adamnfish's questions

Every few minutes (and sometimes repeatedly) my mouse cursor will hang (stop responding to any input) for a few seconds. This is incredibly annoying but compounding the problem is that every time this happens my xinput set-button-map settings are lost and I have to run the command again to restore functionality on my mouse (Evoluent 3). I've also had more serious hangs where the mouse gives up completely (and I need to unplug it and plug it in again to make it work) or where the entire system hangs and I need to hold the power button to kill it. As it stands my machine is borderline unusable.

I assume this is a driver problem but I've no idea which logs to look in to get a sense of where the problem is coming from. Any advice generally (debugging misbehaving USB devices) or specifically (Evoluent 3 hanging regularly) would be much appreciated.

I'm on 15.04 Vivid Mate with the 3.19.0-51-generic x86_64 kernel.

Both gnome terminal and terminator (which I am using on my laptop these days) can be customised to look very pretty. By using full screen and keeping desktop clutter down to a minimum it's possible to get a good-sized area to work in, even on my little EeePC.

However, there is one element that I don't seem to be able to control. Gnome's tabs are massively oversized and ugly at best. They don't fit into the theme at all which looks silly, but for me the biggest problem is the screen real estate that is wasted. On a small laptop screen in particular, it's a real problem.

Is there a way to change these tabs? I realize it's possible to put them up the side of the window, but then they take up even more space!

If this isn't possible with theme-ing or gnome configuration, are there any terminal programs like terminator that can handle the tabs themselves? (Ideally in a more elegant fashion!)

I've been listening to some of my older music today and I've just come across an album that I ripped back in my 'mp3pro days'... Needless to say it doesn't sound very good, which I'm guessing is because Rhythmbox falling back to normal mp3 (at only 96kbps) instead of playing the mp3pro 'extras' so it sounds tolerable :)

Are there codecs that I can use to get mp3pro sounding less horrible or an alternative music player that supports the format? Alternatively, does Rhythmbox already support the format and I'd just not realised how bad it sounds before?

Obviously I'll re-rip it if it comes to that, but it's a hassle I'd rather avoid. (especially since I have quite a few of them)

Thanks!

I have a Fat32 external hard drive plugged into my server at home and since upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04 (from 8.10 - it was a bug jump!) I've been having permissions trouble with it.

It used to be mounted as root automatically and I think the permissions were pretty much 'ignored'. Since the upgrade, it is being mounted with the group and owner being my user. Obviously, I need access as my user and this is no problem still. However, I am also running a PHP script (via apache) that serves certain files to authenticated users. This is now no longer working.

If I run PHP as my user there is no problem (obviously). However, when running under www-data it cannot access the drive so my script is now failing.

The permissions on the drive look like this at the moment:

drwx------ 1 adamnfish adamnfish
-rwxrwxrwx 1 adamnfish adamnfish

for folders and files respectively.

It's very clear what the problem is (only adamnfish can access the drive!) but I have no idea how to fix the problem. I've tried mounting the drive every which way and even using GUI tools to try and set the bitmask properly!

The hard drive is always plugged in, but sometimes I kick its power cord while tidying up (so the solution needs to be resilient to plugging / unplugging the drive) and I reboot the machine from time to time (so ideally it'll be an fstab entry or something so I don't need to manually unmount and remount with the correct permissions every time).

Thanks in advance, I know this will be obvious to a lot of people but I've been pulling my hair out!