is another process using it?

Can't use sudo anymore, could unattended-process be using sudo? if so why for so long?

So it's been a while I am puzzled with this question. A few years ago when I wanted to see passwords stored by chromium I had to enter my computer admin password but now (different computer, different ubuntu version) it's not the case. Concretely anyone accessing my computer and opening chromium can browse and snoop at all my passwords.

I checked my ~/.local/share/keyrings directory and it gaves me the following

my@comp:~/.local/share/keyrings$ ls -al
total 1336
drwx------ 1 jb jb    134 nov.  17 20:38 .
drwx------ 1 jb jb   1022 nov.  18 10:32 ..
-rw------- 1 jb jb 754439 nov.  17 20:38 login.keyring
-rw------- 1 jb jb 300628 janv.  5  2018 login.keyring.temp-1715131298
-rw------- 1 jb jb 300628 janv.  5  2018 .temp-IARUBZ
-rw------- 1 jb jb    207 mai    5  2017 user.keystore

I tried a couple of google searches but people are more focused on how to stop chrome asking for a password on their Windows computer (quite the exact opposite, Windows' users seem to be less sensitive to security issues... ^^,)

Thanks a lot in advance for you help ! :-) (About the above picture: clicking on the eye icon directly shows the password in chromium settings)

So I upgraded my linux distribution recently from 16.x LTS to 18.04 LTS and I can't suspend my computer anymore.

At first the button didn't even appear on the nav bar (Gnome related pb) so I installed the suspend button extension provided here: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/826/suspend-button/ and now I can see the || (pause) button as desired. But this simply shut down my computer instead of suspending it.

I tried to manually close my laptop screen but this also shut down my computer when it used to suspend it with ubuntu 16 LTS :/

I finally tried to deal with it with the terminal:

sudo pm-suspend #but shut down my computer as well

sudo pm-suspend-hybrid #but just doesn't work (the screen turns black but the computer keeps working, the fan being noisy)

As I resized my partitions while upgrading from 16 LTS to 18.04 LTS, I'm wondering if the problem could possibly come from there(Maybe I did something wrong?). Here is a screenshot of my hard drives configuration (In particular I don't understand why there is a star present in the Boot column in the sda1 row when my Ubuntu is installed on sda5.

Thanks a lot in advance for your help! This is quite annoying for me being forced to shutdown my computer every time I go for a break :/

NB: Please do not hesitate to ask for further info If I'm not clear enough in what I am asking :-)

EDIT: I checked the Tweaks option and "Suspend when laptop lid is closed" is on so the problem doesn't come from there. (cf screenshot)

EDIT2: I tried to switch back to unity as advised but the problem still persists. Suspend button simply shutdown the computer whether I'm using Gnome or Unity.

EDIT3: I noticed that the pm-suspend command generate a .crash file when executed (I guess this one is generated during the few seconds between the execution of the command and the shutdown of my computer) Here is the report on a drive .txt file (was not too sure how to share it with you as it is really long) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mwWwlCmOMJ05Dw9aiWC-X5pZ0hWWy_Rf/view?usp=sharing

EDIT4: I'vs got some new stuff. I changed my GPU driver from a proprietary NVIDIA driver to X org X server (cf screenshot) and now suspend is working again. I'm not really sure if I will be able to use my GPU with this open source driver but at least I have identified a possible root cause of the problem. I tried sudo systemctl hibernate and it still doesn't work though but at least suspend is back to normal.

EDIT5: I tried all the nvidia drivers available on the GUI software&updates panel and one of them let me suspend my laptop without any trouble (the 390 one cf screenshot)

So the question is now what's up with the Nvidia driver? Why hibernate is still not working ?

I'm trying to understand what the different background processes are doing on my machine as this one is freezing from time to time. I have noticed that the tracker processes (there are several of them as you can see on the screenshots) take a lot of CPU power. I also noticed that if I kill those processes, it solves the issue and nothing weird or at least nothing visible really happen on my machine.

Do you know what is exactly the use of those processes and why they are taking so much CPU power (what are they doing with all that power?) I tried to do a couple of searches online regarding the tracker processes but I can't really understand what they do. :/

Thanks in advance for you answer, I'm really eager to learn more about Linux ! :))

screenshot tracker processes :

tracker -store taking a lot of CPU power :

tracker -extract taking a lot of CPU power :

I installed Ubuntu a while ago on my computer and despite having done some preliminary researches I am encountering a hard disk space problem. Ultimately I think I understood that partitioning my hard disk so as to install Ubuntu on a 20 Gb partition would be more than OK and would be even common practice but as I installed other softwares, this hard disk is now getting almost full and I am wondering if I misunderstood something:

Are the softwares not meant to be installed on this hard disk? For instance, I installed Cuda and this software takes up to 4.3Gb alone. I don't understand why I had read so many times that 20 Gb would be ok if by installing just a couple of software it is getting full so easily.

I'm not sure if my problem is clear enough, please do tell me if you need any further info. I have to admit I am feeling a little lost here and am wondering if I should re-install and reconfigure my entire machine to solve the problem :/

many thanks in advance for your help!

Insights from my disk usage analyser (1)

Insights from my disk usage analyser (2)

NB: here is the output from df -h

me@comp:~$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            3,8G     0  3,8G   0% /dev
tmpfs           774M   18M  757M   3% /run
/dev/sda5        19G   16G  1,6G  92% /
tmpfs           3,8G  882M  3,0G  23% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5,0M  4,0K  5,0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           3,8G     0  3,8G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda6       231G  141G   90G  62% /home
tmpfs           774M   76K  774M   1% /run/user/1000
/dev/sdb        230G  174G   44G  80% /media/me/DATA