Tomas Aschan's questions

Today my Guake Terminal started acting up in a way I haven't seen before - every time I press AltGr (which on my Swedish keyboard is the right Alt, right next to Spacebar on the right-hand side) the terminal looses focus and hides. On my Swedish keyboard this is extremely inconvenient, since AltGr is used to type pipes (|)...

I did install some updates which required a restart of my system today, but IIRC that was only Ubuntu Base and nothing else. I don't know for certain if this behavior was present before the update - since the popup came up when I started my system, I didn't do much work before I installed them and rebooted.

I also took a look in the Guake preferences to see if there was anything fishy with the keyboard shortcuts, but AltGr isn't used at all, and all other shortcuts work as expected. AltGr works normally in other context, such as an actual Terminal window (opened e.g. by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T) or typing here in Chromium.

What could have caused this? How do i troubleshoot and/or fix it?

I'm running Windows 8 from a VirtualBox machine inside Ubuntu 13.04, and I'm having some problems navigating in the virtual machine.

Many of the navigation options in Windows 8 (the new start menu, for instance) are accessible by moving the cursor to various corners and edges of the screen - this conflicts with my Unity desktop, in which I've mapped the corners to stuff as well using the Ubunut Tweak tool.

Is there any way to tell Unity and/or VirtualBox that when I run a virtual machine in full screen, I want these events forwarded to the guest OS, and no action on the host?

This behavior applies also to the Windows button (between left Alt and Fn on my keyboard), which triggers the Unity launcher instead of the Start menu, even when in fullscreen.

I have an Inkscape SVG file with a few transparency effects and different layers that I want to export to a PDF file for distribution. When I use "Save as..." or "Save a copy..." and select the PDF format, all the effects are garbled:

Top: expected output. Bottom: actual output.

I don't mind flattening the image, loosing editing capabilities and whatnot in the process, since I still have the original .svg, but I can't find any options for it anyway. I'd rather avoid exporting to a rasterized format, because I want to be able to use it for printing on large paper.

When searching for solutions to this, among other things I found this thread, originally from 2006, in which the most recent answer is from 2012 and reads

6 years later.. same problem. Inkscape can't export to pdf level opacity. So sad.

Is there really no way to do this?

While re-discovering Shotwell after upgrading to Ubuntu 13.04, I started organizing my photo album for real. I quickly noted that I prefer a quite wide classification of events, so that one event usually spans many days (sometimes even weeks - a vacation trip, for example). Shotwell handles this very nicely by displaying the first and last dates of photos in the event - but it still sorts the events by month in the side bar:

Since these events often span over month boundaries (even if it's just August 29 to September 3) I'd rather just have all the events sorted by year. However, I can't find any settings related to this. Is there a way to change this view?

Note: I don't care about folder structure on the file system here - that I have setup just as I want it. This is just the event browser inside Shotwell.

I have a 32 GB USB pendrive which I'd like to use as both a startup/installation disk for Ubuntu, and for regular file storage/transfer purposes. Since the Ubuntu installation stuff only needs a little under 3 GB, I thought this would be no problem, but it has turned out to be harder than I thought.

My plan was to create two partitions on the drive - one 4GB that I can wipe at any time and use for installation media, and one with the rest of the space that I can use for data (and won't have to wipe when I create a new installation disk). Creating the partitions posed no problems - gparted did that without complaining - but installing the Ubuntu installation stuff has turned out to be harder than I thought.

In the "Startup Disc Creator" program, I can't select the USB drive's partiions individually - just the entire drive. And if I don't press "Erase disk", I'm not allowed to start the installation. I've tried setting the "boot" flag on the partition I want to use, but it didn't matter. It seems the startup disc creator program isn't "partition aware" - is it? Or do I need to do this with another program?

Is there a way that I can create a bootable USB drive where just one partition is used for the installation media? How?

I have a large text file, where each line consists of three numbers, except for a few comment lines that all start with a hashtag (#). I want to verify that the non-comment lines are sorted numerically. Is there a good way to do this?

