lumbric's questions

XFCE 4.14 promises HiDPI support. I'd like to use different DPI settings on my laptop screen and on the external monitor, but I can't find any new features improving this particular situation. So what does "HiDPI support" mean then? Is this for Wayland + XFCE only?

What I did before XFCE 4.14

This seems to work for < 4.14 and for >= 4.14 the same way:

Custom DPI settings in Appearance -> Fonts allows changing scaling of windows for both monitors at the same time:

This works only for one screen unfortunately. The best I could come up with is adding this script as shortcut to toggle between different settings:

if [ $(xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Xft/DPI) = 152 ]
then
    xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Xft/DPI -s 96
else
    xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Xft/DPI -s 152
fi

Many applications (Firefox, Thunderbird, ...) need to be restarted after changing this setting unfortunately.

What is new but doesn't help

I think the Window scaling option is new (but I'm not sure), but it offers only 1x or 2x scaling for both screens at the same time. This is not helping in my situation.

xrandr

Not sure if this worked too before, but it kind of does now:

xrandr --output eDP-1 --scale "0.5x0.5" 

This sets the Laptop display to a scaling factor 2. But fonts are quite blurry. This does not happen with the Custom DPI setting.

I have a MacBook Pro 2011 (8,2) which suffers from the infamous graphic card problems. I've successfully installed Xubuntu 18.10 by disabling the Radeon graphic card via Grub and EFI partion.

I am trying to connect an external display via Mini Display Port, but the monitor is not detected. I tried an Mini Display Port <--> to Display Port cable (directly to the monitor's display port) an a series of adapters (Mini Display Port <--> VGA <--> HDMI). In both cases the monitor detects the cable and says "no signal from computer".

Is there anything how I could further debug this?

$ xrandr 
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1680 x 1050, maximum 8192 x 8192
LVDS-1 connected primary 1680x1050+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 331mm x 207mm
   1680x1050     59.88*+
   1600x1024     60.17  
   1400x1050     59.98  
   1600x900      59.99    59.94    59.95    59.82  
   1280x1024     60.02  
   1440x900      59.89  
   1400x900      59.96    59.88  
   1280x960      60.00  
   1440x810      60.00    59.97  
   1368x768      59.88    59.85  
   1360x768      59.80    59.96  
   1280x800      59.99    59.97    59.81    59.91  
   1152x864      60.00  
   1280x720      60.00    59.99    59.86    59.74  
   1024x768      60.04    60.00  
   960x720       60.00  
   928x696       60.05  
   896x672       60.01  
   1024x576      59.95    59.96    59.90    59.82  
   960x600       59.93    60.00  
   960x540       59.96    59.99    59.63    59.82  
   800x600       60.00    60.32    56.25  
   840x525       60.01    59.88  
   864x486       59.92    59.57  
   800x512       60.17  
   700x525       59.98  
   800x450       59.95    59.82  
   640x512       60.02  
   720x450       59.89  
   700x450       59.96    59.88  
   640x480       60.00    59.94  
   720x405       59.51    58.99  
   684x384       59.88    59.85  
   680x384       59.80    59.96  
   640x400       59.88    59.98  
   576x432       60.06  
   640x360       59.86    59.83    59.84    59.32  
   512x384       60.00  
   512x288       60.00    59.92  
   480x270       59.63    59.82  
   400x300       60.32    56.34  
   432x243       59.92    59.57  
   320x240       60.05  
   360x202       59.51    59.13  
   320x180       59.84    59.32  
VGA-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

Running xubuntu 18.04 LTS the boot animation does not work anylonger (instead I see a black screen) and it takes very long to boot. I changed /etc/default/grub the line #GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" to #GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="" and after a sudo update-grub I do see boot messages on the screen. At a certain point presumably X server or lightdm is starting and the screen blacks out as before. After 2-3 minutes the login screen appears normally.

I don't know what caused this problem, bug I think some update or configuration change by me, but I don't remember anything relevant. I've tried the properitary Nvidia driver and the default one. I use two monitors.

/var/log/lightdm/lightdm.log shows a huge gab of >2min between two lines:

...
[+0.94s] DEBUG: Session pid=1104: Authentication complete with return value 0: Success
[+0.94s] DEBUG: Seat seat0: Session authenticated, running command
[+0.94s] DEBUG: Launching process 1107: xubuntu-numlockx
[+1.03s] DEBUG: Process 1107 exited with return value 0
[+1.03s] DEBUG: Seat seat0: Exit status of xubuntu-numlockx: 0
[+1.03s] DEBUG: Session pid=1104: Running command /usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm-greeter-session /usr/sbin/lightdm-gtk-greeter
[+1.03s] DEBUG: Creating shared data directory /var/lib/lightdm-data/lightdm
[+1.03s] DEBUG: Session pid=1104: Logging to /var/log/lightdm/seat0-greeter.log
[+130.54s] DEBUG: Activating VT 7
[+130.54s] DEBUG: Activating login1 session c1
[+130.54s] DEBUG: Seat seat0 changes active session to c1
[+130.54s] DEBUG: Session c1 is already active
[+130.81s] DEBUG: Greeter connected version=1.26.0 api=1 resettable=false
[+131.18s] DEBUG: Greeter start authentication for peter
[+131.18s] DEBUG: Session pid=1585: Started with service 'lightdm', use
...

