user5950's questions

I am wondering whether or not there is a way to completely remove Snap from Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri) without losing the ability to install Ubuntu's default browser Firefox.

When I just recently updated to the newest Ubuntu release I realized that the installer programmatically reinstalled Snap, although I had manually removed it before. Additionally the installer removed Firefox, which was installed via the repositories, and reinstalled it via snap.

As I don't want snap to be installed on my machines for various reasons, my question is: Is there a safe way to remove it, and to get the Firefox DEB back to the sources?

Is there a PPA? Could I use a source of an Ubuntu flavor additionally, which didn't remove the Firefox Deb from its sources?

As Ubuntu 21.04 includes pipewire for video streams and screen sharing by default, I am wondering whether or not it is possible to replace pulseaudio completely with pipewire.

I am wondering whether or not there is a way to completely remove snap from Ubuntu 19.10 without losing the ability to install important applications like Chromium.

When I just recently updated to the newest Ubuntu release I realized that the installer programmatically reinstalled snap, although I had manually removed it before. Additionally the installer removed Chromium, which was installed via the repositories, and reinstalled it via snap.

As I don't want snap to be installed on my machines for various reasons my question is if anybody knows a safe way to remove it, and to get the Chromium DEB back to the sources?

Is there a PPA? Could I use a source of an Ubuntu flavor additionally, which didn't remove the Chromium Deb from its sources?

I have some problems trying to update my flatpaks. I have several applications installed via flatpak (system wide) and from time to time I am updating all of them with the command:

flatpak update -y

This used to work very well, but al of the sudden I get the error:

Flatpak system operation Deploy not allowed for user

Here a complete example:

user:~$ flatpak update -y
Looking for updates…


        ID                                                          Arch   Zweig Remote  Download
 1. [✗] org.kde.WaylandDecoration.QGnomePlatform-decoration         x86_64 5.12  flathub 1.0 kB / 56,8 kB
 2. [✗] org.kde.WaylandDecoration.QGnomePlatform_decoration.Sources x86_64 5.12  flathub 1.0 kB / 52,6 kB

Warning: Flatpak system operation Deploy not allowed for user
Warning: Flatpak system operation Deploy not allowed for user
Installation complete.

This might be a problem with policykit, the which – as the flatpaks are installed system wide – should have asked me for an administrator password during the update process, but failed to do so.

Can anybody please hint me in the right direction how to solve this problem.

I am wondering how to disable system sounds in Ubuntu 19.04. Although I have them muted in system settings, as you can clearly see in the screenshot below, they still keep on making sound and annoying me:

Whenever a system sound disturbs my calm a new entry under system sounds appears briefly with full volume and before I can change the volume to mute it, it's gone:

Can somebody enlighten me, please, how to mute all system sounds in Ubuntu 19.04 or Gnome 3.32 respectively.

After I updated to Ubuntu 18.10 my sound device isn't recognized anymore. Only a dummy device is shown.

I have an onboard Intel device:

lspci -nnk | grep -A2 Audio
00:1b.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C216 Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller [8086:1e20] (rev 04)
    Subsystem: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C216 Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller [8086:2036]
    Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
    Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel

The command pacmd list-cards does not show any devices:

:~$ pacmd list-cards
0 card(s) available.

This message in /var/log/syslog might have to do something with the problem:

Oct 19 21:02:06 MyComputerName pulseaudio[14331]: E: [pulseaudio] 
backend-ofono.c: Failed to register as a handsfree audio agent with 
ofono: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.ofono 
was not provided by any .service files

Does anybody have the same issue? How can I fix this?

Since I updated to Ubuntu 17.10 a while ago, my private keys – the which I use for example to access my server via ssh – are not unlocked programmatically after login anymore.

My understanding is, that usually the seahorse client should take care of this, by asking you whether or not to store the key's password when typing them in for the first time.

My first guess was, that seahorse-daemon wasn't running for some reason, but it is:

user@Zeus:~$ ps aux | grep seahorse
user    19170  0.0  0.1 432636 26564 ?        Ss   00:07   0:00 seahorse-daemon

My second guess was, that for some reason I have to delete all related passwords stored in seahorse under »Passwords->login«:

I was hoping to force the client to ask me again and then storing them again. But this didn't help either. The client does not pop up to ask me...

Then I found this question, which could be related, but did not help me: Unlock all private keys on Ubuntu, entering password only once at login

As the management of other passwords work as expected (for example passwords for nautilus, Chromium, Nextcloud etc.) I assume the problem has to do something with ssh-agent...

Can anybody hint me in the right directions, how to solve this problem? Has anything changed in the way how GNOME handles passwords? Maybe some new fancy program failed being installed during the upgrade process?

UPDATE When I add the private key to the authentication agent again with:

ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa

and try to log in, I will be asked to unlock the key only once, after that the key gets unlocked programmatically. But this works only until the next reboot. After a fresh start, I have to add the key again...

When I open the recent files view in Nautilus, it shows all files sorted descending by file name rather than by last access time. This contradicts the main idea of the recent files view, which is, to give an easy access to recently used files. Unfortunately, it is not possible to change the sort criteria in the view, as the row titles are disabled as you can see in the screenshot below:

As you see in the picture the files are sorted by name (descending): V, T, T etc...