I assume I have to extract all the non-comment lines with something like grep -ve \# - butwhere do I pipe this to verify that the output is sorted?

Note: I am not looking for a way to sort the file, but rather to verify that it already is sorted (to verify output the output of a program of mine). Unfortunately, this isn't as common as wanting to sort the contents of a file, or (even more so) wanting to list the contents of a folder in a particular order (alphabetically or by size, for example), so Google has very little for me...

Clarification: The numbers in the file are real, usually on exponential form. I want them sorted in numerical order, which for example means that 0.11000E+02 > 0.90000E+01 > 0.15000E-01.

If it simplifies any, I know that if the file matches what I want, the first two columns will be sorted if counted in pairs - in other words, if the file is valid the third column doesn't have to be considered at all.

Formally, you can express it like this: if x1 and y1 are the first two numbers on one line, and x2 and y2 are the first two numbers on another line, then (x1,y1)>(x2,y2) iff (x1>x2) || (x1==x2 && y1>y2). (x1,y1)>(x2,y2) here means that the line with x1 and y1 should be considered larger, the line with x2 and y2, and (x1,y1) should appear below (x2,y2) in the file.

Sample input: pastebin
I expect the above file to be considered as sorted, but if any two lines (that are not comment lines) are switched, the file is no longer sorted. Note that lines can have leading whitespace.

I have a text file with a strange character encoding that I'd like to convert to standard UTF-8. I have managed to get part of the way:

$ file myfile.txt
myfile.txt:        Non-ISO extended-ASCII text, with LF, NEL line endings
$ iconv -f ascii -t utf-8 myfile.txt > myfile.txt.utf8
$ file myfile.txt.utf8
myfile.txt.utf8:   UTF-8 Unicode text, with LF, NEL line endings

## edit myfile.txt.utf8 using nano, to fix failed character conversions (mostly åäö)

$ file myfile.txt.utf8
myfile.txt.utf8:   UTF-8 Unicode text, with LF, NEL line endings

However, I can't figure out how to convert the line endings. How do I do to replace LF+NEL with CR+LF (or whatever is the standard)? When I'm done, I'd like to see the following:

$ file myfile.txt
myfile.txt:        UTF-8 Unicode text

I have a dual boot system with Ubuntu 12.04 and Windows 7, using GRUB2 (with Burg) as boot loader.

For some reason, the Windows installation shows up twice in the boot menu:

Ubuntu GNU/Linux, with Linux 3.2.0-24-generic
Ubuntu GNU/Linux, with Linux 3.2.0-24-generic (recovery mode)
Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sda1)
Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sda2)

If I look in my partition table, /dev/sda2 is C:\ of the Windows installation, and /dev/sda1 is the "System Reserved" partition (which, IIRC, is Windows' own bootloader). Furthermore, gparted shows /dev/sda2 - but no other partitions - with a boot flag:

What is going on here? I'd like to have only the entries for Ubuntu and one entry for Windows in my boot menu - how do I remove one of them?

When re-installing Ubuntu on a partition where an existing Ubuntu installation already exists, and not choosing to format the partition, the installer shows a warning message before it begins installing:

The file system on /dev/sda5 assigned to / has not been marked for formatting. Directories containing system files (/etc, /lib, /usr, /var, ...) that already exist under any defined mountpoint will be deleted during the install.

Please ensure that you have backed up any critical data before installing.

The list of "system directories" here does not seem complete. Furthermore, I would expect /home to be a system directory, but from experience I know that /home is not erased.

What is the complete list of directories that will be removed during install?

I keep getting popups about internal system errors (see screenshot below) on irregular intervals (several times a day), that I don't know what to do about. If I continue through the dialog and try to report the error back to the Ubuntu project, I get a message stating that development on this version of Ubuntu has been completed, and that I should ask for help here if I don't know what to do about it.

I don't.

If I show the details of the error message, the "executable path" parameter shows /usr/share/apport/apport-gpu-error-intel.py.

