I have a package that needs to be build with both a regular makefile and a setup.py. The thing is that the Debian packaging magic that is invoked via debuild would recognize a makefile and do the right

make
make install DESTDIR=???

thing and get it working right. When I only have a setup.py sitting there and have dh $@ --with python3 --buildsystem pybuild in debian/rules, it will correctly install the Python module with

python3 setup.py build
python3 setup.py install --install-layout deb --root=??? ???

I do not know all those flags. And I think that I do not need to. I just want the makefile magic to happen, and then the setup.py magic.

How can I tell debuild to do both?

When I do the following in debian/rules

%:
        dh $@
        dh $@ --with python3 --buildsystem pybuild

it will only put the first one into the resulting package. I tried to delete the debhelper.log between those, but that did not change much.

I had Kubuntu 13.04 on my ThinkPad X220, and I upgraded to 13.10 and I am not able to connect to a wired or wireless connection. The new network tray icon does not show any entries at all.

In the menu of the tray icon, there is an error saying:

Require NetworkManager 0.9.8, found .

I then tried the following:

nmcli con

** (process:3695): WARNING **: Could not initialize NMClient /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager: Rejected send message, 3 matched rules; type="method_call", sender=":1.64" (uid=1000 pid=3695 comm="nmcli con ") interface="org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties" member="GetAll" error name="(unset)" requested_reply="0" destination="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager" (uid=0 pid=1116 comm="NetworkManager ")
Error: nmcli (0.9.8.0) and NetworkManager (unknown) versions don't match. Force execution using --nocheck, but the results are unpredictable.

nmcli dev

** (process:3700): WARNING **: Could not initialize NMClient /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager: Rejected send message, 3 matched rules; type="method_call", sender=":1.65" (uid=1000 pid=3700 comm="nmcli dev ") interface="org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties" member="GetAll" error name="(unset)" requested_reply="0" destination="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager" (uid=0 pid=1116 comm="NetworkManager ")
Error: nmcli (0.9.8.0) and NetworkManager (unknown) versions don't match. Force execution using --nocheck, but the results are unpredictable.

nm-tool

** (process:3705): WARNING **: Could not initialize NMClient /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager: Rejected send message, 3 matched rules; type="method_call", sender=":1.66" (uid=1000 pid=3705 comm="nm-tool ") interface="org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties" member="GetAll" error name="(unset)" requested_reply="0" destination="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager" (uid=0 pid=1116 comm="NetworkManager ")

NetworkManager Tool

State: unknown


** (process:3705): WARNING **: error: could not connect to NetworkManager

Running those as root works, however. I was also able to run nmcli con up id DHCP which got my DHCP connection working and giving me internet access. That did not work using a Wifi connection though, and I do need those.

How can I get networking back to work without a reinstall?

For a week or so, the Ctrl+C mapping does not send an interrupt, but opens a new tab with another profile. It might have happend around the time when there were updates for all KDE software.

I start with a single tab with the Solarized color scheme:

Then I press Ctrl+C and get a new tab with a different profile:

However, if I press Ctrl+Shift+C, I get the interrupt:

In the settings, it seems all fine:

How can I get it back to have Ctrl+C send an interrupt and Ctrl+Shift+C copy text?

I have a Intel Sandy Bridge i5 with the HD 3000 graphics card. I used to be able to play Urban Terror and Nexuiz comfortably with 85 and 60 frames per seconds until mid/end of October 2012, the former even on a full HD display with that many frames.

Now I have around 30 to 45 on the smaller laptop screen and around 20 to 30 on the external monitor. Did something happen to Kubuntu 12.04 so that it has less graphics performance than previously?

Update

I looked into the system monitor and could not detect anything being at the maximum. The four CPU cores were pretty much bored, the 8 GB RAM were filled with maybe 2 GB. And I ran intel_cpu_top and did not notice anything at its limit. See the output.

after Kernel bisecting

I now did a kernel bisect and tried 3.2.0-23, 3.2.0-27, 3.2.0-29 and 3.2.0-30 and all had full graphics power. Interestingly, I then had full power when I just booted back into the regular 3.2.0-32 kernel. This does not make sense to me …

the hardware

• Lenovo ThinkPad X220
• Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2520M CPU @ 2.50GHz
• Intel HD 3000 Graphics Card (in the CPU)
• 8 GB RAM
• Kubuntu 12.04 LTS

I have a bluetooth mouse (Apple Mighty Mouse) which I use with Kubuntu (KDE). I always have to manually connect to the mouse, although it is listed as a trusted device. How can I automatically connect the mouse when I have it turned on? Or at least reconnect after suspend?

Say I used some thumbdrive on a public Windows computer and I copy some data to my Ubuntu computer with it. I cannot be completely sure that the Windows computer was clean, and it might have put something onto my thumbdrive. Is there a way to erase everything on a USB-Stick, even MBR viruses and that kind of off-filesystem stuff?

