Joshua Besneatte's questions

A security flaw, potentially serious has been found in VLC:

The vulnerability allows for RCE (remote code execution) which potentially allows bad actors attackers to install, modify, or run software without authorization, and could also be used to disclose files on the host system. Translation: VLC’s security hole could allow hackers to hijack your computer and see your files.

However, it might not be that bad:

[Update 8:35 AM] Based on a tweet by VideoLAN, VLC may not be as vulnerable as it initially appeared. VideoLAN says the “security issue” in VLC was caused by a third-party library called Libebml that was fixed 16 months ago, and that Mitre’s claim was based on a previous (and outdated) version of VLC.

Either way this sounds pretty intense... Should I be immediately uninstalling VLC? How vulnerable is Ubuntu LTS vs Current?

I have checked other posts about randomly rotating screens, and screens that rotate after sleep. I have tried the following to no avail:

1. Lock screen rotation:

   

   Problem persists.

2. Disable GNOME orientation plugin:

   gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.orientation active false
   

   Problem persists.

3. Disable/Uninstall iio-sensor-proxy:

   sudo systemctl stop iio-sensor-proxy.service
   sudo systemctl disable iio-sensor-proxy.service
   sudo apt-get remove iio-sensor-proxy
   

   Problem persists.

Every time I close the lid, the laptop wakes up sideways and I have to run:

xrandr -o normal

Is there a bug somewhere? Have I missed something?

How can I make xrandr -o normal run every time the laptop wakes from suspend? Maybe a hackish solution, but it might work, right?

I am using cut and paste within the file browser GUI in 18.04 to move data from one drive to another. There is a progress menu where I can view the progress of this operation:

As you can see there is only a limited amount of info available due to the small size of the menu.

How can I see an expanded view of the moving files to "Data Mine" process?

Something similar to the "Show All Downloads" window in Firefox/Chrome.

Ok, so this is a weird one. After I upgraded to 18.04 I was constantly running out of space on /boot... I couldn't have more than two kernels installed at a time and I needed to autoremove/autoclean before every kernel upgrade.

So I did some digging and found that my EFI partition was 500Mb and my boot partition only 250Mb. This makes NO sense... of course when my system was originally set up (when I installed 16.04) these values were reversed. I mean they had to have been as I could have like 4 kernels at a time on my old install. I solved the problem by resizing the drives as outlined in my blog post here, but I am wondering:

Did the upgrade to 18.04 swap my EFI and Boot partitions for some reason? Is this possible? Is this happening to anyone else???

Now that I have fixed it, my relevant df looks like this:

/dev/sda2                    667M  333M  300M  53% /boot
/dev/sda1                    104M  8.4M   95M   9% /boot/efi

On my original install I did not do "something else" and let Ubuntu install do its thang. There is no reason to create a 500mb efi partition and I am assuming the auto partition install would not do so.

If my EFI drive was originally sda2 (is this even possible?) maybe the upgrade wanted to put EFI on starting partition?

I am curious to hear any and all thoughts/opinions on what is going here. At first I thought I was going crazy, but then I remembered that I went there a long time ago... please comment on this matter! Thanks!

Since I upgraded from 16.04 to 18.04 I have been having these strange screen freezes. Usually while playing videos or solitaire my screen will randomly hang. Although the mouse still works and moves and audio plays, the screen just freezes. The screen pauses for about 5-10 seconds and nothing can be moved, clicked, etc. However, if I try to perform an action with the mouse during one of these hangs, if I complete the action with the mouse, I will see the result once the screen catches up. So it seems that everything is working but there is some sort of display lag as if my video card is under a heavy load.

The problem seems to get worse and more often the longer I am logged in as if there is a memory leak in the video card.

Viewing card load with Nvidia apps shows no excessive load on the card, high temperatures or lack of memory.

I have improved the performance, as will be outlined shortly, but the problem still persists.

The system is a Quad Core Alienware Alpha with 8 gigs of ram. The card is an Nvidia 860 with two gigs of ram.

I am using proprietary Nvidia driver 390 and (in the beginning) a low-latency kernel.

