John's questions

I have not seen a complete guide for correctly installing the GeForce drivers for the new Maxwell based cards and I have struggled getting my Maxwell card to work properly, so I have written a short complete guide that hopefully will help anyone in a similar situation.

What is the problem?

A couple months ago I bought a GeForce GTX 750 TI and it worked perfectly when running Windows 8.1. When running Ubuntu, it had constant problems and when it was working, there were a ton of video glitches. I was excited when I heard that the Linux kernel v3.15 was getting basic Maxwell support. Unfortunately, there isn't enough support there to get a Maxwell card running smoothly. I found out that a lot of people are having this issue, not only with the GTX 750+ Maxwell series but with Maxwell based cards in general.

I have spent hours looking through AskUbuntu posts and none of them have made my card run like it runs on Windows. It wasn't until I saw this review of the new GTX 980 that I had an idea that might fix my problem.

I installed a Spotify client today on my recent Ubuntu 14.04 installation and I realized that the icon in the tray is very distorted:

Is there any way to fix this in Ubuntu 14.04? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Serious props to asymptotically for this one! His solution was amazing:

Now Spotify actually looks like it belongs on my icon tray. Awesome job.

I just installed Ubuntu 14.04 on my server and I was setting up all my config files when I came across this in my sshd_config file:

# Authentication:
LoginGraceTime 120
PermitRootLogin without-password
StrictModes yes

This made me very worried. I thought that it was possible that someone could be logging into my server as root without a password.

I tried connecting to my server as root via:

johns-mbp:~ john$ ssh [email protected]
The authenticity of host '192.168.1.48 (192.168.1.48)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is 40:7e:28:f1:a8:36:28:da:eb:6f:d2:d0:3f:4b:4b:fe.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Warning: Permanently added '192.168.1.48' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
[email protected]'s password:  

I entered a blank password and it didn't let me in, which was a relief. So my question is: what does without password mean and why is this a default in Ubuntu 14.04?

I have a programming assignment where I need to use the pcap lib.

#define _BSD_SOURCE

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <pcap.h> // <-- missing include
#include <netinet/ip.h>
#include <netinet/tcp.h>

void logpacket( unsigned char* payload, struct ip* ipheader, struct tcphdr* tcpheader )
{
    //...
}



int main(int argc, char* argv[] )
{
    //...
}

How can I get the library files I need to compile this program?

I am buying a computer with the main intent of running Ubuntu, would I get the best compatibility and performance with a Windows based computer or a Mac based computer?

If it runs better on Windows based machines:

• Which manufacturer (Dell, HP, ...) has the best compatibility with Ubuntu?
• Does Ubuntu run on the Intel iX series as well as it does on the AMD series?
• Are there any problems running Ubuntu on an AMD processor?

If it runs better on Mac based machines:

• Does Ubuntu support Thunderbolt? Will it support Thunderbolt in 13.10?
• How good is the support for the hardware peripherals? Network Card, Graphics Card, ...

General questions about both:

• Are SSD's recommended or not recommended? Should you not use a Swap partition with an SSD?
• What is the maximum amount of RAM Ubuntu-64 bit can handle?
• Does Ubuntu have support for quad+ core processors?

Edit:

I am interested in getting a Desktop (so if it were a Mac it would be the iMac). I would want to spend less than $1500 US.

I have a Macbook Pro that is currently running OSX. I installed ubuntu on a Windows laptop I had lying around to try it out. I liked it a lot but I didn't want to commit any space to it on my internal storage on my Macbook Pro (my internal storage is not very large to begin with).

I wanted to install ubuntu to a larger external (bootable) hard drive. I downloaded ubuntu 12.04 (.iso file), and then I burned the image to a DVD. I booted up my Mac in the "try ubuntu" mode. Then I setup my wireless connection and clicked "install ubuntu". Then I clicked the "something else" option.

This is the guide I used to partition my hard drive

Note: I made sure to select my external hard drive (Seagate 500 gb external drive) for the boot loader installation

Once I had everything partitioned correctly, I started the installation which took about 15 minutes. I rebooted my Mac and it booted directly into ubuntu. I installed a bunch of updates and then I shut my computer down. I wanted to boot up OSX again so I removed the hard drive and turned my computer on. It came up with the no such device: grub rescue error.

Here is a question about the error for those who are unfamiliar:

• Grub rescue after installing Ubuntu on a external HDD from USB

So what this means is that even know I told the installer to put the boot loader on the external hard drive, it put it on my internal hard drive. It took me days of screwing around to try to get grub off, I ended up just restoring my Macbook from my Time Machine.

This is obviously a problem in ubuntu 12.04. It seems like if you want to install ubuntu 12.04, you should probably just partition your internal because it has issues with installing to an external hard drive. I don't want to install ubuntu on my internal hard drive because if I do that neither OS will have a practical amount of space.

Now here is my question:

Is the problem fixed in ubuntu 13.04? If the problem is not fixed in 13.04, is there a build of ubuntu where it is not a problem?

BOUNTY

How can I install Ubuntu on an external USB Hard drive WITHOUT installing Grub (or Grub2) onto my Mac internal storage?