I have the following rule call my script when I dock or un-dock my ThinkPad:

# /lib/udev/rules.d/81-thinkpad-dock.rules
KERNEL=="dock.0", ATTR{docked}=="0", RUN+="/usr/bin/think-dock-hook off"
KERNEL=="dock.0", ATTR{docked}=="1", RUN+="/usr/bin/think-dock-hook on"

That is the script that will be called:

# /usr/bin/think-dock-hook
# Find the user who is currently logged in on the primary screen.
user="$(who -u | grep -F '(:0)' | head -n 1 | awk '{print $1}')"
su -c "bash -x /usr/bin/think-dock $setto" "$user" >> /root/think-dock.log 2>&1 &

And the script that is then called does something with xrandr.

The thing is that I can run think-dock on as my user (mu) and it works. I can sudo -i and run think-dock-hook on and it works too. But when I let udev run it, it just get the following error from xrandr:

# output of bash -x think-dock on
+ xrandr --output LVDS1 --auto
Can't open display

Now if I call xrandr from my sudo -i shell, I get:

No protocol specified
No protocol specified
Can't open display :0

However, if I do su -c xrandr mu from my sudo -i shell, I get the expected output.

So I do not really understand, the script called from udev fails.

If I have only the internal monitor (LVDS1) with an xrandr -o left command. Now I want to attach a second monitor, say to HDMI1. Then I'd like to rotate only the internal monitor, but not the external one. I tried the following (with no external attached though, since I am mobile currently), but that does not do anything:

xrandr --output LVDS1 -o left

How can I rotate only one monitor?

I do need some command line, since I want to put this into a script.

On KDE, each click in the mouse wheel results in some distance going up and down. If I scroll faster or slower, the same shift in the viewport is achieved.

Is there some way to scroll more when I scroll faster, like it is on the Mac?

For my computer class we need Linux. So I recommend to get Virtual Box and Ubuntu. But since there has to be TeX and Emacs installed which is non-trivial for novices, I thought I might set up an appliance to help them.

I realize that it is free software for the most part, but I am not sure how to handle the Ubuntu brand name in this case.

Is it legal to create a Ubuntu VM, install some packages and make the bundle available for download?

I use the Ctrl+Alt+T shortcut to open a terminal, but I cannot see how I can get it maximized. When I start it manually, I can simply do a gnome-terminal --maximize, but that does not apply for the shortcut. Even a changing of the .desktop files did not change anything.

Any way to let the shortcut open a maximized terminal window?

I use regular Gnome 2 on Ubuntu 11.04 with no compositing effects.

I have a couple files and ls sorts them like this:

a
_b
c

but I want to have

_b
a
c

How can I do that?

I often get HTML emails, I would like to just display them in plain text. How can I disable any HTML/Script rendering?

Can I somehow use gvim to compose my email messages in Thunderbird?

What is the difference between ssh -Y (trusted X11 forwarding) and ssh -X (untrusted X11 forwarding)? As far as I have understood it, it has something to do with security, but I did not grasp the difference and when to use which.

Original Question

Is there some cli tool to convert aac files from the iTunes Store (no DRM) to mp3?

Update 1

MP3 to MP3

I installed libavcodec-unstripped-52 and get a little further.

When I try to encode MP3 files with it: It says [mp3 @ 0x997cde0]Header missing.

lame also had problems since the tags are ID3v2, is it possible that the libmp3lame does not support that either?

Should I convert the tags or what can I do to get this working?

AAC to MP3

This went through, but there are no headers in the resulting MP3 file. How can I get the headers in there?

I have a python script that I want to package for Debian. I use a debian/install file where I wrote

auto_dice.py /usr/bin/

Linitan then complains about the .py extension (script-with-language-extension).

I then changed it to

auto_dice.py /usr/bin/autodice.py

which causes an error because it interpreted autodice.py as a directory.

How can I do the rename there? I do not want to rename my python script in the sources.

I have this Canon LiDE 200 but simple scan cannot use it properly. With the new sane-backend from rober-ancell's ppa the scanner head at least moves a little, but simple-scan simply fails telling me that the scanning fails in a red banner below the menu bar.

Is there some way to get it to work?

I use a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 on Ubuntu 10.10. The multimedia keys (Volume, Play/Pause) work, the Mail and Calculator button as well.

Now I would love to use the zoom slider, if it were possible I'd like to use page scrolling with that. Is there some way to enable that?

I installed a plain Ubuntu 10.10 on my computer and installed some software via apt-get. Last week I managed to break everything and just started from scratch, and I need to reinstall my software. Is there some way to create a list with all the packages that I have installed manually?

So that it would give me a list like texlive, ... and not texlive, texlive-dep1, textlive-dep2, ... and all the standard packages removed?

If I could somehow figure out which programs out of the regular install I have removed, that would be awesome too!

Update 2015-05-23: I now use Ansible as configuration management on my systems. There I specify the packages to install. This serves the goal, installing all the programs on a fresh system, even better. So this question might be the entry into some light configuration management.