alle_meije's questions

I have a pc with an MSI B550 Gaming Plus motherboard, with Windows 10 on it.

After trying to install Kubuntu with different ways to partition the SSD (install windows using the whole disc and have Kubuntu resize it, install windows on part of the disc and manually make a new partition for Kubuntu, etc.), none of these seems to install grub2 in a way that is detected.

I've tried boot loader installation to /dev/sda as well as /dev/sda1 (the ESP used by windows), but it does not seem to put grub2 there.

When I run BCDedit in Windows, it only shows the windows boot manager and the windows boot loader.

As the Kubuntu installation completes without errors I assume that grub2 is placed somewhere, but not not where the motherboard setup 'MSI click' can find it.

Is there a way to change this without reinstalling Kubuntu or windows?

EDIT: using a usb flash drive with boot-repair and the advanced option 'backup and rename Windows EFI files' I can boot into grub2, but then the Windows boot option does not do anything, it returns to the menu.

Maybe something is wrong with the menu option? It now reads:

setparams 'Windows Boot Manager (on /dev/sda1)'
insmod part_gpt
insmod fat
set root='hd0,gpt1'
if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint == xy ]; then
  search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd0,gpt1 --hint-efi=hd0,gpt1 --hint-baremetal=ahci0,gpt1  409C-954a
else
  search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 409C-954a
fi
chainloader /EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi

What I understand of this makes sense. But then there seems to be a choice between moving the Windows files, getting grub2 but no Windows, and using boot-repair without moving the files and not getting grub2?

On my old but light travel laptop I had Debian and Windows 7, which I could both boot from GRUB. I have replaced Debian with Kubuntu, but now booting Windows 7 from GRUB results in a black screen.

On thing I remember that I had to do installing GRUB after Windows, was to map the Windows partition as if it is the first on the disc. Adding these commands

drivemap -s (hd0) ($root)
chainloader +1

to the boot entry for Windows, I ended up at this screen (summary):

                            Windows Boot Manager

A recent hardware or software change might have installed a file that is signed
incorrectly or damaged, or that might be malicious software from an unknown 
source.      

If you have a Windows installation disc, insert the disc and restart your 
computer. Click “Repair your computer“, and then choose a recovery tool.

Otherwise, to start Windows you can investigate further, press the ENTER key 
to display the boot menu, press F8 for Advanced Boot Options, and select Last 
Known Good. If you understand why the digital signature cannot be verified and
want to start Windows without this file, Temporarily disable driver signature
enforcement.

File: \Windows\System32\winload.exe

Status: 0xc0000428

Info: Windows cannot verify the digital signature for this file.

After that, I can do a memory check but there are no other options than boot Windows and return to this screen. Because this is after GRUB (and I want to keep it there) I think the F8 option, or using a Windows disc, are not possible. I can mount the Windows file system in Linux, if anything needs to be done to C:\Windows\System32\winload.exe

Does anyone know if this can be fixed before getting into Windows? For example, I put those 2 commands in the boot entry, but maybe other lines need to be deleted?

I've seen solutions to this problem in other places but which involve xrandr detecting all graphics cards, but that doesn't happen on my computer, so here goes:

My laptop has an Nvidia GPU and an Intel graphics card. I would like the Nvidia card to be detected and available for CUDA, Tensorflow etc but not used for graphics. This is the hardware:

lspci|grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Device 3e9b
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation Device 1f10 (rev a1)

And hardinfo shows this for Graphics:

-Display-
Resolution      : 1920x1080 pixels
OpenGL Renderer : Mesa DRI Intel(R) UHD Graphics 630 (CFL GT2)
X11 Vendor      : The X.Org Foundation

so the graphics go via the Intel card.

One of the problems often listed as the cause for the Intel card not seeing the HDMI port is that the port is physically connected to the Nvidia card only, so if the other card is used, HDMI is unreachable. With xrandr I only see the laptop screen so I am assuming that that is the case for me.

I tried to find out if that is the case on my system so that I can use xrandr --setprovideroffloadsink to render on the Intel then send to the HDMI via the Nvidia. But

xrandr --listproviders
Providers: number : 1
Provider 0: id: 0x43 cap: 0x9, Source Output, Sink Offload crtcs: 3 outputs: 1 associated providers: 0 name:modesetting

where in the examples I could find this would give two cards (named Nvidia and Intel or similar) I have no idea what to do with this?

