Prokop Hapala's questions

I have xubuntu 18.04, and I really like Pop!_OS theme for Xfce ( The minimalistic icons and live pastel colors )

But I really hate how it waste space. The icons and buttons has huge margin around it. I'm looking into /usr/share/themes/Pop/gtk-2.0 especially main.rc and trying to figure out how to minimize all padding, margins and borders so that is use space more efficiently. But I really don't understand the file structure and my blind modifications did not yield any useful results.

This is how Pop!_OS theme waste the space - the icons cannot be seen on standard 24-pixel Xfce panel. The to of application labels are cut.

This is how it looks with some normal GreyBird theme:

I upgraded from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (with gnome-flashback-metacity) to 18.04 LTS.

I'm not very happy about the new design of window framework (see below).

Is it possible to revert it back to normal?

I'm using windows 10 and ubuntu 16.04 LTS for ~1 month, with linux booting from UEFI (i.e. secure boot on, not bios). But yesterday windows installed some automatic actualizations and in the morning I realized that linux does not boot any more (i.e GRUB boot menu does not appear).

1. How to investigate what is the problem? - I'm not sure linux partition is OK, or maybe even GRUB is OK, maybe windows just modified some UEFI/bios settings.
2. How to make Linux run again with minimal risk that I destroy either linux or windows
3. How to make sure that it will not happen again (that is rather question about windows than ubuntu ... but I assume many linux users must have the very same problem with windows ruthless auto-updates)

I'm using a lot "sticky notes" in Gnome-flashback (megacity) which can be added to the main panel by Alt+MMB → Add to panel → Sticky Notes. It worked very well in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, 14.04 LTS ...

Now in 16.04 LTS there is a new version (3.18.2) which lost crucial functionality which makes it completely useless for me. These crucial functions were:

• preserve content of all note windowns after reboot (in the new version all notes are lost after restart)
• can select text by mouse in order to copy-paste (the new version instead drag the window)

I was trying other alternatives such as Xpad, but these lack other necessary functionality like:

• can be shown/hiden by one click on the indicator on the panel
• run at startup
• should not show as regular running application but just as indicator icon

Is there any solution how to get original functionality back:

1. e.g. install the old version from Ubuntu 14.04
2. or install some alternative which has all the required properties ?

I have a lot of pdf files ( research papers, presentations ... ) and I download or make by myself lot of them each week. I need something to browse trough them fast and to manage them (like sort them manually, find what to delete, what to put in copy to particular directory).

It is not so convenient to browse it by standard file manager and open each file separatelly in okular or other pdf viewer. I also use Mendelay for archiving and organizing my research papers, but it is it's to specialized, and not optimal for this job (eg. I don't what to import all the .pdf into mendelay jut to delete 90% ot it in after few seconds)

I would really like something like image browoser (eg. ) that in lower bar would be thumbnails of .pdf and in the central area would be the content, and it would be browse very quicky over all pdf in a directory on my disk.

It would be also great if such browser would be generalized also to other documents ( postscript, Libreoffice and MS office presentations (.ddp, .ppt) and text ( .odt, .doc ) ossibly also spreadsheeats ( .ods, .xls ) and simple textfiles and source files ( .txt, .cpp, .f90, .java, .py ... ) )

On Ubuntu 12.04 I used this "sticky notes" application:

Sticky Notes 3.4.1
Sticky Notes for the GNOME Desktop Environment
© 2002-2003 Loban A Rahman, © 2005 Davyd Madeley

which was very handy to use: Left click on indicator applet to show/hide all notes. Right click open menu.

Now in Ubuntu 14.04 I installed indicator-stickynotes 0.4.2-0~ppa2 which has different, and in my opinion much less handy behaviour.

Left click on the icon open a context menu. Then I have to click once more on show all or hide all notes.

This one click makes the usage 100% slower, because of which I almost don't use it (while the older version with one-click I used a lot)

I'm not sure if this indicator-stickynotes 0.4.2-0~ppa2 is the new version of the sticky notes I was using in Ubutnu 12.04. If so, I don't understand why they changed the behaviour to be slower to use.

Is there any alternative (like another note making application) which has the behaviour of the original sticky notes with just one click to show/hide?

I have just a couple of images ( 20-40 ) and I want make movie which plays with frame rate 1-2 fps ( i.e. each image should be visible for 0.5-1 second ) ... so the whole movie should take ~20-40 seconds to play. It seem that video generated using avconv with option -r 1 or -r 2 does not do this job :-( .

If I generate the movie in this way:

avconv -i ./relief_%04d.png -force_fps -r 1 -vf "scale=320:240" test.avi

I also tried option -force_fps it has no effect

it does strange things:

1. the movie plays just ~2 seconds ( instead of 20-40 seconds )
2. it does not show every images ( just 1-2 )
3. it is like very laggy

( and it is also a bit dependent on the player. mplayer do the strange things described above, vlc shows just black screen )