ΤΖΩΤΖΙΟΥ's questions

I have a machine (Ubuntu 11.10) that I would like to have it play audio (typically through an amplifier), but the machine should be headless (where its final placement will be). I will control what is played through ssh.

However, there is no sound output until I login to the graphical console. At first I thought it was an issue with pulseaudio, so I promptly removed it to use the default ALSA, but I have the same issues. I ssh to the machine, I run alsamixer and get the typical cannot open mixer: No such file or directory error (while /proc/asound/cards display correctly what I have). If I login on the graphical console, alsamixer works fine in the ssh session, and I have sound output. I logout, and then alsamixer stops working. So something runs (Xsession perhaps?) when I login that enables sound output, and gets disabled when I logout.

I remember in older versions of Ubuntu, there was a drum roll when the machine showed the login screen; that is not the case anymore. Perhaps if I somehow can enable that drum roll, I'll have fixed my problem too.

In any case, the question I ask is what the title says.

UPDATE: issue still unsolved. I just wanted to note the information that sound is configured correctly and enabled whether I log in to a Gnome or a XFCE environment, and de-configured and disabled when I log out.

As the question says: how can I turn on/off compositing (like clicking the appropriate option in System→ Preferences→ Appearance→ Visual Effects) using the command-line?

I run Ubuntu desktop 10.10, if that helps.

This is on Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) 64-bit desktop.

I want to make my X server listen to remote connections from clients in other machines on the local network. I know about ssh -X and that is not what I want. I vaguely remember changing something like TCPListen from no to yes, but I don't remember where this change should be applied.

I'm interested in either a GUI method or a CLI one.

PS editing /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc to remove the -nolisten tcp option and rebooting does not work.

I want only two keyboard layouts in my system: us altgr-intl (USA International (AltGr dead keys) ) and gr (Greece), so this is what I've selected in System → Preferences → Keyboard → Layouts. However, every time I begin a new Gnome session (reboot, logout/login), the us keyboard layout is automatically inserted at the top of the list.

I created a small script called fixlang that ensures the desirable result:

layouts='[us    altgr-intl,gr]' # tab between us and altgr
key=/desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard/kbd/layouts

active_layouts="$(gconftool -g $key)"
if [ "$active_layouts" != "$layouts" -o "$1" == -f ]
then
    gconftool -t l --list-type=str -s $key "$layouts"
fi

which I run on login.

However, this is a kludge. How can I ensure that Gnome does not mess with my keyboard layout selection?

I would like to boot from an external USB CD/DVD drive on a Toshiba Portege which can't. I've tried with plop, but haven't had any luck.

This is for a friend's Toshiba Portege laptop with Ubuntu 10.4.1 on it. They want the original Windows XP for tablet PC installed; they do have the disk, but the Portege seems unable to boot from a generic non-Toshiba USB CD drive (and the Toshiba one that came with it is broken for years now).

So I found out about plop. I followed the instructions (modified; I touched /etc/grub.d/40_custom or something) and now the executable '/boot/plpbt.bin' (I copied it there of course) is included as an option (I hope! I ran update-grub2 and update-grub and verified that the custom menu option exists in /boot/grub/grub.cfg).

I cannot bring up the grub menu at boot; Esc unfortunately jumps to the Portege BIOS, and I haven't managed to succeed in getting grub to choose the Plop boot manager.

How can I bring up the grub menu on boot?

Ubuntu 10.10 has dropped support for i586 and lesser processors, along with i686 processors that do not support the CMOV instruction (Conditional MOVe, AFAIK).

What is so special about the CMOV command? It even has a flag of its own in the flags : line of /proc/cpuinfo.

For some obscure reason, my /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local file contained an extra locale that typically should not be there (in my example, pl_PL.UTF-8 UTF-8).

I ran sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales, and the system reported:

Generating locales...
  el_GR.UTF-8... up-to-date
  en_DK.UTF-8... up-to-date
  en_US.UTF-8... up-to-date
Generation complete.

that is, it verified that the rest of the locales are up-to-date; however, there was no mention of the pl_PL.UTF-8 locale. I don't know if it erased files related to the locale.

How can I make sure that there are no files left in the system for the pl_PL.UTF-8 locale?

I'm running Ubuntu 9.10. Whenever I open the gvim application, I have to select a custom font (Edit→Select font). I would like gvim to remember my choice. Perhaps I need to edit the ~/.vimrc file, I am not sure.

How can I make gvim remember my preference?

I'm running Ubuntu 9.10 (can't upgrade due to some applications being incompatible with later versions), with all updates installed.

A colleague has written a VB.Net application which seems to run correctly under Mono, however there is an issue with characters in text boxes: if they are not strictly ASCII, they show as boxes (the typical Windows replacement character).

At first I thought it was an issue with Greek characters (which we use); however, I attempted to insert some accented western characters (like é, which is in the typical western 1252 Windows codepage), and these too showed up as boxes too, so it's not strictly an issue with Greek.

I attempted to type Greek in a textbox: the word «Δοκιμή» (test). I then selected what I typed, pressed Ctrl-C, switched to a native text editor and pressed Ctrl-V. The result was “Îοκιμή”, which is the greek word pretty messed up (think UTF-8 interpreted as Latin-1; I work a lot with Unicode, so it's easy to recognise such stuff :) However, if you want to verify, start a Python interpreter in a UTF-8 capable terminal and try:

>>> a="Îοκιμή"
>>> print a.decode("utf8").encode("latin1").decode("utf8")
Δοκιμή

which is what I typed).

Now, the application also embeds an Internet Explorer control; Mono does well emulating it (I think it uses a Gecko engine), and in a textbox inside that IE control, I can type fine and see any non-ASCII character I want.

I would like to know whether there is an issue with my mono configuration or even if it's a known bug; VB.Net is supposedly Unicode-capable, but I don't know anything about the Unicode-capability of the standard controls it uses.

So, if you can help me, please advise: what can I do on the Ubuntu side to remedy the situation?