ForDummies's questions

Etcher, UnetBootin and such write something like what goes on a CD, and it is no more useful than a CD would be. What I want is an image like the usual R/W drives that are on my computers: a "/" root partition, home etc and bin directories and all the rest, and all booted by GRUB. I want to be able to add stuff and customize -- which of course you can't do on CD's and also not on Etcher images.

To be clear: the results of Startup Disk Creator, UnetBootIn and such are NOT what I want because the image on the thumb drive is read-only, and anything I change is in memory only. I want a partitioned RW device, not a CD image, so that any changes I make, any files I create or copy, will be there the next time I boot the device.

When I try this by running the Xubuntu ISO image, all goes well enough in the setup phase, but after my final click to start the install process, it twirls for a bit then gives a message that something went wrong, but it does not know what. It then gives instructions for reporting the problem using ubuntu-bug, but that fails too.

Note: I had the thumb drive initialized with 4 partitions. A small one flagged bios_grub, a somewhat larger one formatted fat32 and flagged boot,esp, a large one formatted ext4, and finally a linux-swap partition.

It leaves me in the Xubuntu from the install ISO, so I could do some poking around but I don't know what to look for.

I cannot restart the install without rebooting.

Any help appreciated.

I downloaded the vivaldi-stable_7.0.3495.14-1_amd64.deb from https://vivaldi.com, then started the FileManager from my whisker menu and pointed at the downloaded file. It ended with an error saying it could not satisfy a dependency "Error: Dependency is not satisfiable: libglib2.0-0 (>=2.39.4)"

When I have synaptic look at libglib, I see three installed packages with version listed as "2.80.0-6ubuntu3.1"; those packages are libglib2.0-0t64, libglib2.0-bin and libglib2.0-data

The obvious question is: how do I get Vivaldi on this machine?

Normal updates go through just fine, but the release-upgrade to the next LTS does not.

Fortunately, I'm using do-release-upgrade under the script(1) command, so I capture the output. It's too long to put the whole thing here. The short version is that there's a complaint about a GitHub credential, and then the upgrade backs out to the original state.

But there's another problem to mention first: the output suggests web pages for getting help on Ubuntu sites. But the one I looked at suggested using an app called 'xchat', but when I use the apt-get command suggested for installing it, the app does not appear to exist (in my Xubuntu Jammy). So gave up on the Ubuntu direct help, and I'm hoping for a better answer here.

I don't know why the problem occurs, or even what has actually gone wrong, so I could use help both with diagnosis and with a fix.

Here's the complaint with a little context:

