ema's questions

I tried reading the contents of a BIOS EEPROM Chip saved in a file called dump.bin. I also tried opening a file called coreboot.rom containing a Coreboot image. In both cases this error occurred: I used Bless Hexeditor to open the file, but I only got these ASCII squares with four numbers in it, describing which ASCII value the characters have. Most of them are 0046-squares, which equivalents to letter "F". This goes well with what I already know about the contents of dump.bin.

How can I make Bless Hexeditor show me the real byte values as integers/characters? I didn't find any resource regarding this topic. I tried reinstalling Bless with Synaptic package manager, but it didn't help.

I use Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS, Xubuntu flavor. I use xfce4 desktop but I also have some GNOME stuff installed. ls /usr/bin/*session returns

/usr/bin/dbus-run-session
/usr/bin/gnome-session-custom-session
/usr/bin/gnome-session
/usr/bin/xfce4-session

Edit: When I run bless in terminal, I get the following errors before bless starts:

Could not find a part of the path '/home/user/.config/bless/plugins'.
Could not find a part of the path '/home/user/.config/bless/plugins'.
Could not find file "/home/user/.config/bless/export_patterns"

When searching for these errors, I found this thread saying that the errors don't actually mean sth.

Edit2: I found that GHex works just fine, so I'll probably stick with that. It's weird though that a friend of mine using Bless with Ubuntu 20.04 doesn't have this problem.

I thought that I had changed my Ubuntu to a Xubuntu by switching to xfce desktop (Ubuntu 20.04). Though, when I enter gnome-shell --version in the terminal, I get GNOME Shell 3.36.1.

When I enter printenv | grep XDG I get:

XDG_CONFIG_DIRS=/etc/xdg/xdg-xubuntu:/etc/xdg XDG_SESSION_PATH=/org/freedesktop/DisplayManager/Session0 XDG_SESSION_DESKTOP=xubuntu XDG_SESSION_TYPE=x11 XDG_GREETER_DATA_DIR=/var/lib/lightdm-data/mafalda XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=XFCE XDG_SEAT_PATH=/org/freedesktop/DisplayManager/Seat0 XDG_SESSION_CLASS=user XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/1000 XDG_DATA_DIRS=/usr/share/xfce4:/usr/share/xubuntu:/usr/local/share:/usr/share:/var/lib/snapd/desktop

And sudo dpkg -l | grep gnome lists a lot of GNOME packages.

Is that normal? I am trying to tidy up my system a little after recognizing I had several screensavers installed that were maybe interfering with each other.

Does Xfce need the GNOME packages (like gnome-bluetooth, gnome-power-manager...), or can I uninstall them?

I upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04 today, choosing LightDM over gdm3 during the upgrade. During the upgrade I was asked if I wanted to keep or replace /etc/sane.d/dll.conf file. I decided for keeping it.

Now, without actively rebooting, the "Oh no! Something went wrong" screen appeared.

As I am still inexperienced with this kind of troubleshooting, I feel it wouldn't be safe to just try out answers from other threads that don't have exactly the same 'history'.

Solutions I read included Ctrl+Alt+F4 and trying to login and get more information from the command line (Oh no! Something has gone wrong on restart).

Is that safe to do? Ideally, I'd like to save my data that is stored on an encrypted harddrive before trying to fix errors. I'd like to avoid reinstalling the OS.

From reading other threads, I know this post may be criticised as not being precise enough or haven't tried enough, but really I cannot get more information from that white screen myself and don't want to risk ruining everything just to provide more information...

Thank you for your help!! :)

Edit: I have no idea if the problem is related to lvm2-activation-generator, as in Ubuntu 19.10 “Something has gone wrong” after update from 19.04 This and other solutions include booting from a live usb. Can I do this 'safely' by simply switching the laptop off at this stage? Do I have to do sth before?