Charles Green's questions

Version is Linux dad 5.8.0-44-generic #50~20.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Wed Feb 10 21:07:30 UTC 2021 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I've got a newer system76 which will complete grub and the initial boot menus, but which does not seem to start gdm3. If I press ctrl+f2 and then ctrl+f1, or log into the device after pressing ctrl+f2 I run can run sudo systmctl restart gdm3 a normal display opens, and the device will run for days. There is an Nvidia card in the system, however I do not currently have the drivers loaded.

This is consistent across reboots, and the problem has come and gone although I am unsure what updates are causing me issues.

It seems that Xorg is not detecting the integrated graphics device on the computer: The first error in /var/log/Xorg.0.log is

[     6.163] (--) PCI:*(0@0:2:0) 8086:9bc4:1558:8520 rev 5, Mem @ 0xc3000000/16777216, 0xa0000000/268435456, I/O @ 0x00005000/64, BIOS @ 0x????????/131072

And I get the errors described at https://wiki.x.org/wiki/FAQErrorMessages/#index8h2

My question is: Should this be reported as a bug over at Launchpad somewhere?

I have noticed a recect oddity (within the last week) in behavior of my Gnome-shell upon resume:

If I have a window (Thunderbird) open, and suspend by closing lid all seems to go as it should.

When I open the lid and resume, I see my Thunderbird window, but cannot input anything to the window. If I press alt-tab, then Thunderbird pops open, as if I am switching to that task, and accepts input again.

I notice this most often with Thunderbird, but only because that is most often open.

Has anyone else noted this behaviour?

ls -al ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions
total 16
drwxrwxr-x 4 chick chick 4096 Apr 25 07:26 .
drwx------ 3 chick chick 4096 May  1 13:12 ..
drwxrwxr-x 3 chick chick 4096 Apr 24 19:06 [email protected]
drwxrwxr-x 5 chick chick 4096 Apr 15 07:52 [email protected]

I have high cpu use in Ubuntu 19.04, and my screen seems laggy.

Watching top I see gnome-shell running about 50% very often.

I'd like to remove Snap from my system entirely, but have a smallish problem:

1st, I removed all snap packages:

sudo snap remove $(snap list | tail -n +2 | cut -d" " -f1 | grep -v core | tr "/n" " ")

Then I removed snapd, and the gnome snap plugin

sudo apt remove -y snapd gnome-software-plugin-snap

The problem is that at reboot, Apparmor is looking for a profile for snap, and fails parsing snap configuration files:

Feb 21 21:40:47 dad apparmor[698]: AppArmor parser error for /var/lib/snapd/apparmor/profiles/snap-confine.core.5662 in /var/lib/snapd/apparmor/profiles/snap-confine.core.5662 at line 11: Could not open '/var/lib/snapd/apparmor/snap-confine'

which leaves me with a running system, and no apparmor!

I've been beating my head against this for a while, but I'm really not a good script writer. Apologies...

I'm running Ubuntu/gnome 18.10, and have a large set of pictures exported from my wifey's mac. The directory structure is:

year1
  (login dir name with spaces) - Month
    Image names
year2
  ...

as in:

2013
  May 4, 2013
    Image1.jpg
    Image2.jpg
  May 5, 2013
    Image 1.jpg
    Image 3.jpg
  June 22, 2013

What I would like, is:

2013
   January
     All the "january" images...
   February
     All the...

I can create the directories easily enough mkdir {January..December} suffices. But I cannot figure out how to walk the ugly directory tree (exported from Mac), move the images, and then delete the ugly directory.

My problem is this: My laptop has a relatively slow disk subsystem (amd I'm not going to buy a better one) and I backup my system using rsync which works well for me. However, during the backup process, the files read are read into the buffer/cache of the system, which eventually triggers the swap system.

For example, running cat Win10.qcow2 > /dev/null a 60 GB file will result in

free -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           15Gi       2.2Gi       210Mi       170Mi        13Gi        12Gi
Swap:          30Gi        14Mi        30Gi

and if I write to a real device, like my USB backup drive, the swap starts being used, up to a couple of GB. I do have vm.swappiness = 0 in /etc/sysctl

By itself, this is not bad, but because of my slow disk system, the computer becomes less than sprightly in response to inputs. Painfully slow, in fact.

What I would like to have is a method for limiting the amount of page buffer that the process can consume, leaving enough room to run smaller commands, such as opening a terminal.

What I have tried, is using lxc, which did not limit the system use of buffers, docker which I could not fully figure out yet, and I'm attempting to get lxd running, but I'll need some time to figure that one out.

There is a program nocache which I think works, but rsync then does not output progress indicators.

I have a long running script which issues several sudo prefaced commands. The execution time of the script is variable, and occasionally sudo times out while the script is running, meaning that I need to re-enter the password.

How can I run this script without needing to check the program and make sure it's still going?

Some people (me) would prefer the straight GNOME experience as opposed to the Unity style desktop offered in Ubuntu 17.10.

How can I get the standard GNOME desktop and interface?

Does anyone know what happened to the daily builds of Ubuntu-Gnome? They are not present at http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-gnome/

Does anyone have a good way to restrict access to systemctl and some of it's commands?

systemctl reboot or systemctl poweroff seem to take effect immediately, with no request for root permissions.

