Jo-Erlend Schinstad's questions

I know about lxc-freeze and lxc-unfreeze, but as I understand it, these simply pauses the container, similar to sending SIGSTOP and SIGCONT to a process. If I reboot the host, then the containers will cease to exist, right?

I would really like a way to save state to persistent storage so that I could resume them at some later time, even the host is rebooted or something like that. I can achieve exactly what I want using VirtualBox by using the "Save machine state" mechanism, but if I could do it with LXC, it would be completely awesome.

In recent versions of Ubuntu and particularly the upcoming 14.04LTS, I find that I prefer to not use tabs in Firefox, but rather use the app spread. So that's what I do. However, I haven't found a way to remove the tab bar from Firefox and it seems kind of pointless for every one-page window to have a tab bar containing only one tab. Sometimes, it also fools me into using the new-tab button from old habit, so it would really be quite useful to be able to remove that bar altogether.

I've wanted to write a GTK+ version of Unity Dash for some time. I think it could be useful for Xfce, Gnome Flashback, elementaryOS, etc.

Before I start doing anything about it, I'd like to know if there are any high-level libraries to search Scopes, use filters, etc. A GIR-lib would be very nice.

Does anything like this exist, or am I going to have to do all the dbus stuff myself?

I realized this is not entirely obvious from the documentation.

When I search for something in the Dash, a UUID and a search phrase is sent to productsearch.ubuntu.com, providing the Smart Scopes service. If I then act upon one of these results, then that is reported along with the UUID. This is fine.

However, what if this search results in a local file and I click to open this file. Is that action too sent to the Smart Scopes server, or does that only apply to results that actually came from the Smart Scopes server?

Back in 8.04 or so, when PolicyKit was new, we had a GUI "browser" that enabled us to easily decide things like whether a user should be allowed to shutdown the system when other users were logged in and if it should always be allowed or only while on the console, etc.

Then those things suddenly disappeared and though it seems PolicyKit is still in use, I haven't been able to find any similar GUI to actually configure the policies. What happened?

If you want to upgrade from 10.10 to 12.04, then you'll need to follow the upgrade path; 10.10 > 11.04 > 11.10 > 12.04. However, with LTS versions, you can upgrade directly, so that you can upgrade from 10.04LTS to 12.04LTS directly.

But now, LTS versions are supported for five years while there's still a new LTS every two years. That means you can choose to skip an LTS. So the question is; will I be able to upgrade from 12.04LTS to 16.04LTS directly, or will I then have to follow the LTS upgrade path; 12.04 > 14.04 > 16.04?

Lately, I've seen the widget below appear in GTK applications. I can't find it in Glade. What is it?

I'm writing an application that needs to use an indicator. I've done this in the past using PyGTK and GTK2, using as reference this document: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopExperienceTeam/ApplicationIndicators#Python_version

However, that only works with PyGTK and GTK2. Things have changed since then, and I need to find some good documentation, a tutorial or a good example to learn how it works.

Also, one thing that the previously mentioned document doesn't describe at all, is how to add sub-menus to an indicator. I hope someone can shed some light on this, as well as how to integrate with category indicators if that's done using the same tool.

Thanks.

Lately, booting Ubuntu on my desktop has become seriously slow. We're talking two minutes. It used to take 10-20 seconds. Because of plymouth, I can't see what's going on. I would like to deactivate it, but not really uninstall it. What's the quickest way to do that? I'm using Precise, but I suspect a solution for 11.10 would work just as well.

I've found a couple of bugs in HUD, such as when you use it, the window loses focus afterwards. But I can't find a bug tracker for it?

I use a gtk TreeView to display different websites in my Python program. When the selected rows change, the web page is updated to the url field in the store. This works nicely, but a lot of web pages uses javascript to focus an input field. This means I can't use the keyboard to navigate the TreeView.

I don't know how to disable javascript completely, but I also don't want to, because an increasing number of pages are dependent on it. However, I would like to prevent the focus theft. One thing I could do, is to implement some sort of memory about what the user has done, and if focus is removed without user interaction, then I move focus back to the last widget the user interacted with. But this seems ugly. Is there a better way?

I sometimes find small bugs in dialogs or windows. For instance, I found a very minor bug in the sound preference dialog. I thought I'd report it, but it wasn't obvious what package provides the dialog.

Is there a simple tool to do that? I would imagine something like xwininfo; you'd run the command, the mouse pointer would change and when you click a window, the command returns the package name. With such a command, it would be easy to expand it to gather version information, distro and open the bug tracker on the right page.

We used to have Help > Report a problem, but since Gnome Control Center doesn't use menus, that option is not available. This, of course, would be true for all windows that doesn't use menus. So; is there an alternative?

