agnul's questions

I'm running 20.04 on a laptop that alternates between two monitor configurations

• at the office the laptop is connected to two external monitors via usb-c, the first monitor (HP EliteDisplay E243d) has an integrated docking station and the second monitor (HP EliteDisplay E243) is daisy-chained to the first.
• at home the laptop is connected to a single monitor, identical to the one at the Office (HP EliteDisplay E243d)

Nowadays I work almost exclusively at home and the Linux keeps messing with the monitor arrangement: on boot everything is fine, linux "remembers" that I want the monitor as primary (on the right) and the laptop screen as secondary (on the left). If I leave the desk for enough time the screen locks and two things happen when I come back:

• Lock screen (GDM?) still has the screens in the right order
• I enter the password and the screens rearrange: the monitor is now on the left and no longer the primary, laptop screen is on the right and primary... and the two have a gap in the middle where the third monitor used to be when I was at the office

I suspect there must be some kind of saved configuration, but I have no idea where to look. Any suggestions?

I've set gnome-keyring to unlock my ssh key on login, and usually first thing I do after logging in is to run a gnome terminal via the Alt-F2 shortcut,

gnome-terminal --geometry=90x40 -e byobu

This worked fine until a couple of days ago, I could login to my usual servers without being prompted for the ssh-key passphrase. Today it stopped working, and after some poking around it seems that the SSH_AUTH_SOCKET variable is not being set when running gnome-terminal via the Alt-F2 shortcut. Everything is fine clicking on the terminal icon in the dash, typing Terminal after tapping the Super key or using the Ctrl-Alt-T shotrcut.

Subject says it all. How do I get rid of live window resizing? There's no setting for that either in "Appearance" or in "Unity Tweak Tool".

As we have previously established ;-) running Eclipse on ubuntu is a bit disappointing on the UI side. Things are even worse now that Juno is out. Are there any tweaks specific to Gtk3 and Juno that help make things better?

The new UI maybe needs some getting used to, but I'm not convinced. Padding got much worse with all the extra (useless?) space between panes. The gradient on the toolbar looks ugly, the quick search looks like it needs some more polish, the buttons to switch perspectives maybe would look nicer without the quick search bar, tabs are waaay to big. Not sure the color scheme has been fixed since I'm running a modified theme for the sake of old 3.7 (the infamous white on black tooltips)

This is how a web page fragment shows on my old 11.04 system:

and this is how the same fragment showed on 11.10 and shows on my current 12.04 system:

Any idea what's wrong? Of course I have all the same fonts installed (I believe the page uses some kind of Arial, which I installed from the mscorefontstt package IIRC) and I'm running the same version of Firefox. How can I fix things?

This is related to the recurring "white on black tooltips" question. Until yesterday I was able to change tooltip colors (and fix UI element padding) using a specific gtkrc file for eclipse, as suggested by this blog post.

My gtkrc looks like (slightly reformatted)

gtk-color-scheme = "base_color:#ffffff\nfg_color:#4c4c4c\n
  tooltip_fg_color:#000000\nselected_bg_color:#f07746\n
  selected_fg_color:#FFFFFF\ntext_color:#3C3C3C\n
  bg_color:#F2F1F0\ntooltip_bg_color:#f5f5b5\nlink_color:#DD4814
...

and I run eclipse with the command

GTK2_RC_FILES=~/.themes/eclipse.gtkrc eclipse

This worked fine for 11.10 and still works on 12.04, with the exception of tooltip colors, i.e. eclipse starts with the tweaked UI elements but still uses the default white on black tooltips.

Editing the system-wide gtkrc file at

/usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-2.0/gtkrc

as suggested by this answer works fine, but I'd rather not do it and besides I still have no clue as to why eclipse will pick up all my modifications to gtkrc except the gtk-color-scheme setting. Does anyone know what's wrong?

On my linux box (oneiric, 64bit) I'm running Eclipse and java straight from the Eclipse/Oracle tarballs. I'd like to install the javaHL subversion libraries, which according to the subclipse wiki are packaged in the libsvn-java package, but if I do an

apt-get install libjava-svn

apt-get will pull down all sorts of dependencies related to openjdk, which I don't really care for. I'm not that familiar with apt-get too. Is there a way around this? Can I just install the shared libraries, without all the other stuff?

