matigo's questions

A couple of days ago an issue started to appear after waking from sleep where I was unable to interact with any application on the first workspace visible after signing back in. The issue was tracked down to be gjs, which has put a transparent overlay atop the workspace, making everything underneath it inaccessible without first using an Alt+Tab:

Although the gjs process does have an option to "Quit", the menu action does no such thing. Alt+F4 is also useless to eliminate this nuisance.

Searches for solutions online generally say that rebooting is the most appropriate fix, but I refuse to accept this as a viable answer as it's disruptive and can be worked around with an Alt+Tab. This is happening only on my Ubuntu Desktop 21.10 installation. Other systems have never surfaced this issue.

Has anybody found a proper fix for this annoyance?

Recently I've noticed some issues when running apt where the system will warn me of a keyring deprecation:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
8 packages can be upgraded. Run 'apt list --upgradable' to see them.
W: https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/edge/dists/stable/InRelease: Key is stored in legacy trusted.gpg keyring (/etc/apt/trusted.gpg), see the DEPRECATION section in apt-key(8) for details.
W: https://download.sublimetext.com/apt/stable/InRelease: Key is stored in legacy trusted.gpg keyring (/etc/apt/trusted.gpg), see the DEPRECATION section in apt-key(8) for details.

This doesn't stop me from performing the update, but I would much rather not see this when updating my system. How are we supposed to store trusted GPG keys going forward?

Xubuntu 21.10 is a pretty solid system with a lot going for it. That said, there are a few little things that can make a person scratch their head. One issue that I'm facing is that the desktop (and any open applications) will be shown for almost half a second before the lock screen kicks in when resuming from suspend. There was a bug report filed a few years back with a fix apparently released in 2020. Unfortunately, this problem still persists.

A post on the XFCE forums proposes uses a systemd hook to pause for a second on resume:

#!/bin/sh
case $1/$2 in
  pre/*)
    #enter sleep
    ;;
  post/*)
    #exit sleep
    sleep 1
    ;;
esac

While this does reduce the amount of time the desktop is visible by a fraction of a second, people with eagle eyes will still be able to read whatever might be displayed on my screen. Changing the sleep value from 1 to something higher does not resolve the issue.

Is there something else I could do to have the screen blank out before entering sleep so that the first thing a person sees when accessing the notebook is the lock screen?

Hardware:

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon
CPU: Intel Core i5-7200U
RAM: 16GB

OS:

Xubuntu 21.10
Kernel: 5.13.0-22-generic

After nearly a decade, I've decided to give XFCE a try with Xubuntu 21.10 on the ever-reliable ThinkPad X1. Just about everything has been remarkably painless to configure, but I cannot for the life of me get the system to suspend when the lock screen is active. Instead, the system remains active all night, though the screen is off. I wonder if I'm missing something.

I have configured the system to use a screensaver after 15 minutes of inactivity. Pressing Super+L to lock the screen (as one does) will also activate the screensaver. Everything is good.

The power manager is set to put the system to sleep after 20 minutes of inactivity for both battery and when plugged in.

If I leave the system alone for 15 minutes, the screensaver kicks in just fine. If I lock the screen, the screensaver kicks in just fine. If I leave the system for 25 minutes, the screen is still active. If I leave the system for 35+ minutes (15 for the screensaver and 20 for the power manager?) then the screen is off, but the system is still running.

There is no priority process running in the background. The system is quite idle aside from NextCloud Sync and whatever Javascript might be running in a browser.

What combination of settings do I need to have the system suspend after a set number of minutes idle?

Hardware:

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon
CPU: Intel Core i5-7200U
RAM: 16GB

OS:

Xubuntu 21.10
Kernel: 5.13.0-22-generic

As the title asks, I'm wondering if it's possible to change an application's understanding of which fonts are used for the Interface Text and Document Text values in Gnome.

Context:

I generally use TablePlus when working with SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL databases. It's a closed-source application, which means I do not have the luxury of reaching into the code and changing the fonts that are used within the application.

Because it is a SQL editor, monospaced fonts are the only realistic option to use. An l must look like an l and not a 1. I can get the application to use monospaced fonts in the interface if I change the Interface Text and Document Text values in Gnome Tweaks, but I do not want to make everything in Ubuntu monospaced, as that's overkill (besides, I like the Ubuntu font).

