wim's questions

When I shutdown my computer there is some annoying delay, it takes about 5-10 seconds in 13.10 when in the previous version it was almost instantaneous.

During shutdown I press escape to cancel the splash screen and can see that a big part of the delay is after "Asking all remaining process to terminate...", and then there is "Killing all remaining processes". I have filmed the process with my video camera to check which processes had to be killed, but they didn't chat anything to the terminal.

I previously had this same issue in 11.10, and I resolved it as answered here, however this did not work for me in 13.10.

How to identify the cause of delays in the shutdown process, and fix them?

I can't find how to enable the line numbers, current line highlight, and other goodness in 13.10.

In nautilus (or nemo) file manager, the "Size" column shows the filesize for files and the number of items contained in a folder for subdirectories:

Number of items is not that important for me, it would be more useful if I could make this column show the total size contained under the directory. I had an extension on windows called foldersize which shows what I mean:

I think it involved a service which ran in the background monitoring filesystem modifications in order to make sure the column was kept up to date.

I am interested to know if there is any similar extension to nautilus, I would also be open to switching to another file manager to get this functionality. I am aware of the Disk Usage Analyser in Ubuntu, but what I'm looking for is a solution with file manager integration.

It's my understanding that the history file is updated when the terminal exits. But sometimes my computer crashes out, and the terminal doesn't exit cleanly, and then I lose those commands from my history which is annoying. How can I make it flush immediately, so that the entries still go there even if my computer has a meltdown? At the moment I'm using this workaround, but I feel there should be a better way.

I'm using gnome-terminal on Ubuntu 12.10.

I am having trouble to access the filesystem on my phone (it's a samsung / google galaxy nexus). It just worked in previous version of Ubuntu, but now it appears empty whether it is mounted with MTP or PTP. I have followed a few guides on building and reinstalling libmtp etc without success. This answer did not help for me, either, and gMTP just hangs when I click the connect button. I know I can use wifi e.g. airdroid to access my photos, but this is too slow and a bit clumsy for me, and downloaded photos lose their original timestamps.

Has anyone had success connecting to this phone on 12.04 ??

I have music that I play in my car, from an FAT32 USB stick. The folder which I use to put songs on is stored on my EXT4 hard drive. I add/remove/retag songs regularly and occasionally want to rsync the changes to the USB stick. But for some unknown reason (maybe permissions?), rsync copies all the files every time rather than just changed ones. I am calling rsync like:

rsync -vrlptgD source dest

How can I make it work like I want it to (i. e. know when a file hasn't been changed and don't copy it)?

I have run out of space on my WinXP virtual machine, which I only gave 10 GB space for when I created it. Is there an easy way to increase it to, say, 20 GB? I can't see any obvious option in VirtualBox settings.

The suggestion below gives this error

wim@wim-ubuntu:/media/data/winxp_vm$ VBoxManage modifyhd wim.vdi --resize 20000
VBoxManage: error: Cannot register the hard disk '/media/data/winxp_vm/wim.vdi' {46284957-2c09-4e70-8a49-bfbe0f7f681d} because a hard disk '/home/wim/VirtualBox VMs/winxp_vm/wim.vdi' with UUID {46284957-2c09-4e70-8a49-bfbe0f7f681d} already exists
VBoxManage: error: Details: code NS_ERROR_INVALID_ARG (0x80070057), component VirtualBox, interface IVirtualBox, callee nsISupports
Context: "OpenMedium(Bstr(pszFilenameOrUuid).raw(), enmDevType, AccessMode_ReadWrite, fForceNewUuidOnOpen, pMedium.asOutParam())" at line 210 of file VBoxManageDisk.cpp

Removing the .vdi from VirtualBox before calling VBoxManage command, then adding it back in, was successful. But now I can't boot the virtual machine, I get this worrying screen:

By the way, it says FATAL: Could not read from the boot medium! System halted.

The vdi must be reattached to the VM after VBoxManage command. Further, the partition will need to be resized from WITHIN windows, because you will have this empty space:

I was able to resize the partition easily using a bit of freeware called EASEUS Partition Master 9.1.0 Home Edition.

What's that capital 'T' in the permissions mean, and how does it work? Is it related to this 'sticky bit' thing I've heard about but never quite understood?

I get this error when plugging in my iPhone 3GS. What does it mean?

My ubuntu is slow to shutdown, and the culprits seem to be modemmanager and something called nm-dispatcher.action.

On shutdown I get a message on the terminal saying something like "asking all remaining processes to terminate" and then there is a ~5 second delay, before unresponsive processes are forcibly killed.

One of them was modem-manager, and I don't have a modem so I fixed that one with simply sudo apt-get remove modemmanager and there doesn't appear to be any side effects.

The other one is something like "nm-dispatcher.action: Caught signal 15, shutting down. ..." which I was able to fix by removing network-manager and network-manager-gnome. But then, obviously, I don't get the network manager icons and stuff which I need in gnome-shell. I have tried wicd as a replacement, but it is not working to my liking.

So how can I prevent those processes from hanging during shutdown?

