Sean's questions

I have an external hard drive that I use for backing up data. I bought and configured it several years ago, and since then it has always mounted read-write whenever I plug it in. Recently, though, it's started mounting as read-only. I haven't knowingly changed any relevant configuration.

Using my limited sysadmin skills, I can unmount the drive from a terminal and then run sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/myusername/Backup, its usual mount point, and it comes back mounted read-write.

Earlier today the read-only mounting happened again when I plugged in the drive, and I noticed that the drive had been mounted on the directory /media/myusername/Backup1, a directory that doesn't normally exist. When I unmounted the drive, that directory disappeared.

Any tips on how to diagnose the issue and/or restore the original mount-read-write behavior?

I have the wallch program configured to refer to a large directory of images and to change the image every twelve hours. I find that after every reboot, wallch reverts to its default behavior of showing images from a small built-in set, with a much smaller interval. To get the intended behavior, after every reboot I need to open the wallch window, change the "Interval" to 12 hours, then click the "Next" button, to get it to immediately choose an image from my folder. Then everything is fine, until the next reboot.

How can I get consistent behavior across reboots? I'm using Ubuntu 20.04.

If it matters, the default set of images is the same one I see when I open Ubuntu's "Settings" interface, in the "Background" tab. Also, wallch is set to be run at startup, if that wasn't clear.

Recently my laptop's Ubuntu key--that is, the key on the bottom row between Alt and Fn, which would be called the Windows key on a Windows laptop--stopped working.

When I run xev and put the mouse in the xev window, no events are logged when I press the Ubuntu key. Mouse motion and other keys are logged, as normal.

I'm not totally sure, but the button seemed to lose its effect immediately following a software update.

Could the dead button be the result of a misconfiguration? Or could physical damage be to blame? (The laptop has not suffered any trauma lately, to my knowledge.) Are there any other possibilities?

This morning a regular software update brought in an update to Firefox that broke some important functionality in an app I run on top of it (with firefox -app). I checked my upgrade history and found that the previous version of Firefox was 52.0.2+build1-0ubuntu0.16.04.1, installed on April 1. So I tried:

~$ sudo aptitude install firefox=52.0.2+build1-0ubuntu0.16.04.1
Unable to find a version "52.0.2+build1-0ubuntu0.16.04.1" for the package "firefox"

And then just:

~$ sudo aptitude install firefox=52.0.2
Unable to find a version "52.0.2" for the package "firefox"

Is a package version less than a month old really out of reach, or is there some way to get it?

Recently I updated my System76 laptop from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04. Afterwards, occasionally but not always, when I close the lid, the battery appears to continue to drain as if the computer were still active.

For example, I recently went to sleep with my laptop fully charged but unplugged, and when I awoke, the battery was completely dead. On a couple of occasions, I've left the laptop closed and unplugged for an hour or two, and then when I pick it up, the bottom feels warm.

Twice recently, when I've noticed this behavior, I've tried to shutdown or restart the laptop, and the Ubuntu shutdown screen with the cycling red and white dots has remained showing for a minute or two until I lose patience and do a hard power cycle. I'm not positive there's a connection, but that rarely if ever happened before.

I've tried some approaches suggested by answers on this site (here, here, and here), specifically:

• added a line HandleLidSwitchDocked=suspend to /etc/systemd/logind.conf
• added a line HandleLidSwitch=suspend to the same file
• installed the package laptop-mode-tools

...but to no apparent effect.

Any tips for resolving this issue?

I do most of my work in two applications: my web browser and my editor. I switch back and forth between them frequently with Alt-Tab. I also have an IM client (Hipchat) open at all times, but I interact with it only rarely compared to the other two apps.

A recurring annoyance is that after I interact with the Hipchat window and Alt-Tab back to (say) my editor, my muscle memory is tuned to expect another Alt-Tab to focus on my browser, but I end up on Hipchat again.

Is there any way to cause Hipchat to be sent to the bottom of the stack or recency list or whatever it is, after it loses focus by any means?

Today I was trying to resolve a longstanding annoyance, the fact that changes I make in CompizConfig Settings Manager do not persist after a reboot. Googling around, I saw that this appears to be a current bug, but one person claimed to have fixed the issue by going into CCSM's Preferences, then changing "GSettings Configuration Backend" to "Flat-file Configuration Backend".

That seemed like a harmless enough thing to try, so I tried it. Immediately after selecting the flat-file option, Unity died. I was left with only the unadorned windows of programs I was running at the time. I tried rebooting, but came back to a desktop with Unity still dead. Fortunately one of my desktop icons is for my web browser, so I was able to start searching for a fix.

After some fruitless twiddling in /etc/compizconfig, I was able to launch CCSM from the command line and reverted the option that had caused all the trouble, but Unity stayed dead. Eventually I read that I needed to enable the Ubuntu Unity Plug-in. I did so (not that I'd ever disabled it), and was asked if I wanted to enable various other plug-ins, to which I naturally agreed. Another reboot later, Unity was back! Sort of. The launcher and desktop title bar (or whatever it's called) were back, but now whenever I start an application, the window appears in the upper-left corner of the screen, partially obscured by the launcher and title bar, and it doesn't sport any of the usual window manager dressing that would enable me to move it around, resize it, etc.

And here I'm stuck. Any help getting the rest of the way to a working desktop would be much appreciated.

(Unity does seem awfully fragile. Last week I tried to unmount my iPhone by right-clicking on its launcher icon and choosing "Unmount," and that killed Unity too somehow. In that case, however, a reboot brought it back.)