Is this a bug I should report to Launchpad, or just a configuration error somewhere? If it's a bug, how do I collect the data I (and the devs) need?

Update in response to comment: I am running an ASUS N53SN, sporting an Intel Core i7 2630QM CPU and an NVidia GeForce 550M GPU.

I'm trying to install a Matlab R2011a launcher for Unity in Ubuntu 12.04. I've tried this guide (although I know it's for 11.10 and mentions that even 11.10 is an unsupported OS for Matlab R2011a) but without any satisfactory solution.

This is my launcher file, /usr/share/applications/matlab.desktop:

#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Icon=/usr/share/icons/matlab.png
Name=MATLAB R2011a
Comment=Start MATLAB - The Language of Technical Computing
Exec=matlab -desktop
Categories=Development;

I open the dash panel and search for "matlab". This launcher is found among applications. I click it, and Matlab's splash screen shows up, but when it disappears the program doesn't start. (I've verified with htop that no matlab-processes are running in the background either.)

If I add

Terminal=true

to the launcher file, the program starts OK, and opens a terminal as well as Matlab. However, both the terminal and Matlab itself show up in the Launcher area, with the Matlab icon, so it looks like I have two Matlab instances running when really it's only one. (Actually, they show up as two different programs, and not just two instances of the same - the icons are independent, not grouped together.)

This is definitely not optimal. I had hoped to create a launcher I can lock to the launcher area, and then that same icon will be the icon for the active Matlab instance when the program is running.

How do I create a launcher for Matlab that works as expected?

Update: I was apparently a bit unclear on my symptoms, I'll try to clarify a little. I've also tried some suggestions from the answers, and further investigated what happens. My current setup (a launcher file with Terminal=true and Exec=matlab -desktop -nosplash &) renders the following behavior:

1. I open Dash by pressing the Windows key on my laptop, and search for "matlab". It finds the launcher named "MATLAB R2011a". I click it.
2. A terminal window opens, using the icon I referred to in the launcher file. Almost immediately, MATLAB's splash screen also opens, using the same icon (and thus being grouped with the terminal window in the launcher).
3. The splash screen disappears and, so does one of the icons in the launcher. The MATLAB desktop environment opens, using a different version of the icon which is displayed next to the icon for the terminal window (not grouped with it).

I can lock the terminal window's icon to the launcher and successfully start MATLAB by clicking it, but it doesn't feel optimal that I start the program with one icon, and switch to it with another. I've also tried the following:

• Exec without the ampersand & in the launcher command, but it didn't make a difference.
• Executing matlab -nosplash manually from a terminal still shows the splash screen. (What, then, does the nosplash option really do?)

There has been lots of questions here on how to get Unity 3D working with NVidia graphics cards - I've read many of them, but I've still not been able to figure out a solution to my problem.

My setup

I recently installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my ASUS N53SN, which sports an NVidia GeForce 550M as well as an integrated Intel card (see the full spec on ASUS' website). Now I'm having some problems getting Unity 3D to work. I never bothered trying to fix it on Ubuntu 11.10, since I was planning an upgrade to 12.04 anyway and expected it to work then. It doesn't...

My problem

When I log into Ubuntu, I select "Ubuntu" as my desktop environment ("Ubuntu 2D" is also available). However, every diagnostic I tried says I'm using Unity 2D anyway.

Attempted solutions

I've tried unity --reset, which seems to have solved this problem for others, and got the following output (unity --replace gives exactly the same, minus the first two lines):

WARNING: Unity currently default profile, so switching to metacity while resetting the values
/home/tomas/.gtkrc-2.0:3: error: unexpected character `;', expected character `}'
unity-panel-service: no process found
Checking if settings need to be migrated ...no
Checking if internal files need to be migrated ...no
Backend     : gconf
Integration : true
Profile     : unity
Adding plugins
Initializing core options...done
Initializing composite options...done
Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".
Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".
Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

Then I end up in a desktop environment with no window borders, no possibility to resize windows, and where Ctrl+Alt+t no longer works to open a terminal. Luckily, F12 still opens the Guake terminal, where I can confirm that I'm still in Unity 2D - only, apparently, broken.