After trying (and failing) to install better ATI drivers in 11.10, I've somehow lost my grub menu at boot time. The screen does change to the familiar purple colour, but instead of a list of boot options it's just blank solid colour, and then disappears quickly and boots into the default entry normally.

How can I get the bootloader back? I've tried sudo update-grub and also various different combinations of resolutions and colour depths in startupmanager application with no success (640x480, 1024x768, 1600x1200, 16 bits, 8 bits, 10 second delay, 7 second delay, 2 second delay...)

edit:

I have already tried holding down Shift during bootup and it does not seem to change the behaviour. I get the message "GRUB Loading" in the terminal, but then the place where the grub menu normally appears I get a solid blank magenta screen for a while.

Here are the contents of /etc/default/grub

# If you change this file, run 'update-grub' afterwards to update
# /boot/grub/grub.cfg.
# For full documentation of the options in this file, see:
#   info -f grub -n 'Simple configuration'

GRUB_DEFAULT=0
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true
GRUB_TIMEOUT=10
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=" vga=798 splash"

# Uncomment to enable BadRAM filtering, modify to suit your needs
# This works with Linux (no patch required) and with any kernel that obtains
# the memory map information from GRUB (GNU Mach, kernel of FreeBSD ...)
#GRUB_BADRAM="0x01234567,0xfefefefe,0x89abcdef,0xefefefef"

# Uncomment to disable graphical terminal (grub-pc only)
#GRUB_TERMINAL=console

# The resolution used on graphical terminal
# note that you can use only modes which your graphic card supports via VBE
# you can see them in real GRUB with the command `vbeinfo'
#GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480

# Uncomment if you don't want GRUB to pass "root=UUID=xxx" parameter to Linux
#GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true

# Uncomment to disable generation of recovery mode menu entries
#GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true"

# Uncomment to get a beep at grub start
#GRUB_INIT_TUNE="480 440 1"

I just bought a 3TB WD green drive, but when I try to partition in in gparted I get an error like:

======================
libparted : 2.3
======================
partition length of 5860530176 sectors exceeds the msdos-partition-table-imposed maximum of 4294967295

And when I try with Ubuntu "Disk Utility" I get a similar error like:

Error creating partition: helper exited with exit code 1: In part_add_partition: device_file=/dev/sdc, start=0, size=3000592982016, type=0x83
Entering MS-DOS parser (offset=0, size=3000592982016)
MSDOS_MAGIC found
looking at part 0 (offset 0, size 0, type 0x00)
new part entry
looking at part 1 (offset 0, size 0, type 0x00)
new part entry
looking at part 2 (offset 0, size 0, type 0x00)
new part entry
looking at part 3 (offset 0, size 0, type 0x00)
new part entry
Exiting MS-DOS parser
MSDOS partition table detected
containing partition table scheme = 0
got it
got disk
new partition
Error: partition length of 5860528002 sectors exceeds the msdos-partition-table-imposed maximum of 4294967295
ped_disk_add_partition() failed

I would like to show the date in the bar up the top there (next to the time). I can not see any obvious way to enable this.

I'm sure you know the one I'm talking about, that deep magenta. I would like to know it's RGB value.

How can I create a keyboard shortcut so that when I press F12 in nautilus (or desktop), I get a terminal in the current directory?

I have an ext4 drive which is available to my windows XP VirtualBox as a shared folder. When working with files across ubuntu and windows I sometimes see these autogenerated files with Zone.Identifier:$DATA appended to the name. For example, if I have the file

scite-2.29.msi

Then I will get a small annoying file like

scite-2.29.msi:Zone.Identifier:$DATA

The contents of the file:

[ZoneTransfer]
ZoneId=3

They seem to be created any time I write a file to the ext4 drive from within my windows virtual machine. I seem to be able to safely delete them without any obvious consequences.

What are these files for, and if they're useless how can I prevent them from being generated in the first place?

I have 2 TB of data on an NTFS drive which I would like to convert to EXT4 filesystem. My OS runs on a (comparatively) small 60GB SSD. Is there any way to convert the filesystem, apart from backing up and reformatting?

mailto: links fire up annoying "Evolution Setup Assistant". I want it to open a compose window in gmail in my web browser. There are existing questions about this here, but the answers are outdated and no longer work on 11.04.

on my system: I'm using chromium browser, and I think the path goes like this chrome -> xdg-open -> gnome-open and it's evolution that is set up when I check in gconf-editor, so I changed that key to gnome-open https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%U, but it's still firing up Evolution.

My speakers use a digital input, but my headphones use an analog input. I have them both plugged in, and when I want to use the headphones I just turn off the speakers and switch on the headphones. I know that simultaneous output on digital and analog is supported by the hardware, because it worked fine in Windows XP. But on Ubuntu, I seem to only get one at a time, depending on which setting is selected in the combo box located at System -> Preferences -> Sound -> Hardware.

How can I get simultaneous analog and digital output without having to switch the profile every time? I'm on Ubuntu 11.04 and it's an HDA Intel chip.

Currently, if I click a launcher, shortcut icon, etc., I will get a new Nautilus window. If there is already a Nautilus window open, I would rather it open up in a new tab in the existing window (as if I had done Ctrl + T and browsed to the new location). How can I make this happen?