Lorenz Keel's questions

My system is a Samsung NP450R5E-X04IT Ativ Book 4 with GPU NVIDIA GF117M. It runs Ubuntu 21.10 with Gnome Shell 40.5 and kernel 5.13.0-20 on X11 session. Last fresh installation was with Ubuntu 20.04, then I updated the system every 6 months with the regular OS updates.

I use Nouveau drivers, no NVIDIA drivers were installed. Now, I want to install them. Firstly, I tried the following:

$ sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall
No drivers found for installation.

Then, I installed them by sudo apt install nvidia-drivers-470. The installation is ok (following the output with relevant data):

$ sudo apt install nvidia-driver-470
Reading package lists... Done
[...]
0 upgraded, 69 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 305 MB of archives.
After this operation, 858 MB of additional disk space will be used.
[...]
update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated)
INFO:Enable nvidia
DEBUG:Parsing /usr/share/ubuntu-drivers-common/quirks/put_your_quirks_here
DEBUG:Parsing /usr/share/ubuntu-drivers-common/quirks/lenovo_thinkpad
DEBUG:Parsing /usr/share/ubuntu-drivers-common/quirks/dell_latitude
Loading new nvidia-470.74 DKMS files...
Building for 5.13.0-20-generic
Building for architecture x86_64
Building initial module for 5.13.0-20-generic
Secure Boot not enabled on this system.
Done.

nvidia.ko:
Running module version sanity check.
 - Original module
   - No original module exists within this kernel
 - Installation
   - Installing to /lib/modules/5.13.0-20-generic/updates/dkms/

nvidia-modeset.ko:
Running module version sanity check.
 - Original module
   - No original module exists within this kernel
 - Installation
   - Installing to /lib/modules/5.13.0-20-generic/updates/dkms/

nvidia-drm.ko:
Running module version sanity check.
 - Original module
   - No original module exists within this kernel
 - Installation
   - Installing to /lib/modules/5.13.0-20-generic/updates/dkms/

nvidia-uvm.ko:
Running module version sanity check.
 - Original module
   - No original module exists within this kernel
 - Installation
   - Installing to /lib/modules/5.13.0-20-generic/updates/dkms/

nvidia-peermem.ko:
Running module version sanity check.
 - Original module
   - No original module exists within this kernel
 - Installation
   - Installing to /lib/modules/5.13.0-20-generic/updates/dkms/

depmod..........

DKMS: install completed.
[...]
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-5.13.0-20-generic

However, drivers are not listed in Additional Drivers tab even after a reboot.

lspci command shows the follwing controllers:

 $ lspci -k | grep -EA3 'VGA|3D|Display'
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller (rev 09)
    DeviceName:  Onboard IGD
    Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller
    Kernel driver in use: i915
--
01:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF117M [GeForce 610M/710M/810M/820M / GT 620M/625M/630M/720M] (rev a1)
    Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd GeForce 710M
    Kernel driver in use: nvidia
    Kernel modules: nvidiafb, nouveau, nvidia_drm, nvidia

I've tried also to uinstall nvidia-driver-390 according to NVIDIA driver is not detected in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS but to no avail.

What prevents nvidia-drivers from appearing in Additional Drivers tab? Are there some missing commands to run to make the NVIDIA drivers selectable?

Question: Which mechanisms (other than the one in /etc/fstab) automatically trigger fsck at the boot?

Details: My computer currently runs Ubuntu 21.04 without any issues, it works properly. At the boot, a fsck disk check is performed, because I see the following lines on my screen.

Ubuntu: clean, 281400/3276800 files, 3602929/13107177 blocks

where Ubuntu is the label for my /dev/sda2 (the root partition). However, if you ckeck my /etc/fstab file, the last column (that is the column used by fsck to determine whether fsck should check filesystem before it is mounted) is set to zero, therefore I don't expect any check at the startup.

# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
# /dev/sda1
UUID=DA59-E469  /boot/efi   vfat    defaults    0   0
# /dev/sda2
UUID=862c6f26-cbe0-4cd5-860d-fdf306f697f9 / ext4 noatime,errors=remount-ro 0 0
# /dev/sda3
UUID=70f175d4-ec37-455c-84c5-b93d1e2e8761 /mnt/Data ext4 noatime,nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show 0 0
# swapfile
/swapfile none swap sw 0 0

I'm just curious to understand how the check is triggered (and/or if there's something wrong im my assumptions).

Some details:

• I used same /etc/fstab in Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 20.10. The check started to appear after the update to Ubuntu 21.04: no fsck check in 20.04 and 20.10 boot.
• Output of sudo tune2fs -l /dev/sda2 | grep checked is Last checked: Sun Apr 26 15:00:01 2020, that is probably when I set the last column of /etc/fstab to zero.
• I don't have any /forcefsck file on root.
• In my /etc/default/grub there is NO fsck.mode=force setting.