What do I do to make Unity 3D working?

I have learned that I can boot into single user mode (or whatever it's called) by hitting Ctrl+e in the Grub2 menu and adding single to the correct line in the boot script. This is all good - it's saved me a bunch of times when I screwed something up :P

However, I've noticed that when I do this, I get root access basically for free - I never have to enter a password or otherwise prove my identity. This feels unsafe - the keyboard command to edit the boot script is common knowledge, so anyone with access to my computer can just turn it off (forcibly, if needed, via the power button) and on again, edit the boot script and have root access to my computer.

I don't want that.

What do I need to configure in order to force a password for single user sessions?

(I'ts probably not relevant, but I've set my startup options so that I boot straight into the desktop, skipping the login screen. This is OK, since I still need to type a password to sudo, but I don't like the idea of giving anyone root access that easily...)

I'm currently mounting an NTFS partition at startup using the following line in /etc/fstab:

/dev/sda3        /media/data           ntfs      nls=iso8859-1,umask=000

To my Ubuntu 11.10 installation, it looks as if all files and folders are owned by root - and since NTFS doesn't really support the same rights management system anyway, there's no way I can change it after the mount is complete. No matter what I do, ls -l anywhere on the NTFS partition will list every file and folder as owned by root:root.

However, this causes some problems for me. Most notably, some applicaitons running under my account (called tomas) complain about access rights. Also, whenever I try to copy (cp) or move (mv) files from one of my ext3 partitions to the NTFS partition, I get error messages saying

mv: preserving times for `[path to new file]`: Operation not permitted

or, similarly

mv: preserving permissions for ...

Would mounting the partition in my name instead of root help? If so, how do I accomplish that in fstab?

Update:

I have now changed the options according to the suggestions, and arrived at this:

nls=iso8859-1,permissions,users,umask=000,uid=tomas,gid=tomas

ls -l now shows all files owned by me instead of by root, and it seems some of the problems I had before are solved. However, not all of them.

When I start Eclipse, I get an error that a file related to the android-sdk cannot be run: Permission denied. ls -l tells me the following about the file:

-rwxrwxrwx 1 tomas tomas 159620 2011-11-29 14:50 adb*

This looks the way I want it to. But if I try to run it (./adb in a terminal) I also get permission denied errors. But if I run it with sudo, it works (I believe - at least it doesn't give me an error message, but it doesn't give me any output at all, which I think it shouldn't...)

Why is the above file, with execute permissions for anyone, still not executable by anyone else than root? How do I change the way I mount the file system so it is?

Update 2:

OK, I've now come a little bit further. By mounting with these options

nls=iso8859-1,permissions,users,auto

I got all the permissions set the way I expect them to, and chown and chmod actually change settings on the files (at least according to ls -l) =D

BUT my system still behaves in a weird way. The permissions for the adb script file come up as above, but neither I nor Eclipse can run it without "Permission denied" errors. But as far as I can see the file has all the required flags set (o=rwx should be enough, right?). Why doesn't it work?

Update 3

OK, I got everything working on the Ubuntu side, with the following options:

nls=iso8859-1,permissions,users,auto,exec

However, when I try to access files on the partition from Windows, the security settings are all messed up. On all the files (of those few I've examined) a new account called Account Unknown(long GUID) has been added to the list of users, and has full rights. Rigths for most other users are decreased so that I don't have rights to do stuff I expect. Notably "Everyone" does no longer seem to have right to "Traverse folder / execute".

This might be solvable by just selecting the partition and allow Everyone to do anything on the root folder, and then tell it to do it recursively, but I'd rather not as I'm afraid it will take days to complete...

I'm having some problems with a new R.A.T 3 gaming mouse that I bought today. It works flawlessly under Windows 7, but under Ubuntu 11.10 it keeps misbehaving.

