Todd's questions

When I press Ctrl+Shift+E in a native Linux app (e.g., Gedit, TODO, Geary, etc), nothing happens. Why is this, and how can I get a key combo for the default system emoji menu to work?

I have tried setting it to a different key combo with ibus-setup. I restart my machine each time I try this, as ibus exit, ibus restart, ibus-daemon & all have no (observable) effect (on this issue).

Every other ibus-setup setting will change and respect my settings. Every other key combination I set up in GNOME 3 works just fine. Only a key combo assigned to the Emoji picker fails. I can right click Gedit and select the "Insert Emoji" just fine, but grabbing the mouse is a huge flow disruptor ?.

I'm on Ubuntu 18.04 with the latest version of GNOME desktop. I've also verified that I have nothing mapped to any of the key combos I chose, nor the default (Ctrl Shift E).

Can someone help me find the source of this issue, and how I can resolve?

I am using the Unity Dash calc: command to do quick calculations, as Id rather do this than open up Chrome and ask Google. However, I cant copy the result, I still have to open up the calculator application and copy it from there. This is somewhat expensive, as it requires first clicking on the icon, waiting for the silly animation to complete, then clicking on the resulting icon again, then clicking on the open app, then selecting the result, then copying. Thus, its still easier to just use a web browser, so I would like this to be just as easy from the dash.

For any way I click on the result, there doesnt seem to be a way to select text and copy. I am not interested in how to do this with any other application, as this is trivial and known. I am only interested in how to do this within the dash itself.

Is there a way I can modify the dash to make text easily selectable? Is there a way I can just have calc: results copied to my clipboard? For example, if I type calc: 37/60, I want to just simply hit "ctrl+c" and have 0.616666667 in my clipboard.

FWIW, I am using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Also, I am not married to the "dash - calculator" combo - if there is any other way I can pop open the dash, type in some arithmetic, and get an answer I can select and copy, I am happy. Id prefer not to write my own script to handle this, as its such a primitive operation for the OS, the dash should just do this for me.

Ive read quite a few very similar issues on here as what follows, though none match the exact symptoms Im experiencing.

After a recent update, Ive noticed that when I minimize all my application windows, the unity desktop freezes for anything from 15 seconds to 3 minutes. I have two monitors, and while the mouse and keyboard both work perfectly fine, I cant move the mouse cursor off of the monitor screen its on when this freeze begins. Clicking on anything does nothing (at least, not for a long time), and I can do things like hit "Ctrl Alt Del" to bring the logout modal up. Clicking on icons in the unity launcher does nothing for this lockup time, and then after a large amount of time passes, all of the applications I clicked on suddenly open and everything runs as normal.

This isnt normal lag, as in the system performing slow or sluggish. Its just the unity desktop becomes unresponsive for minutes at a time exactly when I minimize the last application that isnt minimized. As long as I dont minimize windows, everything seems to run fine. Immediately after booting up, its also running fine. As soon as I open a single application and then minimize the window, the lockup/freeze begins.

Im on 14.04, and have been for a few months now, and just started experiencing this issue in the last week or so. The machine its on has a 500GB SSD drive, quad core 3.2ghz, 16GB ram, and a decent nVidia display card with recent proprietary drivers. I am away from that machine currently, and can post full specs later. I am taking a wild guess that this is related to a recent update, and some conflict between the unity desktop and nvidia display drivers.

Anyone else experiencing this, and know how to resolve?

My reminders for Thunderbird's Lightning calendar add on pop up behind the current window I am focused on (such as a web browser). This makes it very difficult to notice a reminder is happening, especially if my headphones are off so I cant hear its "beep". Ive nearly missed 2 meetings due to this recently, and only noticed because my panel indicator changed colors, then I noticed in my unity launcher that Thunderbird had a second window open, so I had to cycle through its windows to get the reminder to pop up. That being said, everything else is working fine with Lightning/reminders - just that the reminder window appears 'hidden' behind a pile of other open application windows.

I am now using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, though I had this working as expected when I was using 13.04 and 13.10 (I had to fresh install, instead of upgrade, because as usual, Ubiquity installer crashed during the install, destroying my prior system). I post this here, because I recall I had to mess with one of the random obfuscated settings in compiz, dconf, some-tweak-or-another tool, and cant seem to find it now.

