Ross's questions

I'm installing Ubuntu 13.10 Server (amd64) on a HP Proliant Microserver. I'm using a USB keyboard which works fine until I opt to install Ubuntu and get to the (first) "Select a language" screen. At this point the keyboard becomes unresponsive and the number lock light turns off.

The BIOS is configured to support USB devices in legacy mode (hence I can get past the initial boot screen). Unfortunately the machine does not have a PS/2 port, however I have tried using a range of keyboards to debug this:

• a standard USB keyboard (Microsoft Ergonomic 4000)
• an alternative USB keyboard (G15)
• a PS/2 keyboard using a passive PS/2-USB connector
• and another PS/2 keyboard using an active PS/2-USB connector.

Unfortunately I get the same results with all of these. I note that this has happened to someone else with a wireless keyboard - could this be a case where the installer is not reloading USB devices?

I'm having trouble authenticating incoming SMTP authentication to my postfix server (using Cyrus SASL with a MySQL backend).

In my auth.log I get:

postfix/smtpd[3389]: sql auxprop plugin using mysql engine
postfix/smtpd[3389]: SQL engine 'mysql' not supported
postfix/smtpd[3389]: auxpropfunc error no mechanism available
postfix/smtpd[3389]: _sasl_plugin_load failed on sasl_auxprop_plug_init for plugin: sqlite
postfix/smtpd[3389]: sql plugin Parse the username <email>
postfix/smtpd[3389]: sql plugin try and connect to a host
postfix/smtpd[3389]: sql plugin trying to open db 'postfix' on host 'localhost'

And my /etc/postfix/sasl/smtpd.conf looks like this:

pwcheck_method: saslauthd
mech_list: plain login cram-md5 digest-md5
log_level: 7
allow_plaintext: true
auxprop_plugin: sql
sql_engine: mysql
sql_hostnames: localhost
sql_user: -removed-
sql_passwd: -removed-
sql_database: postfix
sql_select: select password from mailbox where username = '%u@%r'

Essentially I understand what it's saying, that it can't find a MySQL authentication module, however I have installed both libsasl2-modules-sql and postfix-mysql. What am I missing?

I have a laptop that gets very hot and when it overheats it shuts down abruptly. By Sod's law this happened while I was updating to 11.04 (during the install phase, somewhere in the lib* section, so probably the worst time).

When I try to boot into Ubuntu now it cannot find the root filesystem, (I get the option to wait, skip mounting or enter a root terminal). My laptop's keyboard has also decided not to work (this has happened before and it eventually came back, although I do think it's time for a new laptop) - luckily USB continues to work. I am able to boot into my Windows partition so I can assume the hard drive isn't smashed.

My question is how screwed is my Ubuntu install? I have quite a lot of data on the Ubuntu partition - is this lost or will I be able to access it via a live CD? How would I go about manually locating the filesystem in the root terminal? I don't mind reinstalling, but getting the data first is very important (yes, backup is quickly going to be sorted out, damned hindsight).

When I resume from hibernation in Ubuntu 10.10 the screen shows static, very similar to what you see on an analogue TV that hasn't been tuned properly. This also occurs on boot from shut down, but only for a moment after the Plymouth boot screen.

The static lasts for at least 5 minutes. An odd thing that happens is that the mouse pointer, as a lighter square of static, becomes visible and you can move it around. Attempting to change into a terminal (i.e. ctrl+alt+F1) doesn't seem to work (and I'm not sure if that can be done from the login screen).

Resuming from suspend has different issues - vertical lines appearing for a second before appearing to be in terminal mode (blinking cursor) and then going to the lock screen.

I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 on a Dell Studio 15 with ATI graphics, however I'm not using the proprietary drivers as I had issues with dual-screen support, so it's the generic X.org drivers being used.

Just installed a fresh copy of Maverick, and went from my two monitors working perfectly to broken in seconds.

As usual I configured the monitors in the display applet, this worked fine. I also hit Make Default which gave me no problems. I then restarted and the monitors had gone back to Mirror Screen. I changed them back again and hit Make Default which gave me a message about setting the Virtual Desktop resolution. After this any changes I make to the monitors give me the message "Please log out and back in again" - I've tried that and restarting but still cannot configure the monitor resolutions.

Any ideas on how I can revert this? Some searching indicates the problem's with xorg but I've no idea where to go further than this.

Here's the relevant lspci output:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc M92 [Mobility Radeon HD 4500 Series]

I tried extending the desktop using ATI's Catalyst tool but this still mirrored the screens. Does this mean the drivers aren't being used?

I've been bitten a few times recently with rming things I shouldn't have - for example, forgetting to ulink symlinks, not rm them.

I'm thinking of writing a small bash script to simply move the target to ~/.local/share/Trash, as I haven't grasped restoring files (seems to involve a lot of Linux hackery that I'm not going to achieve any time soon).

The only problems I can think of are:

• scripts/applications needing to rm files (really a problem? I could also get used to calling rm! or something),
• files being moved to Trash while files there already have the same name (not sure how Ubuntu get's around that at the moment, could be fixed by appending md5(name + time()) to the name.

Of course the real answer's in backing up or just learning not to do silly things but I'd like an accommodating solution none-the-less.

Is this a really terrible idea or something that could be done?

My processor is an Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 (2.40GHz). As far as I know that's a 64-bit processor - I'm a bit confused as the architecture is called AMD 64, is this a generic name given to 64-bit architectures? I've heard of x64 but can't see a release labelled with this.

I've changed this from the original VHost but it should still work in my mind:

Listen 80
NameVirtualHost *:80
<VirtualHost *:80>
 ServerName localhost
 ServerAdmin ross@localhost

 DocumentRoot /var/www
 <Directory /var/www/>
  Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
  AllowOverride None
  Order allow,deny
  allow from all
 </Directory>

 ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log

 # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
 # alert, emerg.
 LogLevel warn

 CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

The only difference between this and other working VHosts is that /var/www requires higher privileges to access it - I get a "Could not connect" error which I assume is a 500 error (Chrome hides the status codes and I can't remember). What can I do to make this work?

I'm attempting to block myself from time-wasting websites but changes I make to /etc/hosts. For example:

127.0.0.1   localhost
127.0.1.1   ross-laptop

127.0.0.1   bing.com

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1     localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
ff02::3 ip6-allhosts

I can access bing.com in a freshly opened Chrome or Firefox - why is this not working?