LibreOffice does not allow page setup, ie the paper size and orientation cannot be set. This problem occurs in all of the LibreOffice programs: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base.

I've tried this both with the 5.0.2 release available in the software archives, and the 5.0.3-rc2 candidate from the launchpad/libreoffice ppa.

Does anyone have a work-around or patch for this?

I'm running an older Dell XPS M1730, using Ubuntu-Gnome 14.10 and an Nvidia M8700 graphics card.

With the Nouveau drivers, the system is stable although a little slow (the graphics are running through llvmpipe), but if I use any of the Nvidia proprietary drivers, the system becomes unstable: the graphics freeze. The system remains operational, and often switching to a tty and back to graphics mode restores the graphics for a while.

Things I have tried:

• Ubuntu 14.10 / Gnome, Nvidia 304, 331, 340, Bumblebee
• Ubuntu 14.10 / Unity, Nvidia 304, 331, 340, Bumblebee
• Mint 17.1 (utter failure)
• Ubuntu 14.04.1 / Unity, NVidia-331
• Nvidia-331 / Ubuntu 14.04.1 has a known bug reported on Launchpad
• Nvidia-340 / Ubuntu 14.04.1
• NVidia-304 / Ubuntu 14.04.1 - this one seems to be working, although the machine sometimes freezes when Google Chrome is being used.

Overall this appears to be a kernel issue between this particular graphics device (the 8700M) and the kernel - I have not been able to find any logs indicating a crash or halt, and little other information other than the current problem with kernel 3.13.0-45 and nvidia-331

Recently I tried to install a package and it's suggests by using

apt-get install tuxguitar --install-suggests

although this worked, there was far more installed than I bargained for. A total of 1308 packages were installed, including PovRay, Fortran, TexLive, Apache2, gnucash... You get the picture. None of these items were in the install-suggests list as presented by apt-get install tuxguitar, so I must assume that the --install-suggests option recursively looks at the packages requested and their install-suggests until a 'full' set of packages is created.

Is there a clean method of limiting this recursion?

It's not that I'm really complaining much about some of the programs (I like PovRay), but I like adding to my system a little at a time, trying to make sure that the OS is staying stable!

The problem that I have observed intermittently as kernel patches come through, is that my wifi does not always obtain the regulatory domain from the AP. The symptom is poor connectivity with frequent drops, and the work-aroud has been to issue the command sudo iw reg set US, which I usually place in /etc/rc.local as iw reg set US

So the question is: does anyone know how to query the AP (a linksys WRT610N) to ask what regulatory domain it is set to?

An excerpt from /var/log/dmesg from my last boot follows, after changing /etc/default/crda as recommended in comments below: If I am reading this correctly, the regulatory domain is initialized to world, and then using the information in /etc/default/crda, the regulatory domain is updated to become US.

[   12.109314] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: CONFIG_IWLWIFI_DEBUG disabled
[   12.109317] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: CONFIG_IWLWIFI_DEBUGFS enabled
[   12.109318] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: CONFIG_IWLWIFI_DEVICE_TRACING enabled
[   12.109320] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: Detected Intel(R) Centrino(R) Wireless-N 2230 BGN, REV=0xC8
[   12.109419] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: L1 Enabled; Disabling L0S
[   12.124492] intel_rapl: domain uncore energy ctr 380974:380974 not working, skip
[   12.183857] ieee80211 phy0: Selected rate control algorithm 'iwl-agn-rs'
[   12.394864] cfg80211: World regulatory domain updated:
[   12.394867] cfg80211:   (start_freq - end_freq @ bandwidth), (max_antenna_gain, max_eirp)
[   12.394868] cfg80211:   (2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
[   12.394869] cfg80211:   (2457000 KHz - 2482000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
[   12.394870] cfg80211:   (2474000 KHz - 2494000 KHz @ 20000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
[   12.394871] cfg80211:   (5170000 KHz - 5250000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
[   12.394872] cfg80211:   (5735000 KHz - 5835000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
[   12.522154] cfg80211: Calling CRDA for country: US
[   12.523937] cfg80211: Regulatory domain changed to country: US
[   12.523939] cfg80211:   (start_freq - end_freq @ bandwidth), (max_antenna_gain, max_eirp)
[   12.523941] cfg80211:   (2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2700 mBm)
[   12.523942] cfg80211:   (5170000 KHz - 5250000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 1700 mBm)
[   12.523943] cfg80211:   (5250000 KHz - 5330000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
[   12.523943] cfg80211:   (5490000 KHz - 5600000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
[   12.523944] cfg80211:   (5650000 KHz - 5710000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
[   12.523945] cfg80211:   (5735000 KHz - 5835000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 3000 mBm)
[   12.523946] cfg80211:   (57240000 KHz - 63720000 KHz @ 2160000 KHz), (N/A, 4000 mBm)

Since the update to kernal 3.13.0.30, Thunderbird 24.6.0 does not check for new mail on my system. I have tried clearing the 'automatically check for new mail', quitting the program, and restarting the program and resetting the checkbox, but the automatic feature does not work at this time.

The 'Get New Mail' function also does not work - at this time I have to exit Thunderbird and restart the program to receive new mail. Has anyone else seen this behaviour, or know of a fix?