qbi's questions

I'm using different computers with Ubuntu on it. Sometimes I work on a desktop at home, sometimes on a Laptop, sometimes I use another desktop computer. When I switch machines it often happens that a file is on one computer, but not at the other one. So I manually synchronize them. What I'd like to do is to have some kind of automatic synchronisation between all machines. So when I add a file to one computer it should go to the other machines and when a file gets change also the change should move to all the other machines.

I don't want to use some kind of cloud storage (Dropbox etc.) and also a network file system is not the right way to go (no networking access at all times). What do you suggest to realise this?

I'm using byobu when working on the shell. If I start a program the name of it is displayed in the status line. However when something is prefixed with sudo it just displays sudo (sudo tail -F /var/log/syslog). I want it to display the name of the program, the second argument (tail in my example above). How can I do this?

I've heard that disk encryption works reasonably faster when CPU supports AES-NI. How can I check if my CPU supports it? Does the Ubuntus default encryption (dm-crypt) use it by default or do I have to enable it?

I often roam in different networks. Some of those need special settings for DNS or block mails to external mailservers and only accept internal smarthosts. I'm looking for some kind of program where I can make settings based on networks. Say the wireless network with ESSID Foo needs a nameserver on address 10.32.5.12 plus one on 8.8.8.8, wired network with ESSID Bar takes any nameserver which comes per DHCP and so on. What programs do you know and what are the benefits of those?

I was just reading »How to revert to GNOME Classic?«. Some answers say that you should press Alt+Win to get the Add to panel dialogue. However my keyboard has no Win. So I was asking myself how to start the Add to panel window. Usually the best way is to enter the program name into a terminal. In this case I can't figure out the name.

I tested it on another computer and couldn't find the name in the process list. Also xwininfo or similar programs shoed no name. So what is the best way to figure out the name of the program which opened a (X) window.

Recently I deleted the folder Desktop from my $HOME directory. When I logged in again all files and directories in $HOME were shown on the desktop. So I wanted to get the folder back. What is the recommended way to achieve this? I edited ~/.config/xdg-user-dirs.dir and added the correct variable. But I guess there must be some other (more easy?) way.

I want to mount the device /dev/sda3 to the directory /foo/bar/baz. After mounting the directory should have the uid of user johndoe. So I did:

sudo -u johndoe mkdir /foo/bar/baz
stat -c %U /foo/bar/baz
johndoe

and added the following line to my /etc/fstab:

/dev/sda3 /foo/bar/baz ext4 noexec,noatime,auto,owner,nodev,nosuid,user 0 1

When I do now sudo -u johndoe mount /dev/sda3 the command stat -c %U /foo/bar/baz results in root rather than johndoe. What is the best way to mount this ext4-filesystem with uid johndoe set?

When I add a new user to my system I set a password and tell it to the new user. If the user doesn't like it, he/she can change it. However in my opinion it is better to force the user to change his/her password at the first login. Is there a way I can do that in Ubuntu?

Possible Duplicate:
Add options to “Move to” (when you right click on a file)

Assume I want to copy a file from /home/foo/bar/baz to /opt/quuz/dir1/option3. When I try it with Nautilus, first I have to open the correct directory, copy the file, go to the other directory and paste it there. I was thinking of a better way and old KDE3 versions of Konqueror came to mind. It was possible to right-click on a file. The context menu had an option for copying, moving the file to some default directories. Furthermore you could select any directory under /. So for the above action one would right click on a file, select /opt first, a list of subdirectories will open, select /opt/quuz and so on.

Using GNOME there are only two possible values (home and desktop). Is there any way to insert more directories to this context menu in GNOME? Can I copy somehow the behaviour of Konqueror?

I'm looking for a way to find out what kind of RAM a system has (clocking speed, DDR-X etc.). Is there a specific command for that? I'm only aware of free or lspci which don't offer those things.

