Ingo's questions

After the upgrade to 13.10 Saucy Salamander, the brightness controls stopped working. This worked fine from 12.04 throughout.

Does anyone have an idea how I can fix this? If not, can you point me at the right package to file a bug against?

Bug I filed so far:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/1241745

Solutions I have tried:

/etc/default/grub

Changed this line to several options:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" →

1. GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="quiet splash acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor"
2. GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="acpi_backlight=vendor"
3. GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=”acpi_osi="!Windows 2012"

sudo update-grub

None worked.

I also tried to use xbacklight, which didn't work either. xbacklight -get wouldn't return anything.

I am having trouble using the terminal in GEdit since the text-color is white on gray background. I can not find an option to change anything for that terminal anywhere. How can I change it? N.B. The python terminal is fine.

Obligatory screenshot:

For some activities such as running it is important to know how many BPM a song has. I know that Banshee can do this but I couldn't figure out how to do this for a selected range of songs.

Which tool can I use to detect the BPM and immediately tag this in the ID3 fiels of the corresponding files?

Because I'd like to use the Gedit LaTeX plugin that is unfortunately not available for Gedit 3.2 in the repositories, I want to compile it myself. The most recent version you can get on http://git.gnome.org/browse/gedit-latex does support GNOME 3 's Gedit.

In the documentation it says:

Due to a limitation on reading Settings, the plugin currently must be installed in the same prefix as gedit. For instance if you are using gedit 3 from your distribution, you need to do

./configure --prefix=/usr make sudo make install

If you are using a 64bit distribution, you also need to pass --libdir=/usr/lib64 to ./configure script.

That's why I cded into the directory that contains the code, and tried to run ./configure --prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib64. Unfortunately, this does not work, giving the error message:

bash: ./configure: No such file or directory

Having checked the folder, there indeed is no file configure, but only configure.ac. What can I do to compile this plugin?

I'd like to back up some old folders with documents I only very rarely need to access. For that, I'd like to put them all in one archive. As this will be a backup, the format should suit that purpose. So, bottom line:

Which one is the most reliable/robust archiving format in Ubuntu?

Reading the planet and several blogs regularly, and also testing 11.10, it still is not clear to me what is planned for Unity in 11.10. When going to launchpad, no blueprints are available and the open bugs are mostly just fixes or backlog from 11.04.

That makes me wonder what is planned for unity in 11.10 at all? Is there any public documentation available about this topic? Or could some developers make a statement here?
It would undoubtedly be very interesting for many to get some information on this!

Firefox has been the default browser for ages. Thunderbird is a very popular e-mail client under consideration for being included as default in the future. Notify OSD has been around for years now.

What went wrong that in that long timeframe such important applications do not have such an important and visible feature implemented? This is very inconsistent. When will we see it integrated?

One thing that has always annoyed massively is that all my ratings get lost when I reinstall my system. And that happens often.
I know from MediaMonkey for Windows that it is possible to write the rating to tags. Interestingly, when loading the songs into Banshee, for instance, the ratings are recognized in fact!

But apparently, Banshee does not write ratings to the ID3 tag itself. Which player is capable of that?

In Natty I downloaded the latest version of Dropbox from their website. It should come with an appindicator rather than a systray icon, and it does so on my other Maverick installation.

However, it does not for some reason. That is very inconvenient, as these icons are blocked in Natty. I suppose that for some reason the system still installed an older version of Dropbox. How can i fix that/get the latest version to install?

Oilrush is a game with a high-end graphics engine due for release on the linux platform very soon. As a matter of fact, preordering is already possible!

That is why I would like to ask whether it will be available for purchase in the Ubuntu Software Centre.
If it will be offered, I would wait until it is available and buy it to support Ubuntu. If not, I'd rather buy it now and save some money.

Since 10.10 we have the wonderful new Ubuntu sans serif font. If everything goes well 11.04 will bring a great looking new monospace font.