Reading state information... Done
Get:1ahttps://cli.github.com/packageststablerInReleaseu[3,917[B]itingafornheaders]aders]]
Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntuojammyrInReleaseu.com] [Waiting for headers]
Hit https://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/debestable.InReleasem] [Waiting for headers]
Err https://cli.github.com/packagesnstableeInReleaseuntu.com]
  The following signatures were invalid: EXPKEYSIG 23F3D4EA75716059 GitHub CLI <[email protected]>
```Reading state information... Done
Get:1ahttps://cli.github.com/packageststablerInReleaseu[3,917[B]itingafornheaders]aders]]
Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntuojammyrInReleaseu.com] [Waiting for headers]
Hit https://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/debestable.InReleasem] [Waiting for headers]
Err https://cli.github.com/packagesnstableeInReleaseuntu.com]
  The following signatures were invalid: EXPKEYSIG 23F3D4EA75716059 GitHub CLI <[email protected]>

Then

Third party sources disabled

Some third party entries in your sources.list were disabled. You can
re-enable them after the upgrade with the 'software-properties' tool
or your package manager.

To continue please press [ENTER]

Then after some downloading, the failure is announced:

Hit[http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntuonoble-security.InRelease125.190.80)]]
Hit[http://ppa.launchpad.net/system76-dev/stable/ubuntu noble InRelease
Fetchedk0nB]in 0s (0 B/s)

Error during update

A problem occurred during the update. This is usually some sort of
network problem, please check your network connection and retry.


Restoring original system state

I did not see a network problem. My usual test is "ping 8.8.8.8" which pings a Google server, is easy to remember, and seems a decent test of connectivity minus the domain-name servers.

So how do I find out what's really wrong and how to fix it?

I have a System76 computer that came with Ubuntu, but I installed xfce4 on it, and made other changes so that it is now effectively Xubuntu. It has been performing very well, but will now not upgrade from Focal to Jammy. It complains:

  fwupd-signed gnome-software gnome-software-common gnome-software-plugin-snap ubuntu-software

I have tried solutions from other questions that involved apt --upgrade-only, but they did not help. The rest were hard to follow, and I was not sure that trying them would be safe, so I'm doing this as a new question.

The first question probably should be: do I need gnome-software and ubuntu-software when I'm using lightdm and xfce?

After reading answer 1, I made some changes and retried. It failed like so...

Building dependency tree          
Reading state information... Done

Calculating the changes

Calculating the changes

Error in sys.excepthook:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-5218svyf/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeApport.py", line 49, in apport_crash
    from apport.report import Report
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/apport/__init__.py", line 5, in <module>
    from apport.report import Report
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/apport/report.py", line 32, in <module>
    import apport.fileutils
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/apport/fileutils.py", line 495, in <module>
    def get_process_environ(proc_pid_fd: int) -> dict[str, str]:
TypeError: 'type' object is not subscriptable

Original exception was:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-5218svyf/jammy", line 8, in <module>
    sys.exit(main())
  File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-5218svyf/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeMain.py", line 241, in main
    if app.run():
  File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-5218svyf/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeController.py", line 2042, in run
    return self.fullUpgrade()
  File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-5218svyf/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeController.py", line 1991, in fullUpgrade
    if not self.calcDistUpgrade():
  File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-5218svyf/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeController.py", line 1100, in calcDistUpgrade
    if not self.cache.installTasks(self.tasks):
AttributeError: 'DistUpgradeController' object has no attribute 'tasks'
=== Command terminated with exit status 1 (Sat Sep  7 18:27:32 2024) ===

It seems to have gotten as far as processing triggers. Now what?

Being advised that my original question was answered, I opened a new one to investigate why I get a crash when I try to update. See Why does do-release-upgrade fail with an error on Xubuntu 20.04.6 -> 22.04?

I'm trying options to bring an old-ish Xubuntu 20.04LTS up to 22.04. This thing has had some problems that made me very wary of problems along the way, so I did a dry run just now.

• Installed 20.04 LTS on an empty partition (without internet).
• plugged internet back in
• Booted into the new partition and did apt-get update and apt-get upgrade
• So far so good
• Tried a "do-release-upgrade" and it promptly told me to "install all available updates" and it quit.
• I tried apt-get upgrade again and it told me it did not do anything, but 36 updates had been held back.