I was searching on duckduckgo/google all morning for this, and I could have sworn this was trivial for me to search and find the last time I solved this.

How can I force a Lightning/Thunderbird reminder to always be the topmost window, regardless of the application in which I am focused?

I am currently running Ubuntu 13.10. I experienced this same issue with Ubuntu 12.04, so I dont believe the following issue is tied to a specific release.

I am using Ubuntu for work, by choice. Id like to stay logged in overnight, so that I can immediately resume my work when I arrive the next morning. Unfortunately, when I arrive the next day, I often get this issue where any mouse movement or keyboard input results in a flashing/flickering screen, and I cant type in my password for gnome-screensaver.

I try going to tty4, restarting unity (which, in 13.10, now says "restart is deprecated" ... derp), restarting lightdm, restarting compiz, you name it. Nothing works. Everything I try either has no effect, or produces some unhelpful error message that equates to "nope." I am always forced to "sudo reboot" from tty4, which isnt the end of the world, but its leaving me thinking Ubuntu 12.04+ is about as reliable as a Microsoft product (I have many other reasons for this opinion).

I have been trying to troubleshoot this issue for about 7 months to no avail. Previously, my employer gave me a craptacular machine which could barely run Ubuntu 12.04. I ended up believing the issue was due to running a modern OS on an outdated machine. I couldnt even run a Virtual Machine for testing software updates, which was my only viable argument in getting a new computer.

I finally convinced my employer to get me a new machine. This one has 8G RAM, brand new 1TB HD, quad core 3.2ghz i7, etc - its decent for work (note: no video card, but that shouldnt matter cuz I just write web dev software). I installed Ubuntu 13.10 on this machine. I still have the same exact problem.

I usually just have sublime text 2, and 3 gnome-terminal sessions open to my internal development server left open overnight. I lock my screen as I leave for the day, and am using gnome-screensaver (the default black screen). Ive gone through debug log, kernel log, syslog, xorg log, lightdm log, apport log, even faillog, and nothing strikes me as out of the ordinary. At most, the syslog prints tons of the following error overnight:

<time> <hostname>: whoopsie[<id>]: online
<time> whoopsie[<id>]: last message repeated <2/3> times

On the old outdated machine (12.04), there were lots of errors with gnome-screensaver, which led me to conclude that the machine diddnt have enough video memory to reload the desktop after some issue with the screensaver (sounds crazy, but hey Im no expert). On this new machine, there are no such logs concerning gnome-screensaver, so there goes my theory.

Another oddity is I have been using Ubuntu for my home workstation since 12.04 was released, and have never experienced this issue. My home machine is pretty heavy duty in regards to video card, memory, disk space, nice motherboard, etc. I am currently running 13.04 at home (afraid to upgrade due to all the bugs in 13.10 that are also said to be present in the upcoming 14.04). If it werent for my positive experience with my home machine, Id ditch Ubuntu altogether. Not being able to keep my machine logged in overnight is driving me away from canonical products. I seriously cant afford to continue losing time at work with buggy operating system issues. Im that 'weirdo' in the office that chooses to use linux, so people arent fond of my technical differences as it is. Fedora / CentOS with Gnome 3 is looking very nice these days.

Can anyone help me figure out why staying logged in overnight results in flickering screen, unusable peripherals, and a broken environment?

{ update 7/17/2014 }

Hadnt had time to look into this for a while (this is my work machine afterall), but last night left my machine on with gnome-screensaver up overnight, and my system monitors showed low memory usage when I left for the evening. Came back today and memory has 1.7G in use and 5.3G cached, which is pretty much all of it. I then examined htop, and sorted the list by memory use.

Sure enough, there are 5 lightdm processes, and each of them uses a ton of memory. Here is the output:

  PID USER      PRI  NI  VIRT   RES   SHR S CPU% MEM%   TIME+  Command
 1078 root       20   0 2880M 2342M 2319M S  0.7 29.6  8:39.44 /usr/bin/X -core :0 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch
 1117 root       20   0 2880M 2342M 2319M S  0.7 29.6  0:02.92 /usr/bin/X -core :0 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch
 1118 root       20   0 2880M 2342M 2319M S  0.0 29.6  0:01.33 /usr/bin/X -core :0 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch
 1119 root       20   0 2880M 2342M 2319M S  0.0 29.6  0:00.74 /usr/bin/X -core :0 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch
 1120 root       20   0 2880M 2342M 2319M S  0.0 29.6  0:00.00 /usr/bin/X -core :0 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch
... a few other things with low memory usage follow...