I know I can enter any character I need using the character-map applet, but that means grabbing the mouse/opening the "run" dialog, switching to another window, selecting the character, copying... you get the idea. Is there a quicker way to enter characters that are not available on the keyboard (and are not available as alt-gr combinations)? In my specific case I'm using a laptop with the Italian keyboard layout, but I suspect a general solution exists.

As I understand Evolution mixes two kinds of folders in its mail folders pane:

• real folders (that exist on the server)
• virtual folders (e.g. messages marked for deletion are grouped in a virtual "Trash" folder, messages it thinks are spam in a virtual "Junk" folder...).

Every other mail client (and webmail system) has real folders for both examples, so in every IMAP account configured in Evolution I have two trash folders, two spam folders... Is there a way to tell Evolution it should "merge" them?

I'm trying to manually install the Java plugin for Firefox 4 on Mac OS X v10.9 (Mavericks) (I got Firefox 4 from the PPA), but it seems the usual instructions don't work. I've tried doing both

cd ~/.mozilla/plugins
ln -s $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so .

and

cd /usr/lib/firefox
ln -s $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so .

but I still get the "missing plugin" warning in Firefox. It used to work fine for Firefox 3.6. Also, after doing the first above, Chromium is able to pick up the Java plugin without problems. In case it makes any difference I'm running Oracle's "vanilla" JDK, not the Ubuntu sun-java-6-bin package.

On my laptop, running 10.10, whenever I plug in a thumb drive Nautilus will add an icon on the desktop and open a file manager window with the drive contents. This does not work for my 250Mb external hard drive: the icon is added on the desktop, but no file manager window pops up. Double clicking on the icon just causes some disk activity (on the system drive) and nothing else. Double clicking another time on the icon the file manager eventually opens. At first I thought this was related to nautilus-elementary, but after removing nothing has changed. How do I even start debugging this?

Update: suggestions below got me curious, so I "Safely removed" the drive, unplugged it and plugged it in again. This time it would open on the first double click (no automagic file manager window yet, anyway). Doing a quick "mount" in a terminal shows my USB drive is mounted as a fuseblock device. I suspect the first ineffective double click could be used to load/start the whole user space filesystem thingie.

Update: from what I can see after a fresh boot the hard disk is mounted as soon as the icon appears on the desktop, the only thing that doesn't work is double-clicking the first time. Right-clicking the drive and chosing "Open" always works the first time, seems like "Open" is not the default double-click action for external drives...

Update: Looks like there are a couple of bugs that could be related:

• External FAT32 Hard Drive takes excessive time to open in Nautilus
• nautilus fails to open external hard drive before open folder

I've reinstalled Nautilus from the maverick repositories after removing nautilus-elementary and the breadcrumb hacks, but I have no longer access to the "preferences" menu and the default toolbar. How do I reset Nautilus to the default configuration?

Update: I've tried moving both ~/.nautilus and ~/.gconf/apps/nautilus folders as suggested below, but my "Edit" menu is still missing the "Preferences" item. Running the nautilus-file-management-properties applet from the command line I'm still seeing the "Tweaks" tab that nautilus-elementary added.

Solved: My problems where caused by the wrong nautilus-data package being installed. I should have replaced the nautilus-data package along with the nautilus one when removing nautilus-elementary. Before that I should have known there was a nautilus-data package ;-)

I have created a PPTP connection back to my office, and managed to setup routing as suggested in this question, so that everything outside the office LAN keeps going to my current default gateway.

My problem is that I'd like to access some hosts in the office that are on a different subnet. Suppose I'm on the 1.2.x.y/24subnet and through the VPN I can access the 192.168.2.x/24 subnet (the office LAN). I'd like to access the office DMZ at 192.168.0.x/24 through the VPN. How can I do that? (of course at the office the gateway on the LAN knows how to reach the DMZ).

Is there a way to tweak the amount of padding inside UI elements in Ubuntu, besides installing a different gtk theme?

This is how eclipse looks in Ubuntu (with the Radiance theme)

And this is how it looks on XP

What I would like to do is reduce the padding around the icons in the toolbar or the padding around text in tabs. Is there an app or some config file I could edit?