It would only be a logical step to also develop a serif font! This way, the Ubuntu experience would get its definite touch. It could for example give a very special web experience as proposed and supported in this post, by covering the three major font families.

Now of course the question remains, are there any plans for this?

Although I am not a professional programmer, I have written a program or two. Yet, nowadays every engineer and scientist learns to program a bit as well, and as such I am used to writing programs in Python, C and MATLAB. Now I want to give back a bit to Ubuntu and its great folks and fix a bug!

I had a look at the list of the bitesize campaign and had to find that most of them are not that easy for me to fix as I suspect they require a lot of time to get into the matter, and I do not have that. Still I discovered this one and it looks manageable and like a cool feature to me.

As I have never written a patch or released a program to the wild before though, I have no idea where to start. What should be my first step to tackle that problem?

Bottom line: Where and how do I start fixing that guy?

One thing I like for MacBooks is that they are usable within a second after opening their lid when they were on stand by.

Ubuntu always requires me to enter my password when I resume from suspend, which can be very annoying.
How can I disable this?

Related bugs
It turns out that this really is undesired behavior, and there are several bugs related to this issue.
Bug #553646 on launchpad
Bug #643036 on GNOME bugzilla

Let me quote from Mark's blog almost one year ago:

March 5th, 2010 at 7:19 pm
Mark, will there be an update to the sound theme to match the updated visual brand?

Mark Shuttleworth: Gack, I completely forgot about that. A very good point. Would you see if you can rally a round of community submissions for a sound theme inspired by light?

Let's keep it short and sweet: What are the current considerations for the Ubuntu default sound theme?

Update, October 5 2011

This question was "answered" before the release of Natty. However, it proved to be wrong in the mean time. So the legacy continues, and I am reopening this one.

Update, February 15, 2012

Something is rolling! Looks like there will be a new sound for 12.04. Only a start-up sound however, no complete theme.

http://design.canonical.com/2012/02/sound-theme-update/

Update, April 30, 2012

It seemed to look good, but for some reason the sound did not make it into 12.04. There have been no announcements as to why, however. The sound theme remains a mistery...

Update, May 2, 2012

Mark Shuttleworth made a statement on IRC recently saying that it simply "was not perfect yet." It will maybe be in 12.10 then.

Update, December 6, 2012

Not in 12.10, either. But - there's still hope for 13.04!

As of the last update, the bug report for getting a new sound theme has been marked as Confirmed (but not In Progress) with the last comment posted October 31, 2011.

Update, September 11, 2013

Won't be in 13.04, and neither in 13.10. However, an interesting proposal has popped up. The composer of the "Mass Effect" soundtrack offered to make a startup sound for Ubuntu on this mailing list.

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/09/mass-effect-composer-ubuntu-14-04-start-up-sounds

Discussion on Reddit here.

After installing Dropbox I was happy to see that although the installer said it would be version 0.6.7, it actually installed Dropbox 1.1.0. This version includes the new application indicator. However, Ubuntu does not ship with an icon for this by default.

How can I replace the icon with a nice, monochrome icon set?

I am writing a small reminder-app and want to play a system sound once the timer has reached 0. What is the easiest way to play that sound, and which sound would you recommend?

I have recently started learning Python and thus have learned that Ubuntu (10.10) uses Python 2.6. It seems to me that Python 3.X is still rather unpopular in the Linux/Ubuntu community.

Why is that?

Edit April 30, 2012
Python 3.2 is not shipped by default in Ubuntu. There are plans to make Python 3.2 default in 12.10, however, and make it the only version shipped by then. Python 2.7 will then not be on the default ISO anymore. Note: this is only envisaged, not certain yet.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Python/FoundationsQPythonVersions

I want to change an icon of a specific theme. Where do themes save their icons?

How can I replace Docky's standard anchor icon in the dock by Ubuntu's? It would look quite nice I think. This is how it looks right now:

The title says it all. How can I detect duplicates in my media library?