vanden's questions

I have a very fresh install of Lucid 10.04 64bit, fully upgraded, and with a raft of additional packages added. Amongst them is emacs (23.1+1-4ubuntu7). I habitually launch emacs from a terminal.

I just observed that when I have the GUI emacs (i.e., the result of running emacs not emacs --nw) and I Alt+Tab away from it, each press of Alt+Tab results in the line

** (emacs:7690): CRITICAL **: murrine_style_draw_box: assertion `height >= -1' failed

being output to my terminal window (I assume it's from the stderr of the emacs process).

This didn't happen on Jaunty 9.04, for which I had the default Jaunty emacs package installed.

How to fix?

I just installed 10.04, and used manual partitioning to preserve my '/home' from a 9.04 install. (To be clear: I did not upgraded 9.04 to 10.04, but installed 10.04 off a of CD, keeping only my '/home'.) After the sucessful 10.04 install, I used synaptic to apply all updates, rebooted, removed some packages (mostly tomboy and bluetooth), rebooted, and then used synaptic to install tonnes of packages, mostly from lucid/main and lucid-updates/main, though I also did install a number from lucid/universe and lucid-updates/universe.

A minute or so after the mass installation of new packages, a red circular icon with a white bar running horizontally through it appeared in my notification area. (The icon is quite like the "Do not enter this road" sign pictured here.) On hovering my mouse over the icon, I get the following message:

An error occurred, please run Package Manager from the right-click menu or apt-get in a terminal to see what is wrong. The error message was: 'Unknown Error: '' (E:Opening configuration file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99synaptic - ifstream::ifstream (13: Permission denied))' This usually means that your installed packages have unmet dependencies

(Since there was no way to copy the text, I transcribed it; it isn't impossible that it is not a completely faithful transcription.)

I then ran the following commands:

1. sudo apt-get check
2. sudo apt-get clean
3. sudo apt-get autoclean
4. sudo apt-get autoremove

and then ran those same commands (in that order) but also with the -f flag. I then rebooted. This hasn't removed the warning icon from the notification area. So, I am at a loss for how to proceed.

[Snip a lot of detail about what packages I'd installed and removed that turned out not to be relevant at all.]

I am about to install 10.04 (from bare metal to replace 9.04) and I want to set it up so that I can shh into the machine, but only from other machines on my local network. (I.e., I want to reject all ssh attempts from other than 192.168.1 set of IPs.) How do I do that correctly on 10.04?

I've got cron jobs sending mail to my user at /var/mail. I know how to access that at the command line with the mail command. But, while a big command line fan, I do not like reading mail (even system mail) that way.

My mail client of choice is Thunderbird. Can I read /var/mail messages in Thunderbird? How?

I'm running Ubuntu 9.04 and Thunderbird 2.0.0.24 (though I'm soon to upgraded to 10.04).

When I insert a thumb drive, media card, or USB hard drive, to unmount it via the command line, I need to use:

sudo umount /media/the_device

But, I can unmount the device in a file manager like Nautilus simply by clicking the eject button or using the right-click context menu on the device.

What is the rationale for the difference? How can I change it so that I can unmount from the command line without needing root privileges? Is changing it a bad idea?

Edit: In case it has changed, I am running 9.04. I've run most versions 5.10--9.04, and as far as I recall, it has always been this way.

I'm presently running Firefox 3.6.8 on Ubuntu 9.04. My Firefox extensions include Ubuntu Firefox Modifications 0.9rc2. I've upgraded Firefox on this install a few times; as far as I can recall, some version of this extension was present when I initially installed Ubuntu 9.04. I have disabled it, mostly because I didn't know what it provided me, nor was I able to find out when I tried a bit.

What does the extension do?