I did not do anything else. This all happened in the last hour, so it's not like I forgot one little thing along the way.

What's holding these back, and how do I undo it?

I'm reading Python documentation at https://docs.python.org/3/library/concurrent.futures.html and I want to use this feature, but I cannot.

It fails on the first step: importing the module. For import concurrent.futures I get

  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/home/kevin/concurrent.py", line 3, in <module>
    import concurrent.futures
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'concurrent.futures'; 'concurrent' is not a package

And I cannot get pip to find or install it either, either as 'concurrent.futures' or just as 'concurrent'.

I'm currently on Xubuntu 22.04 LTS, running Python 3.

I'm writing some backup software that needs functionality like partclone(8), and having some trouble with the man pages. In particular, I don't see any difference between the pages for partclone.dd and partclone.imager, and the two binaries, while different, are the exact same size. Moreover, I found a question somewhere with an answer that made a distinction between them, but it was not clear why.

So I'm really wanting to know what is different between them. I had supposed they were just dd disguise, but I'm ready to be proven wrong.

I have scripts that run programs (that I did not author) and some are getting segfaults on a few inputs. I do these things in large batches that run for up to a week, and would like to know which input(s) are triggering the problem. As it stands, I get a notification from Bash that a certain script of mine has gotten a seg fault. But the problem is not in the script, it's in the 3rd party program and its input. If I had the name of the input, I could work on the problem.

The current form of the call in my Bash script is (for example program 'autofix')

  for indata in base*.fix; do        
      autofix $indata >${indata/.fix/.stdout} &                                                                                               
  done

As you can see, they are started in the background, and on my workhorse server, there may be as many as 100 or so of these started at once, so I cannot tell which one has failed, and I'm not patient enough to try all 100 one at a time, since each may take an hour. Capturing stderr does not capture anything so I'm looking for other ideas.

I have a cluster of 7 machines, all running Xubuntu. I use them for a very compute-intense hobby, which make me distrust automatic updates or anything else that might force a reboot even on a weekly basis.

For example, on one machine today -- the only one that has updated to 22.04 -- Firefox was reporting tabs crashing when I was just doing a search. I was unable to fix that with anything short of a reboot. I suspect it was some side-effect of the conversion to snaps, but I don't know that.

I also remember seeing references to other things that amount to updates happening without my approval or interventions. I'm suspicious of such stuff affecting the stability of my cluster, given that I may have a task that runs for a month. No kidding.

I'm not married to the X flavor of Ubuntu, but I chose it because it seemed to have the least amount of burden from features I do not care about. I live my life in the terminal, and pretty much avoid GUI programs aside from web browsers and a few things like gparted.

I can switch to Chrome, and avoid the snaps, but worry that there are other things trending in the Ubuntu universe that are going to make it hard to stay here.

I cannot just disconnect from the internet because my most useful machine (with 3 monitors) is both my contact to the outside and the leader of my work (has a large RAID with my database).

Does anyone have hard info about all this?

Difference from prior questions: I want to know about snaps, which I have not found elsewhere. I wanted to be sure the answers were current, because the prior question that was suggested to me had been asked 10 years ago. I wanted some clarity (because I had a lot of confusion) with respect to the symptoms on the machine that "went weird" on me. I got all that now. Thanks.

A recent update to Firefox has made my profiles unusable, and they were already indecipherable. So I want to revert to a previous version and create readable backups of my bookmarks, and take note of active Addons.

The bookmarks list is quite long, and is essential to my workflow and failing memory.

So: is there a way to revert? What's the latest version before the format change?

I'm on Xubuntu 20.04.5 with .deb Firefox. I have older installs in other directories, but they are VERY old. I have backups, but they are also quite old at this point -- at least a year.

Six was a gold-medal winner several times in a computer games olympiad. The source code is on GitHub https://github.com/melisgl/six/tree/master/six. It has been pinned for a couple of decades, but I would like to bring it up, however I'm not familiar with programming KDE, Qt or even C++. I'm mostly and assembly, C and Python programmer, and have been at it for about 50 years (really!).