Is this normal? Ill continue monitoring this, but I have a feeling these many lightdm processes are the culprit, and their collective memory usage is startlingly high. Can anyone shed some further light on this (no pun intended) ?

The other night I received the prompt suggesting for me to upgrade from 12.10 to 13.04. I figured why not, and accepted the upgrade. I had very little interaction, just clicked the accept button, and came back to an upgraded machine in an hour or so.

initramfs now fails on old linux headers which I do not believe exist on my system, and I am unable to update anything on my system which depends on it (which is, pretty much everything, including graphics drivers, system updates, etc). I have been trying to resolve this issue for nearly a month now, and have learned quite a lot about Ubuntu/Linux in the process, though I am still not sure what I have to do to get past the following error.

Whenever I run commands such as:

sudo apt-get install  (with -f or not)
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get remove
sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo update-initramfs -u

I will receive the following messages/errors and will not be able to continue the process:

Setting up initramfs-tools (0.103ubuntu0.7) ...
update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated)
Processing triggers for initramfs-tools ...
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-3.8.0-31-generic
Fatal: open /boot/vmlinuz-3.5.0-21-generic: No such file or directory
run-parts: /etc/initramfs/post-update.d//runlilo exited with return code 1
dpkg: error processing initramfs-tools (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 initramfs-tools
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Both sudo apt-get clean and sudo apt-get autoclean seem to have no effect. Using sudo apt-get update appears to run as expected, but no change as far as receiving the above error with subsequent commands.

Running sudo dpkg-reconfigure -a did not make a difference.

I've learned that there may be remnants of '3.5.0-21-generic' on my system. I've done my best at locating them and moving them to a tmp dir in my home. I've examined my /etc/apt/sources.list for any references to those headers, and there aren't any.

I've examined the contents of /var/lib/dpkg/info/linux-image-generic.list which is as follows:

/.
/usr
/usr/share
/usr/share/doc
/usr/share/doc/linux-image-generic
/usr/share/doc/linux-image-generic/copyright
/usr/share/doc/linux-image-generic/changelog.gz

I've checked the contents of all of those locations, and found no references to anything with 3.5.0-21, and in fact searching my entire system, the only files with that string in the name now exist in my new tmp dir that I moved everything into. I've also moved the references to linux-image-3.5.0-21-generic.* and linux-image-extra-3.5.0-22-generic.* that were in /var/lib/dpkg/info into my new tmp dir.

It seems to me that there isn't any place where vmlinuz-3.5.0-21-generic can be on my system. I can't find any when searching all files for anything containing 3.5.0-21. I still can't use initramfs, which implies that I can't update/upgrade my system, install new packages, or fix a few other issues that sprung up when I upgraded to 13.04.

What follows is (some of) my output from:

$ sudo update-initramfs -u -v
Available versions:  3.8.0-31-generic 3.5.0-41-generic
Keeping /boot/initrd.img-3.8.0-31-generic.dpkg-bak
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-3.8.0-31-generic
Adding module /lib/modules/3.8.0-31-generic/kernel/drivers/hid/hid.ko
... (mostly adding/calling happening here, hundreds of lines of output, seems successful)
Calling hook busybox
Adding binary /usr/lib/initramfs-tools/bin/busybox
Calling hook dmsetup
Adding binary /sbin/dmsetup
Adding library /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libdevmapper.so.1.02.1
rm -f ./etc/ld.so.conf.d/nvidia_settings.conf 
rm -f ./lib/firmware/cxgb4/t4fw.bin 
Building cpio /boot/initrd.img-3.8.0-31-generic.new initramfs
Fatal: open /boot/vmlinuz-3.5.0-21-generic: No such file or directory
run-parts: /etc/initramfs/post-update.d//runlilo exited with return code 1

Could anyone please help me understand this problem, and how I can alleviate it? What can I do to get past this? I really don't want to resort to completely reinstalling my system, is there any other way to fix this?