$ lspci -k | grep -EA3 '3D|Display|VGA'
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GM107M [GeForce GTX 860M] (rev a2)
Subsystem: Dell GM107M [GeForce GTX 860M]
Kernel driver in use: nvidia
Kernel modules: nvidiafb, nouveau, nvidia_drm, nvidia

$ lsmod |grep -i nvidia
nvidia_uvm            757760  0
nvidia_drm             40960  2
nvidia_modeset       1110016  8 nvidia_drm
nvidia              14340096  635 nvidia_modeset,nvidia_uvm
drm_kms_helper        172032  1 nvidia_drm
drm                   397312  5 nvidia_drm,drm_kms_helper
ipmi_msghandler        53248  2 nvidia,ipmi_devintf

My Wi-Fi is slow or completely broken when using Bluetooth headphones. It is said that this is a well know issue, as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi share the 2.4GHz frequency.

Is this something that could be solved? Are cheap/low-end devices more problematic than quality ones?

What I Have Tried

1. Disable coexistence in iwlwifi, as suggested by Pilot6, by running the following command and rebooting:

   sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi-opt.conf <<< "options iwlwifi bt_coex_active=N"
   

   This was only a slight improvement, as it changed the speed of Wi-Fi from zero to unusably slow.

2. Try different channels on router.

   I tried both ends of the spectrum (1 and 11), neither created any improvement. Wi-Fi still broken as soon as headphones are turned on. Setting router channel to auto has the best results so far.

System Info

$ uname -a
Linux alien-box 4.15.0-29-lowlatency #31-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT Tue Jul 17 17:49:04 UTC 2018 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

$ lspci -knn | grep Net -A3; lsusb
04:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation Wireless 7265 [8086:095a] (rev 59)
    Subsystem: Intel Corporation Dual Band Wireless-AC 7265 [8086:5410]
    Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi
    Kernel modules: iwlwifi
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:8000 Intel Corp. 
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:8008 Intel Corp. 
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 004 Device 006: ID 1058:07a8 Western Digital Technologies, Inc. My Passport (WDBBEP), My Passport for Mac (WDBLUZ)
Bus 004 Device 005: ID 0bc2:ab31 Seagate RSS LLC Backup Plus Desktop Drive (5TB)
Bus 004 Device 004: ID 2109:0812 VIA Labs, Inc. VL812 Hub
Bus 004 Device 003: ID 2109:0812 VIA Labs, Inc. VL812 Hub
Bus 004 Device 002: ID 2109:0812 VIA Labs, Inc. VL812 Hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 003 Device 005: ID 08bb:2902 Texas Instruments PCM2902 Audio Codec
Bus 003 Device 004: ID 28de:1142  
Bus 003 Device 003: ID 8087:0a2a Intel Corp. 
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 062a:4101 Creative Labs Wireless Keyboard/Mouse
Bus 003 Device 010: ID 2109:2812 VIA Labs, Inc. VL812 Hub
Bus 003 Device 009: ID 2109:2812 VIA Labs, Inc. VL812 Hub
Bus 003 Device 008: ID 05e3:0727 Genesys Logic, Inc. microSD Reader/Writer
Bus 003 Device 007: ID 0b33:0020 Contour Design, Inc. ShuttleXpress
Bus 003 Device 006: ID 2109:2812 VIA Labs, Inc. VL812 Hub
Bus 003 Device 011: ID 0d8c:0012 C-Media Electronics, Inc. 
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

$ lsmod |grep 'bt\|blue\|rfcomm\|bn'
rfcomm                 77824  4
bnep                   20480  2
btusb                  45056  0
btrtl                  16384  1 btusb
btbcm                  16384  1 btusb
btintel                16384  1 btusb
bluetooth             548864  33 btrtl,btintel,bnep,btbcm,rfcomm,btusb
ecdh_generic           24576  2 bluetooth

I would like to analyze my video card performance (RAM, load, etc) the way that top, free and lscpu does for my main hardware.

Is there an app to do this?

In Unity on 16.04 I was able to adjust the scale of my monitor to my liking. In my case this is 120%. However after upgrading to 18.04 the display configuration only has two size options, 100% and 200%.

How do I set a custom display scaling?

I have always used Alt+Tab key combo to switch between programs. Since upgrade to 18.04 only Super+Tab works.

How do I make both Alt buttons work with Tab to switch applications?