Nevertheless, it was a bit of a surprise when I built a Kubuntu 20.04.3 for the purpose, cloned the repository, and went to start. The usual start is .configure, but even that did not work. Probably because the code is so old, but I need help. It didn't get far and ended up asking if I had things configured correctly, apparently because it could not find kde-config. One hit on a search for that name indicated it was or in in a package called kdelibs5-dev, but I cannot see that in synaptic. Is it in some other package I should install? Is there something simple I could do to get a bit further into .configure?

Here is what the attempt looked like

kevin@kackles:~/Six/six/six$ ./configure
checking build system type... x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
checking host system type... x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
checking target system type... x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
checking for -p flag to install... yes
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking for gawk... no
checking for mawk... mawk
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes
checking whether to enable maintainer-specific portions of Makefiles... no
checking for kde-config... not found
configure: error: The important program kde-config was not found!
Please check whether you installed KDE correctly.

kevin@kackles:~/Six/six/six$

I'm running Xubuntu 16.04.5 on a laptop whose nVidia driver is not supported in 18.04 so I'm stuck here (I need the proprietary driver.) A while ago I started getting error dialogs popping up whenever I booted this machine up. I don't expect fixes, but I'd like to identify the failing software and reinstall or remove it.

So my question is: what packages are involved in the error messages I've identified. BTW I see some reference to bluetooth, and AFAIK this Dell inspiron 1720 has no bluetooth hardware, just wifi. If I'm lucky then I can just disable something that can't work anyway.

I looked at /var/log/syslog and found error reports that are probably related. I can't tell for sure because the dialogs give no hint what actually failed, just a choice of whether or not to "report" the failure.

When I view the syslog in vim, I see red highlights on these lines.

Sep 11 20:08:40 Roisin-x org.a11y.Bus[1452]: ** (process:1569): WARNING **: Failed to register client: 

and two occurrences of

Sep 11 20:08:52 Roisin-x org.blueman.Mechanism[679]: Failed to connect to Mir: Failed to connect to server socket: No such file or directory
Sep 11 20:08:52 Roisin-x org.blueman.Mechanism[679]: Unable to init server: Could not connect: Connection refused

and finally

Sep 11 20:08:52 Roisin-x org.blueman.Mechanism[679]: Failed to connect to Mir: Failed to connect to server socket: No such file or directory

In case more context is needed, here's the section where that occurred

Sep 11 20:08:37 Roisin-x ntpd[1224]: Soliciting pool server 96.126.122.39
Sep 11 20:08:37 Roisin-x ntpd[1224]: Soliciting pool server 2001:470:0:50::2
Sep 11 20:08:38 Roisin-x ntpd[1224]: Soliciting pool server 91.189.89.198
Sep 11 20:08:40 Roisin-x org.a11y.Bus[1452]: ** (process:1569): WARNING **: Failed to register client: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.gnome.SessionManager was not provided by any .service files
Sep 11 20:08:40 Roisin-x org.a11y.Bus[1452]: Activating service name='org.a11y.atspi.Registry'
Sep 11 20:08:40 Roisin-x org.a11y.Bus[1452]: Successfully activated service 'org.a11y.atspi.Registry'
Sep 11 20:08:40 Roisin-x org.a11y.atspi.Registry[1584]: SpiRegistry daemon is running with well-known name - org.a11y.atspi.Registry
Sep 11 20:08:40 Roisin-x systemd[1297]: Time has been changed
Sep 11 20:08:40 Roisin-x systemd[1120]: Time has been changed
Sep 11 20:08:40 Roisin-x systemd[1]: Time has been changed
Sep 11 20:08:44 Roisin-x rtkit-daemon[1186]: Successfully made thread 1867 of process 1867 (n/a) owned by '1000' high priority at nice level -11.
Sep 11 20:08:44 Roisin-x rtkit-daemon[1186]: Supervising 4 threads of 2 processes of 2 users.
Sep 11 20:08:44 Roisin-x rtkit-daemon[1186]: Supervising 4 threads of 2 processes of 2 users.
Sep 11 20:08:44 Roisin-x rtkit-daemon[1186]: Successfully made thread 1873 of process 1867 (n/a) owned by '1000' RT at priority 5.
Sep 11 20:08:44 Roisin-x rtkit-daemon[1186]: Supervising 5 threads of 2 processes of 2 users.
Sep 11 20:08:44 Roisin-x rtkit-daemon[1186]: Supervising 5 threads of 2 processes of 2 users.
Sep 11 20:08:44 Roisin-x rtkit-daemon[1186]: Successfully made thread 1874 of process 1867 (n/a) owned by '1000' RT at priority 5.
Sep 11 20:08:44 Roisin-x rtkit-daemon[1186]: Supervising 6 threads of 2 processes of 2 users.
Sep 11 20:08:45 Roisin-x rtkit-daemon[1186]: Successfully made thread 1917 of process 1917 (n/a) owned by '1000' high priority at nice level -11.
Sep 11 20:08:45 Roisin-x rtkit-daemon[1186]: Supervising 7 threads of 3 processes of 2 users.
Sep 11 20:08:45 Roisin-x pulseaudio[1917]: [pulseaudio] pid.c: Daemon already running.
Sep 11 20:08:46 Roisin-x dbus[679]: [system] Activating via systemd: service name='org.freedesktop.UPower' unit='upower.service'
Sep 11 20:08:46 Roisin-x systemd[1]: Starting Daemon for power management...
Sep 11 20:08:47 Roisin-x dbus[679]: [system] Successfully activated service 'org.freedesktop.UPower'
Sep 11 20:08:47 Roisin-x systemd[1]: Started Daemon for power management.
Sep 11 20:08:50 Roisin-x dbus[679]: [system] Activating via systemd: service name='org.freedesktop.UDisks2' unit='udisks2.service'
Sep 11 20:08:50 Roisin-x systemd[1]: Starting Disk Manager...
