raj's questions

is there an image viewer available for Ubuntu that allows to assign "tags" (like "sport", "car", "river", "drawing" etc.) to any image in a directory and quickly filter that directory, containing a lot of images (about 5000 of them), by these tags so that I can view only images that have a particular tag or set of tags assigned?

I guess it can be partially achieved using "labels", "categories" or "keywords" that are used for example by gThumb, but these are stored in image metadata in "XMP" fields. I want the "tag" feature to be completely independent from image metadata so that tags are neither read from nor written to image files. Some images already contain some "labels" there, which are automatically read by gThumb, but they are not useful to me and I don't want them, and I certainly don't want the image files to be modified. So I'm looking for something that stores "tags" completely independent from image metadata.

Does such an application exist? Can anybody recommend anything?

As you probably know, Google will withdraw password-only access for 3rd party applications since end of May and only OAuth2 or application passwords may be used.

I have multiple calendars in my Google account and I'm currently using them in Evolution as "CalDAV" type calendars. However, this method uses exactly what Google is about to withdraw - password login. I don't want to turn on 2FA on my account (to be able to use app passwords) for various reasons, so I wanted to try OAuth2. I was able to successfully configure first calendar as "Google" type calendar in Evolution (using more or less the procedure specified in this answer), but when I try to add more calendars (by repeating these steps), after clicking on the "Default user calendar" button, instead of getting a calendar list, I get a message "Data source does not support OAuth 2.0 authentication". Even when I try to use a different Google account, I get the same message.

Can there be only one "Google" type calendar defined in Evolution? If not, how to define additional calendars?

I'm using Ubuntu 20.04, Evolution 3.36.5-0ubuntu1.

today the software updater in Ubuntu 20.04 prompted me to do the "partial upgrade" for newest kernel upgrade.

My current kernel is 5.13.0-39-generic. The partial upgrade wants to install the following:

linux-headers-5.13.0-40-generic
linux-hwe-5.13-headers-5.13.0-40
linux-image-5.13.0-40-generic
linux-modules-5.13.0-40-generic
linux-modules-extra-5.13.0-40-generic
linux-modules-nvidia-390-5.13.0-40-generic
linux-objects-nvidia-390-5.13.0-40-generic
linux-signatures-nvidia-5.13.0-40-generic

It wants to upgrade the following:

libnvidia-cfg1-390
libnvidia-common-390
libnvidia-compute-390
libnvidia-compute-390:i386
libnvidia-decode-390
libnvidia-decode-390:i386
libnvidia-encode-390
libnvidia-encode-390:i386
libnvidia-fbc1-390
libnvidia-fbc1-390:i386
libnvidia-gl-390
libnvidia-gl-390:i386
libnvidia-ifr1-390
libnvidia-ifr1-390:i386
linux-generic-hwe-20.04
linux-headers-generic-hwe-20.04
linux-image-generic-hwe-20.04
linux-libc-dev
linux-modules-nvidia-390-generic-hwe-20.04
nvidia-compute-utils-390
nvidia-dkms-390
nvidia-driver-390
nvidia-kernel-common-390
nvidia-kernel-source-390
nvidia-utils-390
xserver-xorg-video-nvidia-390

So far, so good. But it also wants to REMOVE the following two packages:

linux-modules-nvidia-390-5.13.0-37-generic
linux-modules-nvidia-390-5.13.0-39-generic

As 5.13.0-39 is my current working kernel, if the latter will be removed, I guess I will be unable to boot the previous kernel in case the upgrade goes wrong, as NVIDIA modules will be missing.

Has anybody done this already? Is it safe to do?

For unknown reason an additional empty line at the very bottom (below "Properties") is displayed in the context menu that appears when I right-click on a directory in Nautilus - see the screenshot below (this does not happen for files, only for directories). This was not happening previously, I don't know why it started to happen. This looks ugly and I want to get rid of this. Do you have any idea what the reason for this empty line may be & how to remove it?

Nautilus version is 3.36.3-stable.