When I installed Ubuntu 19 it offered to encrypt the disc where I have my /home partition. I chose that because I thought my data would be safer.

For different reasons I was not happy with Ubuntu 19, so I installed Ubuntu 18, leaving the /home disc untouched.

Now it is impossible to mount the disc though. I had to make a /home directory on the (smaller) system disc to continue at all. Now mounting the old disc as /home2 I managed to get to this point:

root@host:/home2# ecryptfs-unwrap-passphrase /home2/.ecryptfs/user/.ecryptfs/wrapped-passphrase 
Passphrase: ********
2abd39dc3693535ca43a2bf40691f5b9  

root@host:/home2# sudo ecryptfs-add-passphrase --fnek
Passphrase: 
Inserted auth tok with sig [934485b75a55371a] into the user session keyring 
Inserted auth tok with sig [ec2a4a6c55ccb30f] into the user session keyring

and then proceeded to mount with:

root@host:/home2# sudo mount -t ecryptfs /home2/.ecryptfs/user/.Private /mnt/
Passphrase: 
Select cipher: 
 1) aes: blocksize = 16; min keysize = 16; max keysize = 32
 2) blowfish: blocksize = 8; min keysize = 16; max keysize = 56
 3) des3_ede: blocksize = 8; min keysize = 24; max keysize = 24
 4) twofish: blocksize = 16; min keysize = 16; max keysize = 32
 5) cast6: blocksize = 16; min keysize = 16; max keysize = 32
 6) cast5: blocksize = 8; min keysize = 5; max keysize = 16
Selection [aes]: 
Select key bytes: 
 1) 16
 2) 32
 3) 24
Selection [16]: 
Enable plaintext passthrough (y/n) [n]: n
Enable filename encryption (y/n) [n]: y
Filename Encryption Key (FNEK) Signature [934485b75a55371a]: 
Attempting to mount with the following options:
  ecryptfs_unlink_sigs
  ecryptfs_fnek_sig=934485b75a55371a
  ecryptfs_key_bytes=16
  ecryptfs_cipher=aes
  ecryptfs_sig=934485b75a55371a
Mounted eCryptfs

which looks hopeful. But then when I go into /mnt I get

root@host:/home2# ls /mnt/
ls: cannot access '/mnt/Public': No such file or directory
ls: cannot access '/mnt/Handboek Communicatiestijl.pdf': No such file or directory
ls: cannot access '/mnt/Videos': No such file or directory
ls: cannot access '/mnt/home': No such file or directory
ls: cannot access '/mnt/Music': No such file or directory
ls: cannot access '/mnt/Desktop': No such file or directory
ls: cannot access '/mnt/Templates': No such file or directory
ls: cannot access '/mnt/Documents': No such file or directory
ls: cannot access '/mnt/Downloads': No such file or directory
ls: cannot access '/mnt/Pictures': No such file or directory
ls: cannot access '/mnt/projects': No such file or directory
ls: cannot access '/mnt/work': No such file or directory
ls: cannot access '/mnt/NVIDIA_CUDA-10.1_Samples': No such file or directory
ls: cannot access '/mnt/homedir': No such file or directory
 Desktop                         NVIDIA_CUDA-10.1_Samples
 Documents                       Pictures
 Downloads                       projects
'Handboek Communicatiestijl.pdf' Public
 home                            Templates
 homedir                         Videos
 Music                           work

So the ls command does end up showing the names, but first it says no such file or directory (even though it does recognise files from directories). And I cannot enter the directories or access files -- their permissions all look like this

drwx------ 29 user user 12288 okt 21 15:26 ./
drwxr-xr-x 25 root root  4096 okt 22 14:39 ../
-?????????  ? ?    ?        ?            ? .hiddenfile
d?????????  ? ?    ?        ?            ? directory
-?????????  ? ?    ?        ?            ? normalfile
l?????????  ? ?    ?        ?            ? link

So getting until here gives me the idea that I provide the right passwords etc, but why doe the files and their permissions end up being changed?

