emchristiansen's questions

I just installed 20.04.3 LTS as a dual-boot beside Windows 10, and the display manager isn't starting when I boot into Ubuntu. Any idea how to fix this?

Instead, I see a black screen with a tiny cursor underscore (_) blinking in the upper-left corner. If I view the logs by pressing Alt-F7 all I see is a message about my boot partition (/dev/nvme0n1p4: clean, 204105/1921360 files, 2608121/7680000 blocks). I can login via a text prompt by pressing Alt-F2.

BTW, in the installation I selected the option to install additional / proprietary software.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

I'm attempting to install Haskell Platform 2013.2.0.0 on a fairly fresh Ubuntu 13.04, using the instructions here: How to install Haskell Platform for Ubuntu 13.04?

I've installed the extra packages mentioned in the comments, but the configure step generates an error related to OpenGL not being found. Here it is:

> ./configure
# Omitting some output
# ...
checking for zlibVersion in -lz... yes
checking GL/gl.h usability... yes
checking GL/gl.h presence... yes
checking for GL/gl.h... yes
checking for library containing glEnd... no
configure: error: The OpenGL C library is required

Strangely, it can find the OpenGL headers, but it can't find glEnd. Any idea what could be causing this?

I just upgraded to 13.04 from 12.10 in a 64-bit Parallels VM, and the semi-transparent terminal windows I configured for Gnome Terminal are now totally opaque.

I'm setting transparency via Edit -> Profile Preferences -> Background -> Transparent background. This is also illustrated in http://www.ubuntugeek.com/howto-create-a-transparent-terminal-in-ubuntu-desktop.html. Adjusting the slider has no effect.

Any workarounds?

I'd like to write a program which displays dynamically-generated slideshows on the desktop, replacing the wallpaper. The point is to display live photo-streams from the web, updating the wallpaper automatically as new images are posted.

I'm currently looking for the best way to display the images. The simplest thing is to just update the wallpaper by issuing a command to gsettings, for example:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri file:///new_wallpaper.png

But this approach isn't perfect:

1) (minor) There's a perceptible lag between issuing the command and the update.

2) (major) There's no smooth transition from the old wallpaper to the new wallpaper, so the effect is jarring.

Do I have a better option? A simple fade transition would be sufficient for my needs. In the future, though, I'll want an interactive canvas, so the user can click on an interesting photo and have the relevant link opened in a browser.

On the upgrade from 11.10 to 12.04, my XMonad + Unity configuration no longer works. When I attempt to log into this session, I get "failed to load session 'xmonad'". Where can I look to figure out what's going wrong?

I'm trying to mount an external Hitachi hard drive. Supposedly it's USB 3.0 and backwards compatible with 2.0.

I can see it with lsusb (it's "SimpleTech"):

Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 045e:00dd Microsoft Corp. Comfort Curve Keyboard 2000 V1.0
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 046d:c016 Logitech, Inc. Optical Wheel Mouse
Bus 001 Device 011: ID 4971:1013 SimpleTech

Additionally, the system appears to see it's a "high speed USB device", and it uses ehci_hcd. From "dmesg | grep -i usb", plugging in and out a few times:

[1914076.788026] usb 1-8: new high speed USB device number 9 using ehci_hcd
[1914118.992058] usb 1-8: reset high speed USB device number 9 using ehci_hcd
[1914466.772118] usb 1-8: USB disconnect, device number 9
[1914478.188029] usb 1-7: new high speed USB device number 10 using ehci_hcd
[1914516.944023] usb 1-7: reset high speed USB device number 10 using ehci_hcd
[1914828.148003] usb 1-7: USB disconnect, device number 10
[1914832.184073] usb 1-7: new high speed USB device number 11 using ehci_hcd

Also, it shows up as /dev/sde. However, "sudo fdisk -l" doesn't show it, gparted doesn't see it, and "sudo parted /dev/sde" gives me "No such device or address".

I know the hard drive works, because I can use it in Mac OS X 10.6 (it's formatted FAT32).

What can I do?

I'm not having luck getting XMonad to run in 11.10 (x64, fresh install) with a gnome fallback session. I've tried adapting the instructions from

http://markhansen.co.nz/xmonad-ubuntu-lucid/

and

http://markhansen.co.nz/xmonad-ubuntu-oneiric/

but with no luck. If anyone has ideas, I'd like to hear them.

EDIT: XMonad can be made to play well with Unity: http://markhansen.co.nz/xmonad-ubuntu-oneiric/ (thanks hvr)

I'm looking for a tiling window manager to use with Unity. I would like the manager to place all the windows for me, as XMonad does, though I get the impression XMonad doesn't play well with Unity. Unity does have some tiling features (you can use keyboard shortcuts to eg send a window to the left half of the screen), but this is still lacking compared to what I want, as I want the manager to choose where to place windows on my behalf. Any ideas?

Thanks!