How can I change the sort criteria to last access time? Is this a bug? By the way, I am using Ubuntu Gnome 17.04 with Nautilus 3.24.1.

When I try to upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04 (from 15.10) with the command:

sudo do-release-upgrade

I get the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-06fgq3pm/xenial", line 8, in <module>
    sys.exit(main())
  File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-06fgq3pm/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeMain.py", line 242, in main
    if app.run():
  File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-06fgq3pm/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeController.py", line 1876, in run
    return self.fullUpgrade()
  File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-06fgq3pm/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeController.py", line 1757, in fullUpgrade
    if not self.doPostInitialUpdate():
  File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-06fgq3pm/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeController.py", line 943, in doPostInitialUpdate
    self.tasks = self.cache.installedTasks
  File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-06fgq3pm/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeCache.py", line 787, in installedTasks
    for line in pkg._pcache._records.record.split("\n"):
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xf6 in position 441: invalid start byte
=== Command terminated with exit status 1 (Fri Apr 22 09:09:59 2016) ===

Any ideas?

Since I upgraded to Ubuntu 15.04 my system shows a strange behaviour booting: Shortly after the Ubuntu boot splash a form element shows up requiring me to enter an »Auth username«. The boot process stucks, until I would hit enter. What is that, where does it come from, how can I get rid of it?

That's how in looks like:

+------------------------------------------+
|                                          |
|                                          |
|                                          |
|                                          |
|                 Ubuntu°                  |
|                 ....                     |
|                                          |
|                                          |
|                                          |
|           Enter Auth Username            |
|           +------------------+           |
|           |                  |           |
|           +------------------+           |
|                                          |
|                                          |
|                                          |
|                                          |
|                                          |
+------------------------------------------+

Trying to do a release upgrade on Ubuntu 14.04 with:

do-release-upgrade

I get the following error:

It was not possible to authenticate some packages. This may be a transient 
network problem. You may want to try again later. See below for a list of 
unauthenticated packages.

libxkbcommon-x11-0 

What is this about? I did

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

before and deactivated all ppas. What else could I do?

I try to repair an broken Ubunu 14.04 with chroot. What I did, is to boot Ubuntu from USB mounted the original system that has to be repaired and changed to this system with chroot:

sudo mount /dev/sdXY /mnt 
sudo mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev 
sudo mount -o bind /sys /mnt/sys 
sudo mount -t proc /proc /mnt/proc 
sudo cp /proc/mounts /mnt/etc/mtab 
sudo chroot /mnt /bin/bash 

That worked fine, but in chroot environment I don't have access to the internet, so apt isn't able to resolve hostnames. What am I supposed to do?

ping www.askubuntu.com

does not work either.

I want to remove all unitiy scopes, that may access the internet completely and permanently form a pool of many Ubuntu 13.10 machines. How to do that?

Since I upgraded to Ubuntu 12.10 the automout of USB devices does not work as expected. When I plug in a storage device it is recognized correctly but I do not have write privileges on it. I thought, that maybe the permissions of /media are not correctly set, but I don't know, how they have to be. They are like this:

drwxr-xr-x  14 root  root   4096 Jan 13 19:37 media

I also checked whether my user is a member of the group plugdev and he definitely is.

What else could be the cause of that problem?

Update: Here is the dmesg output after plugging in an USB storage device: http://pastebin.com/pJ7qebQR

Does anybody know whether or not it will be possible to use the GTK3.2's new HTML5-extension in Ubuntu 12.04? They announced that GNOME3.2 will be included, but will they build the GTK packages with the new HTML5-extension enabled? Unfortunately thy did not in 11.10.

Till Ubuntu 11.10 there the context or edit menu had an option to open a specific folder as administrator. This option came with the package nautilus-gksu. Now it vanished. Does anybody know how to get it back?

Using SSHFS to mount remote file systems in the user space, I have the problem that all instances of Nautilus use to freeze, if one of the mounted hosts is unreachable. That problem occurs with Nautilus 2.X and 3.X and I cant find any solution until today. This problem makes SSHFS almost unusable, at least using an unstable WLAN or something like it. Is this a Nautilus bug? Can anyone confirm this problem, is there a solution?

Does anybody know wether or not it willbe possible to use the GTK3.2's new HTML5-extension in Ubuntu 11.10? They announced that GNOME3.2 will be included, but will they build the GTK packages with the new HTML5-extension enabled?

Is it really true that Nautilus 3.x hasn't the »open parent« button any more? Today I tried the second beta of Ubuntu 11.10 and I am deeply frustrated. Since Gnome3 and this whole Unity thing it feels a bit of always having to be afraid, that a new release will remove some of the main functions you are using in all days work. Back to the point: Is there a chance to get it back?

I would like to record an output of a program with PulseAudio using command line/bash script. It is important not to record all output, but only the output from one specific program.

I thought I would have to create a new null-sink and than move the program's output to this new sink. Than tell parec to use this specific monitor to record.

The first step would be something like this:

pactl load-module module-null-sink sink_name=steam

But how to move the program's output now to this sink?
And how to record the specific sink with a bash script?