UPDATE: Temporarily, the issue went away by itself (???) and I didn't have that empty line anymore. Can't correlate this with anything I possibly did, because I did nothing special, just regular use of the computer. But when I booted my computer next time, the empty line is again there...

Did anybody of you using Ubuntu 20.04 also notice snapd being updated very often recently? If I remember correctly, snapd got updated 3 times over the last week, or so...

Why is this? Are there multiple vulnerabilities found in snapd that have been fixed one by one, or was there a series of unsuccessful fixes, that needed to be fixed again, or... ?

I know that what I want to do is a bit unusual, but I have a need to run a quite old version of gThumb (2.10.11, coming from Ubuntu 10.04) on Ubuntu 20.04.

(Someone asked me in the comments why, so here's the explanation: that old version has a very good slideshow mode, which provides several features that the current version of gThumb present in Ubuntu 20.04 does not provide. Among them are: 1) option "fit to screen only for larger images" works in slideshow mode; 2) GIF animations are played in slideshow mode; 3) the shortcut key "I" - display information about the current image - works in slideshow mode. All this does NOT work in current gThumb).

Until now, I managed to collect all the old libraries needed to run this app into a single directory (so all dependencies are satisfied), the app starts and the GUI appears (screenshot below). However, the app is unable to communicate with current GNOME VFS daemon and therefore does not load the folder contents, so it is in fact unusable. The following error message appears in the terminal:

(gthumb:13485): libgnomevfs-WARNING **: 13:34:54.800: Failed to activate daemon: The name org.gnome.GnomeVFS.Daemon was not provided by any .service files

There is definitely some incompatibility between the old and new GNOME VFS daemon and the app cannot communicate with it. Is there any way to fix this and make the app run on my system - for example, by making the app don't use VFS but just directly read from disk instead? (except of having to rebuild the app myself, as I don't see this feasible)

As the issue is related to VFS, I tried to replace the libgnomevfs-2.so.0 library that I copied from Ubuntu 10.04 with the newest one I could find, that is from Ubuntu 18.04 (there is no libgnomevfs-2.so.0 library available for 20.04). However, the effect is the same. So the change to VFS must have occurred between 18.04 and 20.04.

After upgrade to Firefox 91, the menus in Firefox no more have shadows around them. This looks ugly and makes the menus less visible on top of the webpage. Is there any way I can bring them back? Maybe some tweak in theme's CSS?

Firefox menus were always styled a bit differently from other applications menus (for example note the difference on separators and submenu arrows on enclosed screenshots), but at least they had borders similar to the other applications, up to the latest release, when the borders disappeared.

This is how the menu looks on latest Firefox:

This is how the menu looks in other applications (here GIMP):

And this is how the menu did look in old versions of Firefox (this screenshot is from Firefox 84, which I keep aside due to Flash support, but all versions up to 91 did have similar shadows around menus):

BTW. This seems to be independent from desktop theme used, with all themes there are no shadows.

I manually changed /etc/gnome/defaults.list file to set a different application than Totem for playing video files. It is actually a specific wrapper script around Totem that sets a few things before playing the video, and I created a file /usr/share/applications/auto-totem.desktop for it. All video/...= lines in this file specify my auto-totem.desktop file, including video/3gpp.

However, this doesn't work for this file type (works for all other video files) - these files open in original Totem (without my wrapper script), moreover, I cannot change the default application using "Preferences" menu. Totem is shown as default application for opening these files and when I select another application and click "Set as default", it has no effect - the default reverts to Totem.

What is strange, when I set a default application in "Preferences", the correct line video/3gpp=auto-totem.desktop is actually written to the file ~/.config/mimeapps.list. Moreover, xdg-mime query default video/3gpp shows correctly the auto-totem.desktop file for my application and mimeopen file.3gp correctly opens the file in my application. Only Nautilus behaves strangely and forces opening these files in Totem. I thought that maybe something is cached for the session so I logged out & logged back in, but this did not help.

This is not specific to my application, when I tried to set another application as default for video/3gpp files (like mpv or vlc), the same happens - I cannot set anything other than Totem.