On the left is what I have, and on the right is what I want to see (in the editor and results spaces only, but one battle at a time):

So, if the application is reading the Interface Text and Document Text values from the Gnome interface settings, I would like to have the application use a font of my choosing. There is an outstanding issue requesting the ability to change the font settings within the application already, but it has not been implemented.

I'm running into an issue when trying to reboot or shutdown my primary storage server at home. The shutdown process unmounts and stops most of the system until it hits systemd-udevd, then it hangs.

This what's displayed on the monitor:

...
[  OK  ] Reached target Unmount All Filesystems.
[  OK  ] Stopped Remount Root and Kernel File Systems.
[  OK  ] Reached target Shutdown.
[  OK  ] Reached target Final Step.
[  OK  ] Finished Reboot.
[  OK  ] Reached target Reboot.
[2706010.062757] systems-shutdown[1]: Waiting for process: systemd-udevd, systemd-udevd
[2706100.061724] systems-shutdown[1]: Waiting for process: systemd-udevd
[2706190.199550] shutdown[1]: Waiting for process: systemd-udevd
[2706280.198498] shutdown[1]: Waiting for process: systemd-udevd
[2706360.222337] sd-umoun[120154]: Failed to unmount /oldroot: Device or resource busy
[2706360.223343] sd-umoun[120155]: Failed to unmount /oldroot: Device or resource busy
[2706360.224401] sd-umoun[120156]: Failed to unmount /oldroot: Device or resource busy
[2706360.229444] shutdown[1]: Failed to finalize  file systems, ignoring

At this point the system just sits there until I physically restart the machine.

This is an excerpt from /var/log/syslog that takes place around the time of the hang:

May  6 07:33:22 ubuntu-store systemd[1]: Stopped Initialize hardware monitoring sensors.
May  6 07:33:22 ubuntu-store systemd[1]: Stopping LVM event activation on device 8:16...
May  6 07:33:22 ubuntu-store systemd[1]: Stopping LVM event activation on device 8:32...
May  6 07:33:22 ubuntu-store systemd[1]: Stopping LVM event activation on device 8:48...
May  6 07:33:22 ubuntu-store systemd[1]: Stopping LVM event activation on device 8:64...
May  6 07:33:22 ubuntu-store systemd[1]: Stopping LVM event activation on device 8:80...
May  6 07:33:22 ubuntu-store systemd[1]: Stopping Dispatcher daemon for systemd-networkd...
May  6 07:33:22 ubuntu-store systemd[1]: Stopping PackageKit Daemon...
May  6 07:33:22 ubuntu-store systemd[1]: Stopping Authorization Manager...
May  6 08:05:50 ubuntu-store systemd-sysctl[433]: Not setting net/ipv4/conf/all/promote_secondaries (explicit setting exists).
May  6 08:05:50 ubuntu-store systemd-sysctl[433]: Not setting net/ipv4/conf/default/promote_secondaries (explicit setting exists).

The machine was manually restarted at 08:05:50.

A bit about the system:

• Ubuntu Server 20.04 with all updates
• Runs as a dedicated Samba server
• 5th-Gen Intel Core i5 w/16GB RAM
• 250GB SSD boot drive
• 25TB ZFS storage pool

lsb_release shows:

Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS
Release:    20.04
Codename:   focal

While uname -r shows:

5.4.0-72-generic

The issue has only recently been observed (last month or so), as it doesn't get shut down very often unless there are security updates that require a reboot. One anomaly that I have yet to trace down is a load inconsistency. The CPU utilisation rarely exceeds 4%. The RAM usage rarely exceeds 9GB. The swap file, when used, might be a few dozen megabytes at most. The load, however, sits around 2.2. Running htop or glances does not reveal anything out of the ordinary. Not sure if this is evidence of a zombie process that isn't identified as such by the system.

As one would expect, rebooting the system returns everything to normal for a couple of days. However, as this is a server, I am not enamoured with the idea of having the machine reboot itself every Sunday night as though it were a Windows desktop from the 90s.

Any ideas on what might be causing the issue and/or how I might resolve it?