I would like to write a script with the following requirements:

• in input, get a list of packages available via apt. In there you may have some packages that are automatically installed by other packages in list.
• in output, provide the same list without the packages that depends from other packages in list.

In other terms, I want to do in bash what the user Francois G did in this answer

Maybe something like this already exists, but sometimes I like to write scripts to improve my bash-scripting and also for fun.

In my mind, I already designed the script, but I have a technical issue. Let's assume that I have the dependency list in this format (it's the way apt-rdepends put it):

useless-line-1
useless-line-2
useless-line-3
item-1
  fixed-string substring-1-1
  fixed-string substring-1-2
  fixed-string substring-1-3
item-2
  fixed-string substring-2-1
  fixed-string substring-2-2
item-3
item-4
  fixed-string substring-4-1
  fixed-string substring-4-2
  fixed-string substring-4-3
  fixed-string substring-4-4

I want to extract the paragraph related to item-1 i.e.:

  fixed-string substring-1-1
  fixed-string substring-1-2
  fixed-string substring-1-3

I'm not an awk expert, but I think that it can suit my purposes. I'm not able to "build" the correct command. Due to the fact that item-2 may be not known, I tried:

# extract text between item-1 and the next line that starts without blank
$ awk '/item-1/,/^[A-Za-z0-9]/' deplist
item-1

but item-1 already fits the condition ^[A-Za-z0-9], so it's not good. Moreover, I want to exclude item-1 and item-2 from the output.

Which is the best way to extract that portion of data?

In my Ubuntu 20.04, when I execute sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade, apt informs me that the package xdg-desktop-portal-gtk cannot be updated. As a consequence, if I try sudo apt reinstall xdg-desktop-portal-gtk I get the message (in italian, but you can easily imagine what it means):

xdg-desktop-portal-gtk : Dipende: libgnome-desktop-3-18 (>= 3.17.92) ma non è installabile

If I run sudo apt list -ua I get:

xdg-desktop-portal-gtk/eoan 1.7.1-flatpak1~eoan amd64 [aggiornabile da: 1.6.0-1build1]
xdg-desktop-portal-gtk/focal,now 1.6.0-1build1 amd64 [installato, aggiornabile a: 1.7.1-flatpak1~eoan]

While the output of apt-cache policy xdg-desktop-portal-gtk is:

  Installato: 1.6.0-1build1
  Candidato:  1.7.1-flatpak1~eoan
  Tabella versione:
     1.7.1-flatpak1~eoan 500
        500 http://ppa.launchpad.net/alexlarsson/flatpak/ubuntu eoan/main amd64 Packages
 *** 1.6.0-1build1 500
        500 http://it.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Flatpak is installed from its official PPA.

How can I solve the conflict? Is there a chance to "block" one repository for this specific package in order to get it from the other one? If yes, which is the version that I should prefer?

I use an application called Mame Set Rebuilder (you can easily find references on internet) that is built in Qt4 in a .app format.

When I had Ubuntu 19.10, I was able to set the fonts of the application using the package qt4-qtconfig. Setting the fonts with this package prevents the app from using some predefined and ugly fonts.

Now I have a fresh Ubuntu 20.04 installation and the package has been removed from repository (and if I try to install it from a deb package, it requires some incompatible dependencies). The configurator for QT5 apps qt5ct seems not to be able to apply its configuration to QT4 apps.

Is there a way to improve the fonts of QT4 apps in focal fossa? Please consider that the app fully works, it's only an aestetic matter.

On my Ubuntu Budgie 19.10 I have an ext4 partition mounted in /mnt/Data. Moreover, I've mounted every home folder with a specific folder in /mnt/Data (using bind, no symlinks). fstab file is the below one:

# /dev/sda3
UUID=xxxxx /mnt/Data auto nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show 0 0
# home folders
/mnt/Data/Desktop /home/<user>/Desktop none rw,bind 0 0
/mnt/Data/Documents /home/<user>/Documents none rw,bind 0 0
/mnt/Data/Download /home/<user>/Download none rw,bind 0 0
/mnt/Data/Pictures /home/<user>/Pictures none rw,bind 0 0
/mnt/Data/Music /home/<user>/Music none rw,bind 0 0
/mnt/Data/Video /home/<user>/Video none rw,bind 0 0

However, when I try to delete a file in one of the home folder (for instance, Download) I have the error message "impossible to move the file to trash, do you want to delete it immediately?"

This is the output of ls -la /mnt/Data:

<user>@<user>-home:~$ ls -la /mnt/Data
drwxrwxr-x 12 <user> <user>   4096 gen 19 16:52 .
drwxr-xr-x  3 root   root     4096 ott 31  2017 ..
[...]
drwxrwxr-x  5 <user> <user>   4096 gen 26 19:05 Desktop
drwxrwxr-x  5 <user> <user>   4096 set 22 22:15 .Trash-1000

My question: how can I move my files to the Trash? I've read a lot of questions about it concerning proper ownership of the folder, but I was not able to solve this issue.