How can I fix this?

I need to record some phone calls, therefore I installed Linphone (on Ubuntu 20.04), which has this feature. However, I don't see any option in the preferences to select the location where the program stores recordings. It puts them into ~/Music. I'd rather use a different location, because this folder is pretty crowded in my system and I don't want to mix phone call recordings with actual music in my music players. Is there any way to change this?

Or can anybody recommend another SIP phone application that can record calls and has a configurable recordings location? I tried also Twinkle, but it seems there's no call recording feature in this program.

I am currently using Ubuntu 20.04, but I still have my old PC with Ubuntu 10.04 installation, and I want to keep it available for occasional use (because there are some things in that version that worked good - and I'm used to the way they worked - and they don't work so good in the recent one). However, I don't want to keep the actual hardware, so I decided to convert the old Ubuntu 10.04 installation into a virtual machine and run it under my current system.

My current system is Ubuntu 20.04 64-bit, and the old one is 10.04 32-bit. What type of virtualization should I use? Do I need the full virtualization (I mean KVM - that was my first idea, as I already have some experience with it), or can I use something "lighter", ie. some container-based solution? I have no experience with containers, but as far as I understand, containers need to use the same kernel, so it seems to be impossible in my case? Am I right?

To clarify: I'm not asking about opinions "which virtualization is the best". I'm also not asking for any help with Ubuntu 10.04. I'm asking, if it is possible to run 32-bit kernel 2.6.32 (the one from Ubuntu 10.04) as a guest OS on current Ubuntu 20.04 64-bit kernel using anything "lighter" than full virtualization (mean: containers)?

As probably everybody knows, Flash is EOL after end of 2020. However, there are still many websites on the Net that contain Flash content. Most of them are Flash games, which are highly unlikely to be rewritten by their authors to use another technology (and I would still like to play them :)), however, just recently I accidentally stumbled upon a website that had menu in Flash (!) and was completely un-navigable without Flash turned on.

What will be the best approach to keep the possibility to use Flash? Personally I plan to make a copy of my current Firefox installation with Flash plugin before end of 2020 and keep it aside for accessing sites with Flash content, but what to do if I ever need to reinstall the OS (or replace the computer)? How to keep the actual binary that is downloaded by flashplugin-installer package for future use as it certainly won't be available for download anymore after end of 2020?

Also Adobe's Flash EOL page contains some wording that worries me a bit. It says "Flash-based content will be blocked from running in Adobe Flash Player after the EOL Date". Could it mean that Flash Player software is "time-bombed" in some way and will just stop function after December 31st, 2020?

Does anybody of you have any strategy or thoughts regarding approach to Flash EOL that you can share?

I just realized that in current Ubuntu version /bin/sh is no more symlinked to bash (as it used to be for many years), but to dash instead. I wonder what are the actual syntax differences between those two shells and how big is the probability that a shell script written with bash in mind won't work under dash. Can anybody point me to a good and clear description of differences between these two?

I have on my disk quite a lot of old presentations from earlier versions of OpenOffice (.odp format) and even StarOffice (.sxi format). When viewed in OpenOffice on my old computer (OpenOffice 3.2.0, Ubuntu 10.04), they have nice bullets as in the following screenshot:

However, when viewed with recent LibreOffice (6.4.4.2) on Ubuntu 20.04, all these bullets disappeared and there are just paragaraphs of text one under the other, with first line of the paragraph usually being "outdented", as you can see below:

I asked a question on LibreOffice forum and someone told me this may be a font issue. That person told me to check bullet character in Format -> Bullets and Numbering... menu option, but everything seems correct there. However, this might actually be a font issue, as the set of fonts installed by default on 10.04 is different than the one on 20.04 and LO may pick up the wrong font for these bullets.

But I don't know what exactly to look for. I can try to copy the 10.04 fonts that are missing in 20.04 and install them one by one to see if it helps, but this is in my opinion quite a desperate method and I don't know if it helps at all. Can anybody point me to some method to debug the issue?

Or maybe someone had experienced this issue already and knows the solution?