It looks like we've acquired quite a few new options in desktop files lately. Some of these are explained in very narrow posts, such as how to add a static quicklist to a Unity LauncherEntry. Others are difficult to find documentation for. We seem to have non-standard items in some Gnome applications, for instance, beginning with X-GNOME-

So the question is: where can I find information about all of these, including these extensions? Are there extensions for all desktop environments, like KDE, Xfce and LXDE as well? In other words, what I am seeking, is a complete desktop file reference. Before you answer, please check for duplicates in http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/ar01s05.html. Those are standard and that's a good reference for those. It is all those other types I'm interested in.

I've been trying to port a library from PyGTK to use GI and GTK3. The problem is I can't find any resources specific to the gobject imports, but only for GTK. I was hoping that if someone would translate the following for me, I would get a grasp of how to do this stuff. The GTK things itself seems to be fairly well documented, but I can't find anything about this.

__gsignals__ = {'cell-edited' : (gobject.SIGNAL_RUN_LAST, gobject.TYPE_NONE,
    (gobject.TYPE_PYOBJECT, gobject.TYPE_PYOBJECT, gobject.TYPE_PYOBJECT, 
    gobject.TYPE_PYOBJECT, gobject.TYPE_PYOBJECT)), 'selection-changed' : 
    (gobject.SIGNAL_RUN_LAST, gobject.TYPE_NONE, (gobject.TYPE_PYOBJECT,))}

My assumption was, since I couldn't find any specific documentation, that it would be a matter of changing the name of the constants, but I can't find any replacements.

I really like both Unity and Unity 2D. They currently have different issues, meaning that one does not have the issue the other has. For instance, when I play Battle for Wesnoth, then it integrates nicely with the global menu on Unity 2D, but not so well on Unity. So I tend to switch to Unity 2D while playing it, since I can then use my other monitor without switching between windowed and fullscreen mode. There are other cases as well.

However, for me, that currently means logging out and back in. I know that this isn't necessary, so I was wondering exactly what to do to switch between them in-place, without logging out.

I have loads of RAM and I use very little. I also do record some screencasts with gtk-recordmydesktop, which by default saves to /tmp while recording. I assumed that it would mean storing to RAM as much as possible, but then I actually checked and found that /tmp isn't mounted with tmpfs. Why is that?

It feels like I've read about BtrFS forever, but there has always been something that makes me not want to use it. But I'm guessing things are improving, so I'd like to know what the situation is currently. That means in 11.10.

• Do we have tools to fix a broken BtrFS? I've read that this has been a problem for a long time.
• Do we have GUI apps to take advantage of the cool features of BtrFS, like cloning, snapshots, COW, RAID, etc?
• Do we have user friendly tools to convert an Ext4 into a BtrFS?
• I've read about performance issues in some cases. Is that still an issue?
• Have I missed an important question?

As Ubuntu and Gnome gets modernized, Xfce begins to look like a natural replacement for the "conservative Gnome" that many are used to. And even if the modern desktops are nice, some people will prefer the old ways. But can you simply switch from Gnome 2 to Xfce4 or are there things to consider? I am asking this as a single question, but it can obviously be broken down into many:

• Can I still use the app-indicators that I'm used to?
• Can I still use Gnome panel applets?
• Is it possible to use Compiz with the plugins I've been using?
• Can I use custom launchers and docks like I can in Gnome 2?
• Can I use the same themes, icons, etc?
• Is it ok to just install xubuntu-desktop on my Ubuntu install, or should I install Xubuntu from scratch?

Since I haven't done this, I don't know what questions to ask. So even if I haven't asked them, please do answer them if there are important things to consider.

I'm looking for a backup solution for a specific use case. If none exists, then I'm tempted to make one.

I have a large and growing collection of video files. On my workstation I have a fairly large disk in RAID5, consisting of a few 2TB disks, which is easily expandable. These files are never changed. If I need to edit one, then I create a new file. I use hotswapable 2.5" harddisks for backup, which so far I've done manually. It works, but I'm afraid of doing anything wrong. I might forget to copy a file, mislabel a disk, etc.

I would like a solution that watches the video files on my workstation, automatically copies new files to the current backup disk and presents me with an overview of which backup disk contains which files, descriptions, dates and where those disks are physically stored. It would be nice if I could just insert an unformatted disk and it would be formatted, labeled and tracked automatically. When the free space of a backup disk reaches a certain level, I should be notified so that I can store it safely and replace it with a new one. Each backup disk should contain a copy of the current database and thumbnails for the videofiles contained on this disk.

For restore, I should be able to simply provide a root directory where the hierarchy should be recreated and it would then tell me to "insert disk x" -- like installing Windows 95 from floppies.

Does anyone know of a free backup solution that fits this profile, or should I go ahead and make one?

If you right click a file in Nautilus and select Compress, then you get a dialog where you can choose a compression format and a filename. If you click on Advanced, then there are settings to split and compress the file, but it's deactivated/insensitive. How come and how do I activate those features?

Edit: In an answer below, it has been suggested that it has something to do with rar. But I have that installed, and I don't get the options to split.