Matty's questions

There was an update a few weeks ago that seemed to mess with anti-aliasing in some applications. Firefox, Thunderbird, and the text in some apps such as Mousepad and Leafpad (but not the rest of the window) are affected, whereas Chrome and everything else seems to be just fine. Attached are two screenshots showing the difference between rendering in Firefox and Chrome.

The anti-aliasing settings are the same as they've always been, which have worked just fine - full hinting, RGB sub-pixel order.

I'm really not sure what's going on and am thinking that it might be faster to fix this problem by re-installing, but is there anything I can try first as re-installing is the last thing I want to do?

I'm running Xubuntu 12.04.

Thunar is returning an error when I try to open my home directory:

Failed to open directory "matt". Error stating file '/home/matt/.gvfs': Transport endpoint is not connected.

Is there any way I can fix this without restarting? This error seems to be triggered upon logging out and logging back in when when multiple users are logged in.

I've had this problem come up a few times and Google isn't my friend this time. Is there a quick way to recover from a swap lock? They can sometimes last twenty or more minutes which is a long time to wait if a hard reset isn't possible.

The ideal solution that I'm looking for is a utility that would halt all execution and pop up a task manager-style interface so unnecessary, memory-consuming processes can be killed. Is there something like this, or another way to recover quickly?

I've recently switched to Xubuntu and just noticed a process I've not come across before---tumblerd that was eating about 100MB. I can't find much information about this, except for this on SourceForge. Should I be concerned?

I'm noticing that at the bottom of some man pages in the "See Also" section are references to documentation that aren't other man pages. For example, at the bottom of the man page for bash it references the following documents:

• Bash Reference Manual, Brian Fox and Chet Ramey
• The Gnu Readline Library, Brian Fox and Chet Ramey
• The Gnu History Library, Brian Fox and Chet Ramey
• Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) Part 2: Shell and Utilities, IEEE

I'm aware I can Google them and find them that way, but are they hiding anywhere on my system already? I'm aware the Bash Reference Manual is available through info bash. Is there something similar (non-pdf --- HTML, ASCII, man page, or other info page) for the others?

By default, ls displays its output in multiple columns, but when it's sent to a pager such as less it's reformatted as a single column. Is there any way I can page the original, multiple-column output and preserve the formatting?

At a bash prompt, hitting tab twice will come up with a prompt such as Display all 1770 possibilities? (y or n). What paging utility is bash using? It doesn't appear to be less or more. Is it something internal to bash?

The playback speed reverts to 1x with every new video in a playlist, however, this isn't the behavior I want. Is there a way to make a selected playback speed persist throughout an entire playlist without re-encoding all the media?

This is a strange thing I've noticed across several different computers.

When I have a console session open, every time I scroll (say in a pager) there's a faint click for every line that goes by. It becomes more noticeable if I continuously scroll. Muting my laptop's speakers has no effect.

Is this by design, or some strange quirk?

Is it possible to coerce bash to reload the .profile file without logging out and back in again?