Some additional info: when I create a new presentation from scratch, not load an old one, bullets are displayed correctly. Also when I switch to template view in the loaded old presentation, the bullets are visible on the slide template, but they aren't on actual slides.

Is it possible to make Totem automatically fit window size to video size (not the other way), like other players do? It seems that Totem keeps it's window at fixed size and scales the video to fit in window, instead of adjusting window size to video size. I can't see any option in preferences to change this behavior (Ubuntu 20.04). Last time I was using Totem it was in Ubuntu 10.04, where it behaved as expected ie. window size has been adjusted to video size. Why has this opton been removed? It's illogical.

In Ubuntu 20.04 GNOME Flashback with Metacity, all windows had nice rounded corners like on the screen below:

When I switched to GNOME Flashback with Compiz, non-CSD windows (eg. Firefox or Synaptic) still have those rounded corners, but CSD windows (the ones used by default GNOME applications, like Nautilus) have lost them and now are sharp rectangles:

Is there any way to bring the rounded corners back?

As in title - is it possible to use Compiz with GNOME Flashback on Ubuntu 20.04 ? If yes, how ? It would be nice to have some features like window overview screen with miniatures of all open windows, something that Compiz provided in the older version of Ubuntu.

I created a profile in GNOME Terminal that uses a custom command ssh my.server to start ssh connection to my server right after opening the terminal tab/window with this profile. However, when I click on "X" to close the tab/window, it closes without the usual warning "a process is running in this terminal, do you really want to close?". The warning option is enabled in the preferences and the warning does appear when I run ssh manually in the default terminal profile, ie. the one that starts the shell. But it doesn't appear when ssh is started automatically from the profile.

I saw that someone somewhere on the Net suggested to replace the command ssh my.server with bash -i -c "ssh my.server", but it didn't help.

I also tried MATE Terminal instead of GNOME Terminal, the behavior is the same - no warning on close when ssh is started automatically from the profile.

Is there any way to get this warning displayed?

In Ubuntu 20.04 with GNOME flashback, there is no menu bar in LibreOffice (the one with File, View etc.). I read somewhere on the Net that the issue is related to libreoffice-gtk3 package, and uninstalling it brings the menu back. I tried it - it indeed brings the menu back, but the menu is very ugly, as it has a "raw" X application look, completely unrelated to the currently set GNOME theme. How to bring the menus back in LO while keeping the system theme?

It looks that Ubuntu is getting worse with every release. I started with Ubuntu 10.04 where everything worked just perfectly "out of the box". With each new release I install, there is more and more trivial things that are not working and require much effort to fix.

EDIT: Just found another LibreOffice issue - help does not work. How many more will there be? Starting to think about reverting to Ubuntu 18.04...

After I installed the Radiance theme in Ubuntu 20.04 and set the system to use it, there are no horizontal menu separators in the menus. I noticed it in Firefox, because the separators I created between bookmarks didn't show up in the bookmarks menu (although they are correctly visible in Show All Bookmarks window), but the same is happening for other menus, eg. menus dropping from top GNOME panel (I use GNOME Flashback).

When switching to some of the default system themes, like Yaru or Adwaita, the separators are visible. What should I change in theme's CSS files to bring the separators back?

I just installed Ubuntu 20.04 and want to use the GNOME Flashback session, as I'm used to the old GNOME look and don't like the new one. I also installed the Radiance theme because I like it more than default ones installed with Ubuntu. I even did some minor tweaks to theme's CSS files to get rid of a few things that annoyed me (e.g. the very ugly "overshoot" effect when scrolling past top or bottom of a window) and everything is working well.

However, there's one thing I don't know how to change. The default text color for desktop icon labels is too dark and is hardly visible on the default background:

I don't know how to change it. From what I could find on the Net, people advise to change the color for .nautilus-desktop.nautilus-canvas-item CSS element. I found this element in gtk-3.0/apps/nautilus.css and gtk-3.20/apps/nautilus.css files and changed both, however it didn't work - the color didn't change.

Please tell me what should I change in the CSS files to change this color?