I want to disable GNOME keyring globally on my machine. So I deleted the lines

auth    optional        pam_gnome_keyring.so
session optional        pam_gnome_keyring.so auto_start

in /etc/pam.d/gdm. It seems to me that this has no effect. When I lock in the syslog writes

Aug 24 18:37:03 foobar gnome-screensaver-dialog: gkr-pam: unlocked login keyring

and another user sees a menu window where he hs to enter his credentials. So what is the correct way to disable keyring for every user on that machine?

I used mplayer -options url://to/radiostation to listen to internet radio for some time. However I'd like to use another software for this. What do you use and what do you consider the advantages of this software?

Empathy uses a very small font size. I'd like to have some larger font. But the system setting has no entry for fonts. How can I use another/larger font in empathy?

One of my notebooks is a Compaq nc4200 (Mobile Intel 915GM Express). All Ubuntu kernels > 2.6.32-20 don't boot on that machine. Instead I get an error message:

error: unexpectedly disconnected from boot status daemon
Begin: Waiting for root file system ...

After some googling I found Bug #574755 in Debians BTS. In this case plymouth had some bug. So I tried to add i915 modeset=1 to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules. This made the boot screen complete lack. I saw no output anymore. Second I tried to remove the plymouth-package. After purging it I got the same message again.

I dug a bit further. From my point of view this must be some kind of file system thing. Output from boot:

Begin: Running /scripts/init-premount ... done.
Begin: Mounting root file system ... Begin: Running /scripts/local-top ... done.
Begin: Waiting for root file system ...`

After some time there is a timeout and a BusyBox shell appears:

Gave up waiting for root device. Common problems:
 - Boot args (cat /proc/cmdline)
   - Check rootdelay= (did the system wait long enough?)
   - Check root= (did the system wait for the right device?)
 - Missing modules (cat /proc/modules; ls /dev)
ALERT! r/dev/disk/by-uuid/(UUID-of-my-sda1) does not exist. Dropping to a shell!

BusyBox v1.19.3 (Ubuntu 1:1.10.3-7ubuntu1.1) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a lost of built-in commands.
(initramfs)

Now I'm out of ideas. What can be the cause of it? How I resolve this issue?

I'm using GNU Emacs 23.1.50.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.18.0) and start my Emacs session inside GNU screen.

Since I upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04 and the version of emacs-snapshot there I encounter some problems. Sometimes Emacs hogs all RAM plus the same amount of swap space (2+2GB) and also eats all CPU time. When I send the process a SIGTERM the process stops eating CPU time, but the huge allocated amount of memory stays. Emacs itself doesn't take any key sequences. So usually I send the process a SIGKILL and it dies.

Now I want to find out where the bug (if there is one) is located and want to do some debugging. I can see no special reason for this behavior. Sometimes it starts after Emacs is freshly started, sometimes I can work a whole day without problems, sometimes it happens in between. So I'm looking for a kind of debugging or monitoring the process.

I tried strace, but this generates too much output. Strace output of an editing session could easily fill my whole hard drive. Running Emacs inside gdb would also not work, because if I remember correctly Ubuntu builds the software without debugging symbols. So do you have any advice on how I can find the (possible) bug? What would you suggest?

I realized a second strange thing after upgrading from 8.04 LTS to 10.04. My (GNOME) panel contains the clock applet. This applet shows current date and time. The time is not upgraded after I start a GNOME session. When I remove the applet and insert it again, it works fine. But at some point it stops again. Has anyone seen this? Is there a workaround? Several other people seem to have the same problem, but as far as I saw it they had no solution.

Recently I upgraded from 8.04 LTS to 10.04.

The previous version had some problems regarding screen settings. X only recognised 1024x768 as resolution of my monitor, mainly because the monitor was not identified correctly.

With 10.04 the monitor and its resolutions are identified correctly and the system chooses a better resolution.

But now the fonts seem blurry. They are hard to read. I tried a larger font size which improves the situation a bit. I also played around with nvidia-settings. If I choose 1024x768 again, the fonts look good. Also some resolutions with specific refresh rates seem better. Another thing I tried was to change hinting settings. However the best variant was already chosen.

So I've run out of ideas for a solution. Do you have any hints?

My graphics card is nVidia Corporation C68 GeForce 7050 PV / nForce 630a (rev a2).