I've added allow-debugging = true to /etc/lightdm/lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf which adds some debug messages to /var/log/lightdm/seat0-greeter.log but AFAICS the messages start after the mysterious two minute sleep.

I couldn't figure out what happens between those two lines. Any idea how I could debug this further?

Edit: the problems disappeared, I don't know how.

Sometimes I need to get some files from my desktop computer, so I send a wake on LAN package (using my laptop) to the computer and it turns on. But every 30 times I have to wait ~30 minutes for the file system check (and I can't cancel it through SSH or so).

Many people would like to move the file system check to shutdown, but these projects and ideas seem to be quite abandoned:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AutoFsck https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/prompt-for-fsck-on-shutdown http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/11021/

I tried to use AutoFsck, but I did not succeed to get it work with LightDM - see: Run a script with user interaction on log out / shutdown?

Maybe somebody has a different idea for an work a round?

Disabling the file system check is not an option for me.

I'd like to run a script on shut down, which interrupts the logout process and and pops up a window with zenity. My target is to get autofsck working with lightdm. It seems to work with 12.04 after installing the old *.deb file, if one runs the check script manually. In order to use it, it should run automatically on log out and ask the user if she/he wants to check the disc on shutdown.

There is the option session-cleanup-script in the file /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf which seems to work, if a bash file with full path is used (I can't place the command directly there). But if I press shutdown, there is no time for a user choice.

Is there any other option to solve this problem?

Edit: It seems as if there are also other problems specificially with AutoFsck. The session clean up script runs, but the check command for AutoFsck does not run.

For example there is no logout button:

If I log in with the guest session, everything seems to be fine (there is a log out button). I tried to remove my whole user directory and create an empty one, but the problem remains.

I am running Gnome Shell 3.4 using the PPAs ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3 and ppa:ricotz/testing as described in this answer. I disabled all shell extensions and restarted the computer, but the problem remains.

Another difference between my user and the guest user I noticed: when I close the last window on the current workspace, the activitiy overview appears. This annoying beheviour seems to be disabled for the guest user.

I'm thinking to switch to Debian. I try to get 12.04 running with Gnome Shell since 2 days now...

Prism is a simple XULRunner-based browser which hosts web applications without the full browser interface. It seems as if Firefox Prism was removed from the repos since 10.04; there is no package for Natty (11.04), Oneiric (11.10) or Precise (12.04), only for the LTS versions Hardy (8.04) and Lucid (10.04).

People are writing about incompatibility issues with newer Firefox versions, but I'm still using Prism without problems on Maverick (10.10, no updates anymore) with the newest Firefox from the PPA.

Is there any reason why Prism was removed? Is there any reason I sould not use it and not install it manually? Is there something better or some alternative for >=12.04?

I know it is possible to create a menu entry (a .destkop file) which points to firefox http://someurl.com/, but I'd like also to keep the histories, cache, cookies etc. separted. In additon I find it nice that prism comes with a simplified interface without address bar and so on.

I have the problem described in this Q&A. Probably from quite old linux distros or from windows I have several files with broken filenames. ls displays a "?" instead of the broken character. I successfully renamed some of these files, but I don't know if I've found all of them.

Is there any method to find all affected files?

When I run last I get something like:

user    pts/0        user.domain.provider Sat Feb 25 11:44   still logged in 
user    pts/0        user.domain.provider Thu Feb 23 16:38 - 16:39  (00:00)
...

But if I connect to the server with sFTP, this won't show up in this list. Are there any other logs or a different command?

I want to login as a different user in Gnome and not to run a single program only, but I don't know the users password, I don't want to know it and I don't want to change it, but I'm sudoer.

Is there any way to do so?

The best thing I could think, was to change the user's password but to keep the old shadow file. But this seems to me very ugly and also uncomfortable. I'm also not sure if it's a good idea to change the shadow file on a running machine (but I suppose so, otherwise vipw -s would kind of useless).

Is there an alternative?

The reason I want to achieve this, is that I'd like to test things or to configure programs for users who aren't able to do on their own. Yeah of course I could do everything on the shell als root or as the specific user (and acutally this is what I'm doing until now), but there are things that you definitly don't want to do on the shell. Did any of you ever try to change the position of the gnome-panel on the shell instead of just selecting "bottom"? :)

I don't think gksudo, sudo or su would help me. I want to have the whole gnome session.