What happens is this:

1. I connect the mouse to a USB port. The mouse works as expected for a while.
2. The mouse starts misbehaving: I can still move the pointer around, but it doesn't react to clicking any buttons (at least not right, left, middle, browser forward or browser back...). Furthermore, my trackpad starts behaving the same way - moving works, but no clicking.
3. I disconnect the mouse. Trackpad starts working again.
4. I re-connect the mouse. It works for a while, before collapsing (just as the first time I connected it).

I haven't manually changed any settings anywhere, and I've noticed that even when the mouse misbehaves, it shows up in cat /proc/bus/input/devices with the following information:

I: Bus=0003 Vendor=06a3 Product=0ccc Version=0111  
N: Name="Saitek Cyborg R.A.T 3 Mouse"  
P: Phys=usb-0000:00:1d.0-1.4/input0  
S: Sysfs=/devices/pci0000:00/00:1d.0/usb2/2-1.4/2-1.4:1.0/input/input18  
U: Uniq=  
H: Handlers=mouse0 event4  
B: PROP=0  
B: EV=17  
B: KEY=3ff0000 0 0 0 0  
B: REL=103  
B: MSC=10  

I've googled around a bit and found this forum post, but I find it quite messy and it is unclear whether there is actually any solution to my problem in it. Also, I feel uncomfortable editing Xconf without knowing what I'm doing - and I'm quite new on Ubuntu, so I don't know what I'm doing... Finally, the product web site doesn't appear to have any drivers for Ubuntu and I've found no updates available through the standard sources.

One of the servers I quite often ssh to uses western encoding instead of utf-8 (and there's no way I can change that).

I've started writing a bash script to connect to this server, so I won't have to type out the entire address every time, but I would like to improve this script so it also changes the encoding of the terminal window correctly.

The change I need to do can be performed using the mouse by navigating to "Terminal"->"Set Character Encoding..."->"Western (ISO-8859-1)". Is there a terminal command that does the same thing, for the current terminal window/screen?

To clarify:
I'm not interested in ways of switching the locale of the system on the remote site - that system is administered by someone else, and I have no idea what stuff might depend on the latin-1 encoding there. What I want to do is to let this terminal window on my side switch character encoding to the above mentioned, in the same way I can do with my mouse and the menus.

Every time I insert something in my phone output jack, the sound is muted and I have to go into alsamixer and turn up the volume on the Speaker lever.

I can see the reason this is so - when I'm listening in phones, I don't want the laptop speakers on - but my hardware does this for me automatically, and the Speaker lever goes to the phone jack when something is inserted there. The result of alsamixer doing this adjustment is that I have to open a terminal, type alsamixer, find the speaker lever and turn it up again, every time I insert something in the phone jack.

There has to be a way to turn off this behavior. But how?

I'm trying to mount a unionfs file system in fstab (as one of the steps in this guide), with the following line:

unionfs /usr unionfs nodev,noatime,dirs=/.filesystems/usr/overlay=ro:/usr=rw 0 0

I've installed the package unionfs-fuse and added unionfs to /etc/modules, but when trying to mount -a I still get an error saying

mount: unknown file system type: unionfs

What am I doing wrong here?

As of now, my desktop has begun showing the contents of my home folder (~) instead of the contents of ~/desktop. I must have changed something, but I have no idea what, or what I was doing exactly when it happened.

How do I re-point gnome to the right folder?

I'm running Ubuntu 11.04.

I've seen this question on how to print notes from Tomboy, and that's all very well.

However, I have a "root note" with a contents list of a log book I've been keeping for a project. The contents list has links to all the log entries, which are in their own separate notes.

Is there any way I can make Tomboy "traverse" all these notes and print them for me in one command?

I want the solution to follow all links in each note, but never print the same note more than once (most of the log entries have a link back to the root entry, creating a loop...). Also, I will probably end up printing this to a pdf file anyway, so if there is a way to export the notes in this fashion into a single, human-readable file that does not enable printing directly, that's OK.