Sep 11 20:08:50 Roisin-x udisksd[2082]: udisks daemon version 2.1.7 starting
Sep 11 20:08:50 Roisin-x dbus[679]: [system] Successfully activated service 'org.freedesktop.UDisks2'
Sep 11 20:08:50 Roisin-x systemd[1]: Started Disk Manager.
Sep 11 20:08:50 Roisin-x udisksd[2082]: Acquired the name org.freedesktop.UDisks2 on the system message bus
Sep 11 20:08:50 Roisin-x org.gtk.vfs.AfcVolumeMonitor[1452]: Volume monitor alive
Sep 11 20:08:52 Roisin-x obexd[2108]: OBEX daemon 5.37
Sep 11 20:08:52 Roisin-x dbus[679]: [system] Activating service name='org.blueman.Mechanism' (using servicehelper)
Sep 11 20:08:52 Roisin-x kernel: [   57.624679] Bluetooth: RFCOMM TTY layer initialized
Sep 11 20:08:52 Roisin-x kernel: [   57.624692] Bluetooth: RFCOMM socket layer initialized
Sep 11 20:08:52 Roisin-x kernel: [   57.624701] Bluetooth: RFCOMM ver 1.11
Sep 11 20:08:52 Roisin-x org.blueman.Mechanism[679]: Failed to connect to Mir: Failed to connect to server socket: No such file or directory
Sep 11 20:08:52 Roisin-x org.blueman.Mechanism[679]: Unable to init server: Could not connect: Connection refused
Sep 11 20:08:52 Roisin-x org.blueman.Mechanism[679]: Failed to connect to Mir: Failed to connect to server socket: No such file or directory
Sep 11 20:08:52 Roisin-x org.blueman.Mechanism[679]: Unable to init server: Could not connect: Connection refused
Sep 11 20:08:52 Roisin-x blueman-mechanism: Starting blueman-mechanism
Sep 11 20:08:52 Roisin-x dbus[679]: [system] Successfully activated service 'org.blueman.Mechanism'
Sep 11 20:08:52 Roisin-x org.blueman.Mechanism[679]: (blueman-mechanism:2172): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_icon_theme_get_for_screen: assertion 'GDK_IS_SCREEN (screen)' failed
Sep 11 20:08:52 Roisin-x blueman-mechanism: loading Network
Sep 11 20:08:52 Roisin-x blueman-mechanism: loading Ppp
Sep 11 20:08:52 Roisin-x blueman-mechanism: loading RfKill
Sep 11 20:08:52 Roisin-x blueman-mechanism: loading Rfcomm
Sep 11 20:09:14 Roisin-x systemd[1]: Starting Stop ureadahead data collection...
Sep 11 20:09:14 Roisin-x systemd[1]: Stopped Read required files in advance.

@Javier Ochoa, I ran the command with this output:

root@Roisin-x:~# systemctl disable bluetooth.service
Synchronizing state of bluetooth.service with SysV init with /lib/systemd/systemd-sysv-install...
Executing /lib/systemd/systemd-sysv-install disable bluetooth
insserv: warning: current start runlevel(s) (empty) of script `bluetooth' overrides LSB defaults (2 3 4 5).
insserv: warning: current stop runlevel(s) (0 1 2 3 4 5 6) of script `bluetooth' overrides LSB defaults (0 1 6).
Removed symlink /etc/systemd/system/dbus-org.bluez.service.
root@Roisin-x:~#

When I enable wireless (via a switch that's on this laptop) and run 'rfkill list' I get

0: phy0: Wireless LAN
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no
2: hci0: Bluetooth
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no

The inxi -c 5 -b command produces

System:    Host: Roisin-x Kernel: 4.4.0-135-generic x86_64 (64 bit) Desktop: Xfce 4.12.3
           Distro: Ubuntu 16.04 xenial
Machine:   System: Dell (portable) product: Inspiron 1720 serial: 10SSGF1
           Mobo: Dell model: 0UK437 serial: .10SSGF1.CN486437CJ6132. Bios: Dell v: A09 date: 07/11/2008
CPU:       Dual core Intel Core2 Duo T7250 (-MCP-) speed/max: 1200/2001 MHz
Graphics:  Card: NVIDIA G84M [GeForce 8600M GT]
           Display Server: X.org 1.18.4 drivers: nvidia (unloaded: fbdev,vesa,nouveau)
           tty size: 133x78 Advanced Data: N/A for root
Network:   Card-1: Broadcom BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX driver: b44
           Card-2: Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG [Golan] Network Connection driver: iwl3945
Drives:    HDD Total Size: 1031.6GB (1.6% used)
Info:      Processes: 175 Uptime: 8 min Memory: 292.8/1998.5MB Client:     Shell (bash) inxi: 2.2.35

And on reboot, the system no longer displays error dialogs when I log in. There are errors and failures in syslog, but they are different, and maybe not important.

I'm still baffled about why turning a switch off would cause a dialog about "system program error". It's pretty distressing.

FINAL SOLUTION: reinstalling vi 'apt-get install --reinstall linux-firmware' seems to have eliminated the problem with rebooting when wireless is disabled.

I'm trying to create software to restore backups that I already create with scripts. I haven't needed to restore any, fortunately, but now I want to move the contents of one of my backups to a SSD drive, and it turns out it's harder than I expected.

Right now I'm trying to recreate the partition table. I'd like to use parted because it seems the easiest of the available tools to use in a script. I see two things that are puzzling me.

First, a command like

parted /dev/sdh mklabel gpt mkpart primary fat32 2048 4096 print

makes a gpt partition table and a partition, but it shows a name "primary" and that is what blkid calls a "PARTLABEL". Reading the info and man pages seems to indicate it should be the filesystem type, not name. On experimentation, it appears no fs type is accepted any more, and that is the name instead.

The second problem is: I do not want a name on the partition at all, but I've tried "" and " " with no luck.

So: how do I create a partition without a PARTLABEL? I can certainly do it in gparted, but I cannot script that.