cha's questions

When I fold the screen back on my Lenovo X1 Yoga using Ubuntu 18.04, both the internal mouse (touchpad) and an external USB mouse are completely disabled. Presumably, the mouse is being disabled in order to keep the internal touchpad from messing things up when using the laptop as a tablet (the touchscreen still works correctly) - but I'd still like to be able to use an external mouse while the laptop is folded. With my Yoga installed under Ubuntu 16.04, the external mouse still works while in tablet mode.

I've scoured dconf-editor (the /org/onboard/auto-show/tablet-mode-detection-enabled flag has no effect), played around with xinput props, and searched for any indication of where I might be able to configure this behavior, but haven't yet found anything that controls the tablet mode mouse behavior. Any pointers?

Edit: Here's the output of gsettings list-recursively | grep -i tablet:

org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.tablet area [0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0]
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.tablet keep-aspect false
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.tablet left-handed false
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.tablet mapping 'absolute'
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.tablet display ['', '', '']
org.gnome.power-manager info-last-device '/org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/tablet_wacom_battery_0'
org.onboard.auto-show tablet-mode-leave-key 0
org.onboard.auto-show tablet-mode-state-file-pattern '1'
org.onboard.auto-show tablet-mode-enter-key 0
org.onboard.auto-show tablet-mode-state-file ''
org.onboard.auto-show tablet-mode-detection-enabled true

I've compiled and installed my own build of nginx in order to add a module that doesn't come with the built-in version. Roughly, I'm doing:

apt-get build-dep nginx
apt-get source nginx
cd nginx-1.6.2
# ... add module flag to debian/rules
dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc
dpkg -i ../nginx-full_1.6.2-5+deb8u2_amd64.deb

Now, when I use dpkg -l '*nginx*' to show what nginx I have installed, I see:

Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name               Version        Architecture   Description
+++-==================-==============-==============-=========================================
un  nginx              <none>         <none>         (no description available)
ii  nginx-common       1.6.2-5+deb8u2 all            small, powerful, scalable web/proxy serve
un  nginx-doc          <none>         <none>         (no description available)
un  nginx-extras       <none>         <none>         (no description available)
ii  nginx-full         1.6.2-5+deb8u2 amd64          nginx web/proxy server (standard version)
un  nginx-light        <none>         <none>         (no description available)

My worry is that if upstream releases a new minor version of nginx, unattended-upgrades will replace my self-compiled version with the distro binary that doesn't have my custom module compiled in. Will this happen? If so, is there a way to prevent it?

In a byobu screen, I ssh'ed into another computer and launched byobu on that computer. Now, I have byobu within byobu.

How can I send byobu keystrokes (F2, F3, F6, etc) to the inner byobu rather than the outer? In other words, how do I escape or otherwise transmit these keys to the screen rather than having the outer byobu intercept them?

If I have an encrypted external disk (or an internal disk that is not in fstab), I see an entry for it in Nautilus -- with an entry like "X GB Encrypted Volume". I can click on this volume, and am prompted for a password to decrypt and mount the device.

But how do I do this from the command line?

This wiki page, and other docs I can find, only refer to GUI methods of decrypting the device; but this won't do in the context of headless servers or SSH logins. Is there a simple way to get devices to mount to automatic locations in /media just like they would with the GUI?

(I'm not asking about encrypted home directories -- I'm aware of ecryptfs-mount-private. This question is about additional encrypted volumes.)

The new Gnome 3.0 requires hardware acceleration support. I wanted to try it out -- but how do I tell whether hardware acceleration is supported on my machine?

I would like to install the beta of Firefox 4 in lucid or maverick. I know I can install the ubuntu-mozilla-daily PPA (ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa) and have easy apt-get access to firefox-4.0. However, this repository contains not only Firefox, but also daily builds of Thunderbird and other mozilla products.

If I leave this PPA enabled, apt-get upgrade also upgrades Thunderbird 3 to the latest "shredder". I'm not interested in running a daily build of Thunderbird -- I just want Firefox 4.

Is there some combination of pinning, backporting, or something like that which would make it easy for me to run an up-to-date daily of Firefox 4, but only Firefox 4?