Arlie Stephens's questions

After upgrading to 16.04, my nice purple desktop stopped being entirely purple. After today's batch of security etc. fixes, my desktop is now royal blue.

I'm not seeing any way to control colour in the "settings" app. This may be because the "displays" tab simply tells me "could not get screen information".

Is there any way to set a desktop background and general colour scheme in Ubuntu's default window manager, or am I entirely at the whim of the developers?

Update - when I rebooted, I got back the ugly mix of purple and red that came with the upgrade to 16.04. So at least there wasn't an intentional colour change made mid-release.

The magic SysRq key does not work on my Ubuntu 16.04 desktop. I imagine it's now disabled by default. My attempts to enable it did not work, and the only thing Google finds is a 2007 forum post from when it was apparently enabled by default.

Can I enable it? If so, how?

[Added the following after the first answer:]

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key "In Ubuntu the combination of Alt+SysReq acts as "print screen" command." This is in fact the behaviour I observe on a non-hung system, even after doing sudo sysctl -w kernel.sysrq=1 I get some kind of screen capture on my desktop. Not what I want.

It's not practical to write to /proc/sysrq-trigger from a system that's basically hung, trying to get information to debug the problem.

Is it possible to get a kernel crash dump on ubuntu? If so, how do I enable it? I have a recurring hang, with systemd sleeping uninterruptably, and I want to figure out what it's doing.

Pointers to TFM gratefully accepted.

Problem: a laptop usually plugged into 2 external monitors, both rotated 90 degrees.

At login time, the 3 displays are mirrored, and only the laptop itself is appropriately oriented. I'd prefer to have the laptop screen closed, and be able to see what I'm typing/control my mouse naturally during login.

I'd also prefer all desktop environments, and all user accounts to automatically get the same monitor configuration, not to have to set it individually within each account (and presumably each windowing environment).

On the other hand, if the laptop isn't docked, or is plugged into a projector, I'd like to have a sane appearing screen, based on hardware detected - and have this once again apply even at the login screen.

Is this even possible? If so, how do I do it?

While I'm looking for the general answer, in this case I don't have proprietary graphics drivers or the cards that require them.

Window managers potentially involved: just about anything. I presently have kde and fluxbox installed, but that's subject to change. Happy to read answers like "this will work in my-fav-window-manager; here's how" even if I'm not currently running it.

I consider my level of cluefulness about X11 to be very low; general linux cluefulness fairly high. I.e. please don't assume too many X related clues when replying ;-)

The following earlier question leaves me thinking the task is doable, but doesn't tell me how: How can I configure the login screen to be displayed in portrait orientation?