Does anyone know if this can be solved by different (encryption) options or by using a different version of ecryptfs?

I have Ubuntu 19 and at work I use two Exchange-type mail accounts. One is on an Exchange server and one is on Office365. I can set up both using evolution-ews and for the 'old fashioned' Exchange server it works and syncs mail, contacts, calendar, etc.

For the Outlook365 server it shows the folder pane and even shows how many new messages there are. But the message pane stays empty ("There are no message in this folder") everywhere and I get the message

Failed to refresh folder "me@myserver : Inbox"
The reported error was: "Connection terminated unexpectedly".

If I start it from the terminal I get these messages:

$ env XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=GNOME evolution
(evolution:9221): dbind-WARNING **: 08:56:37.994: 
   Couldn't connect to accessibility bus: 
   Failed to connect to socket /tmp/dbus-67zLohQHkE: Connection refused
(evolution:9221): Gtk-WARNING **: 08:56:38.181: 
   Failed to register client: 
   GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: 
   Method "RegisterClient" with signature "ss" 
   on interface "org.xfce.Session.Manager" doesn't exist
(evolution-alarm-notify:9227): dbind-WARNING **: 08:56:38.395: 
   Couldn't connect to accessibility bus: 
   Failed to connect to socket /tmp/dbus-67zLohQHkE: Connection refused
(WebKitWebProcess:9248): dbind-WARNING **: 08:56:38.512: 
   Couldn't connect to accessibility bus: 
   Failed to connect to socket /tmp/dbus-67zLohQHkE: Connection refused

I'm afraid I don't know what that means.

My window manager is XFCE, which I know is not the default for Evolution. But on an older computer with Debian Stretch and XFCE I have access to the account, and I have seen it work on work on Ubuntu 18 with KDE.

It seems that Ubuntu 19 makes Evolution fail with Office365? I reverted to the Ubuntu 18 repositories and deleted then re-installed evolution 3.28.5 (probably not recommended!) but that has not solved the problem.

Does anyone know if, and how, Office365 can be made to work in Ubuntu 19?

EDIT: The problem seems to be the two-stage authentication. Even though for both exchange/outlook servers I have to set the server that I use for web-mail as well, the authentication, which in both cases goes via this TIQR app on the smartphone, still lets one of them work in Evolution/Gnome Online Accounts but not the other.

According to the answers of this question about docker, running it as a non-root is as easy as adding the non-root username to the docker group, and logging out and back in. And sure enough, when I used it as sudo for the hello-world image that went well. But for another test image called whalefortune I still get the access denied error -- see below.

Is it not generally possible any more to run docker as non-root? I am using Ubuntu 19.04, which is a later version than the examples, and there were mentions of a possible security breach running dockers as non-root.

My idea was to run nvidia-docker as a normal user, would that be possible (or even a good idea)?

$ sudo docker run --rm hello-world
Unable to find image 'hello-world:latest' locally
latest: Pulling from library/hello-world
1b930d010525: Pull complete 
Digest:   sha256:6540fc08ee6e6b7b63468dc3317e3303aae178cb8a45ed3123180328bcc1d20f
Status: Downloaded newer image for hello-world:latest

Hello from Docker!
This message shows that your installation appears to be working correctly.

To generate this message, Docker took the following steps:
  1. The Docker client contacted the Docker daemon.
  2. The Docker daemon pulled the "hello-world" image from the Docker Hub. (amd64)
  3. The Docker daemon created a new container from that image which runs the executable that produces the output you are currently reading.
  4. The Docker daemon streamed that output to the Docker client, which sent it
to your terminal.

To try something more ambitious, you can run an Ubuntu container with: $ docker run -it ubuntu bash

Share images, automate workflows, and more with a free Docker ID:
https://hub.docker.com/

For more examples and ideas, visit:
https://docs.docker.com/get-started/

$ docker run --rm dbkdoc/whalefortune
docker: Got permission denied while trying to connect to the 
Docker daemon socket at unix:///var/run/docker.sock: 
Post http://%2Fvar%2Frun%2Fdocker.sock/v1.40/containers/create: 
dial unix /var/run/docker.sock: connect: permission denied.
See 'docker run --help'.